Scene 107: tine samizdat dossier

Summary

The U.S. government's-eye history of the Entertainment, framed by the one blackmailable fact about Rodney Tine, Chief of Unspecified Services: he has measured his penis every morning since age twelve, with a special metric ruler (plus a telescoping travel model, plus a disguised charting notebook). The samizdat's tally of the lost is tabulated — nineteen at the Berkeley film-scholar's home (the scholar and companion, plus "seventeen police, paramedics, and teleputer-technicians in all") before someone thought to cut the power, two-thirds of an avant-garde festival audience at Tempe, the Boston attaché cluster, D.E.A. researchers, penal-system "volunteer" test subjects — all left docile, continent, but "pithed," with the mental energies of a moth. A retarded Leavenworth Lance Corporal under electrodes manages the only content report before succumbing: the film opens with a high-quality shot of a veiled woman in a revolving door whose veil billows at the sight of someone. Tine's staff christen it "the samizdat"; forensic tracing (postal codes, mailers, the Berkeley copy stolen from an evidence room leaving flannel fibers) points to dissemination along the U.S. north border — the possible Canadian connection being what brings Tine, his retinue, and his ruler to metro Boston.

What to notice

The dossier is framed by the ruler: it opens the scene, resurfaces mid-briefing as the disguised charting notebook, and the page's last words are "his retinue, and his ruler" — a report on a machine of total compulsion that keeps getting interrupted by its narrator's own small one, structure as diagnosis (the measuring itself rendered in dossier shorthand: "like clockwork; has since twelve; still does"). Watch the Berkeley sentence swallow its responders — two cops, then six, then the watch sergeant and partner — list-grammar enacting the widening circle, until the fix arrives at janitorial altitude: "somebody to think to go around back and kill the Berkeley home's power". Twice in one page the only working defense against the terminal Entertainment is cutting the power — the anonymous someone out back, the "level-headed custodian" at Tempe — while the whole security establishment can do nothing but vault cartridges and count the pithed. Seeing costs everything: intelligence, discipline, and near-lethal voltage all fail, and the one content report is bought with the few seconds a mind with less to lose can spare. Even the instruments come back empty — "unexceptional wave-activity", no hypnosis, no dopamine surge: a pleasure that leaves no signature. The scene's richest irony is distributed to the reader alone: "somebody the sight of whom makes her veil billow" means nothing to Tine's staff, but a finished reader has already met the woman in the veil. And the dossier voice permits itself exactly one wink, right at the acronym pile-up of the Anti-Anti-O.N.A.N. agency: "So to speak."

Themes in this scene

• Entertainment and the Self: the institutional ledger of the Entertainment's victims — "lives' meanings... collapsed to such a narrow focus that no other activity or connection could hold their attention" — the pleasure-death rendered in casualty-report prose; "the strongest possible language" is needed to keep even the President from a personal review of the thing's qualities.
• Nationalism and O.N.A.N.: the samizdat as national-security crisis; Gentle's vanity nearly its next casualty; the north-border tracing makes the Concavity politics and the Entertainment one plot for the first time at the federal level.
• Surveillance and Disguise: Tine's ruler — the surveillance state's chief is himself a dossier of one blackmailable compulsion; the charting notebook "could look like almost anything statistical at all" is disguise-craft applied to the self.
• Film and Optics: the only seen frames — a veiled woman, a revolving door, a billowing veil — pure JOI lens-and-motion imagery; the film kills precisely as cinema, through the eye.

Endnotes (digested)

• n.228 (p. 1036): the N.S.A., A.T.F., D.E.A., C.I.A., O.N.R., and Secret Service have all been absorbed into the Office of Unspecified Services — Gentle's whole security state is one unaccountable ambit.
• n.229 (p. 1037): the A.A.O.A.A. — "Unspecified Services' most elite and least specific division" — pays Steeply's salary on his current field assignment, routed through a "Foundation for Continental Freedom" one "fervently hopes is a shell/dummy."