Although it’s nearly impossible to recognize as such the first time you get to page 64 of Infinite Jest and find yourself directed to note 24—an 8.3-page filmography of a character who is dead for nearly all the narrated sequences of the book—that note is something of a skeleton key to the entire novel. Like a hologram, this one tiny portion of the book contains all the major concerns that the other 1070 or so pages address. (I take this hologram method of interpretation from one of the very intelligent posters at the Urth List. I’d love to credit the originator, if I could remember or identify who it was.)

To justify that claim, I suppose I have to first lay out the web of what I think IJ’s major concerns are. As I alluded to in my previous post on the book, I think one of its two paramount subjects—and, depending on how subject areas are understood to be enmeshed, more likely its absolute most important concern—is communication. I’m trying to focus in this post on the filmography, so I don’t want to get too deeply into this right now, but I’ve done an awful lot of keyed underlining during my rereads of this book, and the number of times and ways that communication comes up is staggering and hugely revealing. Related to communication are issues of loneliness (and solipsism and depression), entertainment, and spectation (which last two are obviously yoked). And addiction comes in strongly, tied to individualism (which connects again back to solipsism).

(Wow, suddenly I want so bad to do a full S/Z-style breakdown of this endnote. There’s a project for the future.)

Communication is most obviously the subject of Insubstantial Country and It Was a Great Marvel That He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him. These two come as a kind of one-two punch right toward the end of James Incandenza’s career (and of course the “professional conversationalist” section that begins on page 27 is probably the real-life dress rehearsal for the latter), but issues of communication arise early in the filmography: The first of the Sunstrand documentaries, Annular Fusion Is Our Friend, is “Sign-Interpreted for the Deaf.”

Loneliness seems to me unavoidably implied in The Man Who Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass, with its character who is “brittle, hollow, and transparent to others,” and the unfinished, unreleased (undescribed) films The Cold Majesty of the Numb and Cage V — Infinite Jim sound heartbreaking, while The Unfortunate Case of Me sounds mostly bathetic.

The relevance of entertainment as a topic should be pretty clear when we’re dealing with a filmography. The films are not all intended as entertainment—there are documentaries, art films, experiments, academic-joke nonfilms—but Himself’s “first attempt at commercial entertainment,” Infinite Jest (I), shows up on the first full page, sharing a title with the book, and recurs throughout the listing. Through nearly his entire career, Incandenza kept trying over and over to make an entertainment he was satisfied with.

Spectation comes up most clearly in Cage III — Free Show (the synopsis is so great: “The figure of Death (Heath) presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators’ eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life (Heaven) uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs”), but also in ‘The Medusa v. the Odalisque’ (whose detailed description, beginning on page 396 [spoiler!], reminds me very much of the video to Björk’s “Bachelorette”), The Joke, and even Every Inch of Disney Leith.

Other than the “cocaine-addicted father” in the presumably otherwise mostly autobiographical Widower, Incandenza’s films approach addiction pretty much exclusively in terms of alcoholism. It’s all over the filmography, usually in the form of a drunk father, although there is an intriguingly unfinished “documentary on genesis of reduced-calorie bourbon industry” (Let There Be Lite).

Individualism is the core concern of the book that I think note 24 deals with most obliquely, but I see it in both Homo Duplex, with its focus on what it means to have the same name as a famous person, and The American Century as Seen Through a Brick, which is an examination of history as embodied in the journey of one single brick through the years (almost an O.N.A.N.ite Forrest Gump, in a way).

Some of the films in this endnote are described in more or less detail in the body of the novel, and I’m sure I’ll want to talk about some of them when I catch up to writing about those sections of the Infinite Summer schedule, but for now I’ll leave them alone. I just wanted to point out the degree to which the funny, tedious, interruptive, imaginative note 24 is actually a crucial part of the fractal structure that DFW talked to Michael Silverblatt about.

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