Scene n024: joi filmography

• p. 985: Title and headnote: the career's archival challenges — venue shifts across the InterLace transition, every genre from "industrial" to "dramatic commercial," no formal dating "until the advent of Subsidized Time," privately held production companies under four names, and conceptual works "titled and subjected to critique but never filmed" (the Found Drama tip-off, planted in the apparatus itself).
• p. 986: Format key: each entry gives date (or "B.S." = Before Subsidization), company, credited players, gauge, length, b/w-color, sound, synopsis, and medium; UNRELEASED = never distributed, "publicly unavailable or lost."
• p. 986: Cage (B.S., Meniscus): .5-minute "soliloquized parody" of a shampoo ad using four convex and two planar mirrors and one actress. UNRELEASED. Sub-footnote b (p. 993) deadpans that the Cage series "bears no discernible relation" to Sidney Peterson's 1947 The Cage — "with the possible exception of Cage III."
• p. 986: Kinds of Light (B.S.): 4,444 frames of different light sources reflected off one unpolished tin plate, "disorienting at normal projection speeds"; requires .25 sprocket drive. Companion piece Kinds of Pain comes later (p. 987): 2,222 stills of middle-aged white males in every conceivable pain. Optics and suffering as the two raw catalogable materials of the oeuvre.
• p. 986: Dark Logics (B.S.): palsied child-sized hand turning incunabula of intolerance, dedicated to Griffith and Iimura; deafening Wagner/Sousa. UNRELEASED.
• p. 986: U.S.T.A. advertorial trio — Tennis, Everyone?, 'There Are No Losers Here.' (the B.S. 1997 Kalamazoo junior nationals), Flux in a Box (history of court tennis from the Dauphin's court on). The tennis-academy founder's day-job work, keys to the E.T.A. lore.
• p. 986: Infinite Jest (I) (B.S., Meniscus; Judith Fukuoka-Hearn; 90(?) min., b/w, silent): "Incandenza's unfinished and unseen first attempt at commercial entertainment." UNRELEASED. The Entertainment was the project of the entire career, not a late aberration.
• p. 986: Annular Fusion Is Our Friend and Annular Amplified Light: Some Reflections — two Sunstrand Power & Light infomercials, sign-interpreted for the deaf, nontechnically explaining DT-cycle lithiumized annular fusion and its cooled-photon lasers (pp. 986-987). JOI's physics fortune (scene 020, pp. 63-65) feeding directly into the filmography; "Some Reflections" is the whole oeuvre's pun.
• p. 987: Union of Nurses in Berkeley and Union of Theoretical Grammarians in Cambridge — the latter documents the public Steven Pinker–Avril M. Incandenza debate on prescriptive grammar at the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts convention "credited with helping incite the M.I.T. language riots of B.S. 1997." UNRELEASED DUE TO LITIGATION. Avril's only explicit appearance in the catalog.
• p. 987: Widower (B.S., first Latrodectus Mactans entry — the production company is named for the black widow spider): Cosgrove Watt as a cocaine-addicted father leading his son around a Tucson desert property "immolating poisonous spiders." JOI's own Tucson father and the family arachnophobia, first of many Watt-as-JOI's-father/JOI figures.
• p. 987: Cage II: blind convict (Watt) and deaf-mute convict (Disney Leith) placed together in "solitary confinement" "attempt to devise ways of communicating with each other" — the career's communication-failure thesis at its most naked.
• p. 987: Death in Scarsdale: dermatological endocrinologist (Watt) platonically obsessed with a boy he's treating for excessive perspiration — played by Marlon R. Bain, whose actual hyperhidrosis (cf. n.269) JOI cast as itself; the doctor catches the sweating.
• p. 987: Fun with Teeth: Kosinski/Updike/Peckinpah parody; a dentist performs "sixteen unanesthetized root-canal procedures" on an academic he suspects of involvement with his wife — silent "w/ non-human screams and howls." Cuckold's-revenge fantasy, first overt Avril-affair material.
• p. 987: Infinite Jest (II) (B.S.; Pam Heath; 90(?) min.): "Unfinished, unseen attempt at remake of Infinite Jest (I)." UNRELEASED.
• p. 987: Immanent Domain: three memory-neurons in polyurethane costumes fight displacement in a man's inferior frontal gyrus during intensive psychoanalysis. Kinds of Pain follows (see above).
• pp. 987-988: Various Small Flames: n-frame household flames intercut with a man (Watt) drinking bourbon in a dark bedroom while his wife (Heath) and an Amway rep have "acrobatic coitus in the background's lit hallway"; UNRELEASED DUE TO LITIGATION by Ed Ruscha (Various Small Fires). The marriage again, now with JOI as passive spectator of the affair — spectation as paralysis.
• p. 988: Cage III—Free Show (w/ Infernatron Animation, Canada): Death (Heath) fronts a sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo "unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling" that they turn into "gigantic eyeballs in chairs," while Life (P. A. Heaven) invites fairgoers to undergo degradations so as to be watched in turn. The clearest pre-statement of the Entertainment's mechanism: spectation as self-annihilating compulsion. (Cf. the "free show"/P.G.O.A.T. resonance with Joelle.)
• p. 988: 'The Medusa v. the Odalisque': zone-plating laser holograms of "two visually lethal mythologic females" dueling with reflective surfaces onstage "while a live crowd of spectators turns to stone"; audience-noises appropriated from broadcast TV. Lethal-to-behold femininity + mirrors — the Joelle/veil/Entertainment complex in myth form. Holography by JOI and Urquhart Ogilvie, Jr.
• p. 988: The Machine in the Ghost: Annular Holography for Fun and Prophet — title pun (Ryle inverted; "Prophet"/profit); UNRELEASED DUE TO US/CANADIAN DIPLOMATIC TENSIONS. Homo Duplex: interviews with fourteen Americans named John Wayne who are not John Wayne (cf. E.T.A.'s own Canadian John Wayne). Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony: the Ocha-Kai conducted in a NASA zero-g chamber — cast includes Otto Brandt and E. J. Kenkle, i.e. the future E.T.A. janitor pair: JOI cast his own crew and staff throughout.
• p. 988: Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell (Blake-titled, Infernatron animation): God and Satan play poker with Tarot cards "for the soul of an alcoholic sandwich-bag salesman obsessed with Bernini's 'The Ecstasy of St. Teresa.'" The alcoholic-soul-in-the-balance is Himself; the sandwich-bag man and the Bernini ecstasy both recur in Low-Temperature Civics (p. 991) and in the ecstatic-death iconography around the Entertainment.
• pp. 988-989: The Joke: two Ikegami cameras film the theater audience and project it onto the screen as the "film" — "the theater audience watching itself watch itself get the obvious 'joke' and become increasingly self-conscious and uncomfortable and hostile." His "first truly controversial project"; Sperber credits it with "unwittingly sounding the death-knell of post-poststructural film in terms of sheer annoyance." Screenable in venue only; NOW UNRELEASED. Spectation turned on the spectator — the Entertainment's inverse.
• p. 989: Various Lachrymose U.S. Corporate Middle-Management Figures — unfinished; first of the bare "Unfinished. UNRELEASED" tombstones that thicken as the list proceeds. Every Inch of Disney Leith: 253 minutes of endoscopic and microinvasive traversal of one technical crew member's entire exterior and interior as he sits on the Boston Common.
• p. 989: Infinite Jest (III): "Unfinished, unseen remake of Infinite Jest (I), (II)." UNRELEASED.
• pp. 989-990: The Found Dramas — Found Drama I, II, III … then V, VI … then IX, X, XI, each block tagged only "conceptual, conceptually unfilmable. UNRELEASED." Even the numbering is part of the gag (no IV, VII, VIII; real films sit in the gaps). The entries are deliberately opaque here; the joke itself — dart thrown at a torn-out White Pages page, whoever it hits is the unknowing protagonist of an unwatched, unrecorded 90-minute "ultimate Neorealism," possibly someone already dead, the whole thing a grant-funded revenge hoax on the critical establishment — is explicated by Orin in n.145 (pp. 1027-1028), with the fallout (the burned New Yorker critic, JOI spilling the beans on 'Fresh Air') in n.234 (p. 1038). That the filmography's own source-compilers (Duquette, Posner) were hoax confederates makes the catalog's "completeness" suspect by design.
