IJ study archive

Scene 078: found drama inception

Scene
78
Pages
375–376
When
the recounted night: 'early in the O.N.A.N.ite temporo-subsidized era' (~YW 2002), a 'first brutal winter night' soon after InterLace's dissemination of The Man Who Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass; narrated from YDAU retrospect
Where
E.T.A. weight room / sauna corridor (Lyle's domain), Enfield; n.145 frame: interview in Phoenix/Tempe AZin: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. weight room · Phoenix-area Arizona (also)
POV
impersonal 3rd-person narrator (one-paragraph linking section); n.145 is a Q-redacted interview transcript, Orin speaking

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 6)

Summary

A single linking paragraph gives the secret origin of two whole phases of JOI's career: one brutal early-Subsidized winter night, Himself emerged from the sauna "all sloppy-blotto" and despairing because even the avant-garde journals called plot his fatal Achilles' heel — no movement "that sucked you in and drew you along" (n.144 cites the representative hatchet-job) — and out of that night with Lyle came both Found Drama and anticonfluentialism; only Mario and Joelle know it. The folded-in n.145 (Helen Steeply's 3-Nov-YDAU interview with Orin) supplies the full Found Drama story: a deadpan revenge hoax on the critical establishment — a name chosen by dart-throw at a torn-out phone-book page becomes the oblivious "protagonist" of a ninety-minute Drama with no camera, audience, director, or stage, "because in Reality there are none of these things" — complete with grants, planted journal articles, turgid lecture tours, and tenure-jockeys hailing the ultimate Neorealism until Himself couldn't keep a straight face. Orin's testimony doubles as a portrait of his father going "progressively bats" — funny, abstract, in and out of McLean — and, in its interleaved copper-earring flirtation, as documentation of Steeply's cover working on Orin in real time.

What to notice

The paragraph performs the aesthetic it describes: on the page nothing happens — one sentence of backstory, no scene, no dialogue — while the entire drama (hoax, grants, darts, tenure-jockeys) sits buried below the line, where only a reader who goes digging will find it. A story about an artist condemned for plotlessness is delivered plotlessly, and the endnote-chasing reader becomes Found Drama's impossible audience: nobody is watching the protagonist, except you, from outside the frame. Notice also the narrator's odd epistemic hedge — Mario and Joelle "are probably the only people who know" — a voice claiming a two-person secret while professing uncertainty about it, the half-omniscience the book leaves unexplained until the wraith supplies a mechanism.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. ~375: the inciting night — sauna, Wild-Turkey despair, the critics' plot complaint (n.144: 'Watching Grass Grow While Being Hit Repeatedly Over the Head With a Blunt Object,' Art Cartridge Quarterly, YPW); Lyle as confessor.
  • p. ~376: "Mario and Ms. Joelle van Dyne are probably the only people who know that Found Drama and anticonfluentialism both came out of this night with Lyle." (n.145 ref.)
  • n.145 (pp. 1027-1028): Orin on JOI's lineage — lenses-and-light first, entertainment second; Lang, Bresson, Deren, Frampton, "wacko Nucks like Godbout," anticonfluential Snows; "après-garde" vs. the trendy Orthochromatic Neorealists; intentional atavism, chiaroscuro fetish.
  • n.145: the hoax mechanics — planned partly at McLean ("almost his own private reserved room, by then"); proclamatory edicts placed in film journals; Duquette (M.I.T.) and Posener (Brandeis) seeding the grapevine and landing mammoth grants; The Stork's lecture circuit; drunken invention of new Found-Drama theory "till there was evidence it was time for Himself to go back to detox again."
  • n.145: the form itself — White Pages page thumbtacked to the wall, dart thrown, the hit name is the protagonist for the next ninety minutes; no recording, no observation, "You're not there. Nobody knows what the name in the phone book's doing"; possibly the name belongs to somebody already dead — which Himself especially liked.
  • n.145: aftermath — critics hail it, reappraisal floated, hoax unveiled; JOI refuses to return the grants and spreads the money among local improv companies; "The whole thing was kind of bats."
  • n.145: the nickname taxonomy — "Himself" was the Moms's coinage ("a Canadian thing"), Hal's usage; Orin's was "The Mad Stork" / "The Sad Stork."
  • n.145: the counter-current — Orin's copper-earrings/Tempe-shop patter and his confession of being intimidated by a beautiful woman who is "acute and sharp and politically savvy and penetrating and multilevelled and intimidatingly intelligent": the Subject-hunter being hunted.

