Molly Notkin’s interrogation

Avril moves into the frame the film just built, cast — by the film's own subject — as the genuine article. Madame Psychosis, playing Death for Jim over and over, thought it bizarre that he kept casting her "when he had the real thing right under his nose, and eminently photogenic to boot": the widow whose constant smile was "the rictal smile of some kind of thanatoptic figure," Death incarnate in a late-forties beauty. The Death-Mother cosmology and the actual Incandenza matriarch get welded together by the one witness positioned to see both — the woman gets read as the corporeal fact the artwork could only gesture at. Whatever the film reached for in its blanked-out pregnant Death, the outside witness says was sitting at the head of the table the whole time, smiling.