Joelle's walk continues; the anti-ad and the U.H.I.D.
his well-fed face artistically reddened with some terrible joy, his smile’s arc of the extreme curvature that exists between mirth and fury, his ecstasy terrible to see, his head hairless and plastic and cast back, his eyes on the blue harlequin-patches of the post-storm sky, looking straight up, or having a seizure, or ecstatic, his arms also up and out in a gesture of submission or triumph or thanks, his oddly thick right hand the receptacle for the black spine of the case of some new film cartridge being advertised for distribution, the cartridge stuck like a tongue out of a slot in his (lineless) palm
Context
The whole Entertainment rendered as a sidewalk display, and its star walks up and fingers it. The advertising figure is a legless man in a recliner-adjacent posture, face "reddened with some terrible joy," smiling at the exact curvature "between mirth and fury," eyes rolled up to the sky in something that could be ecstasy or a seizure — pleasure and death made visually inseparable, offering a blank cartridge from a slot in his palm "like a tongue." It is the attaché's fate cast as ad copy: the ecstatic, incontinent-adjacent viewer as sales image, the joy so extreme it reads as agony. And the cruel irony the scene doesn't underline is that the woman pausing before it is the face inside the very thing being advertised — the Entertainment's performer, unrecognized, contemplating the ad for her own lethal image.