IJ study archive

Hal on JOI's audience films

quote

she and the Medusa are basically rumbling for like twenty minutes, leaping around the ornate stage trying to de-map each other with blades and/or de-animate each other with their respective reflectors, which each leaps around trying to position just right so that the other gets a glimpse of its own full-frontal reflection and gets instantly petrified or gemified or whatever.

Context

Hal, preacher-hatted at the I.-Day gala with a mouthful of baklava, mentally summarizing the fight-scene of 'The Medusa v. The Odalisque' — two lethal-to-look-at figures dueling at Ford's Theater. The kill-idiom "de-map" surfaces in Hal's own narrating voice to describe mythological stage combat: the Boston street word for violent erasure has colonized even the filmography register.

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