Hal on advertising and the fall of the Networks
The lingering close-up on an extended tongue that must be seen to be believed, coat-wise. The slow-motion full-frontal shot of the maid’s face going slack with disgust as she recoils, the returned cone falling unfelt from her repulsion-paralyzed fingers.
Context
Camera-fear as the excursus's engine: Hal's paper renders the NoCoat spot shot-by-shot ("lingering close-up," "slow-motion full-frontal shot," then "The nightmarish slo-mo" of the pedestrian reeling away) — ad copy analyzed as cinematography, the tongue given the full horror-film optical treatment. The critics' complaint runs on the same axis: the spots were "equivalent to like Preparation H filming a procto-exam, or a Depend Adult Undergarment camera panning for floor-puddles at a church social" — the camera trained where no one can bear it to look. And the Nunhagen precursor ads worked the same way one page earlier: images "so violently unpleasing to look at that they awakened from their spectatorial slumbers literally millions of Network-devotees" (pp. 413-414). The whole broadcast apocalypse, in Hal's telling, is driven by what filmed images can force a viewer to see about bodies — spectation made intolerable on purpose, for revenue.