IJ study archive

Scene 087: hal tv ad interlace history

Scene
87
Pages
410–418
When
8 November YDAU (2009), Interdependence Day evening, during the gala (Hal's reverie resumes)
Where
E.T.A. dining hall, Hal's seat at the gala; the reverie ranges over millennial U.S. media historyin: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. dining hall (West House)
POV
Hal (3rd person, free-indirect — recapitulating his old term paper through a sugar-and-THC funk)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 9)

Summary

Four cannolis and four cannabis occasions deep, still sick over his paralysis at the Eschaton debacle, Hal sinks into a funk and — since the film is too reminiscent of the late Himself — thinks instead about the one academic thing he's written that's even remotely filmic: his seventh-grade history of how U.S. broadcast television and its advertising industry died. The arc: the besieged Big Four networks, already bleeding to cable's "Don't Sit Still for Anything Less" campaign, are killed off by Viney & Veals's fatally potent ads (Nunhagen's cranio-facial-pain paintings, LipoVac's filmed procedures, the NoCoat tongue-scraper spots) — ads so repellent they awaken pacified viewers to the power of their own thumbs. The cable kabal's triumph is brief: Noreen Lace-Forché's InterLace TelEntertainment, fronting the Big Four's skeletal remains, turns the same anti-passivity rhetoric against cable itself and installs cartridge-on-demand viewing, in which "personal pleasure and gross revenue looked at last to lie along the same demand curve." The scene is the book's media-historical load-bearing wall: how America engineered its way, in the name of choice, to the doorstep of the Entertainment.

