Scene 081: marios onantiad gaudeamus

• p. 380: Mario's first finished entertainment — a puppet show shot three summers back in the Subdorm B janitor closet with the head-mount Bolex H64 and foot-treadle — screens every 11/8; Tavis's fiat suspends dietary regs; Mrs. Clarke goes "sucrotically mad"; everyone wears a hat (Avril's witch hat, Hal's stern preacher's hat; full hat topography in n.148).
• p. 380: Mario's eight-word speech ("Thanks everybody and I hope you like it") while Pemulis crowns his Bolex with Redi-Whip and a maraschino; n.147 reveals the offstage situation — Loach and Dunkel told Avril about the Eschaton injuries; Tavis (sleepless over 'Helen' Steeply's impending visit, which Avril lobbied for without saying the alumnus profiled is Orin) won't be told till morning; Avril is plotting how upperclass heads roll "without those heads including that of Hal."
• pp. 380-381: the film as "openly jejune" adaptation of JOI's ONANtiad; "somebody else in the Incandenza family had at least an amanuentic hand in the screenplay," but the choreography and puppet-work — perfect for Mario's S-shaped arms and falcate digits — are his own.
• p. 381: audience snapshot — Kittenplan's right hand bandaged (Eschaton aftermath — her battery there was of Kieran McKenna, laid out with a left cross; the raw gives the bandage no cause), Thode grading midterms, the Syrian Satellite pro in an ad hoc Red Sox cap being polite about the baklava; Tina Echt runs the lights.
• pp. 381-382: the film opens on Gentle's second-Inaugural quote ("the past has been torched by a new and millennial generation") and his curriculum vitae: Howard-Hughes-grade contamination phobia, Dermalatix Hypospectral skin-burning booths, the Velvety Vocalists Guild and the seven months of 'Live Silence' (n.149: lip-synching to silence until casino audiences became deprived, mob-like, "inadequately nurtured children").
• p. 382: C.U.S.P. — the "annular agnation" of jingoist right and macrobiotic left, first platform plank "Let's Shoot Our Wastes Into Space" (n.150: annular fusion at the stage of generating waste better than consuming it) — sweeps to victory in a voter-spasm of a country with no Foreign Menace left to hate, turning on its own waste.
• pp. 382-383: Gentle's Inaugural — microphone swung by the cord, chlorinated footbaths, the Tighter Tidier Nation, garbage-barges and shit-flies, "a one-time World Policeman" retiring to rake its own lawn; he promises to make the tough choices for us and asks us "simply to sit back and enjoy the show."
• p. 384: the podium-pounding pivot: "Dammit there just must be some people besides each other of us to blame... He swears he'll find us some cohesion-renewing Other"; surgical gloves thrown to the crowd as souvenirs is Mario's own touch.
• pp. 384-385: the cabinet of doo-wopping black-girl puppets; the Presidente of Mexico and P.M. of Canada made honorary 'Secretaries' of Mexico and Canada — protectorate status foreshadowed by a wavered D-minor on Mrs. Clarke's Wurlitzer.
• p. 385: the audience: under-12s migrate beneath the tablecloths; everyone else heckles and throws sweets that stick to the screen, giving sterile Gentle "a sort of carbuncular look"; only Wayne and the Canadian kids sit unhatted and stolid — "This American penchant for absolution via irony is foreign to them"; they remember the Great Convexity and the ATHSCME Effectuators blowing U.S. oxides north toward home.
• pp. 385-386: Gentle and the Canadian P.M. ("J.J.J.C.") chat through NATO's dissolution and the removal of Manitoban "frappeurs" by large short-haired men in white trucks; "We're interdependent. We're cheek to jowl"; entr'acte of "It's a Small World After All" with continent squeezed in for world, ushering in "a whole new era."

Backward

• The Gentle/C.U.S.P. history dramatized here is the referent of dozens of earlier glancing allusions: Subsidized Time itself (scene 059's year-list, p. 223 n.-territory), the attaché's Happy Patterns, Marathe/Steeply on Gentle's "Someone is to blame" (p. 319, scene 072) — Marathe's analysis and Mario's parody describe the same manufactured-Other logic.
• The Canadians' hard memory of the ATHSCME fans points to the Great Concavity/Convexity dispute that the A.F.R. weaponizes (the Marathe/Steeply serial throughout).

Forward

• Directly continues the I.-Day evening (book-order neighbors 077-080; the Eschaton debacle, pp. 321-342, is hours old); n.147 inventories the injuries ("Lord-, Ingersoll-, and Penn-injuries" — Todd Possalthwaite's broken nose is counted separately) and sets up the morning-after fallout and Hal's protected status, feeding the Pemulis-vs-Avril endgame (n.324 territory).
• n.147 also advances the Steeply thread: 'Helen' Steeply's E.T.A. visit (pp. 651-662, scenes 125-127, and the locker-room interviews) was authorized by Avril's lobbying — Avril knowingly letting in the journalist she suspects is profiling Orin; resonates with later hints of Avril's own entanglements (Wayne, possibly Unspecified Services awareness).
• "Sit back and enjoy the show" condenses the book's entertainment-politics: the electorate as passive audience prefigures the Entertainment's lethal passivity (and scene 087's advertising history makes the same arc commercial).
• The film continues through scenes 083 and 086 (headlines montage, Concavity Cabinet, Gaudeamus Igitur's end at p. 442); the Lyle scenes (082, 084) and Hal's reveries (085, 087) are intercut with it.
• Mario's filmmaking with the head-mount Bolex calls back to his work on JOI's documentaries (scene 086, p. 410, the Clipperton footage) and forward to his daily unsheltered-area walks, "sometimes w/ head-mounted Bolex and sometimes not" (raw 071's own description; the Ennet-orbit night walk is scene 117, pp. 589-593).

• p. 380: "If it's odd that Mario Incandenza's first halfway-coherent film cartridge..." — scene opener; the film's provenance and the I.-Day institution in one long sentence.
• p. 382: the single-sentence hyphenated monster describing Gentle's Dermalatix hygiene regime — Wallace's syntax performing the obsession it describes.
• p. 382: "the strange-seeming but politically prescient annular agnation of ultra-right jingoist... and far-left macrobiotic..." — C.U.S.P.'s coalition; key annularity/nationalism-onan anchor.
• p. 384: "Dammit there just must be some people besides each other of us to blame" — Gentle's Other-speech; the geopolitical thesis of the whole Reconfiguration, echoed by Marathe at p. 319.
• p. 385: "This American penchant for absolution via irony is foreign to them." — the Canadian students' stolid faces; one of the book's most quotable irony-sincerity sentences.
• p. 385 (n.147 at p. 380): Avril's plan that rolling heads not "includ[e] that of Hal, who — unlike, thank God, John — was identified at the scene with that Pemulis person" — Avril's machinery, and the seed of Pemulis's expulsion arc.