Infinite Jest (78 page)

Like most young people genetically hard-wired for a secret drug problem, Hal Incandenza
also has severe compulsion-issues around nicotine and sugar. Because smoking will
simply kill you during drills, only Bridget Boone, a steroidic Girls’ 16 named Carol
Spodek, and one or the other of the Vaught twins are masochistic enough to do it,
though Teddy Schacht has been known to enjoy the occasional panatela. The nicotine
craving Hal tries to mollify as best he can by dipping Kodiak Wintergreen Smokeless
Tobacco several times daily, spitting into either a cherished old childhood NASA glass
or the empty can of Spiru-Tein High Protein Breakfast Beverage that even now sits—given
a wide berth by all others—next to a small pile of the tennis balls the table’s kids
don’t have to squeeze as long as they’re eating. Hal’s more serious problem is with
sucrose—the Hope-smoker’s ever-beckoning siren—because he craves it always and awfully,
Hal does—sugar—but finds now lately that any sugar-infusion above the level of a 56-gram
AminoPal High Energy Bar now induces odd and unpleasant emotional states that don’t
do him one bit of good on court.

Sitting here preacher-hatted, with a mouth full of multilayered baklava, Hal knows
perfectly well that Mario gets his fetish for cartridges about puppets and entr’actes
and audiences from their late father. Himself, during his anticonfluential middle
period, went through this subphase of being obsessed with the idea of audiences’ relationships
with various sorts of shows. Hal doesn’t even want to think about the grim one about
the carnival of eyeballs.
¹⁵⁴
But this one other short high-tech one was called
‘The Medusa v. The Odalisque’
and was a film of a fake stage-production at Ford’s Theater in the nation’s capital
of Wash. DC that, like all his audience-obsessed pieces, had cost Incandenza a real
bundle in terms of human extras. The extras in this one are a well-dressed audience
of guys in muttonchops and ladies with paper fans who fill the place from first row
to the rear of the balcony’s boxes, and they’re watching an incredibly violent little
involuted playlet called ‘The Medusa v. The Odalisque,’ the relatively plotless plot
of which is just that the mythic Medusa, snake-haired and armed with a sword and well-polished
shield, is fighting to the death or petrification against L’Odalisque de Ste. Thérèse,
a character out of old Québecois mythology who was supposedly so inhumanly gorgeous
that anyone who looked at her turned instantly into a human-sized precious gem, from
admiration. A pretty natural foil for the Medusa, obviously, the Odalisque has only
a nail-file instead of a sword, but also has a well-wielded hand-held makeup mirror,
and she and the Medusa are basically rumbling for like twenty minutes, leaping around
the ornate stage trying to de-map each other with blades and/or de-animate each other
with their respective reflectors, which each leaps around trying to position just
right so that the other gets a glimpse of its own full-frontal reflection and gets
instantly petrified or gemified or whatever. In the cartridge it’s pretty clear from
their milky-pixeled translucence and insubstantiality that they’re holograms, but
it’s not clear what they’re supposed to be on the level of the playlet, whether the
audience is supposed to see/(not)see them as ghosts or wraiths or ‘real’ mythic entities
or what. But it’s a ballsy fight-scene up there on the stage—having been intricately
choreographed by an Oriental guy Himself rented from some commercial studio and put
up in the HmH, who ate like a bird and smiled very politely all the time and didn’t
have even a word to say to anybody, it seemed, except Avril, to whom the Oriental
choreographer had cottoned right off—balletic and full of compelling little cornerings
and near-misses and reversals, and the theater’s audience is rapt and clearly entertained
to the gills, because they keep spontaneously applauding, as much maybe for the film’s
play’s choreography as anything else—which would make it more like spontaneously meta-applauding,
Hal supposes—because the whole fight-scene has to be ingeniously choreographed so
that both combatants have their respectively scaly and cream-complected backs
¹⁵⁵
to the audience, for obvious reasons… except as the shield and little mirror get
whipped martially around and brandished at various strategic angles, certain members
of the playlet’s well-dressed audience eventually start catching disastrous glimpses
of the combatants’ fatal full-frontal reflections, and instantly get transformed into
like ruby statues in their front-row seats, or get petrified and fall like embolized
bats from the balcony’s boxes, etc. The cartridge goes on like this until there’s
nobody left in the Ford’s Theater seats animate enough to applaud the nested narrative