What to notice

The reverie's topic is chosen as anesthesia: the film is "reminiscent enough of the late Himself" that Hal deliberately switches to "just about the only more depressing thing" available — grief managed by selecting a worse but safer pain — and the body keeps interrupting the scholarship, the wedged cannoli fragment sending him scanning the room for Schacht mid-paragraph on ad-industry history. Notice the rhyme with the film-reverie an act earlier: V&V's fatally potent campaigns are commercial art that repels its audience and works anyway — the cranio-facial-pain paintings and the NoCoat gaggers are, structurally, The Joke with a product attached — so Madison Avenue and Himself's avant-garde converge from opposite directions on the same discovery, that unwatchability is power; the Entertainment will complete the set by inverting it into a watchability that kills. The history's casualties keep resurfacing as its consumers (Winkler "hairless and sugar-addicted", eyeing the very LipoVac procedure whose ads helped kill his marathon-reruns), and its end-state population is irony-proofed all the way down: customers who "perversely refused to invest in" cars painted with ads — the same audience that read The Joke's sincere warning as an anti-ad. And the frame joke is temporal: a seventh-grader narrating events four years old "at the misty remove of glaciers and guys in pelts" — the first quiet symptom that Subsidized Time has broken everyone's depth perception for the recent past.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 410: Hal's state — cannabis four times "on this continental day of rest," guilt over not even rising from his patio-chair at Eschaton, a fourth chocolate cannoli, an incipient carie, the familiar post-sugar funk; the film's "over-arty flash-cuts" between border fortifications/ATHSCME installations and Tine's felt hand on Luria P———'s padded Popsicle-stick knee; Subsidized Time conceived, per dark legend, on a Chinese-zodiac placemat in a Vienna VA Szechuan steakhouse.
  • p. 411: the paper — Mr. Ogilvie's year-long Intro to Entertainment Studies, May of Y.P.W., Hal a seventh-grader "only up to R in the Condensed O.E.D.," writing of events four years prior in a tone of glacial remove (n.161: his only other filmic writing was the predictive-call-for-the-catatonic-hero paper, same course).
  • pp. 411-412: the Big Four's structural crisis — cable proliferation, zappers, commercial-editing VCRs (Mr. O's red yawning skull in the margin of the legal digression); the cable Trade Association (A.C.D.C.) under TCI's Malone, TBS's Turner, and a shadowy Albertan (Yuletide-Fireplace Channel, etc.) attacks "right at the ideological root": the conditioned equation of Freedom to Choose, Right to Be Entertained, and all that is U.S. and true.
  • pp. 412-413: Nunhagen Aspirin — V&V's silent 30-second shots of paintings by artists with crippling cranio-facial pain (the tornado-from-the-eyesocket face, main text p. 412; n.162's gallery includes the painting that had nine-year-old Hal popping aspirin till his ears rang); sales roofward, ratings abysmal — fatally, the ads "awakened... legions" of numbed viewers to "the power and agency their thumbs actually afforded them."
  • p. 413: LipoVac — lurid liposuction spots like "crosses between hyperbolic Hoover Upright demonstrations and filmed autopsies"; the Networks, fiscally desperate, run them anyway; Hal's surprisingly compassionate read on greed vs. survival that Ogilvie noted.
  • pp. 413-414: NoCoat tongue-scrapers — the "spinal camel-straw": the geologic tongue-coat, the meter maid's slack-faced recoil, the vendor's hygienic invectives; ads that "shook viewers to the existential core" (the in-text Depend Adult Undergarment floor-puddle hypothetical winks at the current year's sponsor).
  • p. 414: Hal's thesis sentence: the NoCoat campaign as "a case-study in the eschatology of emotional appeals" — it did what all ads do, "create an anxiety relievable by purchase," only "way more well than wisely."
  • pp. 414-415: consequence one: national tongue-obsession (grim restroom sink-areas; NoCoat's co-op founders into Armani then litigation; n.163: NoCoat takes the Fortune-500 slot vacated by CBS, "Hal noted with surprisingly little irony"); consequence two: the Big Four "fell off the shelf" — sponsor defections, sports rights captured by cable, Fox in Ch. 11, ABC's bomb-threat-provoking 'Happy Days' marathons; consequence three: the big agencies — "the Icarian Viney and Veals" — go down too, and cable-less millions face "vast maddening blocks of utterly choiceless and unentertaining time," with domestic crime and outright suicides topping out.
  • pp. 415-416: the resurrection: Lace-Forché ('The Killer-App Queen'; the only woman Huizenga personally fears) consolidates the Big Four's creditor-proof remains behind InterLace TelEntertainment, and recruits P. Tom Veals — drinking toward pancreatitis after his remorse-tortured partner's half-gainer off the Tobin Bridge — to weaponize the anti-passivity appeal against cable: 504 channels is still spoon-feeding, "which of 504 visual spoon-feedings you'd sit there and open wide for" (n.164: Hal's account grossly simplified; the pair's appeal to "an American ideology committed to the appearance of freedom almost unanalyzably compelling").
  • pp. 416-417: the InterLace order: choose and rent over PC, modem, and fiber-optic line; cartridges on palm-sized diskettes; the viewer as "her/his own programming director," defining "the very entertainment-happiness it was her/his right to pursue."
  • p. 417: "The rest, for Hal, is recent history" — A.C.D.C. winnowed back; entertainment now "inherently pro-active, consumer-driven"; ads edited out at will, so the only metric left is pleasingness: "Personal pleasure and gross revenue looked at last to lie along the same demand curve."
  • pp. 417-418: the InterLace endgame — vertical integration (the Networks' production talent, two home-computer conglomerates, Aapps' Froxx 2100 CD-ROM licenses, RCA's D.S.S. orbiters, HDTV monitor patents); falling pulse- and cartridge-fees plowed into Grid-laying, three Baby Bells, and rebated R.I.S.C.-grade High-Def PCs "recognizably renamed by Veals's boys in Recognition 'Teleputers' or 'TPs'" (n.165: the acquisitions partly to forestall Sherman-Act claims; n.166: the R.I.S.C. chip specs); n.167: InterLace bought a couple of Himself's accessible documentaries and optioned a few higher-brow titles for 'Howls from the Margin,' but the bulk of his work "didn't make any ILT menus until after his untimely death."
  • p. 418: the true loser of the shift: the ad industry — skeletal agencies casting wildly about, billboards sprouting "with near-mycological fury," festooned transit and ad-banner airliners, fall-out cards ballooning postal rates in "another vicious spiral," Ford's side-panel come-ons fizzling against customers in Nike T-shirts who "perversely refused to invest in 'cars that sold out'"; and the kicker — one thriving partnerless metro-Boston agency, whose P. Tom Veals consents "more out of ennui and a sense of unlikely challenge" to manage PR for "a former crooner and schmaltz-mogul who went around swinging a mike and ranting about literally clean streets and creatively refocused blame and rocketing people's waste into the forgiving chill of infinite space" (n.168: Gentle's earliest faithful included sign-carrying Schtitt — drawn, Mario alone knows, to the "athleto-Wagnerian implications" of Gentle's waste proposals, "this business of sending from yourself what you hope will not return").

