Hal on Himself's audience films — "But this one other short high-tech…"
But this one other short high-tech one was called ‘The Medusa v. The Odalisque’ and was a film of a fake stage-production at Ford’s Theater in the nation’s capital of Wash. DC that, like all his audience-obsessed pieces, had cost Incandenza a real bundle in terms of human extras. […] the Odalisque has only a nail-file instead of a sword, but also has a well-wielded hand-held makeup mirror, and she and the Medusa are basically rumbling for like twenty minutes, leaping around the ornate stage trying to de-map each other with blades and/or de-animate each other with their respective reflectors, which each leaps around trying to position just right so that the other gets a glimpse of its own full-frontal reflection and gets instantly petrified or gemified or whatever.
Context
The lethal-sight apparatus of the plan's one-liner: two ways of dying by looking — horror (Medusa) and inhuman beauty (the Odalisque, "so inhumanly gorgeous that anyone who looked at her turned instantly into a human-sized precious gem, from admiration") — both administered by mirror, shield and makeup mirror as "their respective reflectors." A Québecois beauty who kills through the admiring eye, choreographed by Himself years before the Entertainment: the trimmed middle holds the Odalisque's mythology; "de-map" does double duty in the fight vocabulary. Sits alongside 070's A.F.R. highway mirrors — the book keeps handing Québec the mirror.