of the fight-scene play, and it ends with the two aesthetic foils still rumbling like
mad before an audience of varicolored stone.
‘The Medusa v. The Odalisque’
’s own audiences didn’t think too much of the thing, because the film audience never
does get much of a decent full-frontal look at what it is about the combatants that
supposedly has such a melodramatic effect on the rumble’s live audience, and so the
film’s audience ends up feeling teased and vaguely cheated, and the thing had only
a regional release, and the cartridge rented like yesterday’s newspapers, and it’s
now next to impossible to find. But that wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination
the James O. Incandenza film that audiences hated the most. The most hated Incandenza
film, a variable-length one called
The Joke,
had only a very brief theatrical release, and then only at the widely scattered last
remains of the pre-InterLace public art-film theaters in arty places like Cambridge
MA and Berkeley CA. And InterLace never considered it for Pulse-Order rerelease, for
obvious reasons. The art-film theaters’ marquees and posters and ads for the thing
were all required to say something like
‘THE JOKE’: You Are Strongly Advised NOT To Shell Out Money to See This Film,
which art-film habitués of course thought was a cleverly ironic anti-ad joke, and
so they’d shell out for little paper theater tickets and file in in their sweater
vests and tweeds and dirndls and tank up on espresso at the concession stand and find
seats and sit down and make those little pre-movie leg and posture adjustments, and
look around with that sort of vacant intensity, and they’d figure the tri-lensed Bolex
H32 cameras—one held by a tall stooped old guy and one complexly mounted on the huge
head of the oddly forward-listing boy with what looked like a steel spike coming out
of his thorax—the big cameras down by the red-lit EXITS on either side of the screen,
the patrons figured, were there for like an ad or an anti-ad or a behind-the-scenes
metafilmic documentary or something. That is, until the lights went down and the film
started up and what was on the wide public screen was just a wide-angled binoculated
shot of this very art-film theater’s audience filing in with espressos and finding
seats and sitting down and looking around and getting adjusted and saying knowledgeable
little pre-movie things to their thick-lensed dates about what the Don’t-Pay-To-See-This
ad and Bolex cameras probably signified, artistically, and settling in as the lights
dimmed and facing the screen (i.e. now themselves, it turns out) with the coolly excited
smiles of highbrow-entertainment expectation, smiles which the cameras and screen’s
projection now revealed as just starting to drop from the faces of the audience as
the audience saw row after row of itself staring back at it with less and less expectant
and more and more blank and then puzzled and then eventually pissed-off facial expressions.
The Joke
’s total running time was just exactly as long as there was even one cross-legged
patron left in the theater to watch his own huge projected image gazing back down
at him with the special distaste of a disgusted and ripped-off-feeling art-film patron,
which ended up being more than maybe twenty minutes only when there were critics or
film-academics in the seats, who studied themselves studying themselves taking notes
with endless fascination and finally left only when the espresso finally impelled
them to the loo, at which point Himself and Mario would have to frantically pack up
cameras and lens-cases and coaxials and run and totter like hell to catch the next
cross-country flight from Cambridge to Berkeley or Berkeley to Cambridge, since they
obviously had to be there all set up and Bolex’d for each showing at each venue. Mario
said Lyle had said Incandenza had confessed that he’d loved the fact that
The Joke
was so publicly static and simple-minded and dumb, and that those rare critics who
defended the film by arguing at convolved length that the simple-minded stasis was
precisely the film’s aesthetic thesis were dead wrong, as usual. It’s still unclear
whether it was the Eyeball-and-Sideshow thing or
‘The Medusa v….’
or
The Joke
that had metamorphosized into their late father’s later involvement with the hostilely
anti-Real genre of ‘Found Drama,’ which was probably the historical zenith of self-consciously
dumb stasis, but which audiences never actually even got to hate, for a-priori reasons.

FREAK STATUE OF LIBERTY ACCIDENT KILLS FED ENGINEER—Header; BRAVE MAN ON CRANE CRUSHED
BY 5 TON CAST IRON BURGER—12-point Subheader;

GENTLE PROMISES SKEPTICAL CUB SCOUT CONVENTION ‘YOU’LL BE ABLE TO EAT RIGHT OFF’ TERRITORIAL
U.S. BY END OF TERM’S FIRST YEAR—Header;

ANOTHER LOVE CANAL?—24-point Superheader; TOXIC HORROR ACCIDENTALLY UNCOVERED IN UPSTATE
NEW HAMPSHIRE—16-point Header-sized Subheader;

