Scene 168: fully functional phil
Characters present
Open questions this scene bears on
Connects to
- Scene 001: hal admissions interview
- Scene 007: attache receives cartridge
- Scene 011: attache still watching
- Scene 014: attache wets recliner
- Scene 025: attache wife watches
- Scene 028: attache room fills
- Scene 087: hal tv ad interlace history
- Scene 099: man from glad mattress
- Scene 107: tine samizdat dossier
- Scene 171: gately bim football decline
- Scene 175: fackelmann scam wraith returns
Summary
A deadpan transcript of a snow-delayed State House Annex meeting in which Rodney Tine Sr., his ruler-tapping son, InterLace's children's-entertainment V.P. Maureen Hooley, Glad's marketing director Buster Yee (a severe untreatable epileptic whose seizures are triggered by embarrassment), and ad man P. Tom Veals preview the government's anti-Entertainment public-service spot for kids. The original icon — Frankie the No-Thankee Hankie, a singing Kleenex — tested catastrophically (kids associated it with boogers), so Veals has built Fully Functional Phil, a buck-toothed, cross-eyed prancing burro (every other species was copyrighted) who embodies "capacity, agency, choice" against an animated recliner-adult melting under spiral eyes. Phil warns the four-to-twelve demographic, via a stranger-danger abduction allegory with a traumatic graphic at fourteen seconds, that a smiling-faced cartridge that "looks really entertaining" and is known only to be Canadian wants to take away their functionality — and that if Mommy and Daddy freeze at the viewer, "No-ho-ho-ho way" should the kid look, but should run for a policeman to cut the power. The transcript ends as the lights go down to screen the master.
What to notice
Read the bracketed stage directions as the scene's second script: while the dialogue runs on demographic jargon, everything human in the room happens inside brackets — sneezes, hawked phlegm, a shoe's squelch attributed only to "SOMEONE", heels drumming on the terrazzo — the body's channel, which the meeting can neither market nor suppress. Buster Yee is the satire's cruelest invention: a marketer of anti-spectation whose fits are set off by embarrassment, so that mentioning one triggers the next and the room is instructed to "act natural" — an audience forbidden to react, precisely the discipline no audience anywhere in this book manages. Notice that the transcript exists only because Tine Sr. waves the stenographer to go verbatim, and that it stops at lights-down: the novel keeps its iron rule of never showing an entertainment, even a government parody of one — pitch, never product. And the closing exchange is a loaded gun the scene declines to fire: the epileptic, necktie wound round his neck like an aviator's scarf, asking as the room goes dark, "This spot doesn't happen to in any way optically pulse or strobe, does it?"
Beats
- p. 876: caps header listing the five principals, the venue, and the date; clipped greetings ("R. the G.").
- pp. 876-877: blizzard small talk — Yee: snow "less an element than its own dimension"; Veals sneezing and cursing the town; the limo's 180 on Storrow.
- p. 877: status — spot master in V&V's post-production lab, needs Tine's and the titular sponsor's green light for "disseminatable product by the end of the weekend"; Tine Sr. orders verbatim transcription.
- pp. 877-878: the spec sheet — target ages 4-12, white, native English-speaking, median income+, Kruger Abstraction Scale 3+; "advertable attention-span of sixteen seconds"; thirty-second spot "with a traumatic graphic at fourteen seconds"; insertion in 'The Mr. Bouncety-Bounce Show,' 1600 M-F, 82 share.
- p. 878: costs (~500K production, 180K per slot); Tine Jr.'s tantrum — does Glad want "the Year of Glad to be the year half the nation stopped doing anything but staring bug-eyed at some sinister cartridge… until they died of starvation in the middle of their own exc—?"
- p. 879: post-mortem on Frankie the No-Thankee Hankie — "No Thankee" tested archaic/crotchety-adult; kids "hated Frankie… The word booger kept coming up. The singing didn't help."
