The anhedonia excursus
The American Century as Seen Through a Brick’s main and famous key-image is of a piano-string vibrating—a high D, it looks like—vibrating, and making a very sweet unadorned solo sound indeed, and then a little thumb comes into the frame […] Later in the film, after much mordant and didactic panoramic brick-following, we’re back at the piano-string, and the thumb is removed, and the high sweet sound recommences, extremely pure and solo, and yet now somehow, as the volume increases, now with something rotten about it underneath, there’s something sick-sweet and overripe and potentially putrid about the one clear high D as its volume increases and increases, the sound getting purer and louder and more dysphoric until after a surprisingly few seconds we find ourselves right in the middle of the pure undampered sound longing and even maybe praying for the return of the natal thumb, to shut it up.
Context
The screen's hit lands midway through a full JOI-cartridge exegesis embedded in the Kate-Gompert anhedonia excursus: The American Century as Seen Through a Brick gets its thesis stated one page up ("naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America"; "Himself's dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth," pp. 694-695), then its key-image walked through in first-person-plural spectator grammar — "we're back at the piano-string," "we find ourselves… longing and even maybe praying." The excursus borrows the filmography to diagnose the culture's anhedonia, and the analysis makes the theme's signature move: it reads the audience rather than the screen. The stretch's only full JOI-filmography exegesis outside the roster scenes.