The critical rap: "narratively dull and plotless and static," audience-hostile

pivotal · UNDATED (critical reception, to YDPAH)

• When: the scholarly reception forms across his career and posthumously (footnote c cites a Y.P.W. essay; the tenure-essay debate is post-death)
• What: The oeuvre's standing dispute, which the thread records open. Romney and Sperber ask in print "Has James O. Incandenza Ever Even Once Produced One Genuinely Original or Unappropriated or Nonderivative Thing?"; academics read the recurring on-screen audiences (always dumb or grisly-mishap victims) as an auteur's hostility; a U. Cal–Irvine tenure essay elevates the whole "reason-versus-no-reason debate about what was unentertaining in Himself's work" into the central conundrum of après-garde film. Hal's own test case is Accomplice! (YTMP) — the cartridge whose final third is the word "Murderer!" repeated far past all need, shot in the co-op "Himself had rented for O. and the P.G.O.A.T." and "decorated in various gradations of scuz for the interiors of almost all his late projects" (179); Cartridge Scene's reviewers called it "the stupidest, nastiest, least subtle and worst-edited product of a pretentious and wretchedly uneven career" (n024), and Hal cannot decide whether the excruciation is a theoretical-aesthetic end or whether JOI was "simply an amazingly shitty editor of his own stuff." The question the thread leaves open.