Hal watches Accomplice!, the blizzard coverage (pp. 946–947)

The tenure essay Hal cites accidentally states the theme's governing riddle. In "the teleputer age of home-only entertainment," the central conundrum is why ambitious art bores and reductive trash delights — and the whole book is an answer, because the fun of the reductive is the fun of self-forgetting (asking nothing of the watcher, letting the self dissolve) while the boredom of the ambitious is the discomfort of self-confronting (forcing the watcher to remain present, to think, to feel the excruciation of Accomplice!). The Entertainment is the terminal solution to the riddle: maximally fun because maximally self-erasing, the shitty-reductive pleasure pushed to a lethality no ambitious film could achieve. The academic frames it as a paradox; the novel treats it as a diagnosis of a population that has come to experience its own presence as the thing to be escaped.