Hal watches Accomplice!, the blizzard coverage
Did Himself subject us to 500 seconds of the repeated cry ‘Murderer!’ for some reason, i.e. is the puzzlement and then boredom and then impatience and then excruciation and then near-rage aroused in the film’s audience by the static repetitive final of the film aroused for some theoretical-aesthetic end, or is Himself simply an amazingly shitty editor of his own stuff?
Context
Accomplice! runs a live experiment on its audience and the experiment is the point. A third of the cartridge is one word — "Murderer!" — repeated for 500 seconds, far past what any twist requires, and Hal identifies the real tension as the viewer's own escalating states: puzzlement, boredom, impatience, excruciation, near-rage. The film is a boundary test between diversion and excruciation, deliberately withholding entertainment to make the audience notice its own hunger to be entertained and its fury at being denied. It's the anti-Entertainment as designed provocation — a cartridge that makes you feel, in your body, exactly how much you need the screen to keep giving, and what happens when it stops. The unanswerable question (aesthetic intent vs. bad editing) is itself the trap: JOI has built a film you can't tell is failing you on purpose, which is the most audience-hostile thing a maker of entertainments can do.