- pp. 879-880: the turbovirus bug — "Phil's head kept detaching and floating off to the upper right. Not a good effect at all, given the message we want to send"; Yee keeps smelling a citrusy floral odor (his seizure aura).
- p. 880: Fully Functional Phil unveiled — a burro because horses were copyrighted ("Patch the Pony Who Says Nay to Strangers"); "It was basically either an ass or a cockroach"; the deliberately ironized icon: buck teeth, eyes "extravagantly crossed. Like he's just been whacked with a sock full of nickels."
- pp. 880-881: the rhetoric — Phil as peer, not authority figure (no forbidden-fruit boost); Phil "stands for the attraction of capacity, agency, choice," versus the animated adult in the recliner whose body melts and head distends, "his eyeballs huge and whirling."
- p. 881: the pitch script — a "very wicked and sneaky cartridge" with a smiling face and pudgy Pillsbury-allusive limbs that promises more fun "than anything you've ever wished on a star… for."
- pp. 881-882: the traumatic graphic at fourteen seconds — the cartridge as a swart leering dockworker-limbed predator "in a plaid cap and overalls," driving off with a screaming animated kid, spirals starting in his eyes; Yee's first on-camera seizure ("Urgle. Urgle urgle. Splarg. Kaa."); Tine Sr. confiscates Jr.'s ruler.
- p. 882: the intelligence vacuum, child-sized — "the police only know that it's something that looks like you'd really want to watch it… we know it's… Canadian"; plaid cap = "the Big C" to 70% of the target; the Warning Dance at nineteen seconds (Native-American-cum-Breakdance); the tie-ins gaffe re-triggers Yee.
- pp. 882-883: the dire close at 25.35 seconds — if parents sit unresponsive at the viewer, the fully functional kid will "No-ho-ho-ho way" attempt to look himself but will "prance as fast as he can to get a policeman, who'll know just how to cut the premises' power"; the storyboarded adolescent version where Phil's catchphrase becomes "It's your ass, ace"; lights down for the screening — the partial transcript ends before anyone reacts.
Themes in this scene
- Entertainment and the Self: the state's official countermeasure to the Entertainment is itself an entertainment, market-tested to a sixteen-second attention span and inserted into a top-share kids' show — agency itself ("capacity, agency, choice") packaged and sold by the same apparatus that breeds passive spectation; the melting recliner-adult is the medical attaché rendered in cartoon.
- Irony and Sincerity: a sincere life-and-death warning can only be delivered "almost ironized" — clumsy, self-parodic, peer-voiced — because earnest authority would give the cartridge a forbidden-fruit boost; the adolescent version goes fully ironic ("It's your ass, ace"), the book's diagnosis of U.S. address in miniature.
- Nationalism and O.N.A.N.: the threat is identified to children solely as "Canadian," signified by plaid cap and overalls; the Glad Flaccid Receptacle Corp. underwrites the campaign to protect its purchased Year of Glad — Subsidized Time logic eating the public interest.
Connections
Backward
- The spot's scenario — kid finds parents frozen wordless before a viewer — is exactly the medical attaché chain of scenes 007/011/014/025/028 (and Hank Hoyne, pp. 507-508); the spirals-in-eyes iconography literalizes what the novel never shows of the Entertainment.
- Glad: the company whose subsidy names the novel's first/last year (scene 001, YG) and whose Man from Glad was JOI's father (scene 099, pp. 491-503) — the elder Incandenza's old sponsor now bankrolls defense against the younger Incandenza's lethal film.
- P. Tom Veals's pro-bono "public service" sits inside Tine's Office of Unspecified Services operation (Marathe/Steeply serial; Tine's Luria P. compromise).
- Rodney Tine Jr.'s ruler obsession and Tine Sr.'s rage at it — comic rhyme with Tine Sr.'s own measurement compulsion (the self-measuring thread of the Marathe/Steeply dossier scenes, p. 548ff region, scene 107).
