Gately and the wraith
it was real life’s real egalitarian babble of figurantless crowds, of the animate world’s real agora, the babble of crowds every member of which was the central and articulate protagonist of his own entertainment.
Context
The wraith's aesthetic is the anti-Entertainment's positive creed: films with no figurants, no silent human furniture at the periphery, every voice audible, "every member of which was the central and articulate protagonist of his own entertainment." Where the lethal cartridge dissolves the viewer into a pure passive receiver, the wraith's egalitarian ideal insists that everyone in the frame remains a speaking self, a protagonist — spectation without a hierarchy of who's worth seeing and hearing. It's the same impulse as the anti-Entertainment art Joelle audited: a refusal of the audience-hostile posture, an attempt to make watching a relation among selves rather than a devouring. That critics found the figurantless babble "dull and irritating" is the tell — the trained audience wants the hierarchy, wants to be told who matters, and experiences egalitarian realism as an imposition. The appetite the Entertainment exploits is already a preference for being managed.