• p. 989: The Man Who Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass (YW, the first Subsidized-dated film): a man in psychotherapy "discovers that he is brittle, hollow, and transparent to others, and becomes either transcendentally enlightened or schizophrenic." Cast: Cosgrove Watt and Gerhardt Schtitt.
• p. 989: The American Century as Seen Through a Brick (YW): one Back Bay brick's career from found-art installation to E.W.D.-catapult displacement to a Québec waste-quarry to the F.L.Q. anti-O.N.A.N. riots — annular waste-circulation as biography of an object.
• p. 989: The ONANtiad (YW): "oblique, obsessive, and not very funny claymation love triangle" against the live-acted "inception of North American Interdependence and Continental Reconfiguration" (Infernatron claymation). The direct parent of Mario's E.T.A. Interdependence-Day puppet pageant (pp. 380-442 range).
• pp. 989-990: ONAN-history documentary cluster, grouped: The Universe Lashes Out (evacuation of Atkinson NH at Reconfiguration), Poultry in Motion (renegade North Syracuse turkey farmers commandeering "long, shiny O.N.A.N. trucks" to save 200,000 pertussive Thanksgiving fowl).
• p. 990: Möbius Strips (YW): pornography-parody ('Hugh G. Rection,' 'Bunny Day,' 'Taffy Appel'); a theoretical physicist who achieves mathematical insight only during coitus "conceives of Death as a lethally beautiful woman (Heath)." Death-as-beautiful-woman enters the oeuvre; the title is annularity itself.
• p. 990: Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat (YW): possible parody/homage to the LDS public-service-announcement cycle (sub-footnote c hangs here: Romney and Sperber, "Has James O. Incandenza Ever Even Once Produced One Genuinely Original or Unappropriated or Nonderivative Thing?", p. 993); "a harried commuter is mistaken for Christ by a child he knocks over." One of the only entries with a flicker of grace/second-chances — and one of the films Hal returns to.
• p. 990: Blood Sister: One Tough Nun (YTMP): revenge/recidivism-genre parody — "a formerly delinquent nun's (Hurley's) failure to reform a juvenile delinquent (Chumm) leads to a rampage of recidivist revenge." InterLace pulse-dissemination 21 July YTMP. Gets its full scene-length treatment in the main text (E.T.A. viewing, ~pp. 703ff) — failed-rehabilitation plot mirroring the Ennet House material.
• p. 990: Infinite Jest (IV) (YTMP): Pam Heath (?), 'Madame Psychosis'(?) — first appearance of Joelle's stage-name credit in the catalog; 90 min.(?); "Unfinished, unseen attempt at completion of Infinite Jest (III)." UNRELEASED.
• p. 990: First Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited entry (Let There Be Lite, unfinished doc on reduced-calorie bourbon — the alcoholism now in the company name: poor Yorick, the skull, the jester of "infinite jest"). Interleaved Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED tombstones begin.
• p. 990: No Troy (YW): 7-minute holographic scale-model of Troy NY's "bombardment by miscalibrated Waste Displacement Vehicles, and its subsequent elimination by O.N.A.N. cartographers"; released only in Canada; also catalogued as The Violet City / The Violet Ex-City — one film under several names, maps outliving the territory they erase.
• p. 990: Valuable Coupon Has Been Removed (YTMP): a boy helps "his alcoholic-delusional father and disassociated mother dismantle their bed to search for rodents, and later he intuits the future feasibility of D.T.-cycle lithiumized annular fusion" — JOI's own childhood and career-origin myth, straight up (cf. JOI's father's garage monologue, pp. 157-169, and the family bed/squeak material). Listed "silent" — but Hal at p. 687 (scene 132) finds it "maddening because it's all a monologue" from the bespectacled Smothergill kid; authorial inconsistency, both cited as written.
• p. 990: Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators (YTMP): "children and adolescents play a nearly incomprehensible nuclear strategy game with tennis equipment" against exploding sabotaged ATHSCME towers — Eschaton (main text pp. 321-342) existed first as a JOI film subject.
