Joelle cleaning; the Incandenza Thanksgiving — "But there had been flashes of…"
But there had been flashes of something else. Even in the early oeuvre, before Himself made the leap to narratively anticonfluential but unironic melodrama she helped prolong the arc of, where he dropped the technical fireworks and tried to make characters move, however inconclusively, and showed courage, abandoned everything he did well and willingly took the risk of appearing amateurish (which he had).
Context
Joelle periodizes the career in one clause and writes herself into it: the late leap to "narratively anticonfluential but unironic melodrama she helped prolong the arc of." The label pairs 078's coinage (anticonfluentialism) with the unhip earnestness Hal meets in Wave Bye-Bye (132) — and "she helped prolong" is the raw's own quiet claim that the Madame Psychosis films are that arc's extension. Dropping "everything he did well" — the optics — as the price of trying to communicate: the career's whole shape in a subordinate clause.