The Man From Glad and the mattress (pp. 502–503)

The scene's last line, and the theme's quietest devastation. Fled upstairs from the father face-down in his own sick and from the vacuum's shriek, Jim throws himself onto his own bed, knocks over a lamp, shears off a doorknob, and watches it roll in a closed loop — a cycloid on a sphere — and out of that flight into geometry his life's obsession is born: annulation, the endless self-returning loop that will drive his films and, eventually, the Entertainment itself. The son's entire aesthetic vocation is forged in the act of turning away from the collapsed father, converting unbearable domestic horror into pure recursive form. What the father transmits isn't a craft or a gesture; it's the need to escape him into abstraction — and that need becomes the art. The performing father makes, without a lesson, the performing son.