IJ study archive

Scene 083: onan headline montage

Scene
83
Pages
391–394
When
8 November YDAU (2009), Interdependence Day evening (the gala screening continues)
Where
E.T.A. dining hall (warm, multi-odored: Schtitt's pipe, Avril's Benson & Hedges, kitchen vents), Enfield MAin: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. dining hall (West House)
POV
3rd person, the film itself foregrounded; the dining-hall frame held lightly

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 6)

Summary

Mario's film shifts into time-lapse exposition: a montage of real and fake headlines, subheaders, and news-cartridge voiceovers — his late father's parodic device — tracking the chain of events from NATO's dissolution to the signing of the O.N.A.N. pact. The headlines chart Gentle's coercive "Interdependence" diplomacy (NAFTA and Manitoban therms as big sticks, per a Chrétien admission), the tabloid railroad-spike fate of a Canadian P.M., the nationalization-by-stages of InterLace and the auctioning of the calendar (Burger King's Pillsbury awarded rights to the New Year), and the mounting waste catastrophe — capsized barges off Gloucester, Gentle hospitalized for "hygienic stress." It ends with Gentle installed as first Chair of O.N.A.N. and his State of the O.N.A.N. Address, delivered on the last day of solar time, promising Interdependence's "not impossibly radically altered new look." A running gag — the methamphetamine-dependent headline-writer who can't stop exceeding his verbal parameters — keeps the form itself comic.

What to notice

The montage hides its best material in the citation apparatus: each headline's italic attribution is a story of its own, and one of them is the novel's addiction arc in typographic miniature — the "Veteran but Methamphetamine-Dependent Headliner" who cannot stop "Taking up Too Much Space", demoted stage by stage until he is "Already in Dutch Down in the Subheader Dept., Now, Too": a speed-freak losing his job in the margins of a film about a continent that cannot govern its appetites. Type-size works as history's volume knob, deliberately miscalibrated — tabloid horror runs at 24-point Superheader while the consequences of the calendar auction, the birth of the era the whole novel is dated in, trail off at 8-point. The montage also trains you to read by inference: no headline ever says the Canadian P.M. was assassinated — you assemble the murder from the prurience of "EXCLUSIVE COLOR PHOTOS" and from the two quiet words "heavily guarded" attached to his successor. And the newsreel gravitas is homemade: the headlines twirl out of a black background the parenthesis admits is "one of O. Stice's old Fila warm-up tops" — official history's authoritative b&w look conjured from a teenager's jacket.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 391: the dining hall's atmosphere (Schtitt's pipe, Avril's Benson & Hedges, chewing tobacco, the kitchen's honey-and-chocolate vents, 150-plus fit bodies); Mario "as auteur" adopts Himself's device of mixing real and fake news-summary cartridges and headlines from "the last few great daily papers."
  • p. 391: NATO unravels — Ukraine and Baltic applications, "SO THEN WHY A NATO?", the EEC siding with the Pacific Rim on tariffs; Gentle on NATO therm waste: "NOT IN MY NATION, BABE."
  • p. 391: the O.N.A.N. proposal headlines — Mexico signs on; Québec separatists rally against "Finlandization"; Gentle's ultimatum to Canada (no treaty → NAFTA null, Manitoban therms stay put, pollution each nation's own problem) — delivered via the space-hogging "Veteran but Methamphetamine-Dependent Headliner," the montage's running formal joke.
  • pp. 391-392: domestic hygiene-state color: fed workers protest random fingernail screens; Gentle proposes nationalizing InterLace for a "piece of the action"; Burger King's Pillsbury wins rights to the New Year while Pizza Hut's PepsiCo cries bid-rigging — Subsidized Time being born as a revenue measure.
  • p. 392: the B-film parody of the InterLace ads: three striped convicts dicky their cell lock and run not for the wall but to the Warden's dual-modem MacIntosh — "Cartridges by Modem!... Break Free of the Confinement of Your Channel Selector!" — ads the cable networks "so mysteriously suicidally" ran in the last year of Unsubsidized Time.
  • p. 392: O.N.A.N. PACT PENNED; "CANADA 'NUCK'LES UNDER"; Chrétien admits acid rain, landfills, barges, fusion-tech, and Manitoban therms were the "big sticks"; the white-suited short-haired men move the therms onto the Turtle Mtn. Indian Reservation rather than dismantle them; tabloid color photos of doctors fighting to remove a railroad spike from the Canadian P.M.'s right eye — separatist violence flickering at the montage's edge.
  • p. 393: presidential-hygiene satire — the retired White House custodian's barrel of one day's Q-Tips and epidermal ash; Tine calls it "dirty tricks"; waste reality intrudes: barges collide off Gloucester, a putrid slick empties beaches; Gentle at U.N.L.V. on a U.S. "constipatedly impacted on continental waste"; New England governors react to the blue-ribbon landfill-feasibility panel; "WE ARE NOT THIS CONTINENT'S SIGMOID COLON"; Gentle confined at Bethesda for "hygienic stress." Also p. 393: "AD COUNCIL REPORT: BOSTON'S VINEY & VEALS AGENCY'S LIPOSUCTION AND TONGUE-STICK CAMPAIGNS NOT TO BLAME FOR ABC HQ BOMB THREATS—Advertising Age Header" — Erdedy's agency exonerated in passing.
  • p. 394: holography-makes-toxic-fusion-safe assurances at a Methuen P.T.A. (the Concavity's annular-fusion future seeded); Gentle out of Bethesda to address Congress on "RECONFIGURATIVE OPTIONS"; the headlines twirl from a black acetate background (Stice's old Fila top) in vintage b&w style with sappy Scorsese-montage music, lap-dissolving into Gentle accepting the first Chairmanship of O.N.A.N., with the Mexican Presidente and the new "heavily guarded" Canadian P.M. as co-Vice Chairs; the first State of the O.N.A.N. Address falls on the very last day of B.S. solar time.

