Joelle's Too Much Fun at Molly Notkin's party (pp. 229–230)
watching herself almost dance in the full-length mirror of quality plate that after Orin left Joelle had forbidden Jim to hang and had slid beneath her bed face-down; now it’s the west wall’s framed mirror, hung between two empty ornate gilt frames […] the framed frames hanging not quite evenly on either side of the mirror he’d cut for the scenes of that last ghastly thing he’d made her stand before, reciting in the openly empty tones she’d gone on to use on-air […] She is watching herself with unselfconscious fascination in the only serviceable mirror here outside the bathroom.
Context
The Ecstasy-flushed girl in the sailor top (Melinda) dances before the very mirror Jim cut for the final Infinite Jest — the prop of the lethal cartridge hanging on a party wall between Notkin's retroironic framed frames, with Melinda's shameless self-regard performed in front of it. One clause also fuses the Entertainment to Madame Psychosis: the "openly empty tones" Joelle recited into the mirror are the ones she "went on to use on-air." Carlisle reads the mirror as the scene's engine, film-as-drug captivating its viewer into self-absorbed isolation.