Endnote 80: the wobble-lensed monologue-scene
which name had disappeared with the steam but had reappeared the next time the window had steamed up, which had been when James had been driving to this very brownstone, to shoot Joelle in the weird wobble-lensed maternal ‘I’m-so-terribly-sorry’ monologue-scene of the last thing he’d done, and then never shown her, and had ordered the cartridge’s burial in the brass casket w/ him in the same testament in which he’d willed Joelle an absurd (and addiction-enabling) annuity
Context
The screen's weightiest endnote sighting: an endnote off the Molly Notkin party (062) that compresses the Entertainment's production history into one relative clause. In order: the scene named and lens-specified ("the weird wobble-lensed maternal 'I'm-so-terribly-sorry' monologue-scene"), its status as terminal work ("the last thing he'd done"), the performer kept from ever seeing it ("never shown her"), and the master's burial "in the brass casket w/ him" ordered by testament — each point corroborating, from a different narrator-position, what the roster carries at length (Joelle's technical account of the auto-wobble in 178; the party mirror cut for the final cartridge in 062; the interred case of lenses in n160). And the clause's own syntax stages the discovery: JOI learns of Avril's affair from a name written in windshield steam that "reappeared the next time the window had steamed up" — condensation-writing resolving on glass — while driving to shoot the film. The revelation that arguably finishes him arrives optically, on a window, en route to the wobble-lens. (Steam-glass echo of 003's KNIFE mirror noted in Flags, not entered — uncatalogued.)