Joelle cleaning; the Incandenza Thanksgiving — "Joelle and Dr. Incandenza found themselves…"
Joelle and Dr. Incandenza found themselves in a small conversation about Bazin, a film-theorist Himself detested, making a tormented face at the name. Joelle intrigued the optical scientist and director by explaining Bazin’s disparagement of self-conscious directorial expression as historically connected to the neo-Thomist Realism of the ‘Personalistes,’ an aesthetic school of great influence over French Catholic intellectuals circa 1930–1940—many of Bazin’s teachers had been eminent Personalistes.
Context
The bond forms over film theory: she earns "intrigued" by historicizing his enemy. And the detestation is on record from the other end of the book — teenage Jim "reading something dull by Bazin" at lunch in the memoir scene (099): a forty-plus-year grudge against the theorist who disparaged exactly the self-conscious directorial expression JOI's whole technique is (that last equation inferred from the juxtaposition; the raw gives the detestation and the doctrine). "The optical scientist and director" is the raw's own epithet — the career unified in a single apposition.