the JOI filmography (pp. 987–988)
The figure of Death (Heath) presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators’ eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life (Heaven) uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs.
Context
Cage III—Free Show is the theme's whole argument rendered as a sideshow gag, and it's the single most literal image of spectation the filmography holds. Watchers watch degradation so "grotesquely compelling" that their eyes swell until they become nothing but gigantic eyeballs in chairs — the viewer reduced, physically, to the one organ that receives, the body eaten away by its own looking. And the tent's other side completes the loop with vicious symmetry: Life invites you to consent to your own degradation for the privilege of watching others turn into eyeballs, so that every spectator is also a performer-in-waiting and every performance produces new spectators. Death presides over the entrance because this is the pleasure-death machine in miniature — spectation that consumes the spectator into pure eye, a free show whose price is the self.