Molly Notkin's interrogation
had a hard time believing it was even entertaining, let alone lethally entertaining, and tended to believe it had represented little more than the thinly veiled cries of a man at the very terminus of his existential tether
Context
Here is the debunking the reader knows is wrong, and its dramatic irony is the scene's spine. The film's own star — the woman who performed the Death-Mother monologue nude — cannot believe the thing is lethal, or even entertaining; to her it was just a failing man's "thinly veiled cries," a depressive muddle of flashy lensmanship. Everyone in the interrogation reasons from inside the case and concludes the perfect-entertainment myth is a fantasy. And the reader, who has watched the cartridge fell viewer after viewer across the whole book, knows every confident debunker is fatally mistaken. The theme lands its darkest point through this gap: the lethal pleasure is invisible to those who theorize it, deniable by the very people closest to it, which is precisely why it can't be defended against.