IJ study archive

Scene 015: mario filmic function

Scene
15
Pages
54–55
When
YDAU (2009), undated descriptive present; Mario 'Eighteen in May'
Where
E.T.A. grounds and courts, Enfield MAin: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. courts & Eschaton grounds
POV
narrator (3rd person) on Mario

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 7)

Summary

A half-page character card: Mario Incandenza, "Eighteen in May," has a "designated function" at E.T.A. that is filmic — Schtitt and the staff assign him to set up a camcorder on a tripod and record drills and matches, taping strokes, footwork, and hitches so players can be shown exactly what a coach means. The stated rationale doubles as one of the novel's quiet theses: "The reason being it's a lot easier to fix something if you can see it."

What to notice

Half a page in the staff's own homely register — "an old camcorder or whatever video stuff's to hand", a closing sentence-fragment beginning "The reason being" — the prose borrowing the coaching idiom it reports, as if a prorector were explaining Mario to a visitor. Notice what the page omits: no body, no deformity, no diagnosis — the book's first standalone Mario panel defines him entirely by use; and the hand-me-down equipment of a family of auteurs is what he will go on to make the novel's only benign cinema with.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 54: Mario's function defined: A.M. drills and P.M. matches recorded on "an old camcorder or whatever video stuff's to hand," per Schtitt et al.
  • p. 54: instructional purpose — kids see on screen what the coach is talking about; "it's a lot easier to fix something if you can see it." (Raw markers put the whole half-page on p. 54; the scene merely runs to the p. 55 boundary.)

Themes in this scene

  • Film and Optics: Mario inherits Himself's apparatus and vocation in miniature — the camera as instrument of correction and care rather than entrapment; the benign pole of the book's film spectrum, opposite the Entertainment.
  • The Body and Tennis: video deployed on plateaux-climbing bodies; the loop of stroke → image → corrected stroke is E.T.A. pedagogy in its purest form.
  • Disability and Deformity: unstated here but structural — Mario "didn't drill and couldn't play" (scene 006, p. 32), so his place in the body-factory is behind the lens; the institution finds him a function rather than a cure.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Pairs with scene 014 immediately before it: lethal spectation, then instrumental, loving spectation — this scene ends by setting the two uses of the lens side by side.
  • "Designated function" echoes Avril's "the two high-functioning of her three sons" four pages earlier (p. 50, scene 013): the family idiom quietly classes Mario as not-high-functioning, and the institution answers by assigning him a function (echo per Carlisle).

Forward

  • Mario as filmmaker scales up from this: he was crew on JOI's late work — "Leith was cameras, the son was lenses" (p. 939, scene 178) — made the I.-Day puppet film of O.N.A.N.'s founding screened every 8 November (pp. 380-442), and Hal fears Avril sees him as "the family's real prodigy" (p. 317, scene 071); this half page is the seed.
  • "Easier to fix something if you can see it" inverts across the novel: the Entertainment is the thing that cannot be safely seen; Madame Psychosis's radio show is voice without image; the wraith's "figurants" are seen but voiceless — the book's whole optics ethics keys off this homely coaching maxim.
  • Mario's filming itself recurs — the tripod discovery of scene 037, the Bolex willed to him (p. 315, scene 071), and the I.-Day festivities he shoots from the Public Gardens while the Eschaton debacle unfolds across the river without him (p. 331, scene 073).
  • Age note: "Eighteen in May" (p. 54) — under the archive's adopted dating (Mario born ~25 Nov B.S. 1990; nineteen on 25 Nov YDAU per p. 784, scene 157) this reads as "eighteen years old as of May YDAU," not a May birthday; the earlier digest's "turns eighteen in May" reading conflicts with the ruling. Kept as printed; the ruling governs.

Notable passages (2)
  • p. 54: "Mario Incandenza's designated function around Enfield Tennis Academy is filmic" — identity assigned as function; gentle institutional language with a whole life inside it.
  • p. 54: "The reason being it's a lot easier to fix something if you can see it." — the novel's optimism about observation, soon to be tested everywhere.

What links here Timeline events here (1) · Connected from (4) · Passages quoted here (18) · Motifs (1)

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs