the E.T.A. locker-room quiz

The culture that built the Entertainment also teaches it as coursework, and can't quite say what it is. These are junior players cramming for Disney Leith's History of Entertainment exam, fluent in the hardware — cathodeluminescence, acutance, the analog-to-digital "seminal" shift — and the one place their teacher goes slippery is "entertainment qua entertainment," entertainment as such, the thing itself rather than its delivery technology. That's the tell the scene doesn't know it's dropping: an entire academic apparatus can catalog the machinery of spectation down to lines-of-resolution and still find the essence of the thing unpinnable, a subject you can be examined on and never actually define. The society is expert in how it entertains itself and mute on why, or what it costs.