Gately and Joelle: the veil and the perfect
Don, I’m perfect. I’m so beautiful I drive anybody with a nervous system out of their fucking mind. Once they’ve seen me they can’t think of anything else and don’t want to look at anything else and stop carrying out normal responsibilities and believe that if they can only have me right there with them at all times everything will be all right. Everything. Like I’m the solution to their deep slavering need to be jowl to cheek with perfection.
Context
The star of the Entertainment describes the Entertainment's exact effect, and neither speaker knows it. Joelle, cornered into anger, throws this at Gately as bitter sarcasm about her own beauty — but every clause is a clinical description of what the samizdat does to a viewer: once they've seen her they "can't think of anything else and don't want to look at anything else and stop carrying out normal responsibilities," believing she's "the solution to their deep slavering need." That is the casualty ward at 101, the attaché at 014, the p-terminal rat at 096 — total fixation, all other life abandoned, the fatal object mistaken for the solution to everything. The devastating irony is that she is literally the face inside the cartridge; the thing she describes sarcastically as the effect of her beauty is the documented effect of the film she stars in. The Entertainment's power is spoken aloud by the one person who embodies it, dressed as a complaint.