Scene 159: notkin spills

• p. 787: the setup — technical interviewers "really do do this": portable high-watt lamp on the subject's face; homburg and "shade-affording eyebrows" removed by polite request; Notkin fresh off the N.N.Y.C. rail, in her Sidney Peterson-shaped directorial chair amid dropped luggage, guts duly spilled (n.325: Tine Sr.'s interview theory comes from boyhood noir films; n.326: "(and then some)").
• pp. 787-788: the Entertainment per Notkin — Madame Psychosis as "maternal instantiation of the archetypal figure Death," nude, gorgeous, hugely pregnant (an f/x — Notkin's seen her naked, n.328 "(though never unveiled)", n.329 flagging her never-carried-a-child claim as "complete horseshit" the operatives let pass), face veiled/computer-blurred/anamorphosized; the cosmology: "Death is always female... the woman who kills you is always your next life's mother"; maybe a knife; the strange single lens as the technical hook (n.327: Bolex turret detail).
• p. 788: the mother's suicide — ordinary kitchen garbage disposal, Thanksgiving evening YTMP, "four-odd months" before the Auteur's own kitchen-appliance death; any Lincoln-Kennedy connections left to the interviewers.
• pp. 788-789: camera mechanics — the digital Bolex H32 (Canadian line, three C-mount lenses) fitted with "an extremely strange and extrusive kind of lens," the camera lying on floor or cot with the parturient Death-Mother inclined over it, "talking down to it — in both senses"; mothers' obsessive love as "amends for a murder neither of you quite remember."
• p. 789: Notkin's bid to get the lamp moved off — "a brass-faced falsehood and dismissed as such by R. Tine Jr."; JOI and Joelle never sexually enmeshed (his "finite world-total of available erections" belief; impotent or guilt-ridden); Joelle loved only the Auteur's son, "as thoroughgoing a little rotter as one would find down through the whole white male canon" (the sentence running on past the cut)
• p. 789: Joelle absent from the suicide, the funeral (expired passport), and the will-reading despite being a beneficiary; she never saw the finished cartridge, doubted it was even entertaining — "thinly veiled cries of a man at the very terminus of his existential tether" — and believed JOI, an acute critic whatever his spinning compass, would have destroyed the Master as he'd destroyed the four or five prior attempts "featur[ing] actresses of lesser mystique."
• pp. 789-790: the funeral "purportedly" in L'Islet Province, Nouveau Québec, the widow's birth-province — "an interment and not a cremation"; her helpful suggestion: why not simply go ask J.O.I.'s widow where the cartridge is? (met with silence).
• p. 790: the widow — unlikely to be anti-American whatever her "indiscreet youth" files say, agenda no larger than "her own individually neurotic agendas"; but Madame Psychosis thought her "very possibly Death incarnate," rictal-smiling, thanatoptic — and found it bizarre that JOI kept casting her as Death "when he had the real thing right under his nose."
• p. 790: the sobriety bargain — JOI stopped distilled spirits as Joelle's condition for appearing in the final cartridge, and "apparently, incredibly [n.330: 'given the guy's track record with ingestion']" kept it from Xmas YTMP to 1 April YTSDB.
• pp. 790-791: Notkin's theory of Joelle's secret habit — pure guilt-driven self-punishment, narcotics substituted for Wild Turkey; the guilt not over the film (an "olla podrida of depressive conceits strung together with flashy lensmanship") but over the sobriety condition itself, which removed "all that was keeping the man's tether ravelled" — JOI and M.P.'s term: "self-erasure."
