IJ study archive

F/X Porn

source

TL;DR

Wallace's Waterstone's Magazine essay (Winter/Spring 1998), an appreciation of James Cameron's low-budget The Terminator turned polemic against the big-budget genre he calls "Special Effects Porn." It is Wallace criticism, not writing about Infinite Jest — but its subject is the exact machinery the novel's Entertainment weaponizes: a "movie" that is really "half a dozen or so isolated, spectacular scenes" of "riveting, sensuous payoff" strung on "flat, dead" narrative, its spectacle escalating to "distract us from the formulaic void at the story's center". Wallace formalizes a half-serious "Inverse Cost and Quality Law" — the bigger the budget, the worse the film — and traces how commerce hollows an auteur. The essay is the film-critical sibling of E Unibus Pluram and a prose gloss on why the samizdat had to be an anti-commercial art object.

Key claims

  • Special Effects Porn as a genre. Cameron's Terminator 2 inaugurated "this decade's special new genre of big-budget film: Special Effects Porn." "Porn" because "if you substitute F/X for intercourse, the parallels between the two genres become so obvious they're eerie": both are really a handful of isolated spectacular set-pieces strung on dead connective tissue.
  • The anatomy of the spectacle film. "What they really are is half a dozen or so isolated, spectacular scenes" — "scenes comprising maybe twenty or thirty minutes of riveting, sensuous payoff" — "strung together via another sixty to ninety minutes of flat, dead, and often hilariously insipid narrative."
  • The Inverse Cost and Quality Law. "It is called the Inverse Cost and Quality Law, and it states very simply that the larger a movie's budget is, the shittier that movie is going to be." Its financial logic: a film costing hundreds of millions gets backing only if investors are maximally sure of a runaway hit, which forces reliable formulae, bankable stars, and easy sentiment.
  • The corollaries. "The more lavish and spectacular a movie's special effects, the shittier that movie is going to be in all non-F/X respects"; and there is "no quicker or more efficient way to kill what is interesting and original about an interesting, original young director than to give that director a huge budget and lavish F/X resources."
  • Spectacle as void-filling. Insipid dialogue "puts an ever heavier burden of importance" on the digital effects, "which now must be stunning enough to distract us from the formulaic void at the story's center," which in turn demands still more money and attention on the F/X — an "insidious three-part loop."
  • Generic sentiment. There is "no quicker or easier ingress to the audience's heart than to present an innocent child in danger", and "protecting an innocent child from danger is heroism at its most generic": the reliable devices a megabudget must adopt.
  • What Wallace admires is the opposite pole: the "dark, breathlessly kinetic, near-brilliant piece of metaphysical Ludditism" that was the low-budget original, whose noir lighting and "Dexedrine pace" turned scarcity into mood.

Theories & evidence

CONNECTION: entertainment as isolated "sensuous payoff" strung on "flat, dead" narrative — the mechanism the Entertainment weaponizes

  • Crux: entertainment-lethality
  • Early text: The spectacle film is "half a dozen or so isolated, spectacular scenes" of "riveting, sensuous payoff" "strung together via another sixty to ninety minutes of flat, dead, and often hilariously insipid narrative"; its effects must be "stunning enough to distract us from the formulaic void at the story's center". [¶2, ¶3, ¶12] The porn analogy makes the point: entertainment reduced to pure repeatable stimulus. [¶2]
  • IJ echo: The samizdat / the Entertainment as pure lethal pleasure — a cartridge whose viewers want only the payoff, over and over, unto death (the medical attaché's fatal viewing, scene 007, 029). Wallace's porn-spectacle model is the real-cinema asymptote the novel pushes past into lethality.
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation
  • Notes: The film-critical twin of E Unibus Pluram (both 1990s TV/film critique); Wallace's own analysis of entertainment as real pleasure carried toward its addictive limit, not a sci-fi contrivance. The essay raises no counter to it.

CONNECTION: the Inverse Cost and Quality Law — commerce hollowing the auteur, against J.O. Incandenza's anti-commercial cinema

  • Crux: none
  • Early text: "the larger a movie's budget is, the shittier that movie is going to be"; and there is "no quicker or more efficient way to kill what is interesting and original about an interesting, original young director than to give that director a huge budget and lavish F/X resources." [¶8, ¶15]
  • IJ echo: James O. Incandenza's filmography — the "anti-confluential", conceptual, deliberately un-commercial cinema catalogued in the endnote (n.24), and the founding-of-E.T.A. / auteur backstory (scene 020); the novel's final Entertainment is the anti-commercial art object taken to a terminal extreme.
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation
  • Notes: A film-aesthetics continuity, not a plot crux — the commerce-vs-art axis that shapes JOI's filmmaking.

Themes

Entertainment and spectacle (the sensuous payoff; distraction from a "formulaic void"); commerce vs. art (the Inverse Cost and Quality Law; the hollowed auteur); addiction-adjacent pleasure (entertainment as repeatable stimulus); the film/TV critique that E Unibus Pluram and Infinite Jest share.

Cross-references

  • dfw-laughing-with-kafka — the companion 1998 essay on entertainment as anaesthetic reassurance; F/X Porn supplies the film-industry mechanics beneath that cultural diagnosis.
  • The archive's E Unibus Pluram material — Wallace's television essay of the same period; this piece is its cinema counterpart and shares the spectacle-and-distraction argument the Entertainment literalizes.

Notable passages

  • "if you substitute F/X for intercourse, the parallels between the two genres become so obvious they're eerie".
  • "What they really are is half a dozen or so isolated, spectacular scenes" of "riveting, sensuous payoff" "strung together via another sixty to ninety minutes of flat, dead, and often hilariously insipid narrative".
  • "It is called the Inverse Cost and Quality Law, and it states very simply that the larger a movie's budget is, the shittier that movie is going to be".
  • "which now must be stunning enough to distract us from the formulaic void at the story's center".
  • "no quicker or more efficient way to kill what is interesting and original about an interesting, original young director than to give that director a huge budget and lavish F/X resources".