Themes in this scene

  • Film and Optics: Found Drama and anticonfluentialism named at their source — JOI's aesthetics of plotlessness, lenses, après-garde stasis; the genre that removes the camera entirely.
  • Irony and Sincerity: an elaborate ironic hoax built to punish critics — yet conceived in sincere drunken despair at being called unentertaining; irony as JOI's weapon and symptom at once.
  • Fathers and Sons: Orin's fondly corrosive testimony of watching Himself "go progressively bats in front of your eyes"; the nickname genealogy as family forensics.
  • Addiction and Recovery: the sauna-blotto inception, McLean as second home, theory-benders ending in detox — JOI's alcoholism as the medium of his late career.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Duquette the M.I.T. critic belongs to the Notkin/M.I.T. film-theory circle (scene 058's party frame, p. 219; Duquette himself speaks at scene 062, p. 233) — note the curious echo of Joelle's alias "Lucille Duquette" (per the archive's catalog), a different figure.

Forward

  • Found Drama's joke-theory — a protagonist who doesn't know he's in a Drama, no audience, "in Reality nobody thinks they're in any sort of Drama" — is the photographic negative of the Entertainment: JOI's last work is all audience, fatally engaging, plot reduced to pure compulsion. The critics' complaint here (no movement "that sucked you in and drew you along," p. ~375) reads as the dare the samizdat answers.
  • The dart-at-the-phone-book protagonist who may already be dead anticipates the wraith's figurant doctrine (pp. 834, scene 162ff): the unwatched, unhearable background person as the real subject of JOI's art.
  • Scene 080 (the dead-fetus speaker of 079 between them) continues this Lyle/JOI weight-room confessional institution; The Man Who Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass and the Found-Drama corpus live in the JOI filmography (endnote 24).
  • n.145 is an installment of the Helen Steeply cover-operation initiated in scene 077's assignment datum: dated 3 Nov YDAU, it shows the "cultivation" of Orin succeeding (the flirtation beats), feeding the U.S.O.U.S. thread that runs through nn.234/269 (the Bain correspondence) and Steeply's E.T.A. visit (pp. 651ff).
  • Anticonfluentialism recurs as the announced form of Mario's own ONANtiad parody (pp. 380ff, scene 081 ff.) — fitting, since Mario is one of the two keepers of the secret; Joelle's knowing it marks how deep inside JOI's work she already was (cf. her account of him, pp. 736ff, and Notkin's pp. 788ff).

Notable passages (4)
  • p. ~375: "even the bastards in the avant-garde journals were complaining that… Incandenza's fatal Achilles' heel was plot, … no movement that sucked you in and drew you along." — the wound the Entertainment overcorrects; film-optics and entertainment-self cross at exactly this complaint.
  • p. ~376: "Mario and Ms. Joelle van Dyne are probably the only people who know…" — the sentence that makes Lyle, Mario, and Joelle JOI's true intimates.
  • n.145 (p. 1028): "in Reality there are none of these things… in Reality nobody thinks they're in any sort of Drama." — Found Drama's theory; the book's metafictional thesis in miniature.
  • n.145 (p. 1028): "I think he especially liked the idea that the star of the show might have already moved away or recently died and there was no way to know." — JOI and the dead/absent subject; proto-wraith.

What links here Timeline events here (7) · Connected from (5) · Passages quoted here (23)

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here