Themes in this scene

  • Nationalism and O.N.A.N.: the documentary spine of the O.N.A.N. founding — coercion dressed as Interdependence, Québec's grievance born on-screen, Subsidized Time arriving as a calendar auction.
  • Film and Optics: montage as inherited technique — Mario reproducing Himself's real/fake-news device with the editing lab's Compugraphic facilities; the form (headers, subheaders, voiceovers) is the content.
  • Irony and Sincerity: the gap between headline registers — respectable dailies, tabloids, the meth-dependent headliner — makes official history indistinguishable from parody; "it's hard to tell which of the headlines... have been dickied with" (stated at p. 399, scene 086).

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Chrétien's "big sticks" admission and the therms-on-the-reservation move echo Gentle's frappeur dialogue with the P.M. in scene 081 (pp. 385-386) — the same blackmail, headline-ratified.

Forward

  • Continues the film from scene 081; the montage device returns at scene 086 (pp. 398 ff.) where it delivers the Concavity itself — this installment ends exactly at Reconfiguration's threshold.
  • "BURGER KING'S PILLSBURY AWARDED RIGHTS TO NEW YEAR" (p. 391) is the origin of Subsidized Time — the system whose year-names structure the entire novel (scene 059's canonical year list; the archive's year table); scene 087 (p. 410) gives the companion legend of Tine conceiving it on a Chinese-zodiac placemat.
  • The InterLace-ad parody (p. 392) and the nationalization headline preview scene 087's full history of broadcast TV's death and InterLace's rise — the two accounts interlock across the gala.
  • The railroad-spike P.M. headline and "heavily guarded" new P.M. (p. 394) foreshadow the assassination politics around Québec separatism — the A.F.R.'s milieu (scenes 057-058; Marathe/Steeply serial).
  • The Methuen holography/fusion headline (p. 394) seeds the annular-fusion program that creates and feeds the Great Concavity (n.150 via scene 081; full mechanism discussed in the Pemulis-Hal endnote material and pp. 571-574).

Notable passages (5)
  • p. 391: the dining hall's sensory inventory ("Between Gerhardt Schtitt's pipe and Avril Incandenza's Benson & Hedges...") — the warm communal frame around the cold political content.
  • p. 391: "BURGER KING'S PILLSBURY AWARDED RIGHTS TO NEW YEAR" — Subsidized Time's birth certificate.
  • p. 392: the convicts running to the Warden's MacIntosh — "Break Free of the Confinement of Your Channel Selector!" — entertainment-freedom rhetoric the book will spend scene 087 dissecting.
  • p. 393: "'WE ARE NOT THIS CONTINENT'S SIGMOID COLON,' GENTLE WARNS" — the waste-anxiety idiom at its most grotesque-comic.
  • p. 394: the montage's close — headlines lap-dissolving into the O.N.A.N. chairmanship on "the very last day of 'B.S.' solar time" — the hinge between solar and Subsidized eras.

What links here Timeline events here (6) · Connected from (4) · Passages quoted here (26)

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