Hal watches Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms — "The art-cartridge critics and scholars who…"
The art-cartridge critics and scholars who point to the frequent presence of audiences inside Himself’s films, and argue that the fact that the audiences are always either dumb and unappreciative or the victims of some grisly entertainment-mishap betrays more than a little hostility on the part of an ‘auteur’ pegged as technically gifted but narratively dull and plotless and static and not entertaining enough
Context
The anti-Entertainment defined by its recurring subject: audiences. Hal notes that JOI's films are full of on-screen audiences, and that these audiences are always either "dumb and unappreciative" or "the victims of some grisly entertainment-mishap" — the critics reading this as an auteur's hostility toward the very viewers who found him too static to watch. This is the exact inverse of the lethal cartridge: where Infinite Jest will hold its audience in fatal rapture, the whole prior body of work stages audiences that don't or can't be held, watchers shown as inattentive or petrified, art built to be about spectation and its failures rather than to compel it. The man who could make the perfect Entertainment spent his career instead putting the problem of the audience inside the frame, refusing to be entertaining as if on principle.