Accomplice!, the blizzard, and the Weston house (pp. 955–956)
Himself felt his jaw and pushed his glasses up several times and shrugged and finally said he supposed he was afraid of the film giving Orin the wrong idea about having sex. He said he’d personally prefer [p. 956] that Orin wait until he’d found someone he loved enough to want to have sex with and had had sex with this person, that he’d wait until he’d experienced for himself what a profound and really quite moving thing sex could be, before he watched a film where sex was presented as nothing more than organs going in and out of other organs, emotionless, terribly lonely. He said he supposed he was afraid that something like The Green Door would give Orin an impoverished, lonely idea of sexuality.
Context
JOI's only recorded piece of viewer-protection: the maker of Accomplice! and (maybe) the samizdat, gently declining to forbid a porn cartridge and instead articulating a whole ethics of spectation — that a film can install "an impoverished, lonely idea" of an experience in a viewer who meets the film before the experience. It's the Entertainment's logic run in reverse: film as the thing that can pre-empt and deform real feeling, from the one director in the book who demonstrably believed it. Hal's coda makes it a family-optics tragedy in miniature: "It was the most open I’d ever heard of Himself being with anybody, and it seemed terribly sad to me, somehow, that he’d wasted it on Orin."