Infinite Jest Review

Infinite Jest is a very long book meant to warn tennis players to be wary of wheelchair-bound Quebecois. I do not play tennis, and I live far from Quebec, so I ignored those aspects of the book and instead focused on the secondary meaning of David Foster Wallace’s best-known work: a prophetic warning about a worsening culture of nihilism. This culture of nihilism, which Wallace incidentally diagnosed in his book on the dangers of associating with Canadians, saps the meaning from human existence. The outcome is a spiritual flatness, which we remedy through the avoidance of negativity through isolation, drugs, and entertainment. These are not solutions; they are coping mechanisms that get in the way of the real remedy: a near-monastic devotion to ritualized order that fosters vulnerable, reciprocal human connection.

The plot of Infinite Jest takes place mostly outside the book. It is not even in the background of the book. It is absent, with only a couple of references to the “true plot,” which the reader must piece together after reading. It is as if Infinite Jest is a long collection of character backgrounds to serve as a baseline for the real plot. But it is not necessarily boring. Rather, it demonstrates persistent existential unease with a relative absence of drama. Long passages reflect the low grade “struggle” with this unease, which we all feel every day in boredom or other feelings.

Life is monotonous and lacks the typical extravagance of a good story. Work, school, responsibilities, and sleep onward into infinity. Many aspects of what we now call “tradition” were complex social technologies that addressed this, giving life coherence and meaning. Without those, coherence and meaning are not totally lost, but they are significantly lost. We did away with them because we found easier ways to handle the feeling. Ernst Junger observes in On Danger that bourgeois society has created an intolerably boring life. Danger is something far away, and the everyday stakes of life disappear. Wallace’s novel depicts a world in which characters experience a dull, persistent dissatisfaction with ordinary life. “The truth is usually not just un-but anti-interesting.” (p. 441) Gerhardt Schtitt, the token German at Enfield Tennis Academy, finds the USA both amusing and frightening due to its alien nature. Schtitt had his early education in a “Kanto-Hegelian” gymnasium, which taught how to “sacrifice the hot narrow imperatives of the Seelf... to the larger imperatives of a team” and state, which prepares the child for compliance with and service to the state and laws in adulthood. The United States, on the other hand, is not a team nor a code but instead a “sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness.” (p. 76) The US exemplifies modernity in this way, with Schtitt observing that there is nothing larger to be part of or to serve. Instead, it is the individual, free to pursue his or her private pleasure.

This ethos takes away communal guiding lights. The Church, the State, the People, all of that is anachronistic and authoritarian, so the individual gets to decide on their own directives. These individual directives have gotten tastier over time, optimizing for only the quick dopamine hit. This results in profound boredom and concomitant minimal viable pleasure-seeking. Cybernetic circuitry reinforces the feeling of boredom and the need to appease it. Byung Chul Han argues that a sociology of hyperattention emerges. Boredom is a precursor to contemplation, which is a precursor to humanity's cultural achievements, and is frenetically attacked and washed away. Rapid change between tasks and sources of information is the dominant mode of awareness. What is necessary for the converse (meaningful construction of greatness) is not only boredom but profound boredom. Deep contemplative attention vanishes. This hyperattention has progressed since Wallace wrote to the point at which all feel the “spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure or attachment to things formerly important.” (p. 596) The low-grade stimulation provided by the television will become the focal point in a room filled with loved ones.

This stimulation from television or TikTok streams hollows out the soul. Look at someone’s eyes while they scroll without them noticing. You see that it sucks it all out, all feeling and meaning, as if the scrolling social media feed was a high-speed treadmill placed too close to a tablecloth. It disappears and remains gone until the treadmill is turned off and the cloth is pulled out. Anhedonia or some kind of depression is described as something clinical and particular, but it has become generalized. With this generalization comes cope:

It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip — and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. (p. 597)

Although the anhedonia is not always performed in such a way, the experience of total social media-induced numbness has a necessarily performative character in that one only observes the performance of others for the social media feed, proceeding then to perform accordingly, as if always displayed in a social media feed. Baudrillard reflects on the collapse of play-acting and reality in reality television. Among others, no one is with others any longer but always potentially on camera, on reality teevee, and so they must dance to become part of the stimulation sludge that they consume. This performance consumption complex is one of many forms of escapism from the existential unease that permeates modernity. Wallace depicts other forms of escapism.

