Endnote 366: JOI and Peterson's The Cage
Sounding rather suspiciously like Professor H. Bloom’s turgid studies of artistic influenza—though it’s unclear how either Flood- or dead-ancestor discussions have any connection to S. Peterson’s low-budget classic The Cage, which is mostly about a peripatetic eyeball rolling around, other than the fact that J. O. Incandenza loved this film and stuck little snippets of it or references to it just about anywhere he could; maybe the ‘disjunction’ or ‘disconnection’ between the screen’s film and Ph.D.’s scholastic discussion of art is part of the point.
Context
Glosses 172's lecture-film passage (172's spine entry: Paul Anthony Heaven silently weeping through a lecture in Bloom's anxiety-of-influence vocabulary while Peterson's The Cage runs on the screen behind the lectern). What the note claims: the lecture is Bloom pastiche ("artistic influenza," the note's own joke on influence); The Cage is "mostly about a peripatetic eyeball rolling around"; and the only connection the annotator can find is that "J. O. Incandenza loved this film and stuck little snippets of it or references to it just about anywhere he could" — the auteur as compulsive quoter, seeding another filmmaker's rolling eyeball through his own oeuvre. The hedged reading that the screen/lecture "disjunction" or "disconnection" is "part of the point" is immediately undercut by the note's own sub-note a: "(Which of course assumes there’s a point.)" A famous film that is mostly a loose eye at large in the world is about as pure an emblem of this theme as the book offers, and the note says Himself hid it everywhere he could. Cross-ref: 159's "Sidney Peterson–shaped directorial chair" — Peterson framing both the Notkin interrogation and this gloss.