Gately, the wraith, and the figurants — "The wraith says that he himself…"
The wraith says that he himself, the wraith, when animate, had dabbled in filmed entertainments, as in making them, cartridges, for Gately’s info to either believe or not, and but in the entertainments the wraith himself made, he says he goddamn bloody well made sure that either the whole entertainment was silent or else if it wasn’t silent that you could bloody well hear every single performer’s voice, no matter how far out on the cinematographic or narrative periphery they were; and that it wasn’t just the self-conscious overlapping dialogue of a poseur like Schwulst or Altman, i.e. it wasn’t just the crafted imitation of aural chaos: it was real life’s real egalitarian babble of figurantless crowds, of the animate world’s real agora, the babble of crowds every member of which was the central and articulate protagonist of his own entertainment.
Context
The wraith's cinematic-theory core, the plan's "anti-Altman radical aural realism" verbatim at source: JOI's mic-everyone aesthetic stated as ethics — no figurants, every peripheral performer audible, silence or full egalitarian babble with nothing in between. The Altman comparison ("a poseur like Schwulst or Altman") is dismissed on precise technical grounds: overlapping dialogue is "the crafted imitation of aural chaos", a director's simulation of democracy, where the wraith's method records "the animate world’s real agora" in which everyone is "the central and articulate protagonist of his own entertainment" [n.342 hangs off "the babble"]. The aesthetic and the family grief are one system: a man whose son went mute built films where nobody is inaudible.