the filmography: the un-ironic terminus

The arc's fatal terminus. The whole filmography climbs out of allusive irony toward something un-ironic, and it arrives at IJ(V?) — the last film, made as JOI died, described as "far and away his most entertaining and compelling work," aimed at "sheer" entertainment through "radical experiments in viewers' optical perspective and context." This is where the flight from irony lands: having spent a career in metaparody "designed to have nothing really felt going on" (138), JOI ends by making the one thing that makes viewers feel too much, lethally — the Entertainment that cannot be looked away from. The un-ironic is not the safe harbor after irony; it is the deadliest thing he ever made. The novel's darkest joke about the theme is that JOI cured his own irony and it killed everyone who watched.