David Wallace - Infinite jest

— Molly Notkin tells them that Madame Psychosis’s own mother had killed herself in a truly ghastly way with an ordinary kitchen garbage disposal on the evening of Thanksgiving Day in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, four-odd months before the film’s Auteur himself had killed himself, also with a kitchen appliance, also ghastlyly, which she says though any Lincoln-Kennedy-type connections between the two suicides will have to be ferreted out by the interviewers on their own, since as far as Molly Notkin knew the two different parents didn’t even know of each other’s existence.

— That the lethal cartridge’s digital Bolex H32 camera — already a Rube-Goldbergesque amalgam of various improvements and digital adaptations to the already modification-heavy classic Bolex HI6 Rex 5 — a Canadian line, by the way, favored throughout his whole career by the Auteur because its turret could accept three different C-mount lenses and adapters — that Infinite Jest (V) or (V/)’s had been fitted with an extremely strange and extrusive kind of lens, and lay during filming on either the floor or like a cot or bed, the camera, with Madame Psychosis as the Death- Mother figure inclined over it, parturient and nude, talking down to it — in both senses of the word, which from a critical perspective would introduce into the film a kind of synesthetic double-entendre involving both the aural and visual perspectives of the subjective camera — explaining to the camera as audience-synecdoche that this was why mothers were so obsessively, con-sumingly, drivenly, and yet somehow narcissistically loving of you, their kid: the mothers are trying frantically to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember.

— Molly Notkin tells them she could be far more helpful and forth-comingly detailed if only they’d switch that beastly lamp off or train it someplace else, which is a brass-faced falsehood and dismissed as such by R. Tine Jr., and so the light stays right on Molly Notkin’s glabrous unhappy face.

— That Madame Psychosis and the film’s Auteur had not been sexually enmeshed, and for reasons beyond the fact that the Auteur’s belief in a finite world-total of available erections rendered him always either impotent or guilt-ridden. That in fact Madame Psychosis had loved and been sexually enmeshed only with the Auteur’s son, who, though Molly Notkin never encountered him personally and Madame Psychosis had taken care never to speak ill of him, was clearly as thoroughgoing a little rotter as one would find down through the whole white male canon of venery, moral cowardice, emotional chicanery, and rot.

— That Madame Psychosis had been present neither at the Auteur’s suicide nor at his funeral. That she’d missed the funeral because her passport had expired. That nor had Madame Psychosis been present at the reading of the late Auteur’s will, despite the fact that she was one of the beneficiaries. That Madame Psychosis had never mentioned the fate or present disposition of the unreleased cartridge entitled either Infinite Jest (V) or Infinite Jest (VI), and had described it only from the perspective of the experience of performing in it, nude, and had never seen it, but had a hard time believing it was even entertaining, let alone lethally entertaining, and tended to believe it had represented little more than the thinly veiled cries of a man at the very terminus of his existential tether — the Auteur having apparently been extremely close to his own mother, in childhood — and had no doubt been recognized as such by the Auteur — who though not exactly the psychic sea’s steadiest keel had been in many respects an acute reader and critic of film, and would have been able to distinguish the real filmic McCoy from pathetic cries veiled as film no matter how wildly his nautical compass was spinning around, on its tether, and would in all probability have destroyed the Master Print of the failed piece of art, the same way he’d reportedly destroyed the first four or five failed attempts at the same piece, which pieces had admittedly featured actresses of lesser mystique and allure.

— That the Auteur’s funeral had purportedly taken place in the L’Islet Province of Nouveau Quebec, the birth-province of the Auteur’s widow, featuring an interrment and not a cremation.

— That far be it from her to tell the U.S. Office of Unspecified Services its business, but why not simply go to J.O.I.’s widow and verify directly the existence and location of the purported cartridge?

— That it seemed pretty unlikely to her, Molly Notkin, that the Auteur’s widow had any connections to any anti-American groups, cells, or movements, no matter what the files on her indiscreet youth might suggest, since from everything Molly Notkin’s heard the woman didn’t have much interest in any agendas larger than her own individually neurotic agendas, even though she came on to Madame Psychosis all sweet and solicitous. That Madame Psychosis had confessed to Molly Notkin that the widow struck her as very possibly Death incarnate — her constant smile the rictal smile of some kind of thanatoptic figure — and that it had struck Madame Psychosis as bizarre that it was she, Madame Psychosis, whom the Auteur kept casting as various feminine instantiations of Death when he had the real thing right under his nose, and eminently photogenic to boot, the widow-to-be, apparently a real restaurant-silencer-type beauty even in her late forties.

— That the Auteur had stopped ingesting distilled spirits as Madame Psy-chosis’s personal condition for consenting to appear in what she knew to be her but did not know to be the J.O.I.’s final film-cartridge, and that the Auteur had, apparently, incredibly, [330]kept his side of the bargain — possibly because he’d been so deeply moved at M.P.’s consent to appear before the camera again even after her terrible accident and deformation and the little rotter of a son’s despicable abandonment of the relationship under the excuse of accusing Madame Psychosis of being sexually enmeshed with their — here Molly Notkin said that she of course had meant to say his — father, the Auteur. And that the Auteur had apparently remained alcohol-free for the whole next three-and-a-half months, from Xmas of the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad to 1 April of the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, the date of his suicide.

— That the completely secret and hidden substance-abuse problem, the one that had now landed Madame Psychosis in an elite private dependency-treatment facility so elite that not even M.P.’s closest friends knew where it was beyond knowing only that it was someplace far, very far away, that the abuse-problem could have been nothing but a consequence of the terrible guilt Madame Psychosis felt over the Auteur’s suicide, and constituted a clear unconscious compulsion to punish herself with the same sort of substance-abuse activity she had coerced the Auteur into stopping, merely substituting narcotics for Wild Turkey, which Molly Notkin could attest was some very gnarly-tasting liquor indeed.

— No, that Madame Psychosis’s guilt over the Auteur’s felo de self had nothing to do with the purportedly lethal Infinite Jest (V) or (VI), which as far as Madame Psychosis had determined from the filming itself was little more than an olla podrida of depressive conceits strung together with flashy lensmanship and perspectival novelty. That, no, rather the consuming guilt had been over the condition that the Auteur suspend the ingestion of spirits, which it turned out, M.P. had claimed in deluded hindsight, had been all that was keeping the man’s tether ravelled, the ingestion, such that without it he was unable to withstand the psychic pressures that pushed him over the edge into what Madame Psychosis said she and the Auteur had sometimes referred to as quote ‘self-erasure.’