the JOI filmography — "basing the gauge on critical allusions…"

The lethal cartridge's filmography entry is a paradox that names its own lethality without meaning to: Infinite Jest (V?) is reviewed as "extraordinary" and JOI's "most entertaining and compelling work," yet "no scholarly synopsis or report of viewing exists." Praised, never witnessed — because the witnesses don't come back to write it up. The archival record can register the film's compelling power (the reviews) but not its content (no synopsis), which is exactly the signature of an object that empties everyone who watches it. And in the same entry the archive names the one technical fact it can reconstruct — the West Coast archivists date the film's gauge from critical allusions to its "radical experiments in viewers' optical perspective and context," the distinctive feature being not story or image but a manipulation of the viewer's own seeing (the audience-side mechanism, cf. 178's crib's-eye wobble and 098's density theory). The catalog runs five Infinite Jest attempts (I through V?), each "unfinished, unseen," the series itself a filmography of failures culminating in the one success no one survives to describe — the Master "either destroyed or vaulted sui testator." The most entertaining work ever made leaves no report of viewing, and the filmography states the lethality as a bibliographic gap.