'I'm sorry...I'm sorry....I'm sorry.'
Before he committed suicide, Himself (1), an 'auteur'/ film-maker, made five versions of an 'entertainment' entitled 'Infinite Jest', alternately referred to as 'samizdat'. (2, 3) While none of those entertainment-imbued cartridges were officially released for public consumption, nevertheless bootleg copies, or deviously distributed ones, do exist and we are given to know that they are deadly. Copies turn up here and there, wrapped in plain brown paper or with smiley faces on the cartridge's spine. Innocuous as all get out. Hmm.
The contents of the cartridge are not fully known, but some of the book's characters, being very curious, try to get going a game of chicken to see what the hoopla is all about. A terrorist group wants to find the master so copies can be made and deployed as a weapon against its enemies (4). This quest is left unresolved at book's end, but there are clues as to its whereabouts.
We first learn about the cartridge's Venusian flytrap qualities when a Near-Eastern medical attache' is found in a state of corporeal decay in his chair, eyes fixed on the screen (p.87), the film's 'recursive loop' still recursively looping on the hotel's viewing device. Fascinating! One envisions subliminal daggers flung at the viewer while invisible restraints prevented him from even closing his eyes, let alone rising from the chair to turn the thing off. Nobody who has ever viewed the cartridge has survived. Some remain catatonic, vegetables rotting in institutions. Resistance, as they say, is futile.
What makes the entertainment so compelling that no one can resist its deadly allure? Some reviewers of I J refer to the book's theme as an exploration of obsession, and it is that, but it goes deeper. DFW has created a powerful metaphor for escapism in many forms: through alcohol, drugs, sports, sex, communication breakdowns (between Orin and Avril, Himself and Hal, Hal with almost anyone in the end, language barriers - hilarious as they are - and many characters who talk but are unable to actually converse, meaning, to hear the the other person's words and respond appropriately); compulsive cleaning( especially Avril and Johnny Gentle); and the penultimate of all escape tactics, suicide.
There seems to be a basic human gene that switches on when life becomes majorly unpleasant or intolerable. This gene causes the mind to initiate a self-destruct sequence, and the ensuing protocols (i.e., addictions to the method of choice) are too powerful for mere mortals to control. Himself seems to have captured the essence of this in his final entertainment. To be entertained to death is the path of least resistance, and everybody with something to sell knows it. It doesn't even have to be deliberately undertaken, it just sort of happens while we're on our usual daily auto-pilot maneuvers. To what extent are human beings pre-programmed to succumb? Is anyone immune? If not, then why bother to stick around?
The perfect visual of all this appears in the final cartridge: A mother leans over her baby's crib, intoning an endless apologetic litany for bringing another doomed child into the world. 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry...'
Himself perhaps should have joined AA, which seems to be the only hopeful thing in the book, despite being dismally portrayed, AA. Tell me your thoughts.
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1 'Himself' was the moniker of James O. Incandenza, husband of Avril, father of Orin and Hal, probably not of Mario who nevertheless bears Himself's surname, and founder of the ETA (Enfield Tennis Academy near Boston, MA) in DFW's novel INFINITE JEST (hereafter referred to as I J).
2 According to footnote 24 (James O. Incandenza: A Filmography, I J, pp. 985-993).
3 Is it me, or does samizdat sound a lot like same as that?
4 The separatists are embodied in a group called The Wheelchair Assassins, who want Quebec to secede from the O.N.A.N., (Organization of North American Nations, basically all of the North American continent).
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