Orin, B.U. punting, and Joelle (pp. 297–298)
Orin, despite his interests in upgrading the P.G.O.A.T.’s commercial tastes, was himself pretty luke-warm on film and cartridges and theater and pretty much anything that reduced him to herd-like spectation, but he respected Joelle’s own creative drives, to an extent; and he found out that he really did like watching the football footage of Joelle van Dyne, featuring pretty much him only […] Orin liked to adjust the co-op’s rheostat way down when Joelle wasn’t home and haul out the diskettes and make Jiffy Pop and watch her little ten-second clips of him over and over. He saw something different each time he rewound, something more. The clips of him punting unfolded like time-lapsing flowers and seemed to reveal him in ways he could never have engineered. He sat rapt. It only happened when he watched them alone.
Context
Orin, lukewarm on all "herd-like spectation," discovers the one film he can't stop watching: himself, shot by Joelle. Dimmed lights, popcorn, compulsive re-viewing, something more revealed at every rewind, rapt, alone — the medical attaché's posture rehearsed years early, with the same camerawoman-and-Incandenza pairing that will later produce the real thing. Carlisle's Inf/Reg reading calls self-escape and self-absorption the same gesture here.