Infinite Jest: Chapter 45 Summary & Analysis

8 November Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment Interdependence Day Gaudeamus Igitur. Mario’s first finished and “halfway-coherent” film was of a finger puppet show, and it was such a surprising hit with E.T.A. students and staff that it is screened every year on Interdependence Day. (An endnote here explains that Charles and Schtitt spent I-Day giving presentations about E.T.A. at tennis clubs and missed the whole Eschaton fiasco. Charles has also been preoccupied with the imminent arrival of Helen Steeply on E.T.A.’s campus.) Mario gives a very short introduction to the film, which is loosely based on a political propaganda film made by James called The ONANtiad.

The film features a lounge singer and B movie actor called Johnny Gentle who became President of the U.S., and it mixes historical facts with Mario’s own inventions. The O.N.A.N. era is introduced with President Gentle telling the Mexican President and Canadian Prime Minister: “We North Americans have to stick together… we’re interdependent.” The Canadian P.M. replies: “It is a smaller world, today,” and this leads into the song “It’s a Small World After All.”

Down in the weight room, Lyle recalls an E.T.A. student called Marlon whose skin was always wet. There are almost always people in the weight room, even though it’s technically locked at night. Tonight, LaMont Chu confesses that he has “an increasingly crippling obsession with tennis fame.” He is only 11 but completely fixated on every aspect of life as a professional tennis player. Lyle responds by explaining that after the initial rush of fame, professional tennis players end up just as “trapped” and unhappy as LaMont is now. In despair, LaMont concludes that he is therefore trapped either way.

Lyle’s advice tends to be straightforward and effective. Back upstairs, Mario’s film features James’s signature blending of clips from real and fake news cartridges. The headers are listed side by side with no indication of which ones are real. They announce the emergence of the O.N.A.N. pact, the enormous waste problem the U.S. was facing at the time, and the decision to dump this waste in the Great Concavity.

One of Lyle’s repeated phrases of advice is “Do not underestimate objects!” When Stice seeks Lyle’s help about the problem of his bed moving around his room at night, he regretfully apologizes for not following Lyle’s advice before, but Lyle dismisses this as no problem at all. Almost no E.T.A. students smoke cigarettes because it makes training so much more painful, but Hal is addicted to nicotine and thus chews and spits tobacco instead. He also has a compulsion issue with sugar, which—when he ingests it in significant amounts—induces strange, unappealing emotional experiences.

Mario’s interest in puppets is another thing he inherited from James, who once made a short film called The Medusa v. the Odalisque, which depicted a fake theatre production. The Odalisque is a Medusa-like character from Quebecois mythology who is so beautiful that anyone who looks at her turns into a precious stone. The film was not a huge success, but is far from James’ “most hated” cartridge, which is undoubtedly one called The Joke. The Joke’s marketing advised viewers not to see it, which had the effect of encouraging art film fans to see it, only to find that the entire film was just a shot of the audience itself. It ran as long as anyone could bear to stay watching it.

Back in Mario’s film, more headlines announce the emergence of birth defects in babies born near the Great Concavity, and the President Gentle administration’s denial that anything shady was afoot. Having initially denied the existence of the Great Concavity, President Gentle declares it a “federal disaster” and offers disaster relief to affected citizens. His administration came to be nicknamed “The Concavity Cabinet”; Mario inexplicably depicts it as consisting entirely of glamorous black women with coiffed hair.

In Mario’s representation of the meeting between Gentle’s cabinet, the President of Mexico, the P.M. of Canada, and various other statesmen, Mr. Rodney Tine, the Chief of the Office of Unspecified Services, announces Gentle’s plan to “give it away” (“it” meaning the Great Concavity). The Secretary of State is appalled that Gentle let Tine persuade him to have the toxic waste dumped on that site in the first place. Yet Tine insists that the Great Concavity will be a “an unprecedented intercontinental gift,” which the Secretary of State calls “a kind of ecological gerrymandering.”

More headlines describe Gentle’s effort to force Canada to accept the “gift” of the Great Concavity, despite the Canadian P.M.’s extreme reluctance to do so. One news cartridge announces that Gentle has isolated himself in a private suite in hospital and is engaged in extremely erratic behavior. Tine publicly claims that the President “has completely lost his mind” and is threatening to both commit suicide and bomb his own nation if Canada doesn’t accept the gift.

Some E.T.A. students know that this part of the film is a “puppet-à-clef-type allusion” to the story of Eric Clipperton. Clipperton was an independent junior tennis player who owned a gun and, if he was losing a game, would play with it pressed to his head. As a result, no one could bring themselves to beat him. No one knows where Clipperton came from; the only person he befriended was Mario, who was eight at the time they met.

Hal has smoked weed four times this I-Day, and while watching the film has eaten four chocolate cannolis in half an hour. The film mentions Tine’s love affair with a mysterious Quebecoise woman called Luria P——. Hal is well informed about the contemporary American advertising industry, having once written a long research paper about advertising and television for Mr. Ogilvie’s Introduction to Entertainment Studies class in seventh grade. Ratings for TV networks have been falling for some time, and in his paper Hal argued that the pressure of fighting for short-term financial viability made it impossible for TV execs to adequately plan for how to adjust to longer-term changes in entertainment culture.

A trio of black and white ads for a small company that made tongue scrapers was ultimately what sealed the TV networks’ fate. The ads “shook viewers to the existential core,” and for a year the whole American population became obsessed with tongue hygiene. At the same time, the “big four” TV networks suffered complete financial collapse, taking the major advertisement agencies who focused on TV ads with them. A visionary video-rental mogul persuaded the big four to consolidate behind a front company she founded after predicting this exact turn of events. She advocated a future of self-selected programming, rather than viewers passively choosing a particular channel.

Thus began the cartridge era. Suddenly, televisual production no longer depended on advertising. For the first time, “personal pleasure and gross revenue looked… to lie along the same demand curve.” Cartridges were played on Teleputers (TPs) and featured no ads at all. Advertising agencies were overrun with panic and chaos. The enormously successful ad exec P. Tom Veals, on learning about the lounge singer Johnny Gentle, decided to serve as the manager of his presidential campaign.