Accomplice!, the blizzard, and the Weston house — "Himself often liked to use rank…"
Himself often liked to use rank amateurs; he wanted them simply to read their lines with an amateur’s wooden self-consciousness off cue cards Mario or Disney Leith would hold up well to the side of wherever the character was supposed to be looking. […] Like the Parisian-French Bresson he so admired, Himself had no interest in suckering the audience with illusory realism, he said. […] But the real truth was that the early Himself hadn’t wanted skilled or believable acting to get in the way of the abstract ideas and technical innovations in the cartridges, and this had always seemed to me more like Brecht than like Bresson. […] one way of looking at Himself’s abandonment of anticonfluentialism is that in his last several projects he’d been so desperate to make something that ordinary U.S. audiences might find entertaining and diverting and conducive to self-forgetting [n.378] that he had had professionals and amateurs alike emoting wildly all over the place.
Context
The plan's "full embedded filmography lecture," first movement: Hal, supine, delivers the most compact aesthetic biography of JOI anywhere in the main text. The stated theory (Bresson: strip illusory realism, remind the audience they're watching actors acting), Hal's correction of it (really Brecht: don't let acting obstruct "the abstract ideas and technical innovations"), and the late reversal — anticonfluentialism abandoned in desperation to make something "conducive to self-forgetting," which is one clause from the Entertainment's whole lethal premise. The lecture closes on the fraternal fault-line that structures the scene: "I could remember arguments during which Mario had claimed I didn’t see a lot of what was right there."