The Man from Glad and the mattress
I remember I was eating lunch and reading something dull by Bazin when my father came into the kitchen and made himself a tomato juice beverage and said that as soon as I was finished he and my mother needed my help in their bedroom. My father had spent the morning at the commercial studio and was still all in white, with his wig with its rigid white parted hair, and hadn’t yet removed the television makeup that gave his real face an orange cast in daylight.
Context
Winter 1963, Sepulveda: JOI's own memoir chapter opens with both halves of the theme in a single sentence-pair. Teenage Jim is reading Bazin — film theory, at lunch, found "dull" — when the father walks in still wearing the broadcast image: wig, whites, television makeup that makes his "real face" orange in real daylight. The unremoved makeup runs the whole scene (sweat "in dark orange lines," the makeup "ended abruptly at the turtleneck collar," the sleeve "dark orange" from blotting): at home, off-camera, the father never stops being a transmitted picture, and the future auteur is the one narrating the seam where image meets face.