IJ study archive

Troeltsch sick in bed (p. 61)

quote

The viewer’s right under Pemulis’s poster of the paranoid king that you can’t escape looking at if you want to look at the viewer.

Context

A small framing detail with the theme built into its geometry. To watch the screen at all, Troeltsch has to look up at the paranoid king glowering above it — the viewer and the specter of doomed royalty share a single sightline, the entertainment literally can't be seen without the poster's warning hanging over it. It's the supine spectator's visual field organized so that the object of desire (the screen) and a portrait of ruin occupy the same upward glance, which is about as neat an emblem of the whole theme as ambient dorm decor can manage.

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