• p. 791: the turkey-shaped gift bottle of Wild Turkey by the microwave, cerise ribbon under its wattles — plausibly placed by the widow-to-be, enraged he'd never quit "'for her'" but had "'for'" Madame Psychosis.
• p. 791: the deformity affirmed — irreparable facial trauma the same Thanksgiving as the mother's suicide; her U.H.I.D. membership "no kind of metaphor or ruse."
• p. 791: alternative suicide-etiology — not film or the "angelic monster of audience-gratification" (anyone could see fun was low on his priority list; his approach "naïvely post-Marxist," anamorphic fragmentation plus "anti-Picaresque narrative stasis," n.331 glossing Picaresque via Bay Area avant-gardeists Peterson & Broughton and their mother-Death/cranial-imprisonment touchstones) but the widow-to-be's enmeshments "with just about everything with a Y-chromosome... including possibly with the Auteur's son... as a child."
• pp. 791-792: the academic crescendo — the perfect-entertainment-as-Liebestod myth as "the antinomically schizoid function of the post-industrial capitalist mechanism," per M. Gilles Deleuze's (fictional, posthumous) Incest and the Life of Death in Capitalist Entertainment, offered as a loaner if they don't mark it up; the interviewers request she spare them "the eggheaded abstractions" and swap in a higher-watt bulb.
• p. 792: the Duquette backstory — Joelle's deforming trauma "like something right out of the Auteur's most ghastly... proto-incestuous disaster films" (The Night Wears a Sombrero, Dial C for Concupiscence, The Unfortunate Case of Me); the low-pH Daddy, Kentucky reagent chemist, daily movies and mid-South twirling circuits; the agoraphobic canning mother; puberty arriving and the Daddy regressing her — child-rated films, interdicted brassieres and Pap smears, "Nasty Pootem Wooky Bam-Bams" at B.U.
• pp. 792-793: college distance; the punctured-football autograph e-mails; third visit home with "the little rotter," Thanksgiving Y.T.M.P.; the Daddy mashing her turkey to puree between fork-tines under Orin's raised eyebrows; Joelle finally Speaking the Unspeakable at table, midday 24 Nov YTMP.
• pp. 793-794: the Daddy's eruption — secretly, "purely," genuflectorily in love with her "from way, way back," never touching or ogling; the regression-to-incontinence as pressure-management; a decade of hanging on; the peephole above the bathroom mirror he'd spent "every gram of trembling will" resisting for a decade — then drilled, and used "every night since" Madame Psychosis and the Auteur's son first arrived to sleep together, while the pipes behind her headboard sang and clunked.
• p. 794: the mother's denial-system blows — no marital relations since Joelle first menstruated; her own itinerant camp-meeting-preacher father had molested her and her sister, hence marriage at sixteen; "she'd married the exact same kind of monster."
• pp. 794-795: "maybe it was her... who was the monster"; she hurdles three pointers down to the Daddy's cellar acid-lab — world-class collection of acids in Pyrex flasks; the half-eaten-away skull on the label, flaming scarlet litmus afloat.
• p. 795: identification — Madame Psychosis "in reality" Lucille Duquette, the Daddy "either Earl or Al Duquette of extreme southeast KY"; the throw — the mother hurls the flask at the Daddy, who ducks; Orin, "a former tennis champion with superb upper-body reflexes," instinctively ducks too; bradykinetic Joelle takes the direct facial hit; nobody presses charges; the freed mother, despondent, later feeds first one arm and then — "kind of miraculously if you think about it" — the other into the garbage disposal. [n.332]

