Joelle's Too Much Fun at Molly Notkin's party
A good many of James O. Incandenza’s films were silent. He was a self-acknowledged visual filmmaker. His damaged grinning boy Joelle never got to know because Orin had disliked him often carried the case with the lenses, grinning like somebody squinting into bright light.
Context
Joelle perched at the party, glancing over the film-cartridge academics clustered at Notkin's school-supplied Infernatron viewer. Three flat declarative sentences give the auteur his epitaph — visual, silent — and put the lens case in Mario's arms: the apprentice literally carrying the optics.