Hal watches Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms
the incredible pathos of Paul Anthony Heaven reading his lecture to a crowd of dead-eyed kids picking at themselves and drawing vacant airplane- and genitaliadoodles on their college-rule note-pads […] and yet all the time weeping, Paul Anthony Heaven […] silently weeping, very steadily
Context
Inside the anti-Entertainment, the human flash Joelle went looking for. The film-lecture scene shows the whole failure of spectation at once — a presenter droning in a "narcotizing" monotone to a hall of "dead-eyed kids" picking at themselves and doodling, the material about desiccation and death-as-teleologic-end going utterly unreceived — and then, the detail that redeems it: the presenter is weeping the entire time, silently, steadily, tears falling below the lectern's frame. The audience within the film is the era's audience, disengaged and vacant; the weeping man is the maker's smuggled grief at exactly that disengagement, the same quick human ache Joelle found flashing in M-v-O. The anti-Entertainment's whole method is here — to render un-compelling watching truthfully, and to weep at it.