Infinite Cast Part 119: Reviewing Accomplice! (pp. 945–951) — commentary segment (~19 min): the irreconcilable father, IJ as a sex-negative book, the entertainment conundrum inverted

TL;DR

The Accomplice! session: Hal's candied-sunlight memory of his meek, Noxzema-smelling father is read as built to pose one question — how could that man conceive of a film like Accomplice!? — and the discussion fans out from there into the book's sexual economy: a flat sex-negative verdict (the novel contains no good sex anywhere; sex gets the same handling as every other pleasure — a thing to abuse, get hooked on, and grow psychoses around), run as a survey of the cast (Orin the abused child turned coercive man, Hal asexual, Avril pretty much confirmed abusive, JOI sublimating everything into bizarre violently pornographic films, homosexuality appearing mostly paired with disease, death, exploitation, and addiction), plus a thoughtful historicization of the book's AIDS moment from readers who grew up just after it. Two more ledgerable items: the house reverie read as looping Hal back to where it all began — the mold he ate — with the mold/DMZ rhyme left half-assembled on purpose; and the text's own reason-vs-no-reason film conundrum (ambitious film boring, commercial entertainment fun) declared inverted in the streaming era. A Fritz Lang story and an Oscar-night tail round it out. ASR transcript: paraphrase only.

Key claims

• Digestion scope: commentary only (trim at 30:15 of 49:22); the buffer caught the tall-thin-quiet-man read-aloud — the candied east-window sunlight portrait of Himself, impossible to reconcile with Accomplice!, down to Hal's tip-of-the-tongue almost-memory of something almost moving Himself once told Orin about the film — print territory, and the direct referent of the discussion. Coverage pp. 945–951 (feed-declared; on-air the hosts place the session at 944-to-950, eight pages — page refs ASR-derived, approximate).
• The Accomplice! reaction: unpleasant, pornographic — and the childhood reverie turns out to be aimed at exactly the question of how the silent meek father could make a movie like that — what the inside of JOI's sick, twisted head must actually hold.
• The AIDS historicization: the book was published when HIV/AIDS was better understood than at the epidemic's height but still a life-shortener and a heavy social weight; a recent viral diagnosis-announcement (met publicly with congratulation on a normal life ahead) shows how completely the disease's role has changed — the book's AIDS material will eventually read, and already half reads, as historical; personal recollections of 90s-childhood AIDS messaging (the please-hug-me poster; Ryan White as the it-can-happen-to-anybody story) and the observation that their cohort crossed into adulthood exactly as treatability arrived; a cure or reversal is imagined within their lifetimes — something Wallace could simply never have pictured.
• The Wallace-and-gay-stuff question, asked directly: what is Wallace's relationship to gay material? — answered with a survey rather than a verdict: instances of homosexuality in the book are usually paired with disease, death, exploitation, and addiction; the Accomplice! encounter (bus-station hustler, transactional, brutal) is a raw and ungenerous rendering of gay sex with a watched-Midnight-Cowboy-once flavor — though being straight isn't so great in this book either.
• The sex-negative verdict: none of the sex in the book is good; the best-portrayal search fails on every candidate (Orin's athletic hypercompulsion — no, a sexually abused child turned sexually coercive man; Hal — asexual; Avril — pretty much confirmed to be abusive; JOI — seems okay, weirdly, except he sublimates his obsessions into bizarre violently pornographic films); conclusion: the book handles sex the way it handles every other pleasure — as a thing to abuse, get addicted to, and develop psychoses and conditions around.
• The house-reverie observation: the original suburban Weston house was last seen at the very beginning of the book (a good pull, the other host concedes, having forgotten); Hal's psychedelic-flavored reverie circles Hal back toward a possible origin point — the childhood mold-eating — with the grown-over-mold beat and the LSD comparison left as pieces still being put together, and a host predicting the thread will develop from here.
• The conundrum inversion: the text's referenced criticism — the tenure-essay claim that arguments over whether Himself's work was unentertaining on purpose lit up millennial après-garde film's core puzzle: ambitious art film dull, cheap commercial product enjoyable (byte-true print wording quoted at the theory block below) — gets a present-day audit: the wires have crossed; now the ambitious film is the interesting one and the commercial product is boring; the avant-garde has been purged to elite art societies; the Tár-is-too-arty discourse cited as evidence, and the whole thing looped back to the JOI question — if something sucks, is it intentional?
• Endgame color: Don hasn't been seen in a while; the who's-dying-again recall lands on Fackelmann (goddamn lie); the hosts place themselves ~30–35 pages from the end (ASR-heard loose talk), a long strange journey nearly done.
• Color: a Fritz Lang story (a high-school attempt to take friends to a touring 35mm Metropolis print, defeated by Lang-equals-Nazi-film philistinism — he fled the Nazis, bros; the looming wave of film centennials), prompted by the house inventory's framed print of Lang directing Metropolis; an Oscar-night tail (best-picture completism, Women Talking jokes, the Triangle of Sadness first-scene appreciation) that widens into a situationship taxonomy rant (a state defined by its lack of definition — very postmodern) and a recalled favorite line — the freaks wanted it more — attributed to Matt's description of who won the English Civil War.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Infinite Jest is a sex-negative book — sex is one more abusable pleasure, and no character models a good version of it

• Crux: sex-negativity (proposed — not in the theory registry; orin-avril-abuse adjacency)
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [text] The exhaustive-candidates survey: Orin's athletic, hypercompulsive sex fails (a sexually abused child who becomes a sexually coercive man — a no-go); Hal is asexual; Avril is pretty much confirmed to be abusive; JOI seems okay, weirdly, except that he sublimates his obsessions into bizarre, violently pornographic films. [00:00]
  • [text] The homosexuality pattern: instances of gay material in the book arrive paired with disease, death, exploitation, and addiction — with the immediate qualification that nothing pairs well in this book and being straight fares little better. [00:00]
  • [inference] The unifying account: in this novel sex gets the same treatment as every other pleasure — abused, made into an addiction, wrapped in psychoses and conditions. [00:00]
• Notes: The Accomplice! rendering (raw, ungenerous, transactional) is the session's exhibit A, and the hosts pose the what-is-Wallace's-relationship-to-gay-stuff question without resolving it (what is any purportedly straight guy's relationship, is the shrug it gets). The Avril pretty-much-confirmed-abusive line is delivered as settled in-book fact — a dated instance of how firmly that reading had set among serial readers by the book's end.

THEORY: The childhood reverie exists to stage the irreconcilability of JOI — the meek Noxzema father cannot be squared with the mind that conceived Accomplice!

• Crux: incandenza-autobiography (with filmography-coded-message adjacency)
• Stance: entertains
• Evidence:
  • [text] The structural read: the long wondering-where-this-is-going reverie of childhood resolves into exactly one question — how could my own father have conceived a film like this; what JOI's sick, twisted interior must contain. [00:00]
  • [text] The passage's own testimony, held as the referent: the silent candied-sunlight figure "seems, still, impossible to reconcile with the sensibility of something like Accomplice!" (pp. 951–952, print-verified), sodomy and razors unimaginable in him no matter how theoretically — and Hal's almost-memory of something almost moving that Himself once told Orin about the film hangs unreachable, its pursuit feeling like the preface to another attack. [00:00]
• Notes: The hosts stop at the irreconcilability itself — no coded-message decoding of the filmography is attempted; the block's stance is entertains because the question (what the films say about the man) is opened and deliberately left as the text leaves it: unresolved, with the almost-moving anecdote never recovered.

THEORY: The reverie loops Hal back to where it all began — the mold he ate — and the mold/DMZ rhyme is assembling

• Crux: hal-dmz (with annular-structure adjacency)
• Stance: entertains
• Evidence:
  • [text] The loop observation: the original Weston house was last seen at the very beginning of the book, and Hal's reverie returns him to a candidate point of origin: the mold he swallowed as a small child. [00:00]
  • [inference] The half-assembled rhyme: the mold-that-had-grown-mold beat and an LSD comparison are put next to the reverie with an explicit we're-still-putting-everything-together hedge and a promise that it will go further from here. [00:00]
• Notes: ASR is roughest exactly here (see transcript-quality note): the mold/LSD fragment garbles, and the paraphrase above stays at the level the audio supports — the hosts connect the reverie, the childhood mold-eating, and a psychedelic register without stating a dosing mechanism. The DMZ-mold-derivation echo is the obvious destination, but this session doesn't arrive at it on-air.

THEORY: The book's entertainment conundrum has inverted since publication — ambitious film is now the fun one and commercial product the boring one

• Crux: eup-connection (with entertainment-purpose adjacency)
• Stance: entertains
• Evidence:
  • [text] The anchor passage, byte-true from print: the U. Cal–Irvine tenure essay "arguing that the reason-versus-no-reason debate about what was unentertaining in Himself’s work illuminated the central conundra of millennial après-garde film, most of which, in the teleputer age of home-only entertainment, involved the question why so much aesthetically ambitious film was so boring and why so much shitty reductive commercial entertainment was so much fun" (p. 946, print-verified). [00:00]
  • [inference] The audit: the wires have since crossed — aesthetically ambitious film now reads as the more interesting thing while the commercial product bores; the avant-garde has been ruthlessly purged to elite art societies; the current is-Tár-too-arty-to-watch discourse is the evidence offered. [00:00]
  • [inference] The loop-back: the inversion re-poses the JOI question in the present tense — when a work is bad, did its maker mean it to be? [00:00]
• Notes: A historicization rather than a reading of the novel's claim: the hosts treat the text's conundrum as a correct description of its own moment that the streaming era has inverted. A go-watch-Mothlight-style joke rides the same beat (real avant-garde cinema brandished at the too-arty complainers).

Themes

Fathers and their unknowability (the irreconcilable JOI); sex and addiction (the sex-negative economy); the body and its era (AIDS historicized); entertainment and ambition (the inverted conundrum); annular return (the house, the mold); film history (Lang, centennials, Oscar night).

Cross-references

• ic-part114 — the session where the my-son-ate-this callback first surfaced in this stretch; the mold-loop reading here is its continuation.
• ic-part117 — the previous round-3 session; its Fackelmann death-watch is recalled in this session's closing.
• ic-part123 — the post-finish re-read, where the mold scene gets its boldest identification (the Entertainment's own crib image); this session's loop observation is the mid-read seed.
• ijbc-ep46 — the other community's filmography session, and the origin of the Beat-reading of Accomplice! terrain this episode covers without touching.
• e-unibus-pluram-ij-connections — the essay home of the ambitious-vs-fun axis the inversion audit historicizes.
• ic-part45 — the Matt Christman guest episode; his freaks-wanted-it-more line is quoted from memory in this session's tail.