Escapism from boredom is not mere indulgence. American culture has made this escapism imperative. Life is spiritually flat, so one must urgently consume and relieve through commercially available means. This is the most clear theme in Infinite Jest, with one setting being a halfway house for recovering drug abusers, and a central theme being the brain-melting pleasure-maxxing “Entertainment”. The dullness and need for intoxication are clear from one of the first chapters, in which Erdedy waits isolated in his apartment after making every excuse for why he will not be seen in everyday life. He is waiting for his weed dealer to get back to him and promising himself that this is the last time he will go on a multi-day, solitary weed binge. Trapped in his boring and secure world, he waits for the call from his dealer, making every excuse that he needs it. Erdedy has a life, job, friends, etc., like everyone else, but in the age of spiritual flatness and consumerist nihilism, he needs to escape to the dull high of weed just to escape. He does not even like the experience, and marijuana ceases to be nearly as fun when used habitually. His hope is that he can snap himself out of it by using too much and making himself completely sick of marijuana.

In 2026, weed dealers do not exist anymore because, like every other banal pleasure, it can be purchased and delivered at any time with the click of a button. Pleasure becomes a duty in this spiritual desolation. Baudrillard argues that the consumer treats it as an obligation imposed on them, and, in many respects, this is due to advertising's psychological aggression. The consuming subject believes they are obliged to be happy, to have love, and dynamic, euphoric experiences. Baudrillard states: “This is the principle of the maximization of existence by the multiplication of contacts and relations, by the intensive use of signs and objects, and by the systematic exploitation of all the possibilities of pleasure.” The new ethics of constraining obligation toward happiness and pleasure (only ever in banal forms) is the modern equivalent of the duty toward labor. If the subject forgets to consume, Baudrillard continues, “he will be gently and instantly reminded that he has no right not to be happy.” He is obliged to engage in continuous pleasure maxxing, lest he run “the risk of being satisfied with what he has and of becoming asocial.” (Baudrillard, Selected Writings, p. 28)

The consumption ethos exists because of the total commodification of American capitalism. In Wallace’s book, time is subsidized. Years are not numbered, but named after a product or brand that purchased it. President Gentle pursues this decision after facing the triple-bind of an electorate that wants new stuff, no new taxes, and a Reserve Board that wants a balanced budget. After returning from a football game, he notes that the stadiums are named after sponsors, so why not years? There is no beginning or end to the cycle of consumerism. Revenue is needed to sustain consumption; it is generated through advertising slot sales, which in turn feed back into consumption.

The compulsion to consume interlocks with the compulsion to optimize. The subject views itself as a project that must be perfected and constructed. Han observes in In the Swarm that this is the new essence of liberation. Performance, achievement, and self-optimization are the expectations, and are displayed most clearly at Enfield Tennis Academy, where boarding students engage in slavish devotion to perfecting their tennis skills. “The achievement subject exploits itself until it collapses,” Han says. Not only is this seen in the psychological troubles of the students at ETA, but also by the founder, J. O. Incandenza, who commits suicide upon the completion of the Entertainment. “Often enough, they lead to suicide... the self turns out to be a projectile that it now turns on itself.” (Han, In the Swarm, p. 49) The core of Han’s observation about optimization is that freedom is not the absence of coercion, as classical liberal ethics indicates. Rather, freedom turns into self-coercion, because one must determine what to do with one’s freedom. Even attempts to pursue something great are done in an atomized manner outside of a broader, cohesive cultural project. “Psychic maladies such as depression and burnout express a profound crisis of freedom,” Han says. (Han, Psychopolitics, p. 1)

Self-optimization dominates ETA through total quantification of the self. There is a class on understanding athletic spreadsheets; every student is ranked nationally and within the academy. Players’ progress is constantly gauged like market performance: “This endless tension among E.T.A.s about how the coaches are seeing you, gauging your progress — is your stock going up or down.” (p. 651) Measurements of error and tactics at the minute level factor into the lives of all students, even to the point where their extracurricular game, Eschaton, is a convoluted, statistics-heavy activity. Other characters also place an undue focus on self-measurement, such as the chief of the US Office of Unspecified Services, Rodney Tine Sr., who cannot help his compulsive daily self-measurements.

The quantification of the self creates a false image of the subject, in which the subject is confused with a compilation of isolated measurements of the subject. This has reached an extreme in the digital age, in which big data constantly harvests user information to profile individuals for consumerist or political advertising and targeting. What emerges is a shadow or phantom of the subject profiled from their data residua. Bratton ties together self-optimization and hyper quantification. He argues that this form of optimization “elevates the principles of User-centered design into an existential mandate for biological disclosure and epistemological closure tuned to harmonize with the hyperindividuated self-regard native to the zones that link transhumanism and Atlas Shrugged... self-mastery through the quantification of system... is premised on a fundamental misrecognition—one for which the visual coherency of the object tracked is taken as validation of the subjective coherency of the “self” that stares back at it. As before, mirror reflection makes a false guarantee of the self’s apparent outline.” (Benjamin Bratton, The Stack, p. 375)

The self is confused with its statistical representation. Hal understands himself as number 4 and John Wayne as number 1. Perception replaces the real with the representation, further symbolized how the ETA pass-time of Eschaton is a game which plays out nuclear conflict over a map, representing a territory, which collapse into one and are also played out over the tennis court, which is the map for the ETA students and yet it becomes their total life future and territory, just as their understanding of self is constructed through the values in the cells on the athletic spreadsheet.

The quantification of the self causes the subject to lose sight of the aspects of itself that are not quantifiable and cannot be reduced to numbers on a spreadsheet. Despite the hypothetical ability of scientific measurement to describe and quantify a human being, from the cells in the body to the synapses in the brain, the measurement of a thing is not the thing itself. It is a map of the thing, a representation according to a discrete theoretical schema, not an exhaustive replication of the thing in all aspects. This one-sided view of the self can lead the subject down a path of neuroses and depression, opening the door to further feelings of meaninglessness as the mysterious, unpredictable, and varied aspects of the human are hidden away. This results in further desire for consumption of numbing substances, whether it is drugs or entertainment.

The Entertainment itself is the logical conclusion of a self-pleasing, consumerist system: why not just go to extremes? Have the perfect maximum pleasure? Just overdose on heroin? Watch the most pleasurable film of all time to the point at which you will defecate on yourself and starve to death while viewing, and if you are forcibly taken away, you will never feel any pleasure again without it?

Agents Steeply and Marathe discuss the p-terminal and its relationship to the Entertainment. Steeply describes its discovery during a trial-and-error brain stimulation study:

‘What happened was that Olders and the Canadian neuroscientists happened to find, during all the trial and error, that firing certain electrodes in certain parts of the lobes gave the brain intense feelings of pleasure.’ Steeply looked back over his shoulder at Marathe. ‘I mean we’re talking about intense pleasure, Rémy. I’m remembering Olders called these little strips of stimulatable pleasure-tissue p-terminals.’ (p. 406)

Upon its discovery, the scientists began stimulating it in animals. The animals would auto-stimulate when given the chance thousands of times per hour, ignoring food, sex, and all other survival needs. When it came time to experiment on human subjects, regulations prohibited studies involving unwilling subjects. The study was leaked, and “hordes” of willing subjects showed up to be tested on, “just for the chance of this kind of pleasure,” and they were not deviants in any way. “Just regular young people... Volunteering for fatal addiction to the electrical pleasure.” (p. 408)

They float the idea of it becoming a consumer product, and everyone just staying home. Totally normal people shut into their homes, flicking the p-terminals, abandoning community and relations altogether. Total civic collapse. The agents analogize this to the Entertainment, which has the same effect. The prospect is horrifying, to find something so pleasurable that one would abandon everything in life that they ever found meaningful just to pursue pleasure unto death. Yet this is the logic of the entertainment age, where pleasure is used as a shield against nihilism. But it does not restore the good things; it is an anti-life escape from all negativity, from working through the emptiness to find the meaning on the other side.

The numbing self-pleasures engaged in to escape the meaninglessness lead the subject to isolation. Erdedy is alone as he waits for his weed, and he plans to be locked up alone for days with his weed. The consumer of the Entertainment consumes it alone, even if in the presence of others. Hal is incredibly secretive about his use of marijuana, going to extreme lengths to keep it under wraps. This means isolating himself when he consumes, and remaining isolated as long as necessary so that the effects of the drug do not tip off others. At the start of the book, which is also its final scene, Hal is trapped in his own mind. He has lost the ability to intelligibly communicate, although his inner monologue is intact.

His consciousness becomes sealed within its own experience, which reflects the atomization brought about by digital media consumption. Hal’s condition likely stems from accidental consumption of DMZ, aka Madame Psychosis, a fictional giga-psychedelic. Although the exact mechanism of Hal’s consumption is unclear, and may have had something to do with the ghost of his father, it unlocked a richer interior life for Hal. Before committing suicide, James Incandenza was certain that his son Hal was unable to speak. This was not true, but J. sought to connect with Hal despite his misunderstanding. He created the fateful Entertainment to communicate with Hal. It is unclear if Hal ever views it. That being said, it is possible that J.’s ghost drugged Hal, making Hal impossible to understand as J. thought he was, but also unlocking an emotional depth in him. This descent into incommunicability coincides with Hal quitting marijuana, an isolating and numbing substance. He leaves behind the numbing substance and develops emotional richness, but he loses the ability to communicate. This is the opening scene of the book, where his uncle CT bargains with college admissions and coaches to get Hal into college. Their discussion of Hal is not about Hal himself but about the quantified Hal, and why his grades and tennis performance qualify him for matriculation. Both symbolically and literally, Hal is mute because he has escaped numbness and found who he is on the inside, but those who surround him see him only as a number.

Communication is lost today. People exchange information, but the deeper forms of communication are few and far between. It is communication without community. The rapid flow of information through text messages, group chats, and social media is not a replacement. Flusser commented on the meaninglessness of the information stream before the age of digital tech:

The form of contemporary society embodies an unsatisfactory and in part incorrect perception of the society’s cerebral, netlike character. Mass culture, proliferating kitsch, the descent into boredom, into entropy, are the results of this faulty organization. As a result, the real function of society (of the mind) is thwarted. Rather than producing improbable, adventurous things, contemporary society is close to exhausting the information that is fed into it. It is a stupid society. (Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, p. 92)

Talking about a teevee show is banal; it is not communication in a community. It is good to share interests, but if relationships revolve around discussions of how we entertain and pleasure ourselves, they are hollow. The media environment has funneled society to this point. Written and printed words both led to an increase of interiority as information could be consumed in solitude, rather than in a community. Walter Ong argues that the “evolution of consciousness through human history is marked by growth in articulate attention to the interior of the individual person as distanced.” Philosophy becomes more preoccupied with the ego and the interior life over time, as does narrative. The progression “of consciousness described in a Jungian framework by Erich Neumann... move toward a selfconscious, articulate, highly personal, interiority.” (Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 173) Inward focus of consciousness created a feedback loop with the presence of written and printed words, both reinforcing one another. The printed word made this especially the case. Ong observed that “. The advent of print intensified the inwardness fostered by script. The age of print was immediately marked in Protestant circles by advocacy of private, individual interpretation of the Bible, and in Catholic circles was marked by the growth of frequent private confession of sins, and concomitantly a stress on the examination of conscience.” (Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 149) This inferiority has many positive aspects, but it increases the risk of total isolation from others as it grows.

Digital communication makes it worse, because relationships can be simulated through digital media. The subject understands oneself as quantified through digital relationships in terms of the number of likes, friends, and followers. These provide the illusion of relationships and a simulacrum of community. Han argues that the “compulsion of self-production” in attention grabbing displays through digital media, “leads to a crisis of community.” Community in the digital age is “atrophied,” and it “lacks the symbolic power to bind people together.” (Han, Disappearance of Rituals, p. 13) A healthy community needs an orientation; it needs to be directed toward something transcendent for the group to share a common purpose beyond mere career. Nations, high cultures, and faiths have filled this role for most of human history, but post-Enlightenment rationalists carefully dismantled each of them, labeling them anachronistic. There is no transcendent rallying point in the age of reason on a large scale, but communication only occurs on a large scale.

The need for a higher purpose echoes Schtitt’s earlier observation in this review. It is easy to simply assume that extreme discipline, Prussian-style, will fix everything. As inclined as I am towards that perspective, that is not the perspective Wallace presents. Schtitt himself sees excellence as something only attainable through “sacrifice of Self” to the rules/Law: “The only way to get to them: sacrifice. Suffer. Deny. What are you willing to give.” (p. 83). Yet it risks psychic deformation: “It’s possible that the only jr. tennis players who can win their way to the top and stay there without going bats are the ones who are already bats, or else who seem to be just grim machines” (p. 377). The pursuit of excellence, especially athletic excellence, often takes on a celebrity form. This brings its own host of issues, in that relationships risk becoming extremely shallow, and the adoration of thousands simply serves as another numbing mechanism. Wallace uses Orin’s punting euphoria (”30,000 voices... as One Sound”) to stage performance as a temporary exit from self-consciousness: it is transcendence via spectacle rather than relation (p. 257). This is excellence as insulation, using elite performance as its own substitute for meaning.

The other prominent setting in IJ is Ennet House, the halfway house for rehabilitating drug addicts. Being a place for addicts, the house rules mandate that tenants must frequent AA or some other anonymous meeting. Addicts arrive at the house skeptical that they will ever be able to recover. Among them is Don Gately, who has graduated from the program and now works at the house to help others in their recovery. Wallace describes him:

Don Gately was a twenty-seven-year-old oral narcotics addict (favoring Demerol and Talwin), and a more or less professional burglar; and he was, himself, unclean and violated. But he was a gifted burglar, when he burgled — though the size of a young dinosaur, with a massive and almost perfectly square head he used to amuse his friends when drunk by letting them open and close elevator doors on, he was, at his professional zenith, smart, sneaky, quiet, quick, possessed of good taste and reliable transportation — with a kind of ferocious jolliness in his attitude toward his livelihood. (p. 52)

After spending four months in Ennet House, Gately was surprised to find out that any of the recovery process works. It is extremely regimented and community-focused. After those four months, Gately realizes that he has stopped sneaking away to use. It was not a conscious decision to stop; he just realized that he already had: “The idea that AA might actually somehow work unnerved him. He suspected some sort of trap. Some new sort of trap.” (p. 303) It seems like a trap because Ennet house functions in a manner that fills in the void that addicts are trying to fill in the first place. Part of this process means acknowledging a higher power, something above the material world, the wants of the self, something transcending all of it. In Gately’s path to recovery, he makes himself act as if there were a transcendent force before he has confidence that there is one:

His sole experience so far is that he takes one of AA’s very rare specific suggestions and hits the knees in the A.M. and asks for Help and then hits the knees again at bedtime and says Thank You, whether he believes he’s talking to Anything/body or not, and he somehow gets through that day clean... Gately still feels like he has no access to the Big spiritual Picture. He feels about the ritualistic daily Please and Thank You prayers rather like like a hitter that’s on a hitting streak and doesn’t change his jock or socks or pre-game routine for as long as he’s on the streak. (p. 382)

The question of a higher power is considered by many throughout the book. Some are more willing to consider it than others, but the AA veterans always say the same thing to the newcomers: whatever you think about it, whatever your opinion on God, it works. It leads to recovery, so if recovery is what the newcomer wants, they need to accept AA's higher power tenet and practice it. It is not sufficient on its own for recovery, though.

Ennet House and AA embrace a relapse architecture, with the house's physical and social structures designed to manage a return to normalcy (p. 173). The aesthetics of the space matter because the environment orients the subject. They practice ritual humility. AA slogans are treated as a catalog of routinized survival language. “I came here to learn to live by cliches... To turn my will and life over to the care of cliches,” one resident says (p. 236). The residents must humble themselves and trust received wisdom, even if it seems little and dumb. Because it works, it is seen as little and dumb. Most people do not need to repeat these to themselves because they are automatic; they are the background process. The residents are missing these background processes that keep most people away from hard drugs. Language functions as behavioral scaffolding, and the recovering addicts must repeat the cliches before they know if they believe them or not. McLuhan describes clichés as recovered archetypes, often drawn from earlier ages. Archetypes, in the Jungian sense, embody a shared psychic entity produced by the experiences of multiple generations and expressed through art. The dismissal and loss of archetypes, because they are not rational or logical constructs, leads the subject to also dismiss the function the archetype served. Repeating a cliché is a means of rectifying that.

AA meetings are repetitive and unglamorous, with everyone speaking in a communal setting, with no optimization or drive toward efficiency or consumption. There is no quantification of the self except in relation to escape from the substance, no simulation, and no irony. It is not done to be pretty or fun. It is a process of communal vulnerability in which the truth must be told to oneself and to others. “An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church.” (p. 320)

Recovery in Ennet House and AA is a life of rituals. These rituals bind together and bring forth a community with a common purpose above themselves and a shared rhythm. Han describes a crisis of resonance taking place in modern society because we have lost the dimension of the other. Shared rituals are a critical component of maintaining resonance:

Rituals bring forth a community in which resonances occur, one that is capable of accord, of a common rhythm:... Without resonance we are thrown back on to ourselves, isolated. Increasing narcissism works against the experience of resonance. Resonance is not an echo of the self; the dimension of the other is inherent in it. It means accord. Where resonance disappears completely, depression arises. Today’s crisis of community is a crisis of resonance. Digital communication channels are filled with echo chambers in which the voices we hear are mainly our own. Likes, friends and followers do not provide us with resonance; they only strengthen the echoes of the self. (Han, The Disappearance of Rituals, pp. 10-11)

Digital technology eliminates resonance by placing people in echo chambers where they see only those they already strongly agree with and connect with. Hard questions and insights that prompt a serious examination of self, the kind needed to overcome the root causes of drug addiction, are not found in this environment. The digital forum is the opposite of an AA meeting, where the only way to survive social evisceration is an ever-present guard of irony. The medium of the message. Additionally, digital communication eliminates contact with the other because it is not even real. The subject recognizes its subjectivity by seeing itself through the eyes of the other, where the subjectivity of each is thrown back and forth as both recognize that they are thinking, feeling, flesh-and-blood humans. I am skeptical that this process was ever possible on the internet, but with the domination of generative language models, it is certainly impossible today.

The way to recover meaning amid the meaningless of digital entertainment, consumer culture, and pain avoidance is to rebuild real community through shared rituals and a common vision that transcends materialism.

This review is effectively complete, but it seems odd not to mention Joelle Van Dyne, a through-line for many of the themes discussed above. Joelle is the former girlfriend of Orin Incandenza, Hal’s older brother. During their relationship, Joelle developed a strangely close relationship with J.O. Incandenza prior to his suicide. She was the victim of a chemical attack by her family member, which permanently disfigured her face, after which she has appeared exclusively wearing a veil. What is unclear is whether this disfiguring made her face beautiful or horrendous. From the little Wallace tells the reader about the Entertainment, it is clear that Joelle features prominently in the film, possibly with her veil lifted.

Joelle runs a radio show under the persona “Madame Psychosis”, which is also a name for the ultra-potent DMZ that Hal likely ingested, which made him unable to speak, as his father believed him to be, but also gave him a rich emotional life. J.O. created Entertainment to help Hal come out of his shell and connect with him. Shortly after the reader is introduced to Joelle, she nearly dies from a crack overdose and is placed in Ennett House, where she develops a close bond with Don Gately over the course of the book.

Her course seems relevant to the themes discussed here: she was already beautiful before her disfigurement, and she (possibly) jokes to Gately that her disfigurement is on the beautiful side. Physical beauty is recognized visually and consumable through visual media. She is and symbolizes the brain-frying Entertainment, and also names herself after the brain-frying DMZ, both of which J.O. used or intended to use to change Hal, and she lands in recovery at Ennet house, which functions as the real antidote for the emptiness of the age, or at least the antidote for some coping mechanisms. Despite these connections, I am unsure exactly how Joelle fits into these themes. Perhaps this is a flaw in my thesis. Please leave a comment if you have thoughts on the matter.

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