Hal watches Accomplice!, the blizzard coverage (pp. 944–945)
in his last several projects he’d been so desperate to make something that ordinary U.S. audiences might find entertaining and diverting and conducive to self-forgetting
Context
Here the Entertainment's mechanism gets its plainest name — self-forgetting — and the novel's own footnote sharpens it to a blade: n378 glosses "conducive to self-forgetting" as "(As opposed to self-confronting, presumably.)" That parenthesis is the whole theme's fulcrum. What ordinary audiences want from entertainment is to forget themselves, and what JOI's late work "desperately" chased was that self-forgetting his earlier anti-illusory films had refused to provide. The lethal cartridge is simply self-forgetting perfected — the total erasure of the self-confronting the culture cannot bear. The same wish that makes Marathe's chosen love redemptive (giving the self away deliberately) makes the Entertainment fatal (giving the self away entirely, to be forgotten). The footnote quietly names the choice the whole book turns on: forget yourself, or confront yourself, and the market has voted.