Hal on Himself's audience films — "except as the shield and little…"
except as the shield and little mirror get whipped martially around and brandished at various strategic angles, certain members of the playlet’s well-dressed audience eventually start catching disastrous glimpses of the combatants’ fatal full-frontal reflections, and instantly get transformed into like ruby statues in their front-row seats, or get petrified and fall like embolized bats from the balcony’s boxes, etc. The cartridge goes on like this until there’s nobody left in the Ford’s Theater seats animate enough to applaud the nested narrative of the fight-scene play, and it ends with the two aesthetic foils still rumbling like mad before an audience of varicolored stone.
Context
The Entertainment in miniature, a decade early: a show that kills its entire audience through the eye, seat by seat, while the performance grinds on before "an audience of varicolored stone." The kill mechanism is optics pure — strategic mirror angles delivering a fatal sight — and the deaths are spectation deaths, rapt faces caught mid-applause. The choreography keeping both combatants' backs to the audience "for obvious reasons" (the sentence this quote's "except" hinges on) carries [n.155].