David Wallace - Infinite jest

Hal tries to imagine the tall slumped tremulous stork-shape of Himself inclined at an osteoporotic angle over digital editing equipment for hours on end, deleting and inserting code, arranging Blood Sister: One Tough Nun into subversive/inversion, and can’t summon one shadowy idea of what Himself might have been feeling as he patiently labored. Maybe that was the point of the thing’s metasilliness, to have nothing really felt going on.[289]

Jennie Bash has left V.R. 6’s door agape, and Idris Arslanian and Todd (‘Postal Weight’) Possalthwaite and Kent Blott all drift in and sit Indian-style in a loose hemisphere on the thick carpet between the girls’ recumbency and Hal’s recumbency, and are more or less considerately quiet. They all keep their sneakers on. Postal Weight’s nose is a massive proboscoid bandaged thing. Kent Blott wears a sportfisherman’s cap with an extremely long bill. That queer faint smell of hot dogs that seems to follow Idris Arslanian around begins to insinuate itself into the room’s colognes. He isn’t wearing the rayon handkerchief as a blindfold but does have it tied around his neck; no one asks him about it. All the littler kids are consummate spectators and are sucked immediately into Blood Sister’s unfolding narrative, and the older females seem to take some kind of psychic cue from the little boys and subside, too, and watch, until after a while Hal’s the only person in the room who isn’t 100 % absorbed.

The entertainment’s uptake is that a tough biker-chick-type girl from the mean streets of Toronto is found O.D.’d, beaten up, molested, and robbed of her leather jacket outside the portcullis of a downtown convent and is rescued, nursed, befriended, spiritually guided, and converted — ‘saved’ is the weak entendre made much of in the first act’s dialogue — by a tough-looking older nun who it turns out, she reveals (the tough older nun), had herself been hauled up out of a life of Harleys, narcotics-dealing and — addiction by an even tougher even older nun, a nun who had herself been saved by a tough ex-biker nun, and so on. The latest saved biker-chick becomes a tough and street-smart nun in the same urban order, and is known on the mean streets as Blood Sister, and wimple or not still rides her Hawg from parish to parish and still knows akido and is not to be fucked with, is the word on the streets.

The motivational crux here being that almost this whole order of nuns is staffed by nuns who’d been saved from Toronto’s mean, dead-end streets by other older tougher saved nuns. So, endless novenas later, Blood Sister eventually feels this transitive spiritual urge to go out and find a troubled adolescent female of her own, to ‘save’ and bring into the order, thereby discharging her soul’s debt to the old tough nun who’d saved her. Through processes obscure (a Toronto troubled-but-savable-adolescent-girl-directory of some sort? Bridget Boone cuts wise), Blood Sister eventually takes on a burn-scarred, deeply troubled adolescent punker-type Toronto girl who is sullen and, yes, reasonably tough, but is also vulnerable and emotionally tormented (the girl’s pink shiny burn-scarred face tends to writhe in misery whenever she thinks Blood Sister’s not looking) by the terrible depredations she’s endured as a result of her rapacious and unshakable addiction to crank cocaine, the kind you have to convert and cook up yourself, and with ether, which is highly combustible, and which people used before somebody found out baking soda and temperature-flux would do the same thing, which dates the film’s B.S. time-period even more clearly than the tough tortured punk girl’s violet stelliform coiffure.[290]

But so Blood Sister eventually gets the girl clean, by nurturing her through Withdrawal in a locked sacristy; and the girl becomes less sullen by degrees that almost have audible clicks to them — the girl stops trying to dicky the lock of the sacramental-wine cabinet, stops farting on purpose during matins and vespers, stops going up to the Trappists who hang around the convent and asking them for the time and other sly little things to try to make them slip up and speak aloud, etc. A couple times the girl’s face writhes in emotional torment and vulnerability even when Blood Sister’s looking. The girl gets a severe and somewhat lesbianic haircut, and her roots establish themselves as softly brown. Blood Sister, revealing biceps like nobody’s business, beats the girl at arm-wrestling; they both laugh; they compare tattoos: this marks the start of a brutally drawn-out Getting-to-Know-and-Trust-You montage, a genre-convention, this montage involving Harley-rides at such speeds that the girl has to keep her hand on Blood Sister’s head to keep B.S.’s wimple from flying off, and long conversational walks filmed at wide-angle, and protracted and basically unwinnable games of charades with the Trappists, plus some quick scenes of Blood Sister finding the girl’s Marlboros and dildo-facsimile lighter in the wastebasket, of the girl doing chores unsullenly under B.S.’s grudgingly approving eye, of candle-lit scripture-study sessions with the girl’s finger under each word she reads, of the girl carefully snipping the last bits of split violet ends from her soft brown hair, of the more senior tough nuns punching Blood Sister’s shoulder approvingly as the girl’s eyes start to get that impending-conversion gleam in them, then, finally, of Blood Sister and the girl habit-shopping, the girl’s burned lantern jaw and hairless Promethean brow frozen in a sunlit montage-climax shot under a novitiate wimple’s gull-wings — all accompanied by — no kidding — ‘Getting to Know You,’ which Hal imagines the Stork justified to himself as subversively saccharine. This all takes about half an hour. Bridget Boone, of the Indianapolis archdiocese, begins to declaim briefly on Blood Sister: One Tough Nun’s ironic anti-Catholic subthesis — that the deformed addicted girl’s ‘salvation’ here seemed simply the exchange of one will-obliterating ‘habit’ for another, substituting one sort of outlandish head-decoration for another — and gets pinched by Jennie Bash and shushed by just about everyone in the room but Hal, who could pass for asleep except for the brief lists to port over the wastebasket, to spit, and in fact is experiencing some of the radical loss of concentration that attends THC-Withdrawal and is thinking about another, even more familiar J. O. Incandenza cartridge even while he watches this one with the other E.T.A.s. This other attention-object is the late Himself’s so-called ‘inversion’ of the corporate-politics genre, Low-Temperature Civics, an executive-suite soap opera filled with power plays, position-jockeyings, timid adulteries, martinis, and malignantly pretty female executives in elegant tight-fitting dress-for-successwear who eat their paunched and muddled male counterparts for political lunch. Hal knows that L-TC wasn’t an inversion or lampoon at all, but derived right from the dark B.S. ‘8os period when Himself had changed careers from government service to private entreprenurism, when a sudden infusion of patent-receipts left him feeling post-carrot anhedonic and existentially unmoored, and Himself took an entire year off to drink Wild Turkey and watch broadcast-television tycoon-operas like Lorimar’s Dynasty et al. in a remote spa off Canada’s Northwest coast, where he supposedly met and bonded with Lyle, now of the E.T.A. weight room.

What’s intriguing but unknown to everyone in V.R. 6 is the way Boone’s take on Himself’s take on the substitution-of-one-crutch-for-another interpretation of substituting Catholic devotion for chemical dependence is very close to the way many not-yet-desperate-enough newcomers to Boston AA see Boston AA as just an exchange of slavish dependence on the bottle/pipe for slavish dependence on meetings and banal shibboleths and robotic piety, an ‘Attitude of Platitude,’ and use this idea that it’s still slavish dependence as an excuse to stop trying Boston AA, and to go back to the original slavish Substance-dependence, until that dependence has finally beaten them into such a double-bound desperation that they finally come back in with their faces hanging off their skulls and beg to be told just what platitudes to shout, and how high to adjust their vacant grins.