Scene 085: hal joi audience films

• pp. 395-396: Hal's compulsion inventory — Kodiak Wintergreen dipped into a childhood NASA glass or a Spiru-Tein can; sucrose "the Hope-smoker's ever-beckoning siren"; lately any sugar-infusion above an AminoPal bar induces "odd and unpleasant emotional states."
• p. 396: Hal knows Mario's fetish for puppets, entr'actes, and audiences comes from Himself's audience-obsessed subphase; he doesn't even want to think about "the grim one about the carnival of eyeballs" (n.154: The Cage III — Free Show; see endnote 24).
• pp. 396-397: 'The Medusa v. The Odalisque' — a filmed fake stage-production at Ford's Theater: snake-haired Medusa (sword and polished shield) vs. L'Odalisque de Ste. Thérèse of Québecois myth, so gorgeous her sight turns viewers to precious gems (nail-file and makeup mirror); costumes per n.155 (chain-mail backless gown; Merry Widow); each tries to show the other her own reflection; the combatants are visibly holograms; the choreographer ate like a bird and spoke to no one but Avril.
• p. 397: the playlet's audience applauds the choreography — "spontaneously meta-applauding, Hal supposes" — while stray reflections gem-ify and petrify them one by one, until the foils rumble on before "an audience of varicolored stone"; the film's own audiences felt teased and cheated (no full-frontal look), and the cartridge rented "like yesterday's newspapers."
• pp. 397-398: The Joke — marquees required to read 'You Are Strongly Advised NOT To Shell Out Money to See This Film,' which art-film habitués read as ironic anti-ad; two Bolex H32s by the EXITs (one held by a tall stooped old guy, one mounted on a forward-listing boy with what looks like a steel spike out of his thorax — JOI and Mario undisguised); the screen shows the audience itself filing in, expectation curdling to puzzlement to rage as row after row watches itself watching.
• pp. 398-399: running time = as long as one patron remains; only critics and film-academics stretch it past twenty minutes ("who studied themselves studying themselves taking notes"); father and son frantically pack the gear to fly Cambridge↔Berkeley for each showing.
• p. 399: Mario said Lyle said Incandenza confessed he loved that The Joke was "so publicly static and simple-minded and dumb," and the critics who defended the stasis as aesthetic thesis were dead wrong, as usual; unclear which of the three audience-pieces metamorphosized into Found Drama, "the historical zenith of self-consciously dumb stasis," which audiences never got to hate "for a-priori reasons."

Backward

• Found Drama's "a-priori reasons" are explained in the Orin–Steeply interview note (n.145, pp. 1027-1028; the in-book inception is scene 078, pp. 375-376) and JOI's filmography (n.24): the 'audience' can never see it because the drama is unwatched by design.

Forward

• n.154 equates the dreaded "carnival of eyeballs" film with The Cage III — Free Show (full entry in n.24) — whose sideshow-of-spectation premise is the filmography's most explicit Entertainment precursor.
• The Medusa/Odalisque logic — fatal to view directly, weaponized via reflectors — is the optical grammar of the samizdat: cf. Joelle/Madame Psychosis's lethal-or-veiled face (U.H.I.D., scene 060; Molly Notkin's account pp. 788-795) and the wraith's account of the Entertainment as a figurantless lure for the in-bent son (pp. 838-845; n.24's Infinite Jest entries — the lens-and-light angle is n.145's).
• The Joke's audience-watching-itself is JOI's anti-spectation pedagogy in embryo: the same impulse the wraith says drove the Entertainment — "Make something so bloody compelling it would reverse thrust on a young self's fall into the womb of solipsism" (p. 839), made by a man obsessed with what watching does to watchers ("too perfect" belongs to Joelle's account, pp. 940-941, where it names a failed piece and is flagged as a joke); also rhymes with Marathe's spoon-fed-viewers indictment (p. 318, scene 072).
• "Mario said Lyle had said Incandenza had confessed..." — establishes the Lyle-JOI confidence channel (cf. scene 084's connections; the spa-bond of scene 138, p. 706, and Lyle's Ontario visits, n.234), and Mario as the family's honest relay.
• Hal's sugar-state carries directly into scene 087's opening (the fourth chocolate cannoli — the one that wedges and prompts the ask-Schacht beat — four cannabis occasions, the post-Eschaton stomach-pit) — scenes 085 and 087 are one continuous Hal-reverie split by the film's Concavity act.
• Hal's R-in-the-O.E.D. precocity and Ogilvie's Entertainment Studies course (scene 087, p. 411) frame both reveries as the same essayistic mind at work.

• p. 395: "Like most young people genetically hard-wired for a secret drug problem..." — the scene's clinical opener; key addiction anchor for Hal's arc.
• p. 396: "the grim one about the carnival of eyeballs" — the flinch itself is the datum: what Hal can't bear to think about re: Himself.
• p. 397: "an audience of varicolored stone" — the petrified theater; the book's most compact image of spectation as death.
• p. 398: the long sentence of The Joke's screening — patrons watching "row after row of itself staring back at it" — entertainment-self performed at syntax level.
• p. 399: "so publicly static and simple-minded and dumb... dead wrong, as usual" — JOI's own aesthetics, via Mario via Lyle; load-bearing for reading the Entertainment's intent.