the I-Day film; the psychic slack
one of the really small E.T.A. kids crawling around with a bottle of adhesive under the tables has whacked his head on the sharp edge of an institutional chair and is in Avril I.’s lap crying with a desolate late-day hysteria that makes everybody feel jagged.
Context
While the puppet-film of the Incandenza family's political imagination plays on the screen, the real maternal labor happens three meters away in the dark: a tiny sugar-crashed kid cracks his head and ends up sobbing in Avril's actual lap. The image quietly undercuts everything on the screen — the represented, authored, ironized family up in the projector-beam versus the flesh mother absorbing a stranger child's late-day hysteria in real time. The theme's whole tension in one room: the Incandenzas as a system you watch and interpret, and Avril as a woman with a crying body in her lap.