• pp. 990-991: Stand Behind the Men Behind the Wire (YTMP): documentary on the Essex County expedition to "track, verify, capture, or propitiate the outsized feral infant" of Lowell — the Concavity's feral-infant lore (cf. Marathe/Steeply and the I-Day pageant) as in-world documentary fact.
• p. 991: As of Yore (YTMP; Watt, Marlon Bain; 181 min.): "a middle-aged tennis instructor, preparing to instruct his son in tennis, becomes intoxicated in the family's garage and subjects his son to a rambling monologue while the son weeps and perspires." A near-verbatim transposition of JOI's father's Tucson garage monologue (main text pp. 157-169) — fathers-and-sons trauma recycled as art, with sweating Bain again as the son.
• p. 991: Unfinished-title tombstones, grouped: The Clever Little Bastard, The Cold Majesty of the Numb (Hal-anhedonia avant la lettre), and Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space With Mind-Boggling Efficiency — "Unfinished due to hospitalization" — the title Hal's late first-person sections will reach for.
• p. 991: Low-Temperature Civics (YTMP): Wyler parody — four sons intrigue for a sandwich-bag conglomerate after their CEO father (Watt) "has an ecstatic encounter with Death ('Psychosis') and becomes irreversibly catatonic." Madame Psychosis as Death; father lost to an ecstatic encounter — the Entertainment's plot in corporate drag. National dissemination in InterLace's 'Cavalcade of Evil' series.
• p. 991: (At Least) Three Cheers for Cause and Effect (YTMP): "the headmaster of a newly constructed high-altitude sports academy" obsesses over litigation to divert himself "from his wife's (Heath's) poorly hidden affair with the academically renowned mathematical topologist who is acting as the project's architect ('Rection')." E.T.A.'s founding plus Avril's affairs, undisguised.
• p. 991: (The) Desire to Desire (YTMP): "a pathology resident (Lingley) falls in love with a beautiful cadaver ('Psychosis')" and her paralyzed sister, "she died rescuing [her] from the attack of an oversized feral infant." Title = anhedonia's cure stated as lack; Joelle again cast as beautiful death.
• pp. 991-992: Safe Boating Is No Accident (YTMP(?)): Kierkegaard/Lynch(?) parody — a claustrophobic water-ski instructor whose fiancée's ('Psychosis''s) "face is grotesquely mangled by an outboard propeller" gets trapped in an elevator with a defrocked Trappist, two LDS missionaries, a fitness guru, a state commissioner, and "seven severely intoxicated opticians with silly hats and exploding cigars." The mangled-face fiancée pre-figures/encodes the Joelle-disfigurement question (U.H.I.D., Notkin's acid story) a year before the accident's main-text dates.
• p. 992: Very Low Impact (YTMP): narcoleptic aerobics instructor (Chumm) hiding her condition; the catalog's one POSTHUMOUS RELEASE (YWQMD). The Night Wears a Sombrero (YTMP(?)): Rancho Notorious parody — a nearsighted cowpoke's mistaken-identity Oedipal revenge plot ends at "a sinister Mexican ranch where Oedipally aggrieved gunslingers are ritually blinded by a mysterious veiled nun ('Psychosis')." The veil, blinding-to-behold, and Oedipal grievance fused in one synopsis.
• p. 992: Accomplice! (YTMP): "an aging pederast mutilates himself out of love for a strangely tattooed street hustler" (Watt, Stokely 'Dark Star' McNair). Withdrawn after Cartridge Scene called it "the stupidest, nastiest, least subtle and worst-edited product of a pretentious and wretchedly uneven career." Hal recounts and puzzles over its plot in the main text (~pp. 945ff).
• p. 992: Three consecutive Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED. entries — the YTMP-YTSDB collapse rendered typographically.
• p. 992: Dial C for Concupiscence (YTSDB): noir-parody tribute to Bresson — a cascade of mistaken identities ends with the heroine in a semaphore-communicating Islamic community, in love with "an armless Near Eastern medical attaché" (Chawaf). Eerie pre-echo of the actual Near Eastern medical attaché who becomes the Entertainment's first on-page victim (scene 007, pp. 33-37).
