IJ study archive

Scene 138: blood sister viewing

Scene
138
Pages
701–706
When
Wed 11 Nov YDAU (2009), P.M. Study Period, continuing scene 132's evening
Where
E.T.A. Viewing Room 6in: E.T.A. (Enfield Tennis Academy) › E.T.A. Viewing Rooms
POV
Hal Incandenza (3rd person), in a filling V.R. 6

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 9)

Summary

Hal's attempted isolation in V.R. 6 fails as Blood Sister: One Tough Nun opens ("AIYEE!") and the room steadily fills: Bridget Boone with contraband frozen yogurt and her maddening inverted-spoon technique, Fran Unwin, then Bernadette Longley and Jennie Bash (warning that a huge lady with a notebook is cruising the halls hunting him), then little Arslanian, Possalthwaite, and Blott cross-legged on the carpet. Between sallies of teasing about his near-loss and his "best friend in the whole world" Pemulis's funny exploit, Hal delivers his critical take on Himself's commercial-genre period: grotesquely exaggerated formula as "metacinematic parody," over-clever and aloof, with Himself always half-seduced by the very cathartic-bloodbath formulae he meant to invert. The film's recursive premise — nuns saved from Toronto's mean streets by tough nuns who must each save a soul to discharge the debt — plays out through a brutally drawn-out Getting-to-Know-You montage, while Boone's wisecrack thesis (salvation as merely "the exchange of one will-obliterating 'habit' for another") is, unknown to all present, exactly the not-yet-desperate newcomer's standard rationalization for quitting Boston AA. Hal, in THC-withdrawal and squeezing his ball to forearm-swelling, watches the room watch and thinks instead of Low-Temperature Civics — the corporate "inversion" he knows was no inversion at all, but a product of Himself's post-carrot anhedonic year of Wild Turkey and tycoon-operas at the spa where he met Lyle.

What to notice

Hal's word for hiding in a public room is recovery vocabulary he doesn't know he's using — "I'm isolating. I came in here to be by myself." — a boy in withdrawal squeezing a tennis ball "so hard his forearm keeps swelling to twice its size": the addiction plot conducted entirely through props while a film about Withdrawal plays. Notice that Blood Sister's premise is a sponsorship chain — each tough nun saved by a tougher older nun, each debt discharged only by saving somebody new — so the cartridge Hal reads as aloof metaparody is structurally Boston AA's pass-it-on economy, and the son diagnoses technique precisely where the father buried a confession. The maddening spoon business is the scene's quiet cruelty: Boone engineering pleasure "without the mediation of cold spoon" in front of someone whose every mediation (Kodiak, ball, film criticism) is a buffer against wanting. And the coda pulls the book's strangest camera move: its AA knowledge is announced as "unknown to everyone in V.R. 6" — no one present can be thinking it, so a narrator fluent in the Ennet House world simply walks into an E.T.A. room, and the sentence it starts finishes in the next scene, in Joelle's story.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 701: in medias res — nun vs. power-tool man, the title bleeding lurid light over frozen kick; Boone and Unwin uninvited on the other recumbency; Hal declines yogurt by pointing at his Kodiak lump.
  • pp. 701-702: "I'm isolating" / "So then you should've locked the door" / no locks on V.R. doors [n.287: since an upperclassman's late-night panatelas in V.R. 3]; the inverted-spoon business that has always gotten under Hal's skin; Boone needles him about sulking over his "near-loss in full view of a whole crowd."
  • p. 702: Longley and Bash arrive — "a totally huge lady cruising the halls looking for you, with a notebook and a very determined expression" (Steeply hunting Hal); the Poutrincourt term paper "Done, redone, formatted, printed, proofed, collated, stapled"; Boone has done a couple one-hitters, Hal can tell; "your best friend in the whole world did something really funny today" (Pemulis, story deferred).
  • pp. 702-703: Hal's spectatorship sociology — girls slip out of their shoes and embody making-yourself-at-home; males stay suited-up, transient; Hal knows people sense he's "somehow there only in a very technical sense"; eight empty sneakers sunk in carpet; the room redly dim [n.288: TCBY = The Continent's Best Yogurt®].
  • pp. 703-704: Blood Sister's commercial context (InterLace first-run purchases, Spontaneous Disseminations) and Hal's critique: genre exaggeration as "sub/inversions," over-clever, with Himself seduced by the cathartic-bloodbath formula; The Night Wears a Sombrero as his best in the vein — a Langesque metaWestern shot outside Tucson AZ that's also "a really good Western"; Blood Sister's production made no friends on either side of the Concavity.
  • p. 704: Hal tries and fails to imagine what Himself felt while editing — "Maybe that was the point of the thing's metasilliness, to have nothing really felt going on." [n.289: in fact BS:OTN was "a very sad self-hate-festival," a veiled allegory of sponsorship and JOI's distaste for AA's vacant grins and platitudes.]
  • pp. 704-705: the littles drift in and are instantly absorbed; Postal Weight's proboscoid nose-bandage; Arslanian's hot-dog smell and un-blindfolded rayon handkerchief; the plot — biker chick saved by tough nun who was saved by a tougher older nun, the transitive salvation-debt; Blood Sister takes on a burn-scarred punker girl [n.290: whether the scars are a freebase accident is never explicit; Longley hopes so, since facial-equals-moral deformity would be "terribly gooey and heavy and stock"].
  • pp. 705-706: Withdrawal in a locked sacristy; the girl's click-by-click desullening; the Getting-to-Know-and-Trust-You montage (Harley rides holding the wimple on, unwinnable charades with the Trappists, habit-shopping) scored — "no kidding" — to 'Getting to Know You,' which Hal imagines the Stork justified as "subversively saccharine."
  • p. 706: Boone (Indianapolis archdiocese) declaims the anti-Catholic subthesis — one will-obliterating "habit" exchanged for another — and is pinched and shushed; Hal, concentration shot by THC-withdrawal, thinks of Low-Temperature Civics: no lampoon but a product of the dark B.S. '80s patent-windfall year — "post-carrot anhedonic and existentially unmoored," a year of Wild Turkey and Lorimar tycoon-operas at the remote Northwest-coast spa where he supposedly met Lyle.
  • p. 706: the narrator's coda — Boone's substitution-take is "very close to" the not-yet-desperate-enough newcomer's excuse for quitting Boston AA, until the Substance beats them back in "with their faces hanging off their skulls," begging to be told what platitudes to shout.