Themes in this scene

  • Entertainment and the Self: the genealogy of the Entertainment's market — passivity attacked in the name of choice, twice, ending in a system whose sole selective pressure is pleasure; "open wide for" the spoon is Marathe's spoon-feeding image in ad-copy form.
  • Addiction and Recovery: Hal's day — four smokings, sugar-bingeing, the funk — frames the history; the media arc itself is structured like addiction (anxiety relievable by purchase, escalating potency, the deprived millions' crime/suicide withdrawal year).
  • Nationalism and O.N.A.N.: Subsidized Time's placemat conception, the Tine/Luria subplot, Reconfiguration's repercussions for the ad industry — the political and commercial reorderings shown as one process.
  • Irony and Sincerity: V&V's campaigns as cynicism perfected ("more well than wisely"); Hal's reverent-glacial seventh-grade tone, Ogilvie's marginal skull, and n.163's "surprisingly little irony" — the scene constantly measures registers of earnestness about manipulation.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Companion piece to scene 085 — one continuous Hal reverie split by the film's Concavity act; together they cover JOI's anti-spectation art and the industry that made spectation total.
  • The "same demand curve" endpoint (p. 417) is the precondition for the Entertainment's lethality: a distribution system optimized purely for pleasure is exactly what the samizdat needs (the attaché's pulses, scene 007 ff.; Steeply's "dissemination" anxieties throughout the serial); Marathe's "fed this death of pleasure with spoons" (p. 318, scene 072) and Veals's "spoon-feedings... open wide for" (p. 416) are the same image from opposite sides.
  • "Eschatology of emotional appeals" (p. 414) puns on the afternoon's Eschaton (pp. 321-342, scene 073) — whose guilt is literally sitting in Hal's stomach as he recalls the phrase; the thumb-awakening also rhymes with Eschaton's lesson about players discovering agency over the game's frame.
  • Tine's hand on Luria's knee and the Subsidized-Time placemat legend extend n.156's Tine-as-dark-force theory (scene 086) and Luria's seduction-of-Tine thread (Marathe/Steeply serial; pp. 92-95 territory).
  • InterLace's "teleputers, cartridges, pulses" backbone is the book's ambient infrastructure — Erdedy's entertainment cartridges (scene 004), the attaché's viewer, E.T.A.'s dissemination-grid lore — all founded here; the videophony collapse (Sprint's "primitively naked" early videophony, p. 417) is told in full at pp. 144-151 (scene 047 territory).
  • Hal's catatonic-hero paper (n.161) is the famous "hero of non-action" essay excerpted earlier (pp. 140-142) — and a self-diagnosis in advance of his own Year-of-Glad catatonia-adjacent state (scene 001).
  • The Depend Adult Undergarment floor-puddle joke (p. 414) winks at the current year's name — the book's sponsor-calendar folding back on itself.

Forward

Notable passages (7)
  • p. 410: "Hal, having smoked cannabis on four separate occasions—twice w/ others—on this continental day of rest..." — the ledger-keeping voice of secret addiction; key marker in Hal's YDAU decline.
  • p. 410: the Vienna VA Szechuan steakhouse / Chinese-zodiac placemat legend — Subsidized Time's comic origin myth; pairs with scene 083's Pillsbury headline.
  • p. 412: cable's attack on "the psychic matrix where viewers had been conditioned... to associate the Freedom to Choose and the Right to Be Entertained with all that was U.S. and true" — the ideology the whole novel interrogates, in one clause.
  • p. 414: "a case-study in the eschatology of emotional appeals... create an anxiety relievable by purchase" — Hal's thesis; anchor passage for entertainment-self.
  • p. 416: "the invitation to choose which of 504 visual spoon-feedings you'd sit there and open wide for" — Veals's copy as Marathe's argument.
  • p. 417: "Personal pleasure and gross revenue looked at last to lie along the same demand curve, at least as far as home entertainment went." — the Entertainment's economic precondition.
  • p. 418: "ranting about literally clean streets and creatively refocused blame and rocketing people's waste into the forgiving chill of infinite space" — Gentle's whole program in one clause, sold by the industry that sold NoCoat; bridge into the ONANtiad scenes.

What links here Manuscript differences (1) · Timeline events here (13) · Echoes (3) · Connected from (11) · Passages quoted here (19) · Motifs (3)

Manuscript differences

Timeline events here

Echoes

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs