Infinite Jest

Through subsequent phone calls, it becomes clear that Orin is asking Hal about Canadian Separatism because he himself is being questioned about it by Steeply (the latest "Subject" he is sleeping with). Orin has never been a very good student, and Hal knows that ordinarily he couldn't care less about Canadian politics. Fairly quickly, it is obvious that he just wants to impress Steeply. At this moment in the novel, the question foreshadows Orin's involvement with the political events that are beginning to unfold in the background, but it also suggests that he can't be the mastermind behind any schemes.

Unfortunately for Orin, he has gotten himself unwittingly involved in a Canadian Separatist terror plot by sending a copy of The Entertainment to the near-eastern medical attaché. The novel implies that he sends the film because the medical attaché once had an affair with Avril. If true, this motive highlights the fact that all Orin cares about is his own family—in fact, he is so wrapped up in his feelings about his family that he is jealous of his mother's sexual partners, struggles to connect with his own, and spends years going to great lengths to avoid talking to any of his surviving family members. Despite his self-involved motives, the medical attaché's mysterious death immediately draws powerful people's attention to The Entertainment and everyone in its orbit. Canadian Separatists want to use it to kill Americans en masse, and the O.N.A.N. Office of Unspecified Services wants to find it so they can foil the plot. Steeply goes undercover to investigate Orin on behalf of O.U.S., believing that he might know something. Orin, witless, begins learning all he can about Separatism and his own father's possible connections to it so that he can keep up with Steeply's questions. Their combined blind spots make for a situation that keeps escalating until Orin truly is in the thick of the political mess.

DMZ is fictional, but Wallace imagines that it is discovered in the same countercultural drug wave as LSD. In fact, it is discovered by the very same chemist who accidentally discovered LSD. After this discovery, LSD went on to become the drug of choice for many writers and artists who rebelled against mainstream institutions in the 1960s and 1970s. Timothy Leary was a psychologist and author who believed in the therapeutic effects of psychedelic drugs like LSD and mushrooms. He led social experiments that resulted in his firing from Harvard and became one of the intellectual faces of the counterculture movement. Alan Watts ran in these same circles.

Many drugs are associated, fairly or not, with particular social groups. By linking DMZ with the elite figures of the counterculture movement, Wallace turns it into a drug for well-off intellectuals who are curious about the human condition and the possibility that people might use drugs to free their minds from the strictures of society. Additionally, the idea that DMZ is "an obscure mold that grows only on other molds" suggests that it might be the substance Orin remembers Hal ingesting long ago at the Weston house. If this is true, it raises the question of how the mold got into the house. It is difficult to find DMZ, so it seems unlikely that it grew there of its own accord. More likely is the possibility that Hal's father, an accomplished scientist and artsy type with his own interest in social and psychological experimentation, grew the mold himself.

The novel never answers the question of exactly what causes Hal's breakdown by the time of his college interview, but it is heavily implied that DMZ has something to do with it. Some readers believe that Hal has a latent reaction to the DMZ he ingested as a young child. Others believe that James Incandenza's wraith deposits the drug on his toothbrush. On the other hand, maybe DMZ has nothing to do with Hal's condition, and he finally just collapsed under the pressure of stress and trauma. In any case, this passage about DMZ's origin suggests that the reader doesn't need to know what technically happened to Hal. Regardless, his father is at the root of it all.

Gately moved to Ennet House to avoid prison time after he accidentally killed a Canadian operative during a burglary-gone-wrong. In a nice turn of events, he finds that sobriety suits him. He takes the AA program seriously (maybe even a little too seriously), and he is proud that he can help other residents of Ennet House on their own sobriety journeys. Not all of the residents want to engage with him in earnest. Gately accepts them on their own terms, but he is thrilled when Erdedy comes along and seems to really care what he has to say. In this passage, the narrator notes that Erdedy, who went to Harvard, is really nodding along because of his training in the elite "white-collar" world Gately has only encountered via the people he has robbed. Erdedy may not be following along with what Gately says so much as keeping up the appearance that he is invested so that he can get in and out of Ennet House efficiently.

The dramatic irony makes Gately look a little foolish, but more than anything it sheds light on the optimistic social experiment taking place at Ennet House and other rehabilitation programs. Boston is a city with pronounced social stratification, especially between rich and poor communities. While different substances may show up in different ways among various social groups, one of the novel's central claims is that addiction does not discriminate. Recovery programs, therefore, are one of the only spaces where people from every part of the class spectrum come together. Gately may not know how Erdedy interfaces with other white-collar people, but AA gives them a language and shared experience all their own. The novel is somewhat critical of AA, raising the question of whether it really makes recovering addicts free or whether it pens them in all over again with its rules and dogma. Still, it seems to be a place where people can explore human connection across social barriers that have previously restricted them.

Stice has come into Dr. Rusk's office because he has been seeing inanimate objects move around him, seemingly of their own accord. Rusk explains that the intense pressure of elite athletics must be making Stice anxious to control the objects around him. Ignoring Stice's protestations that he does not care about action figures, Rusk goes on at length about how children become obsessed with G.I. Joe and Barbie because they see the toys as symbols of their parents. She makes far-fetched connections between the acronym "G.I." and boy children's desire to impress their mothers by controlling their bowel movements. She then explains that boys might become obsessed with Barbies because of a repressed sexual attraction to their mothers.

Most of what Rusk says here falls in line with Freudian psychoanalysis (which has been heavily reworked or outright abandoned by modern psychologists). What makes her speech a parody is her almost free-association between G.I. Joe and gastrointestinal issues, along with her over-the-top insistence that the Oedipus complex must explain Stice's issues. She believes so deeply in sex, incest, and bathroom habits as driving forces of psychology that she doesn't notice that Stice isn't following her at all—nor is she following him. He can't keep up with her jargon, mistakenly assuming at first that "counterphobia" is fear of linoleum. Meanwhile, Rusk mistakenly assumes that Stice is complaining about a paranoid obsession with the objects in his room. On the contrary, he is disturbed that he is actually seeing the objects move. The implication in the book is that the wraith of Hal's father is haunting Stice, which is an entirely different issue from the one Rusk is trying to address. Stice doesn't even know what is real and what is in his head, and Rusk jumps to conclusions before Stice can fully describe his problem.

With this scene, Wallace shows that Freudian psychoanalysis (and sometimes talk therapy more generally) can be an inflexible script that gets in the way of real, helpful connection between a therapist and a patient: simply putting a person in a room with a therapist can make them feel even more alienated from the rest of the world. Many more modalities of talk therapy have become widely available since the time when Wallace wrote Infinite Jest. However, getting the right kind of help can still be a challenging process even for those with no barriers to access. Rusk's reaction to Stice's wraith problem is a comical and exaggerated way for Wallace to criticize the mental healthcare system for failing to listen to patients or consider when it may be the real world, and not the patient's mind, that is broken.

Mario, who takes comfort in Madame Psychosis's nightly radio show, has been struggling with loneliness ever since she went off the air. He is surrounded by plenty of people whom he talks to and even counsels on a regular basis. Madame Psychosis, though, talks about being alone in her own mind and body in a way that resonates with Mario. In response to her voice, Mario feels a kind of solidarity he is lacking in his in-person community. When he hears her through the window at Ennet House, he feels "strangely thrilled" not only to hear her voice, but also to know that there is another fellow listener so near to him. With this listener, too, he feels a kind of solidarity.

The reader knows what Mario does not: the listener is almost certainly Madame Psychosis herself, Joelle Van Dyne. She has recently checked into Ennet House, and her stay there is in fact the reason she is not making any new shows for the time being. Mario doesn't realize that in this moment when Madame Psychosis feels so far away, she is actually closer to him than she has been since she created her radio personality. By bringing Joelle back within Mario's physical orbit, Wallace also emphasizes the dramatic irony swirling around Mario's entire love of the radio show: he does not seem to realize that the reason Madame Psychosis's voice feels so familiar and nice to him is because he knows her personally.

This moment in the book almost seems to promise that Mario and Joelle will have a meaningful reunion. Ironically, their physical proximity doesn't amount to anything (at least that the book explicitly covers). This missed connection reinforces the fact that E.T.A. and Ennet House are worlds largely apart from each other, even though they stand right next to each other and their residents sometimes interact.

If Joelle is being entirely earnest, The Entertainment was intended not for Hal (as James Incandenza's wraith attests) but rather for Joelle. She used to joke that she hid her face because, like Medusa in one of James's other films, she was so beautiful she would paralyze anyone who looked directly at her. In turn, James created a film so mesmerizing that it needs to stay hidden forever. She now tells Steeply that the joke is even better than James knew because Steeply will need to go into the giant dump of the Great Concavity if he wants to find the Master cartridge. James has made such a dangerously enticing film that an American operative will cross enemy lines and wade into the garbage in order to find it.

Joelle may be telling Steeply all she knows, in which case either she or others (or, likely, all of them) are missing key pieces of the story. James may have made The Entertainment with multiple goals, including connecting with Hal and also joking with Joelle. He may even have made it intending to weaponize it, as Steeply worries. The reader knows that The Entertainment is not buried with James because Orin has been making copies of it, but then again Hal, Wayne, and Gately dig something out of James's grave. The confusion and contradiction that comes to the surface in this scene demonstrates that no one ever has the full story, including the reader; everyone is always too wrapped up in their own version of events to see the whole picture.

On the other hand, Joelle might be telling a deliberate lie to get Steeply away from her. She remarks that her story will send him into the "annulation zone" (referring to the Great Concavity). James Incandenza first understands the idea of annulation when he sees a detached doorknob rolling around on the floor, going in circles around a fixed point. Joelle might in fact be sending Steeply into the Great Concavity on a wild goose chase that takes the trajectory of a rolling doorknob: while he is running in circles around the Master cartridge he is sure is located there, she can get back to living her life.