Infinite Jest, 5/1 call follow-up - p.297

I missed finishing the reading last week by 4 pages. I read these immediately after we all got off the called and kicked myself; page 297 is one of the most amazing pages in this book so far and wanted to share about it while it’s still fresh. Here’s what I found:

(1)
Foot note 101: “Some of their [Orin and Joelle van Dyne/Madam Psychosis] dates were watching big-budget commercial films, and Orin had one time completely unpremeditatedly told her it was a strange feeling watching commercial films with a girl who was prettier than the women in the films, and she’d punched him hard in the arm in a way that just about drove him wild.”
While it seems like Orin took this as a sexual advance, it’s actually also a reference back to page 237 (bottom) where Joelle’s father used to tell her “over and over again how she was prettier than [any of the women on the movie screen]” while sexually molesting her at the same time; “when she was of back-pocket height and prettier by far than any of the peach-colored titans they’d gazed up at, his hand in her lap her hand in the box and rooting down past candy for the Prize”, p.239 (bottom).

(2)
“[Orin] blasted up the hill to Enfield and brought down The Mad Stork’s [Jim’s] own Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heave and Hell, which had a major impact on [Joelle].”
Going to the filmography (p.988) in the film “God and Satan play poker with Tarot cards for the soul of an alcoholic sandwich-bag salesmen obsessed with Bernini’s ‘The Ecstasy of St. Teresa.’
‘The Ecstasy of St. Teresa’ is the thing which Joelle “always sees, after inhaling, right at the apex” of getting high. (p.235)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecstasy_of_Saint_Teresa
“The two central sculptural figures of the swooning nun and the angel with the spear” and St. Teresa experience of “religious ecstasy”:
“I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it.”
This idea of pain vs. sweetness speaks to the central concept of addiction throughout the book…. and experience of actually reading the book itself.
We’ve also previously determined the films Jim made are all inspired by life events. It seems like “sandwich-bag salesmen” is analogous to his running the tennis academy. Other references to sandwich-bags are littered throughout the filmography.
Additionally to this point, we’ve just determined Jim [The Made Stork] is an alcoholic; “The Made Stork negotiate his suite by holding on to walls” after a night of drinking with Orin and Joelle. P.297.

(3)
“Right after Thanksgiving Himself [Jim] let the P.G.O.A.T. understudy with Leith [Disney Leith, one of Jim’s main actresses] on the set of The American Century as Seen Through a Brick in return for getting to film her thumb against a plucking string.” (p.297, top).
The filmography says this movie was “all intercut with ambiguous shots of a human thumb’s alterations in the interference pattern of a plucking string.” (p.989).

(4)
“This might have been the end’s start, gradually, in hindsight.” (p. 239, middle)
The scope of what this statement is alluding to is interesting to consider…
-Of the relationship between Orin and Joelle (we know Orin breaks the relationship off; p.229, bottom – “after Orin left Joelle”)?
-Of Jim’s life? A working relationship between Joelle and Jim seems to be fostered in this scene; Joelle is cited as the only actor in Infinite Jest (V?), which is the film Jim was working on when he committed suicide. (p. 993)
-Of society? Infinite Jest seems to be the vehicle the wheel chair assassins use to kill people (which is established by going back to the scene where the medical attaché died in his sofa watching the film and everyone who came to check on him also died as a result, and the subsequent conversation about it on the mountain top over looking Arizona between the guy in the wheelchair and cross-dressing agent).

Also interesting to note here is back on pg. 237 (bottom), while getting high, Joelle notes, “she’d never so much again as in that line [cocaine] felt so taken care of, destined for big-screen entertainment’s unalloyed good fun, never once again until starting in with this lover [cocaine], cooking and smoking it, fiver years back, before [Jim] Incandenza’s death, at the start.”
There’s clearly some triggering even which happens, that I’m not sure we’ve reached yet…
The development of Joelle van Dyne’s character is further evidence of this. She goes from the Prettiest Girl of All Time who likes “movies where ‘a whole bunch of shit blows up’ “(297, top), into a woman who is addicted to cocaine, wears a veil due to her deformed face and is part of The Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed” (p. 226), and hosts a radio show where she speaks only in monologues that “seem both free-associative and intricately structured, not unlike nightmares.” (p.185)

As to the trigger point which begins this transformation, it could be the collision that seems to happened at the end of this chapter where Orin’s facemask collides into the view-finder she’s using while filming him. Or, in the filmography, there is also reference to Safe Boating Is No Accident (p.991), which Joelle stars (Madame Psychosis) as the fiancée whose “face is grotesquely mangled by an outboard propeller.” (p.991-992). When you combine this with the fact that all Jim’s films echo his real life, that the film was shot in X-Ray and Infrared Photography (think security footage), and was UNRELEASED, that all seems rather un-ironic. It also seems that based on the other odd, dysfunction occurring in the movie (including “an enigmatic fitness guru”, who could be the sweat-licker in the ETA gym) that could serve as something that would be a triggering event.

(5)
P. 297 also mentions that Joelle stared in Low Temperature Civics whose description seems rather foreshadowing:
Sons fight over a sandwich-bag conglomerate after their CEO father has an ecstatic encounter with Death (played by Joelle/Madam Psychosis) and becomes irreversibly catatonic [i.e. Infinite Jest]. (p.991)

(6)
The fact that the nickname of Joelle’s father is Personal Daddy in light of the fact he sexually molested her is more of the dark, sick humor scattering the book. (p.297 / 239 bottom).