• p. 992: Insubstantial Country (YTSDB): "an unpopular après-garde filmmaker (Watt) either suffers a temporal lobe seizure and becomes mute or else is the victim of everyone else's delusion that his... seizure has left him mute." JOI's Hal-delusion reversed onto himself; also the template for Hal's Year-of-Glad condition (scene 001).
• p. 992: It Was a Great Marvel That He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him (YTSDB; Watt, Smothergill; 5 min.): "a father (Watt), suffering from the delusion that his etymologically precocious son (Smothergill) is pretending to be mute, poses as a 'professional conversationalist' in order to draw the boy out." The exact scenario of scene 005 (pp. 27-32), filmed; the title (father/son mutual unknowing) is the family's epitaph.
• p. 992: Cage IV—Web and Cage V—Infinite Jim — both unfinished; the second title fuses the Cage series with the Infinite Jest series and with Himself's own name: Jim, caged, infinitely. Death and the Single Girl, unfinished.
• pp. 992-993: The Film Adaptation of Peter Weiss's 'The Persecution and Assassination of Marat...' (YTSDB): JOI's only acting credit as himself — a "chemically impaired director (Incandenza)" interrupts the play-within-a-play to "discourse incoherently" until the actor playing Marat (Leith) has an onstage cerebral hemorrhage, the nearsighted stage director throttles the wrong man, "the extra-dramatic figure of Death ('Psychosis') descends deus ex machina," and "Incandenza becomes ill all over the theater audience's first row." UNRELEASED DUE TO LITIGATION, HOSPITALIZATION. Auto-portrait of the late-stage alcoholic auteur wrecking his own apparatus.
• p. 993: Final tombstones: Too Much Fun, The Unfortunate Case of Me, Sorry All Over the Place — unfinished titles that read as a three-line suicide note (cf. the wraith's "sorry" lexicon and Joelle's account of the IJ(V?) apology-monologue).
• p. 993: Infinite Jest (V?) (YTSDB, Poor Yorick; sole credit 'Madame Psychosis'; "no other definitive data"). "Thorny problem for archivists": his last film, death occurring during post-production; most authorities list it unfinished/unseen; some file it under YTMP as completion of IJ(IV). "Though no scholarly synopsis or report of viewing exists," two Cartridge Quarterly East essays (sub-footnotes d-f: Duquette's "Beholden to Vision: Optics and Desire in Four Après Garde Films," and the Anonymous "Seeing v. Believing") call it "extraordinary" and "far and away [his] most entertaining and compelling work" — praise with no surviving witnesses. West Coast archivists infer the gauge "16... 78... n mm." from allusions to "radical experiments in viewers' optical perspective and context." Canadian archivist Tête-Bêche (head-to-tail — annularity in a surname) lists it completed and privately distributed via posthumous will provisions; everyone else has the Master cartridge "either destroyed or vaulted sui testator" — by the testator's own arrangement, i.e. the buried Master the A.F.R. and U.S.O.U.S. spend the novel hunting.
• p. 993: The apparatus itself (sub-footnotes a-f): source citation, the Sidney Peterson disclaimer, and the derivativeness-debate articles — scholarship as deadpan comedy, footnotes within a footnote.

Forward

• Referenced from the main text at p. 64 (scene 020's JOI dossier), which sends the reader here; this note is the spine for every later film mention.
• Found Drama: the joke explicated by Orin in n.145 (pp. 1027-1028) — phone-book dart, no camera, "Reality being camera-free," protagonist possibly already dead — and its aftermath (NPR confession, the revenge of the burned New Yorker critic) in n.234 (p. 1038). Compilers Duquette and Posner were in on the hoax per n.145, compromising this very document.
• The ONANtiad → Mario's Interdependence-Day puppet pageant, a parodic remake screened annually at E.T.A. (pp. 380-442 range).
