IJ study archive

Scene 044: hal hero essay

Scene
44
Pages
140–142
When
document dated 21 Feb YPW (2005); Hal in seventh grade, age 12 (consistent with Hal's June-1992 birth date)
Where
document: Hal's submission for Mr. Ogilvie's seventh-grade 'Introduction to Entertainment Studies,' E.T.A.in: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy)
POV
Hal's written 1st person-plural academic voice, framed by an all-caps editorial headnote

Characters referenced

Themes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 13)

Summary

"HAL INCANDENZA'S FIRST EXTANT WRITTEN COMMENT ON ANYTHING EVEN REMOTELY FILMIC": a seventh-grade essay, written one year after Himself's death, contrasting Chief Steve McGarrett — the classically modern "hero of action," single case, single focus, camera always tight on him — with Captain Frank Furillo, a "'post'-modern hero" — "a hero of reaction" — a bureaucratic virtuoso of triage navigating eleven cluttered cases per episode. The essay tracks the change in camera grammar (romantic tripodic close-up vs. frenetic moving pan) and ends with the unsupported flourish that cost it a full grade: after the hero of reaction must come "the hero of non-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus, carried here and there across sets by burly extras." The headnote tells us Ogilvie gave it a B/B+ because that conclusion was supported by nothing but "subjective intuition and rhetorical flourish" — which, four-hundred-odd pages of Hal's own trajectory later, reads as prophecy graded down.

What to notice

The essay's syntax secretly obeys each hero's camera style: the McGarrett paragraphs are stripped declaratives — "He acts out. It is what he does." — a field of prose bare of clutter, while the Furillo material degenerates into a heap of fragments ("Payroll vouchers. Duty logs.") that beset the reader from all sides; the twelve-year-old is doing with sentence rhythm exactly what he says the two shows do with the lens. His scholarly connectives — Viz., I.e., "as we have observed thus far in our class" — are apparatus worn like a grown-up's clothes, and the costume slips exactly once: the Public Defendress's complaint runs Miranda rights and premature ejaculation together in one unpunctuated breath, a kid faithfully transcribing adult content he can name but not weigh. Notice the headnote's dating scheme: the document is clocked to two demises given equal billing — broadcast television's and Dr. James O. Incandenza's — grief admitted into the record only as a calendar convention. And the famous prophecy's least-quoted detail may be its saddest: even in Hal's imagined future the catatonic hero's handlers are chemically maintained, blood singing with retrograde amines — at twelve he cannot picture a coming era in which nobody's bloodstream is doing the work.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 140: The all-caps headnote: course, date, the four-years-after-broadcast-TV and one-year-after-JOI clocks, and Ogilvie's grading rationale (the heading as the document's only narrator — the essay below is reproduced without comment).
  • p. 140: McGarrett the modern hero of action: one case a week, audience knows the truth by Act One, "there is no mystery, there is only Steve McGarrett"; homing in as essence.
  • p. 140-141: McGarrett's field of action "bare of diverting clutter" — no females, friends, or emotions; he refashions known truth into "an object of law, justice, modern heroism."
  • p. 141: Furillo the hero of reaction: eleven cases, vouchers, egos, the ex-wife haunting the frosted-glass cubicle, the Public Defendress's Miranda-and-premature-ejaculation clause — "a virtuoso of triage and compromise and administration."
  • p. 141: The camera-grammar contrast: Furillo as one part of a frenetic pan; "Hawaii Five-0"'s steady tripodic close-up "more reminiscent of romantic portraiture than filmed drama."
  • p. 141-142: The loneliness comparison: Furillo "a heroic part of the herd… his lonely face as placid under pressure as a cow's face"; jut-jawed action becomes mild-eyed reaction.
  • p. 142: The conclusion: North America "trapped" in reactive moral ambiguity of "'post-' and 'post-post'-modern culture" — "We await, I predict, the hero of non-action, the catatonic hero… carried here and there across sets by burly extras whose blood sings with retrograde amines."

Themes in this scene

  • Entertainment and the Self: hero-evolution read entirely through what audiences will watch; the terminal hero is a pure spectator-object — the Entertainment's victim described a decade early by a twelve-year-old.
  • Irony and Sincerity: the essay maps modern→postmodern→whatever-comes-after, the book's own aesthetic question; Hal's prediction is sincere intuition penalized for lacking ironic-academic support.
  • Film and Optics: the argument turns on camera technique (tripodic romantic close-up vs. moving pan) — JOI's son thinking in lens grammar a year after the optics-genius father's death.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Written one year post-JOI for a course called Entertainment Studies: the family wound processed as media theory; pairs with scene 005 (JOI's professional-conversationalist despair that Hal doesn't speak) — the boy answers in writing, about heroes who stop acting.
  • Ingersoll's "E Unibus Pluram" quip (scene 036, p. 112) and this essay are two winks, pages apart, at Wallace's TV-irony essay; the "post-post" terminology is its vocabulary.

Forward

  • The catatonic hero is Hal's self-prophecy: the YG admissions interview (scene 001 — restrained, carried, "I am in here"), his late-novel inward retreat, and arguably the Entertainment's slack-jawed viewers (scenes 007/011/014/025/028) and the attaché "carried here and there" by caretakers. The YG deans' reading list even cites a later draft by title — "The Emergence of Heroic Stasis in Broadcast Entertainment" (p. 7, scene 001): the essay literally precedes Hal into the Year of Glad interview room.
  • "Carried here and there across sets by burly extras" also pre-echoes the figurant idea (Hal's later Madame-Psychosis-era meditations and the wraith's figurant speech, pp. 834-839, scene 162) — background bodies without voice.
  • The B/B+ for an unsupported-but-true conclusion is a meta-joke on Infinite Jest's own ending — judged by Ogilvie-logic, the novel also refuses to "set up" its conclusion.
  • Document-form note: scenes 043-047 are all heading-led standalone documents (e-mail, essay, article, list, excursus) — Carlisle reads the run's narrative-integral headings against the Aeolus chapter of Ulysses (his observation).

Notable passages (4)
  • p. 140: "there is no mystery, there is only Steve McGarrett" — the action-hero ontology in nine words.
  • p. 141: "a virtuoso of triage and compromise and administration" — Furillo, and incidentally every adult administrator in the novel (C.T., Pat M., Schtitt's staff).
  • p. 142: "We await, I predict, the hero of non-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus" — this scene's single most load-bearing sentence; the full closing paragraph rewards reading whole.
  • p. 141-142: "The 'post'-modern hero was a heroic part of the herd… his lonely face as placid under pressure as a cow's face." — Furillo's herd-loneliness; the bridge sentence between the two hero-types.

What links here Timeline events here (5) · Connected from (4) · Passages quoted here (19) · Motifs (2)

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs