Joelle cleans, remembers the Work — "The Medusa v. the Odalisque’—cold, allusive…"

The Entertainment's future star delivers the sharpest verdict in the book on its maker's anti-entertainment art. Joelle reads M-v-O as "cold, allusive, inbent, hostile," a film whose only posture toward its audience is contempt — the on-screen theater-audience "presented as objects long before they turn to blind stone," so that the petrification the plot delivers is just the literalization of how the film regarded its watchers from the first frame. It's the exact inverse of the lethal cartridge to come: where Infinite Jest would love its viewer to death, this earlier work despises the viewer and turns him to stone as punishment. The critique matters because it comes from the woman who will become the fatal film's face — she knows, from inside the Work, that JOI's whole prior project was audience-hostile, art that refuses to compel.