Much later, in subsequent events’ light, Johnette F. would clearly recall the sight of the boy’s frozen hair slowly settling, and how the boy had said whom, and the sight of clear upscale odor-free saliva almost running out over his lower lip as he fought to pronounce the word without swallowing.
Technical interviewers under Chief of Unspecified Services R. (‘the G.’) Tine [325] really do do this, bring a portable high-watt lamp and plug it in and adjust its neck so the light shines down directly on the face of the interview’s subject, whose homburg and shade-affording eyebrows had been removed by polite but emphatic request. And it was this, the harsh light on her fully exposed post-Marxist face, more than any kind of tough noir-informed grilling from R. Tine Jr. and the other technical interviewer, that prompted M.I.T. A.B.D.-Ph.D. Molly Notkin, fresh off the N.N.Y.C. high-speed rail, seated in the Sidney Peterson-shaped directorial chair amid dropped luggage in her co-op’s darkened and lock-dickied living room, to spill her guts, roll over, eat cheese, sing like a canary, tell everything she believed she knew:[326]
— Molly Notkin tells the U.S.O.U.S. operatives that her understanding of the après-garde Auteur J. O. Incandenza’s lethally entertaining Infinite Jest (V or VI) is that it features Madame Psychosis as some kind of maternal instantiation of the archetypal figure Death, sitting naked, corporeally gorgeous, ravishing, hugely pregnant, her hideously deformed face either veiled or blanked out by undulating computer-generated squares of color or ana-morphosized into unrecognizability as any kind of face by the camera’s apparently very strange and novel lens, sitting there nude, explaining in very simple childlike language to whomever the film’s camera represents that Death is always female, and that the female is always maternal. I.e. that the woman who kills you is always your next life’s mother. This, which Molly Notkin said didn’t make too much sense to her either, when she heard it, was the alleged substance of the Death-cosmology Madame Psychosis was supposed to deliver in a lalating monologue to the viewer, mediated by the very special lens. She may or may not have been holding a knife during this monologue, and the film’s big technical hook (the Auteur’s films always involved some sort of technical hook) involved some very unusual kind of single lens on the Bolex H32’s turret,[327] and it was unquestionably an f/x that Madame Psychosis looked pregnant, because the real Madame Psychosis had never been visibly pregnant, Molly Notkin had seen her naked,[328] and you can always tell if a woman’s ever carried anything past the first trimester if you look at her naked.[329]
— 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.