The final opus: filming the veiled Joelle, the crib-lens, and the two accounts of Infinite Jest (V/VI)

pivotal · YTMP-YTSDB (Xmas YTMP filming; JOI's death during post-production, 1 Apr YTSDB); content disputed

• When: the last ~year-plus; the sobriety-conditioned filming runs Xmas YTMP to 1 Apr YTSDB; he filmed Joelle as "his father's optical beloved" for "twenty-one" months; the last filming and his death both fall at "the start of Y.T.S.D.B.," the death "during its post-production"
• What: In his final months JOI, gone "underground" in the post-production closet off the E.T.A. lab (Mario bringing him food; C.T. already running the school, event 12), filmed the veiled Joelle van Dyne "at prodigious and multi-lensed length" — inclined over "that long quartzy auto-wobbling lens propped up in the plaid-sided pram," a "neonatal lens" built to blur "in imitation of a neonatal retina," reciting "the mother-death-cosmology and apologies she'd repeated over and over." He called it the thing "he'd always wanted to make," "a final opus so magnum he'd claimed to have had it locked away," and never let her see even the dailies. The endnote apparatus (n80, Joelle-sourced) adds three hard facts to this stretch: by the time Joelle knew him "Jim wasn't in a position to be lovers with anybody, neurologically speaking"; it was "when James had been driving to this very brownstone, to shoot Joelle in the weird wobble-lensed maternal 'I'm-so-terribly-sorry' monologue-scene of the last thing he'd done" that the re-steamed Volvo window resurrected the name that exposed Avril's infidelity to him; and he "then never shown her" that scene, instead ordering "the cartridge's burial in the brass casket w/ him in the same testament in which he'd willed Joelle an absurd (and addiction-enabling) annuity" (n80 p. 0999; casket metal clashes with n160's "bronze casket" — cite both as written, see event 20). Joelle's private name for him was "Infinite Jim"; her suggested title "The Face of the Deep" he rejected for the Hamlet-graveyard skull-fragment. He "refused to share what he'd made of it, and died w/o a note." Molly Notkin's secondhand account (scene 159) is the fullest making-side description: Madame Psychosis as "some kind of maternal instantiation of the archetypal figure Death, sitting naked... hugely pregnant, her hideously deformed face either veiled or blanked out," delivering a Death-cosmology "in very simple childlike language" — that Death is always female and maternal, "the woman who kills you is always your next life's mother." Joelle (scene 178) confirms the lens from performing under it ("a night-vision scope" of a "crib-lens," "Lenses were Jim's forte... He made all his own"), but flatly deflates the lethality rumor as an inside joke: "Jim took a failed piece and told me it was too perfect to release... It was entirely clear that it was an ironic joke. To me," insisting "there wasn't anything unendurable or enslaving in either of my scenes." Corroboration: JOI "stopped ingesting distilled spirits as Madame Psychosis's personal condition for consenting to appear" (159); Joelle was Orin's disfigured beloved JOI "compulsively used in films" (122), her "first appearance in a James O. Incandenza project occurred in... Low-Temperature Civics" (139), his interest running "first aesthetic and then anti-aesthetic" (166); Notkin believes he "would have destroyed the Master Print of the failed piece." The samizdat is treated as attributed to him ("the Entertainment's alleged filmmaker," 077; "the film's director supposedly made" an anti-Entertainment, 038); Notkin's party swirls with the "cartridge-as-ecstatic-death" rumor (062). [FINAL-FILM CRUX, PRESERVED IN TENSION: Joelle here says an ironic joke, nothing lethal; the AFR/U.S.O.U.S. call it verifiably lethal (event 19); the wraith calls it the opus made "to reach" Hal (event 21) — RESOLVED NOWHERE.]