‘New Hampshire environmental officials yesterday flatly denied that vast collections
of drums leaking industrial solvents, chlorides, benzenes and oxins had been quote
“stumbled on” by 18 federal EPA staffers playing a casual game of softball east of
Berlin, NH, claiming instead that the corroded receptacles had been placed there against
statute by large men with white body suits and short haircuts in long shiny trailer
trucks with O.N.A.N.’s official crest, a sombreroed eagle with a maple leaf in its
mouth, stencilled on the sides. In the nation’s capital, a quote “full and energetic
investigation” has been promised by the Gentle administration into claims by residents
of Berlin, NH and Rumford, ME that the incidence of soft-skulled and extra-eyed newborns
in the toxicly affected area far exceeds the national average.’—$3.75 U.S. Nightly-Rental
News Cartridge Anchor Lead;

SUB ROSA FUSION-IN-POISONOUS-ENVIRONMENT TEST SITE ALLEGED AT MONTPELIER, VT—
Scientific North American
Header;

MY BABY HAS SIX EYES AND BASICALLY NO SKULL—Lurid Color 32-point Tabloid Header, Dateline
Lancaster NH;

FED EPA SOFTBALLERS ALLEGE TWO MORE ‘POISONOUS WASTE HORRORFEST’ ILLEGAL DUMP SITES
‘STUMBLED OVER’ NEAR NORTH SYRACUSE, HISTORIC TICONDEROGA—NYC Daily Header;

THE FINE ART OF FEDERAL STUMBLING: A WHOLE LOT OF SOFTBALL GOING ON—Editorial Header
in Syracuse NY’s
Post-Standard;

CANADIAN
P.M.
DENIES SECRET MINIATURE GOLF OUTING WITH OUTRAGED NEW ENGLAND GOVS—Surprisingly Small
3rd-Page 10-point Header;

GENTLE SHOCKER—Pearl-Harbor-Sized 32-point Super-superheader Almost Too Big to Read
Clearly; MAYFLOWER, RED BALL, ALLIED, U-HAUL STOCKS SOAR—16-point Financial Daily
Subheader; TWO NORTHEAST GOVS HOSPITALIZED FOR INFARCTION, ANEURISM—10-point Subheader;

GENTLE DECLARES ALL U.S. TERRITORY NORTH OF LINE FROM SYRACUSE TO TICONDEROGA, NY,
TICONDEROGA, NY TO SALEM, MA FEDERAL DISASTERS, OFFERS FEDERAL AID FOR UPSTATE AND
NEW ENGLAND RESIDENTS WISHING TO RELOCATE, CLAIMS FUNDS FOR EPA CLEAN-UP ‘ARE NOT
WITHIN THE MAP OF WHAT’S POSSIBLE’ [
SIC
]—Header from Chemically Over-Garrulous Headliner Eventually Fired Even from Subheader
Dept. for Exceeding Verbal Parameters and Now Starting to Get in the Same Hot Water
All Over Again at a Much Less Prestigious Daily Paper;

and so on and so forth. Himself’s old optical editing lab has imposing Compugraphic
typesetting and matteing facilities: it’s hard to tell which of the headlines and
other stuff are for real and which have been dickied with, usually, if you’re too
young to recall the actual chronology. At least some of the headlines are phony, the
kids know; miniature golf indeed. But the accuracy of Mario’s puppeteered account
of the seminal meeting of what’s come to be known as ‘The Concavity Cabinet’ gets
to stand uncontested by fact. Nobody who wasn’t actually there at the 16 January meeting
knows just what was said when or by whom, the Gentle administration being of the position
that extant Oval Office recording equipment was a veritable petri dish of organisms.
Gentle’s claque of doo-wopping Motown cabinet-puppets have purple dresses and matching
lipstick and nail polish, and bouffants so blindingly Afrosheened that there had been
special lighting and film-speed problems in the custodial closet:

S
EC.
T
REAS.
: You’re looking vigorous and hale today, sir.

G
ENTLE
: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh.

P
RES.
M
EX.
/S
EC.
M
EX.
/V-C O.N.A.N.: May I ask, Señor, why my distinguished co-Vice Chair of O.N.A.N. is
not with us in attendance today.

G
ENTLE
: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh.

M
R.
R
ODNEY
T
INE
, C
HIEF
, U.S. O
FFICE OF
U
NSPECIFIED
S
ERVICES
: The president’s taking a little pure oxygen today, boys, and has authorized me as
his oral proxy on this may I say historically opportune day. The Canadian
P.M.
’s in a bit of a snit. He prefers to whinge in the media surrounded by Mounted Reserves
and is off somewhere far from Québec in a Kevlar vest doing whatever the Canadian
word is for pouting, doubtless poring over opinion polls prepared by chinless guys
in Canadian hornrims.