Infinite Jest (186 page)

Cosgrove Watt was a pro, but he wasn’t very good, and before Himself discovered him,
Watt’s career consisted mostly of regional-market commercials on broadcast television.
His widest commercial exposure was as the Dancing Gland in a series of spots for a
chain of East Coast endocrinology clinics. He’d worn a bulbous white costume, white
toupee, and either a ball-and-chain or white tap-shoes, depending on whether he was
portraying the Before-Gland or the After-Gland. Himself during one of these commercials
had shouted Eureka at our HD Sony and travelled personally all the way to Glen Riddle,
Pennsylvania, where Watt lived with his mother and her cats, to recruit him. He used
Cosgrove Watt in almost every project for eighteen months. Watt for a time was to
Himself as DeNiro was to Scorsese, McLachlin to Lynch, Allen to Allen. And up until
Watt’s temporal-lobe problem made his social presence unbearable, Himself had actually
put Watt, mother, and cats up in a contiguous suite of what later became prorectors’
rooms off the main E.T.A. tunnel, the Moms acquiescing in this but instructing Orin,
Mario, and me never ever to remain in a room alone with Watt.

Accomplice!
was one of Watt’s later roles. It is a sad and simple cartridge, and so short that
the TP retracked to the film’s beginning in almost no time. Himself’s film opens as
a beautifully sad young bus-station male prostitute, fragile and epicene and so blond
even his eyebrows and lashes are blond, is approached in the Greyhound coffee shop
by a flabby, dissipated-looking old specimen with gray teeth and circumflex eyebrows
and obvious temporal-lobe difficulties. Cosgrove Watt plays the depraved older man,
who takes the boy home to his lush but somehow scuzzy co-op apartment, in fact the
place Himself had rented for O. and the P.G.O.A.T. and had decorated in various gradations
of scuz for the interiors of almost all his late projects.

The sad and beautiful Aryan-looking boy agrees to seduction by the dissipated old
specimen, but only on the condition that the man wear protection. The boy, who is
inarticulate, nevertheless makes this stipulation extremely clear. Safe Sex or No
Sex, he stipulates, holding up a familiar foil packet. The hideous old specimen—now
in a smoking jacket and ascot of apricot-colored silk, and smoking through a long
white FDR-style filter—is offended, thinks the young male prostitute has sized him
up as such a depraved and dissipated old specimen that he might well have It, the
Human Immuno Virus, he thinks. His thoughts are rendered via animated thought-bubbles,
which Himself at that late-middle stage hoped the audience would find at once self-consciously
nonillusory and wildly entertaining. Watt’s old specimen is grinning grayly in what
he thinks is a pleasant way as he obligingly takes the foil packet and removes his
ascot with what he believes to be a sensual flourish… but inside his thought-bubble
he’s having temporal-lobe spasms of sadistic rage at the sad blond boy for appearing
to size him up as a health risk. The obvious health risk here is referred to, both
orally and in the thought-bubble, merely as
It
. For example: ‘Little bastard thinks I’m so dissipated-looking that I’ve been at
this sort of thing so long that I’m likely to have
It,
does he,’ the old specimen thinks, his thought-bubble going all jagged with rage.

So the flabby old specimen’s now, at only six minutes into the cartridge, Track 510,
he’s now taking the sad beautiful boy, in the standard (extravagantly hunched) homosexual
way, on the canopied bed of his tacky boudoir: the young male prostitute’s dutifully
assumed the hunched, homo-submissive position because the old ponce has showed him
he’s wearing the condom. The young prostitute, who’s shown (hunched) only from the
left side during the act itself, seems beautiful in a fragile, skinny-flanked, visible-ribs
way, while the old specimen has the slack ass and pointy little breasts of a man made
grotesque by years of dissipation. The intercourse scene is done under bright lamps,
without any sort of soft focus or light-jazz background score to lighten the atmosphere
of clinical detachment.

What the sad blond submissive boy doesn’t know is that the dissipated old specimen
had secretly palmed an old-fashioned one-sharp-sided razor blade when he’d gone into
his burgundy-tiled bathroom to gargle with cinnamon mouthwash and dab Calvin Klein–brand
Pheromonic Musk on his flabby pulse-points, and as he hunches animalistically over
the boy, he’s holding the business end of the blade right up next to the sad boy’s
anus as he takes his pleasure, so that the blade’s sharp side slices into both condom
and erect phallus on each outthrust, the hideous old specimen unmindful of the blood
and whatever pain’s involved in the phallic slicing as, still hunched and thrusting,
he peels the slit condom off like the skin of a sausage. The young male prostitute,
hunched submissively, feels the condom-peel and then the blood and starts struggling
like a condemned man, trying to get the condomless bleeding flabby old specimen out
and off of him. But the boy’s thin and delicate, and the old man has no trouble holding
him down with his soft slack flabby weight until he’s grimaced and grunted and taken
his pleasure to its end. It’s apparently an explicit-homosexual-sex-scene convention
that whoever takes the submissive hunched position keeps his face turned away from
the camera while the dominant partner’s phallus is inside him, and Himself honors
this convention, though a self-conscious footnote subtitled along the bottom of the
screen rather irritatingly points out that the scene is honoring a convention. The
prostitute turns his agonized face around to the camera only after the depraved older
homosexual has removed his bloody and deflating post-pleasure phallus, brings his
blond-browed face around to his left to face the audience in a mute howl as he collapses
onto his delicate chest with his arms out on the satin sheets and his violated bum
hiked high in the air, revealing now at the crease of his bum and upper hamstring
a vivid purple splotch, more vivid than any bruise and with eight spidery tentacles
radiating from it that are, the older man’s horrified thought-bubble reveals, the
unmistakable eight-legged-vivid-contusion-blotch sign of Kaposi’s Sarcoma, that most
universal symptom of
It,
and the boy is sobbing that the depraved old homosexual has made him—the prostitute—a
murderer, the boy’s racking sobs making the hiked bum waggle in front of the old specimen’s
horrified face as the boy sobs into the chartreuse satin and shrieks ‘
Murderer! Murderer!
’ over and over, so that almost a third of
Accomplice!
’s total length is devoted to the racked repetition of this word—way, way longer than
is needed for the audience to absorb the twist and all its possible implications and
meanings. This was just the sort of issue Mario and I argued about. As I see it, even
though the cartridge’s end has both characters emoting out of every pore,
Accomplice!
’s essential project remains abstract and self-reflexive; we end up feeling and thinking
not about the characters but about the cartridge itself. By the time the final repetitive
image darkens to a silhouette and the credits roll against it and the old man’s face
stops spasming in horror and the boy shuts up, the cartridge’s real tension becomes
the question: Did Himself subject us to 500 seconds of the repeated cry ‘Murderer!’
for some reason, i.e. is the puzzlement and then boredom and then impatience and then
excruciation and then near-rage aroused in the film’s audience by the static repetitive
final
of the film aroused for some theoretical-aesthetic end, or is Himself simply an amazingly
shitty editor of his own stuff?

It was only after Himself’s death that critics and theorists started to treat this
question as potentially important. A woman at U. Cal–Irvine had earned tenure with
an 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. The essay was turgid to the point of being
unreadable, besides using
reference
as a verb and pluralizing
conundrum
as
conundra
.
³⁷⁹

From my horizontal position on the bedroom floor I could use the TP’s remote to do
everything but actually remove and insert cartridges into the drive’s dock. The room’s
window was now a translucent clot of snow and steam. InterLace’s Spontaneous Disseminations
for New New England were all about weather. With our subscription system, E.T.A. got
numerous large-market Spontaneous tracks. Each track took a slightly different angle
on the weather. Each track had a slightly different focus. Remote reports from Boston’s
North and South shores, Providence, New Haven, and Hartford-Springfield served to
establish a consensus that a terrific amount of snow had fallen and was continuing
to fall and blow around and pile up. Cars were shown abandoned at hasty angles, and
we got to see the universal white VW-Bug-shape of snow-buried cars. Black-helmeted
gangs of adolescents on snowmobiles were shown prowling New Haven’s streets, clearly
up to no good. Pedestrians were shown bent over and floundering; remote-report journalists
were shown trying to flounder over to them to get their thoughts and reflections.
One floundering reporter in Quincy on the South Shore abruptly disappeared from view
except for a hand with a microphone protruding bravely from some sort of sinkhole
of snow; the bent backs of technicians were then shown floundering away from the remote
camera to his aid. People with snow blowers stood in their own little blizzards. A
pedestrian was filmed doing a spectacular pratfall. Cars at all angles in streets
were shown with their tires spinning, shuddering in stasis. One track kept cutting
back to a man endlessly trying to brush off a windshield that immediately whitened
again behind each brushstroke. A bus sat with its snout in a monster-sized drift.
ATHSCME fans atop the wall north of Ticonderoga NNY were shown making horizontal cyclones
of snow in the air. Rouged somber women in InterLace studios concurred that this was
the worst blizzard to hit the region since B.S. 1998 and the second-worst since B.S.
1993. A man in a wheelchair was shown staring stonily at a two-meter drift across
the ramp outside the State House. Satellite maps of east-central O.N.A.N. showed a
white formation that was spiralled and shaggy and seemed to have what looked like
claws. It was not a Nor’easter. A hot moist ridge from the Gulf of Mexico and an Arctic
cold front had collided over the Concavity. The storm’s satellite photo was superimposed
on schemata of the ’98 ass-kicker and shown to be just about identical. An unwelcome
old acquaintance was back, a striking woman with black bangs and vivid lipstick said,
smiling somberly. Another track iterated: this was not a Nor’easter. It might have
been better to say ‘smiling mirthlessly.’ The flat glazed eyes of the man brushing
impotently at his windshield seemed to represent an important visual image; different
tracks kept returning to his face. He refused to acknowledge journalists or requests
for thoughts. His was the creepy businesslike face of someone carefully picking up
glass in the road after an accident in which his decapitated wife’s been impaled on
the steering wheel. Another track’s anchor was a beautiful black woman with purple
lipstick and what looked like a very tall crew cut. Reports of snow came in from all
directions. After a while I stopped keeping track of the number of times the word
snow
was repeated. All synonyms for
snowstorm
were rapidly exhausted. Helmetless thrill-seekers on snowmobiles were doing doughnuts
in Copley Square downtown. Homeless men hunched nearly drift-covered in doorways,
readying snorkels of rolled-up newspaper. Jim Troeltsch, now apparently a resident
of B-204, had liked to do a pretty funny impression of an InterLace anchorwoman having
an orgasm. One of the thrill-seekers’ snowmobiles spun out of control and plunged
into a drift, and the remote camera stayed on the drift for several moments, but nothing
emerged. Connecticut’s National Guard Reserve had been ordered to assemble but had
not assembled because travel in Connecticut was impossible. Three men in uniforms
and gray helmets chased two men in white helmets, all on snowmobiles, for reasons
an on-site journalist described as not yet emergent. Remote-site journalists used
such words as
emergent, individual, alleged, utilize,
and
developing
. But all this impersonal diction was preceded by the anchorperson’s first name, as
if the report were part of an intimate conversation. An InterLace delivery-boy was
shown delivering recorded cartridges on a snowmobile and was described as plucky.
Otis P. Lord had undergone a procedure for the removal of the Hitachi monitor on Thursday,
LaMont Chu had said. I had never once ridden a snowmobile, skied, or skated: E.T.A.
discouraged them. DeLint described winter sports as practically getting down on one
knee and begging for an injury. The snowmobiles on the viewer all made sounds like
little chain-saws that were extra pugnacious to compensate for being so little. There
was a poignant shot of a stuck plow in Northampton. ‘Individuals who are not with
emergency reasons to travel’ (
sic
) were being officially discouraged from travelling by a state trooper in a hat with
a chinstrap. A Brockton man in a Lands’ End parka took a fall too burlesque to have
been unstaged.