Fresno Quik and the birth of Subsidized Time
Wayne’s sitting low on his spine in the dining hall with the other Canadian kids, watching the screen and squeezing a ball without any readable expression. Hal’s eyes are fevered and rolling around in his head. And actually by this time a lot of the eyes in the I.-Day audience have lost a bit of that festive sparkle. Though there’s a certain chortle-momentum left over from the film’s self-felonious Gentle/Clipperton comparisons, the Rodney-Tine-Luria-P.-love-rumor-and-Tine-as-Benedict-Arnold thing seems brow-clutchingly slow and digressive.
Context
The I-Day gala deep in Mario's ONANtiad, and the narration keeps cutting from screen to audience: the E.T.A.s have become restless critics, registering pace ("brow-clutchingly slow"), running on leftover "chortle-momentum," eyes gone flat. The sentence ends at the ref to n.176, where the film is measured against Himself's original ONANtiad and found most derivative exactly here (n.176 is quoted below among the screen sightings). The film stays a screened, judged object rather than transparent history — reception as part of the scene's content.