Hal on JOI's and Mario's audience-films
certain members of the playlet’s well-dressed audience eventually start catching disastrous glimpses of the combatants’ fatal full-frontal reflections, and instantly get transformed into like ruby statues in their front-row seats, or get petrified and fall like embolized bats from the balcony’s boxes
Context
The Medusa v. the Odalisque is the Entertainment rendered as a gag, decades early: a show whose audience is killed by watching it. Two combatants wield fatal images — the Medusa's petrifying face, the Odalisque's gem-making beauty — and the choreography is rigged so the on-screen theater audience keeps catching the "fatal full-frontal reflections" and turning to stone in their seats, dropping from the balcony "like embolized bats," until "there's nobody left in the seats animate enough to applaud." It's the exact mechanism of the lethal cartridge, staged as spectacle: a lethal thing to look at, and a rapt audience destroyed by looking. Incandenza had the whole concept in his hands here — the fatal image, the annihilated spectators — years before he made it work for real. The only difference between this playlet and the Entertainment is that here the death is depicted; there, it's delivered.