JOI's father delivers the garage monologue (p. 167)
they were losing their fronds and the fronds were blighted and the color of really old olives in those old slim jars at the very back of the refrigerator and exuded a sick sort of pus-like slippery discharge and sometimes abruptly fell from trees curving back and forth through the air like celluloid pirates’ paper swords.
Context
Even the forensics of the 1933 fall — the palm-rot pus the father may have slipped on — arrives through a movie simile: the falling fronds are swords from a pirate picture. The celluloid siren has colonized the monologist's entire image-bank.