Orin at B.U.: punting and Joelle (pp. 297–298)
Orin liked to adjust the co-op’s rheostat way down when Joelle wasn’t home and haul out the diskettes and make Jiffy Pop and watch her little ten-second clips of him over and over. He saw something different each time he rewound, something more. The clips of him punting unfolded like time-lapsing flowers and seemed to reveal him in ways he could never have engineered. He sat rapt.
Context
Orin alone in the dark, rewatching himself on a loop — the attaché's posture, with the self as the entertainment. He dims the lights when his lover is out, makes the Jiffy Pop, and runs the ten-second clips of his own punting "over and over," rapt, seeing "something more" each rewind, aroused, unable to stop. It's the purest circuit of self-spectation in the book: the man has become his own lethal cartridge, the watched and the watcher collapsed into one figure sitting entranced before an image of himself. That it "only happened when he watched them alone" makes the shame explicit — this is spectation as autoerotic solitude, the crowd-roar of the field distilled to a private feedback loop of one. The Entertainment's mechanism (rapt, recursive, alone, unable to look away) is here already, running on footage of the self.