- Tine Jr.'s nightmare image — a nation dead of starvation mid-excrement before a cartridge — restates Steeply's home-entertainment doomsday case from the mountainside serial (scenes 087ff) in committee-speak.
Forward
- 'The Mr. Bouncety-Bounce Show' recurs as Gately's beloved viewing in the Trauma Ward flashbacks (scene 175, p. ~923) — the kids' insertion-vehicle watched daily by the book's other convalescent.
- Phil's crossed eyes "like he's just been whacked with a sock full of nickels" (p. 880) — verbatim echo of Gately's dented cheekbone from an actual sock full of nickels (scene 171, p. 902), two scenes later; the ad-man's simile is somebody's real damage.
Notable passages
- p. 878: "You want the Year of Glad to be the year half the nation stopped doing anything but staring bug-eyed at some sinister cartridge…?" — the stakes stated baldly, by the ruler-tapper.
- pp. 879-880: "Phil's head kept detaching and floating off to the upper right. Not a good effect at all, given the message we want to send." — accidental decapitation gag; the medium betraying the message.
- pp. 880-881: "He stands for the attraction of capacity, agency, choice. As versus the spot's animated adult… little spirals going around and around in his eyes as his body sort of melts" — the book's master opposition (active vs. passive) as ad copy; anchor passage for entertainment-self.
- p. 882: "He says all we know is it looks really entertaining. But that it really just wants to take away your functionality. He says we know it's… Canadian." — the Entertainment reduced to child-speak; irony-sincerity and nationalism-onan in one breath.
- p. 883: "his trademark expression becomes 'It's your ass, ace.'" — the irony-escalation pipeline from child sincerity to adolescent self-parody.
What links here
- The "Fully Functional Phil" meeting: Tine chairs the counter-Entertainment kids'-PSA
- The U.S.O.U.S. counter-measure — "Fully Functional Phil," the anti-samizdat children's ad
- The ad meeting: two tapping Tines, "Shut up, Rodney," and the confiscated ruler
- The anti-samizdat public-service ad — Tine chairs "Fully Functional Phil"
- Scene 007: attache receives cartridge
- Scene 036: big buddy sessions
- Scene 162: gately wraith figurants
- Scene 170: hal horizontal vr5
- Scene 171: gately bim football decline
- Fully Functional Phil: 'It's your ass, ace'
- Fully Functional Phil: 'No Thankee' tests uncool
- Fully Functional Phil: almost ironize the icon
- Gately's M.D.-temptation dream (p. 883)
- Gately's dream-M.D. temptation (pp. 883–884)
- Stice stuck to the window (pp. 874–876)
- Stice stuck to the window (pp. 875–876)
- Stice stuck to the window; Kenkle's verdict
- The Fully Functional Phil spot meeting
- The Fully Functional Phil spot meeting (pp. 883–884)
- the Fully Functional Phil ad meeting
- the Fully Functional Phil ad meeting (pp. 882–883)
- the Fully Functional Phil ad meeting — "He’s a goof, an iconic child…"
- the Fully Functional Phil ad meeting — "the spot’s animated adult who we…"
- the children's-ad campaign: Glad protects its purchased year — Subsidized Time eats the public interest
- the children's-ad campaign: the federal-corporate war-room — Tine chairs the ad meeting
- the children's-ad campaign: the federal-corporate war-room — Tine chairs the ad meeting — "the incredible good will that’s even…"
- the children's-ad campaign: the threat identified to children solely as "Canadian"
- the children's-ad campaign: the threat identified to children solely as "Canadian" — "That’s why the plaid cap in…"
- the voice heard as weeping, the face read as mirth · S1
- the voice heard as weeping, the face read as mirth — "My voice had been neutral and…" · S1
- the voice heard as weeping, the face read as mirth — "Your face is a hilarity-face. It's…" · S1
- unable to read even his own face