Hal on Himself's audience films — "The Joke’s total running time was…"
The Joke’s total running time was just exactly as long as there was even one cross-legged patron left in the theater to watch his own huge projected image gazing back down at him with the special distaste of a disgusted and ripped-off-feeling art-film patron, which ended up being more than maybe twenty minutes only when there were critics or film-academics in the seats, who studied themselves studying themselves taking notes with endless fascination […] Mario said Lyle had said Incandenza had confessed that he’d loved the fact that The Joke was so publicly static and simple-minded and dumb, and that those rare critics who defended the film by arguing at convolved length that the simple-minded stasis was precisely the film’s aesthetic thesis were dead wrong, as usual.
Context
A film whose running time is defined by spectation itself — it lasts exactly as long as someone keeps watching himself watch — and whose ideal viewers, the critics, get caught in the recursion "studying themselves studying themselves." The authorial confession arrives through the book's oddest provenance chain (Mario said Lyle had said Incandenza had confessed), the same Lyle-circuit 078's sauna night runs on. The trim skips the frantic two-man pack-up of "cameras and lens-cases and coaxials" for the Cambridge-Berkeley shuttle, JOI and Mario as the whole crew again.