samizdat

The name used within the novel's world for the lethal film cartridge — the movie catalogued as Infinite Jest (V?) and more often just called "the Entertainment." Anyone who watches it is captured into a passive, infantile trance and will re-watch it, to the exclusion of eating, sleeping, or moving, until they die; because of this it is hunted as a contraband weapon, most fiercely by a Québécois separatist cell that wants a master copy to deploy against the United States. First on-screen victim pp. 33-37; the one eyewitness description of its contents, in a government dossier, p. 549; the film's catalogue entry is endnote 24 (pp. 986-990).