Viewing Room 6: frozen yogurt, the spoon-plane, and Blood Sister

pivotal · 11 Nov YDAU, evening

• When: 11 Nov YDAU, evening, in V.R.6 during the after-supper cartridge-viewing.
• What: Her fullest scene, and everything the profile promised performed live. As Blood Sister: One Tough Nun rolls its lurid credits, "Bridget Boone and Frances L. Unwin have come in uninvited and joined Hal in V.R. 6 and are curled up against the arms of the room's other recumbency, their feet touching at the soles, Boone eating unauthorized frozen yogurt from a cylindrical carton" — which she keeps extending to Hal "in an inviting way." She needles the sulking Hal directly — "Bridget Boone gives him a look. 'What's up your particular butt?'" — and expertly: "'Maybe this is partly because this is a public room, for everybody, that your thinking person probably wouldn't choose to isolate in.'", the barb's tail hooking that afternoon's exhibition ("No matter how sullen and pouty that person is over that person's play or near-loss in full view of a whole crowd that day, I hear."). When Longley and Bash arrive ("I thought I heard you in here" — the room fills around Boone), her diagnosis of Hal is flat and accurate: "He's isolating. He won't respond and is spitting extra repulsively to get across the point." All the while the spoon flies — "sometimes Boone plays with the laden spoon, makes it fly around in front of her face like a child's plane," banking it, barrel-rolling it, adding dive-bomber sounds — and the narration quietly confirms the standing profile: "Hal can tell she's done a couple one-hitters." Watching the film she is Hal's one aesthetic peer in the room: the climactic mahogany-object blow's "symbolic unsubtlety making both Hal and Bridget Boone cringe," and at the carved CONTRARIA SUNT COMPLEMENTA tympanum Hal cringes "so severely it's Boone who has to supply the translation Kent Blott asks for." The endnote hands her the evening's laurel: the film's emphasis on silencing leads "B. Boone—a lazy student but very bright girl—to opine that the silent brown-cowled Trappists who've been hanging superfluously around the film's edges like some mute Greek chorus have been serving a symbolic rather than a narrative function, which strikes Hal as perceptive." The scene's last note keeps her unpindownable: "It's hard to tell whether Boone and Bash's applause is sarcastic."