• 'Madame Psychosis' credits (IJ(IV), Low-Temperature Civics, (The) Desire to Desire, Safe Boating, The Night Wears a Sombrero, Marat/Sade, IJ(V?)) → Joelle van Dyne's film career and veil: her own retrospective during the freebase scene (pp. 219-240, scene 058, 060, 062), Molly Notkin's theories of the Entertainment's content — Death as the wobbling-lens mother-apology — to U.S.O.U.S. (pp. 788-795, scene 159), and Joelle's firsthand account of filming the crib-POV apology monologue, told to Gately.
• The Medusa v. the Odalisque → viewed and argued over in the myths discussion, scene 103, pp. 528-530; also named by Orin in n.145 alongside The Joke as the works that provoked the critics.
• Blood Sister: One Tough Nun → full scene-length E.T.A. viewing with Hal's running synopsis, ~pp. 703, scene 138ff.
• Accomplice! → Hal recounts the plot and worries over what Himself found funny, ~pp. 945, scene 179ff.
• Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat → Hal's repeated viewings and the second-chances reading (main text; cf. also Notkin's salon film-theories).
• It Was a Great Marvel... → the professional-conversationalist scene 005 (pp. 27-32) filmed verbatim; As of Yore → JOI's father's garage monologue (pp. 157-169); Valuable Coupon Has Been Removed → JOI's childhood/fusion-origin material.
• Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators → Eschaton (scene 073, pp. 321-342); Stand Behind the Men Behind the Wire → feral-infant Concavity lore (Marathe/Steeply installments; I-Day pageant).
• Casts double as the novel's population: Gerhardt Schtitt (Man... Made of Glass), Marlon Bain (Death in Scarsdale, As of Yore; cf. n.269), Disney Leith (E.T.A. film staff), Kenkle and Brandt (Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony), Cosgrove Watt as the perennial JOI-figure.
• IJ(V?)'s "vaulted sui testator" Master → the anti-Entertainment hunt: the attaché's cartridge (scenes 007/011/014/025), the A.F.R.'s search (Antitoi raid, pp. 481-489; Steeply/Marathe), JOI's head/grave (Gately's dream-flash in scene 003, p. 17; the wraith's conversations with Gately, where Himself confirms he made the Entertainment to reach Hal — "to bring him 'out of himself'").
• Insubstantial Country and The Cold Majesty of the Numb → Hal's Year-of-Glad mutism (scene 001) and late anhedonia sections.
• Catalog gap, flagged as written: Union of Publicly Hidden in Lynn, which Hal watches at p. 687 (scene 132), is absent from this filmography — either an authorial inconsistency or an instance of the headnote's own admission that the list's "completeness [is] … not definitive" (p. 986).

• p. 985: "The following listing is as complete as we are able to make it..." — the headnote's deadpan archival apparatus; the novel's encyclopedic method in miniature, comedy played absolutely straight.
• p. 986: "Incandenza's unfinished and unseen first attempt at commercial entertainment" — the IJ(I) entry; nine words that reframe the whole career as one repeated attempt.
• p. 988: "the spectators' eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs" — Cage III—Free Show; the Entertainment's theory of spectation, stated as carnival grotesque.
• pp. 988-989: "the theater audience watching itself watch itself get the obvious 'joke'..." — The Joke; involution as assault on the viewer.
• pp. 989-990: "Found Drama I. / Found Drama II. / Found Drama III.... conceptual, conceptually unfilmable. UNRELEASED" — the bare entries whose punch line is withheld until n.145 (pp. 1027-1028: the dart, the phone book, the protagonist who may already be dead — the closest the source comes to the "too late" idea); the catalog keeps the hoax's straight face.
• p. 992: "a father (Watt), suffering from the delusion that his etymologically precocious son (Smothergill) is pretending to be mute..." — It Was a Great Marvel; the saddest entry, scene 005 compressed to a log line.
• p. 993: "Too Much Fun. / The Unfortunate Case of Me. / Sorry All Over the Place." — three unfinished titles as de facto suicide note.
• p. 993: "Infinite Jest (V?)... no other definitive data. Thorny problem for archivists." — the Entertainment's own entry: praise without witnesses, gauge inferred from allusion, Master "destroyed or vaulted sui testator"; the novel's MacGuffin filed under proper scholarly hedging.