IJ study archive

Scene 021: orin mile high wings

Scene
21
Pages
65–66
When
1 Nov YDAU (2009), Denver CO (per the DENVER CO dateline, p. 65)
Where
Mile High Stadium, Denver CO — Orin airborne in promotional bird-costume glidein: Other single-scene locales
POV
3rd person over Orin

Characters present

Themes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 7)

Summary 1 November YDAU, Mile High Stadium, where Orin Incandenza — NFL punter for the Phoenix Cardinals — is gliding down into the stadium in a fake-red-feathered cardinal suit for a promotional spectacle, screaming "I hate this!" over the crowd's oxide-updraft roar. Orin tacks grimly, refuses to whistle or squawk, has told no one of his morbid fear of heights, and whispers "Please Lord, spare the Leg" before every touchdown. The holder's consolations: it's worse in Philly; you could be a Brown.

What to notice

The comedy is built on disintegration: the spectacle can't hold itself together even mid-performance — "ill-glued feathers keep peeling off and rising", beaks and a claw pinwheel down to the turf, a Bronco's costume loses its rear end at midfield — fakery shedding parts in real time while the cameras zoom. The crowd's roar doesn't just drown the dialogue, it amputates it on the page: Clayt's consolations keep breaking off mid-word, so Orin's whole outraged manifesto is delivered where speech physically cannot land. Register whiplash is the other engine — elaborate aerodynamic description punctured by the flat "He feels like a dick." And catch the quiet betrayal in the last movement: the scene opens insisting Orin refuses to loop or spiral, then sends him "Spiralling down toward the line of X's" anyway — the participle handing him, over his objection, the very word the previous page attached to his father's decline, and setting him down precisely on his mark.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 65: DENVER CO header; "'I hate this!' Orin yells out to whoever glides near"; Orin airborne, tacking ("the gliding equivalent of snow-plowing"), nylon wings shedding ill-glued feathers; "Far and away the loudest stadium anyplace"; he knows the camera light that means Zoom.
  • pp. 65-66: The worst moment is the jump off the stadium rim; the crowd roar: "it starts sounding like the crowd's roaring at its own roar, a doubling-back quality like something'll blow"; Orin's untold phobia of heights and high-altitude descent.
  • p. 66: His protest monologue — "I punt! I'm paid to punt long, high, well, and always!... I'm an athlete! I'm not a freak-show performer!"; New Orleans was just robes and halos and a once-a-season zither.
  • p. 66: "Please Lord, spare the Leg," whispered before touchdown; the holder: "It's worse in Philly!... You could be an Oiler! You could be a Brown."

Themes in this scene

  • Entertainment and the Self: the athlete absorbed into spectacle — players costumed as mascots, Zoom-lights, a crowd roaring at its own roar (a recursive, self-feeding audience: spectation closing into a loop, the Entertainment's crowd-physics in miniature).
  • The Body and Tennis: Orin's body reduced to one monetized part ("the Leg"); the prayer before each landing is the book's purest statement of athlete-as-equipment.
  • Fathers and Sons: the cut itself — from the father's posthumous honors (scene 020's obituary close) straight to the eldest son flapping in a bird suit — is the connection; Orin fled tennis and Himself for football and is still performing in someone else's apparatus.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • The JOI obituary paragraph immediately preceding (now scene 020, p. 65) supplies the juxtaposition this scene runs on; the L'Islet-burial and hyperfloration threads are tracked there.
  • The falling fake bird closes the loop on the Jacuzzi wren-omen of scene 012 (p. 44): Orin becomes the bird dropping out of the sky over water/turf (pairing per Carlisle); Carlisle also pairs the openers by ear — Orin's "I hate this!" against Hal's "I ate this" (p. 11, scene 002) — and notes the spiral wordplay: JOI's "very gradual spiral" (p. 64) vs. Orin, who "doesn't loop or spiral like the showboats" (recorded as his catches).

Forward

  • Orin's fear of heights and his trade from tennis to punting are unpacked in the Orin-history scenes (pp. 283+); his "personal interviews on my personal side" complaint sets up the Helen-Steeply profile that the Moment journalist (Steeply in disguise) is running on him (scenes 012, 029-orbit; pp. 1038+ n.234).
  • The cardinal costume is grimly proleptic: Orin's last scene is under glass with roaches (p. 971, scene 184) — trapped fauna, "Do it to her!"; and the Cardinals' promotional bird prefigures the book's recurring birds-falling imagery (Eschaton's dropped lobs).
  • The crowd's self-feeding roar anticipates the stadium-crowd analysis in Marathe/Steeply's Entertainment debates: Americans queueing up to give themselves away to pleasure (scene 035).

Notable passages (4)
  • p. 65: "it starts sounding like the crowd's roaring at its own roar" — recursion as crowd dynamics.
  • p. 65: "The updraft is the oxides from Mile-High's thousands of open mouths." — the crowd as physical force lifting the performer; entertainment-self in one image.
  • p. 66: "I'm an athlete! I'm not a freak-show performer!" — Orin's protest, false in exactly the way the book cares about.
  • p. 66: "Please Lord, spare the Leg" — prayer to the body-part; tag for the-body-tennis anthology.

What links here Timeline events here (2) · Connected from (4) · Passages quoted here (17) · Motifs (3)

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs