Kate Gompert, Day, and the billowing shape (pp. 650–651)

The scene's closing dissolve equates the two vacancies directly. Day and Gompert talk about the black billowing horror of clinical depression without looking at each other, both "staring into space," while the diapered infant capers on the viewer and a broken man cries out in his sleep — three registers of the same absence stacked into one dreamy, surreal frame. The depressive void and the Entertainment-victim's vacancy get lit identically here: whatever is missing behind the eyes of the pleasure-casualty is the same thing missing behind the eyes of the anhedonic, and the screen's abject infant presides over both.