Joelle cleans, remembers the Work — "Orin liked to sit in the…"

Two ways of watching, sketched in a clause. Orin sits in the dark, jaw slack, and "enter[s] what he watched" — the pure passive absorption of a kid raised on cable, the viewer dissolved into the screen — while Joelle keeps "the living room's lights up high," wanting to see herself and the room around the viewer, watching critically rather than surrendering. The contrast is the theme's whole spectrum in one memory: the absorbed viewer who gives himself away to the image versus the studying viewer who refuses to disappear into it. That the absorbed one is the future maker of nothing and the critical one becomes the fatal film's face is the kind of irony the scene leaves unremarked.