Backward

• Joelle's own POV scene (pp. 227-240, scene 062) and her "own personal Daddy" material in the Thanksgiving-cleaning meditation (scene 150, pp. 736-745) supply the inside view of what Notkin retails secondhand; the archive's catalog: the father is canonically Joe Lon van Dyne, "Lucille Duquette" being Notkin's mistaken/alias "real name" (p. 795) — Notkin doesn't know even the name Joelle van Dyne.
• The setting is itself a catch: Notkin's co-op is the "Back Bay-edge brownstone [Joelle] had lived in once with Orin and performed in with his father and then passed on to Molly Notkin" (p. 227, scene 062) — i.e. rooms where she acted in JOI's work (cf. n.80's filming apparatus). The U.S.O.U.S. interrogators sit asking where the Master is in the very rooms of its making.
• "Brass-faced falsehood" (p. 789) echoes Hal's brass-faced monster-liars taxonomy closed fifteen pages earlier (p. 774, scene 155) and Pemulis's "brass mask" face (p. 774; his "serious brass" at the urinal is p. 772, scene 155) — three scenes running on undetectable lying.
• Avril material: Death-incarnate, the "indiscreet youth" file, enmeshments "including possibly with the Auteur's son... as a child," and the Wild Turkey-placement theory connect to the Avril-John Wayne and Avril-C.T. threads (pp. 552ff; n.234's Avril dossier — see scene n234; "Politeness Roulette" itself is the brothers' term at p. 523, scene 102) and to Orin's "malcathected issues with his mother."
• The acid-flask Thanksgiving retells, in grand guignol register, the same family-pressure physics as Avril's frozen-Québecois-father story (scene 154, pp. 765-766): systems under enormous silent pressure that erupt totally — Notkin even states the principle (p. 793).
• Orin the "little rotter" ducking the flask and then abandoning Joelle "within months" feeds his Subjects pathology (pp. 566ff, n.234, n.269) and Steeply's separate Orin-investigation; the punctured-football autograph (p. 792) dates the courtship to B.U. football.

Forward

• The interrogation is downstream of Joelle's 7 Nov overdose at Notkin's party (pp. 227-240, scene 062) and of the tightening U.S.O.U.S./A.F.R. race for the Master; Marathe's phone betrayal in scene 156 (p. 776) and Steeply's E.T.A. embed are parallel prongs. Steeply himself interviews a veiled Joelle later (pp. 938-941) — where much of Notkin's version (esp. the deformity and the mother-guilt etiology) gets complicated or contradicted.
• "An interment and not a cremation" in L'Islet, Nouveau Québec (pp. 789-790) — with the suggestion to ask the widow — underwrites the buried-Master thread: JOI's grave near the Concavity (per n.234), Gately's dream/vision of digging up the head with Hal (p. 934, scene 175), and YG Hal's "John N. R. Wayne... standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father's head" (p. 17).
• The Death-Mother monologue ("the woman who kills you is always your next life's mother") is what the wraith-Gately chapters approach from JOI's side (pp. 829-845, 934ff): the film built to reach Hal, the infant's-eye lens, Madame Psychosis's lalating apology; cf. Joelle's radio "lalation" and Mario's devotion (scene 155).
• JOI's sobriety Xmas YTMP-1 April YTSDB squares with the wraith's account of his last months and the microwave suicide (pp. 248-251, scene 064's grief-therapist phone call; the archive's dating ruling: suicide 1 April YTSDB).

• p. 787: "really do do this, bring a portable high-watt lamp..." + "spill her guts, roll over, eat cheese, sing like a canary" — the comic frame; surveillance as bad cinema.
• p. 788: "Death is always female, and that the female is always maternal. I.e. that the woman who kills you is always your next life's mother." — the Entertainment's cosmology; the book's single most load-bearing description of the lethal film.
• p. 789: "the mothers are trying frantically to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember." — the Death-Mother thesis completed; essential for entertainment-self and family-hamlet.
• p. 789: "little more than the thinly veiled cries of a man at the very terminus of his existential tether" — Joelle's (relayed) reading of the film she starred in but never saw; the destroyed-Master belief that everyone's plans turn on.
• p. 790: "very possibly Death incarnate... when he had the real thing right under his nose" — Avril via Joelle via Notkin; triple-hearsay and unforgettable.
• p. 791: "what Madame Psychosis said she and the Auteur had sometimes referred to as quote 'self-erasure.'" — JOI's own term for his death; pairs with the "eliminate his own map for keeps" diction elsewhere (p. 408, scene 086).
• p. 795: the flask throw — "the rotter, one Orin... had instinctively ducked also, leaving Madame Psychosis... open for a direct facial hit" — the deformity narrative at maximum specificity, still only as good as Notkin's sourcing; and the closing garbage-disposal sentence with n.332 hanging off it.