Infinite Jest Themes

The issue of mothers in Infinite Jest is ultimately a question of the Entertainment, since the heart of the film involves the mother-death figure explaining to the viewer through a lens designed to replicate an infant’s field of vision, that the woman who kills you is your mother in the next life, then proceeds to apologize repeatedly for this transgression (788, 850, 939). Two things are clear at this point, one being that the film is seen as a logical aggrandizement of pleasure, or, in other words, is the pure form of entertainment pushed to a radical point. James Incandenza desires to make a film ‘so bloody compelling’ that it will strike his son out of the depths of anhedonia (839); likewise, Wallace has critiqued the act of watching television

In the same way that a mother responds to the demands of the infant, the entertainment culture has learned to predict and satisfy human desire, or, as Wallace says, supplies people with what they think they want. Benzon has also pointed out the over-bearing nature of entertainment industry: “The irresistible loops of ‘Infinite Jest’ make explicit an inherently regimented televisual culture in general, which conceives itself as ‘free’ because it can surf channels at seeming whimsy, but is actually confined to the fixed parameters of television…” As seen in the previous chapter, Avril over-responds to her own unconsciously selected needs for her children, exemplary of the horror in exorbitantly coordinated responses to

The videophone resembles present day online video calling services, but largely failed due to the anxiety involved in exhibiting one’s image while chatting on the phone. Wallace explains that the high-tech fad of video-calling died out because self-image pierced through an “illusion of unilateral attention…[that is] almost infantilely gratifying from an emotional standpoint” (146). Once the videophone was deemed stressful for the consumer, ridiculous add-on features hit the market in order to quell people’s insecurities about appearance, culminating in masks that actually enhanced users’ images, to the point where their authentic appearance no longer sufficed (145-151). The ‘expulsion-from-Eden feeling’ of no longer mentally drifting on the phone haunts even the memory of Eden, because it evokes the realization that on the other end of the line, the same inattentiveness had always taken place. This videophonic stress constitutes both the trauma involved in the image as it pertains to the actual body, as well as exploring the narcissistic wound of no longer being the centerpiece of attention; this is precisely what is at stake in the mirror stage transition. Insofar as its consumers must hide from the each other, the notion of videophonic dysphoria captures the emergence of the unruly body as it fails to synchronize with the caller’s