the Port Washington meet

The athlete perfected into pure commodity, and the perfection reads as death. John Wayne is the finished product the whole academy is manufacturing toward — flawless, automatic, "all business," his play (Schacht notes) "less alive than undead." And the future the scene foresees for him is spectacle all the way down: an "all-business entertainer, citizen of the world, everywhere undead, endorsing juice drinks and liniment ointment." The word that does the work is "undead" — mastery this total has hollowed the person out of the performer, leaving a beautiful functioning mechanism whose destiny is to be watched and to sell. Where Chu burns to become an image and Orin dissolves into being watched, Wayne is the endpoint reached: the human fully converted into content, so complete an entertainer that there's no one left home inside.