Endnote 101: commercial films on early dates
Some of their earliest dates were watching big-budget commercial films, and Orin had one time completely unpremeditatedly told her it was a strange feeling watching commercial films with a girl who was prettier than the women in the films, and she’d punched him hard in the arm in a way that just about drove him wild.
Context
Endnote off the punting-courtship scene (068): Orin and Joelle's romance begins as co-spectation, and the screen's catch is the comparison Orin can't help making — the girl beside him graded against "the women in the films" and winning. Texture, but on-theme texture: the P.G.O.A.T., who will end up veiled and then wobble-lensed as the fatal image itself, is introduced to the Incandenza orbit as the thing that out-pretties the commercial screen. The film-optics interest is exactly that the films here are wallpaper — "big-budget commercial" spectation as date-furniture, the benign zero-grade of the book's viewing spectrum.