Themes in this scene

  • Film and Optics: a full Incandenza-cartridge exegesis inside an Incandenza institution — genre, metacinema, InterLace economics, and Hal's filial film criticism as his only mode of contact with Himself.
  • Irony and Sincerity: this scene's central knot — metaparody designed "to have nothing really felt going on" vs. n.289's buried sincerity (the film as self-hate and AA-allegory); Boone's clever substitution-thesis exposed as the rationalization that kills addicts; 'subversively saccharine' as JOI's alibi for feeling.
  • Addiction and Recovery: the Withdrawal-in-a-sacristy plot, the habit-for-habit reading, and the coda's portrait of those who quit AA over banality and crawl back begging for platitudes — scene 139's Joelle picks up the sentence directly.
  • Fathers and Sons: Hal physically unable to imagine his father's interior ("can't summon one shadowy idea of what Himself might have been feeling"); the father's confession is in the film, and the son reads it as technique.
  • Communication and Solipsism: Hal "isolating" in a public room, present "only in a very technical sense," the one unabsorbed spectator — watching the watchers, thinking of a different cartridge.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • The Night Wears a Sombrero's Tucson exteriors, the "ambivalent-but-finally-avenging-son story" — Orin's city and the Hamlet scaffolding winking from inside the filmography (full catalog at scene n024).
  • The "totally huge lady... with a notebook" is Steeply working the halls after the match (scene 130); his last on-page E.T.A. material is the Poutrincourt conversation (scene 130, pp. 673-682).

Forward

  • Direct continuation of scene 132 (Blood Sister queued at p. 689); the screening's Act III and aftermath are scene 140 (pp. 711-714); the narrator's AA-substitution coda runs grammatically into scene 139's "Some Substance-dependent persons, though..." (p. 707) — a three-scene braid of film and fellowship.
  • n.289's sponsorship-allegory reading retro-illuminates scene 132's datum of JOI's 2.5 months in Boston AA, and forecasts the wraith's account of why he made the Entertainment (pp. 838-839): art as the father's last attempt at unironic address.
  • Low-Temperature Civics, the Wild Turkey year, and meeting Lyle at the spa: key JOI-chronology datum; Lyle's present-tense hovering is this same evening's montage (scene 137, p. 700); Joelle's first JOI appearance was in L-TC (scene 139, p. 707).
  • Pemulis's deferred "really funny" exploit and Hal's finished Poutrincourt paper thread into the discipline/expulsion machinery (n.321/n.324/n.332 files).

Notable passages (9)
  • p. 702: "there's a totally huge lady cruising the halls looking for you, with a notebook and a very determined expression." — Steeply via teenage transom; surveillance comedy.
  • pp. 702-703: the shoes-off/shoes-on spectatorship passage ("Girls literally embody the idea of making yourself at home... He's somehow there only in a very technical sense") — Hal's self-diagnosis of transience; communication-solipsism extraction.
  • p. 704: "Maybe that was the point of the thing's metasilliness, to have nothing really felt going on." — Hal's wrong-but-resonant reading; pair with n.289 for the irony-sincerity seminar.
  • p. 706: "post-carrot anhedonic and existentially unmoored" — JOI's attainment-crisis named in the essay's own vocabulary (cf. scene 135's correction that this is NOT what killed him).
  • p. 706: the coda — newcomers who quit over "an 'Attitude of Platitude'" returning "with their faces hanging off their skulls and beg to be told just what platitudes to shout, and how high to adjust their vacant grins." — addiction-recovery anchor bridging to scene 139.

Endnotes digested here

  • n.287 (p. 1053): no V.R. locks since last winter's discovery of a certain upperclassman's late-night panatela smoking in V.R. 3.
  • n.288 (p. 1053): TCBY — "The Continent's Best Yogurt®" (post-Reconfiguration rebranding joke).
  • n.289 (p. 1053): wholly unknown to Hal, BS:OTN was "a very sad self-hate-festival on Himself's part, a veiled allegory of sponsorship" and his distaste for the AA he kept being referred to.
  • n.290 (p. 1053): the punk girl's burn-scars — Longley hopes they're a freebase accident, since facial-as-moral deformity symbolism strikes everyone over thirteen as gooey, heavy, stock.

What links here Timeline events here (18) · Connected from (7) · Passages quoted here (27) · Motifs (4)

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs