Infinite Jest (75 page)

If it’s odd that Mario Incandenza’s first halfway-coherent film cartridge—a 48-minute
job shot three summers back in the carefully decorated janitor-closet of Subdorm B
with his head-mount Bolex H64 and foot-treadle—if it’s odd that Mario’s first finished
entertainment consists of a film of a puppet show—like a kids’ puppet show—then it
probably seems even odder that the film’s proven to be way more popular with E.T.A.’s
adults and adolescents than it is with the woefully historically underinformed children
it had first been made for. It’s proved so popular that it gets shown annually now
every 11/8, Continental Interdependence Day, on a wide-beam cartridge projector and
stand-up screen in the E.T.A. dining hall, after supper. It’s part of the gala but
rather ironic annual celebration of I.-Day at an Academy whose founder had married
a Canadian, and it usually gets under way about 1930h., the film, and everybody gathers
in the dining hall, and watches it, and by Charles Tavis’s festive fiat
¹⁴⁷
everybody gets to two-handed snack instead of squeezing tennis balls while they watch,
and not only that but normal E.T.A. dietary regulations are for an hour completely
suspended, and Mrs. Clarke, the dietician out in the kitchen—a former Four-Star dessert
chef normally relegated here to protein-conveyors and ways to vary complex carbs—Mrs.
Clarke gets to put on her floppy white chef’s hat and just go sucrotically mad, out
in West House’s gleaming kitchen. Everybody’s supposed to wear some sort of hat—Avril
Incandenza positively towers in the same steeple-crowned witch’s hat she teaches all
her classes in every 10/31, and Pemulis wears the complex yachting cap and naval braid,
and pale and blotchy Struck a toque with a kind of flitty aigrette, and Hal a black
preacher’s hat with a stern round downturned brim, etc. etc.
¹⁴⁸
—and Mario, as director and putative author of the popular film, is encouraged to
say a few words, like eight:

‘Thanks everybody and I hope you like it,’ is what he said this year, with Pemulis
behind him making a show of putting a maraschino on top of the small twizzle of Redi-Whip
that O. Stice had sprayed on the top of Mario’s head-mount Bolex H64, which counts
as a hat, when the dessert-course’s zenith had gotten slightly out of control near
the I.-Day gala supper’s end. These few brief words and round of applause are Mario’s
big public yearly moment at E.T.A., and he neither likes the moment nor dislikes it—same
with the untitled film itself, which really started out as just a kids’ adaptation
of
The ONANtiad,
a four-hour piece of tendentiously anticonfluential political parody long since dismissed
as minor Incandenza by his late father’s archivists. Mario’s piece isn’t really better
than his father’s; it’s just different (plus of course way shorter). It’s pretty obvious
that somebody else in the Incandenza family had at least an amanuentic hand in the
screenplay, but Mario did the choreography and most of the puppet-work personally—his
little S-shaped arms and falcate digits are perfect for the forward curve from body
to snout of a standard big-headed political puppet—and it was, without question, Mario’s
little square Hush Puppy on the H64’s operant foot-treadle, the Bolex itself mounted
on one of the tunnel’s locked lab’s Husky-VI TL tripods across the overlit closet,
mops and dull-gray janitorial buckets carefully moved out past the frame’s borders
on either side of the little velvet stage.

Ann Kittenplan and two older crew-cut girls sit in identical snap-brim fedoras with
their arms crossed, Kittenplan’s right hand bandaged. Mary Esther Thode is grading
midterms on the sly. Rik Dunkel has his eyes closed but is not asleep. Somebody’s
slapped an ad hoc Red Sox cap on the visiting Syrian Satellite pro, and the Syrian
Satellite pro sits with most of the prorectors, looking confused, his shoulder taped
up with a heatable compress, being polite about the comparative authenticity of Mrs.
C.’s baklava.

Everyone gathers and all’s quiet except for the sounds of saliva and chewing, and
there’s the yeasty-sweet smell of Coach Schtitt’s pipe, and E.T.A.’s youngest kid
Tina Echt in her giant beret gets to be in charge of the lights.

Mario’s thing opens without credits, just a crudely matted imposition of fake-linotype
print, a quotation from President Gentle’s second Inaugural: ‘Let the call go forth,
to pretty much any nation we might feel like calling, that the past has been torched
by a new and millennial generation of Americans,’ against a full-facial still photo
of a truly unmistakable personage. This is the projected face of Johnny Gentle, Famous
Crooner. This is Johnny Gentle, né Joyner, lounge singer turned teenybopper throb
turned B-movie mainstay, for two long-past decades known unkindly as the ‘Cleanest
Man in Entertainment’ (the man’s a world-class retentive, the late-Howard-Hughes kind,
the really severe kind, the kind with the paralyzing fear of free-floating contamination,
the either-wear-a-surgical-microfiltration-mask-or-make-the-people-around-you-wear-surgical-caps-and-masks-and-touch-doorknobs-only-with-a-boiled-hankie-and-take-fourteen-showers-a-day-only-they’re-not-exactly-showers-they’re-with-this-Dermalatix-brand-shower-sized-Hypospectral-Flash-Booth-that-actually-like-burns-your-outermost-layer-of-skin-off-in-a-dazzling-flash-and-leaves-you-baby’s-butt-new-and-sterile-once-you-wipe-off-the-coating-of-fine-epidermal-ash-with-a-boiled-hankie
kind) then in later public life a sterile-toupee-wearing promoter and entertainment-union
bigwig, Vegas schmaltz-broker and head of the infamous Velvety Vocalists Guild, the
tanned, gold-chained labor union that enforced those seven months of infamously dreadful
‘Live Silence,’
¹⁴⁹
the total scab-free solidarity and performative silence that struck floor-shows and
soundstages from Desert to NJ coast for over half a year until equitable compensation-formulae
on certain late-millennial phone-order retrospective TV-advertised So-You-Don’t-Forget-Order-Before-Midnight-Tonight-type
records and CDs were agreed on by Management. Hence then Johnny Gentle, the man who
brought GE/RCA to heel. And then thus, at the millennial fulcrum of very dark U.S.
times, to national politics. The facial stills that Mario lap-dissolves between are
of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, founding standard-bearer of the seminal new ‘Clean
U.S. Party,’ the strange-seeming but politically prescient annular agnation of ultra-right
jingoist hunt-deer-with-automatic-weapons types and far-left macrobiotic Save-the-Ozone,
-Rain-Forests, -Whales, -Spotted-Owl-and-High-pH-Waterways ponytailed granola-crunchers,
a surreal union of both Rush L.– and Hillary R.C.–disillusioned fringes that drew
mainstream-media guffaws at their first Convention (held in sterile venue), the seemingly
LaRoucheishly marginal party whose first platform’s plank had been Let’s Shoot Our
Wastes Into Space,
¹⁵⁰
C.U.S.P. a kind of post-Perot national joke for three years, until—white-gloved finger
on the pulse of an increasingly asthmatic and sunscreen-slathered and pissed-off American
electorate—the C.U.S.P. suddenly swept to quadrennial victory in an angry reactionary
voter-spasm that made the U.W.S.A. and LaRouchers and Libertarians chew their hands
in envy as the Dems and G.O.P.s stood on either side watching dumbly, like doubles
partners who each think the other’s surely got it, the two established mainstream
parties split open along tired philosophical lines in a dark time when all landfills
got full and all grapes were raisins and sometimes in some places the falling rain
clunked instead of splatted, and also, recall, a post-Soviet and -Jihad era when—somehow
even worse—there was no real Foreign Menace of any real unified potency to hate and
fear, and the U.S. sort of turned on itself and its own philosophical fatigue and
hideous redolent wastes with a spasm of panicked rage that in retrospect seems possible
only in a time of geopolitical supremacy and consequent silence, the loss of any external
Menace to hate and fear. This motionless face on the E.T.A. screen is Johnny Gentle,
Third-Party stunner. Johnny Gentle, the first U.S. President ever to swing his microphone
around by the cord during his Inauguration speech. Whose new white-suited Office of
Unspecified Services’ retinue required Inauguration-attendees to scrub and mask and
then walk through chlorinated footbaths as at public pools. Johnny Gentle, managing
somehow to look presidential in a Fukoama microfiltration mask, whose Inaugural Address
heralded the advent of a Tighter, Tidier Nation. Who promised to clean up government
and trim fat and sweep out waste and hose down our chemically troubled streets and
to sleep darn little until he’d fashioned a way to rid the American psychosphere of
the unpleasant debris of a throw-away past, to restore the majestic ambers and purple
fruits of a culture he now promises to rid of the toxic effluvia choking our highways
and littering our byways and grungeing up our sunsets and cruddying those harbors
in which televised garbage-barges lay stacked up at anchor, clotted and impotent amid
undulating clouds of potbellied gulls and those disgusting blue-bodied flies that
live on shit (first U.S. President ever to say
shit
publicly, shuddering), rusty-hulled barges cruising up and down petroleated coastlines
or laying up reeky and stacked and emitting CO as they await the opening of new landfills
and toxic repositories the People demanded in every area but their own. The Johnny
Gentle whose C.U.S.P. had been totally up-front about seeing American renewal as an
essentially aesthetic affair. The Johnny Gentle who promised to be the possibly sometimes
unpopular architect of a more or less Spotless America that Cleaned Up Its Own Side
of the Street. Of a new-era’d nation that looked out for Uno, of a one-time World
Policeman that was now going to retire and have its blue uniform deep-dry-cleaned
and placed in storage in triple-thick plastic dry-cleaning bags and hang up its cuffs
to spend some quality domestic time raking its lawn and cleaning behind its refrigerator
and dandling its freshly bathed kids on its neatly pressed mufti-pants’ knee. A Gentle
behind whom a diorama of the Lincoln Memorial’s Lincoln smiled down benignly. A Johnny
Gentle who was as of this new minute sending forth the call that ‘he wasn’t in this
for a popularity contest’ (Popsicle-stick-and-felt puppets in the Address’s audience
assuming puzzled-looking expressions above their tiny green surgical masks). A President
J.G., F.C. who said he wasn’t going to stand here and ask us to make some tough choices
because he was standing here promising he was going to make them for us. Who asked
us simply to sit back and enjoy the show. Who handled wild applause from camouflage-fatigue-
and sandal-and-poncho-clad C.U.S.P.s with the unabashed grace of a real pro. Who had
black hair and silver sideburns, just like his big-headed puppet, and the dusty brick-colored
tan seen only among those without homes and those whose homes had a Dermalatix Hypospectral
personal sterilization booth. Who declared that neither Tax & Spend nor Cut & Borrow
comprised the ticket into a whole new millennial era (here more puzzlement among the
Inaugural audience, which Mario represents by having the tiny finger-puppets turn
rigidly toward each other and then away and then toward). Who alluded to ripe and
available Novel Sources of Revenue just waiting out there, unexploited, not seen by
his predecessors because of the trees (?). Who foresaw budgetary adipose trimmed with
a really big knife. The Johnny Gentle who stressed above all—simultaneously pleaded
for and promised—an end to atomized Americans’ fractious blaming of one another for
our terrible
¹⁵¹
internal troubles. Here bobs and smiles from both wealthily green-masked puppets
and homeless puppets in rags and mismatched shoes and with used surgical masks, all
made by E.T.A.’s fourth- and fifth-grade crafts class, under the supervision of Ms.
Heath, of match-sticks and Popsicle-stick shards and pool-table felt with sequins
for eyes and painted fingernail-parings for smiles/frowns, under their masks.

The Johnny Gentle, Chief Executive who pounds a rubber-gloved fist on the podium so
hard it knocks the Seal askew and declares that Dammit there just
must
be some people besides each other of us to blame. To unite in opposition to. And
he promises to eat light and sleep very little until he finds them—in the Ukraine,
or the Teutons, or the wacko Latins. Or—pausing with that one arm up and head down
in the climactic Vegas way—closer to right below our nose. He swears he’ll find us
some cohesion-renewing Other. And then make some tough choices. Alludes to a whole
new North America for a crazy post-millennial world. First U.S. President ever to
use
boss
as an adjective. His throwing his surgical gloves into the miniature Inaugural crowd
as souvenirs is Mario’s own touch.

And Mario Incandenza’s idea of representing President Gentle’s cabinet as made up
mostly of tall-coiffured black-girl puppets in shiny imbricate-sequin dresses is also
of course historically inaccurate, though the honorary inclusion, in that cabinet’s
second year, of the Presidente of Mexico and the P.M. of Canada is both factual and
of course seminal:

P
RES.
M
EX. AND
P.M. C
AN.
[in unison and green-mask-muffled]: It is tremendously flattering to be invited to
sit on the cabinet of the leadership of our beloved neighbor to the [choose one].

G
ENTLE
: Thanks, boys. You have gorgeous souls.

It’s not the cartridge’s strongest scene, heavy on stock phrases and two-handed handshakes.
But the historical fact that the Presidente of Mexico and P.M. of Canada are honorarily
appointed by President Gentle to be ‘Secretaries’ of Mexico and Canada (respectively)—as
if the neighbors had already become sort of post-millennial American protectorates—is
foreshadowed as ominous by a wavered D-minor on the soundtrack’s organ—Mrs. Clarke’s
Wurlitzer, at home—but the two leaders’ respectively dusky and Gallic expressions
seem unperturbed, under their green masks, as more stock phrases are invoked.