One of the things that struck me while reading Pattern Recognition is that it must be impossible to convincingly describe rapturous aesthetic experience. Or to represent an aesthetic work within an aesthetic work. I’m thinking of the “footage” in the novel and how basically unappealing it sounded to me whenever described. Or, rather, it wasn’t so much that I found it unappealing, but that I had serious difficulty imagine anyone having such a strong aesthetic reaction to it as to, you know, devote hours every day to scouring the web for more footage, or obsess endlessly—see “Zaprudered”—over the already discovered chunks. It just didn’t sound that cool to me.

Take the first description: “Light and shadow. Lovers’ cheekbones in the prelude to embrace.” Gibson often writes fragments like these; usually they’re meant to convey a sense of kinesis—like, if somebody’s running down the street observing things, those things will then get referred to in sentence fragments. Here, I guess the fragments are meant to convey the movement or progress of the film itself. Also: they’re not very pretty sentences. Rather than try to represent the aesthetic quality of the film via any sort of high lyricism, Gibson’s made the more conservative move: just describe what Cayce sees on the screen.

And what does she see? Two people hugging against a black background. The description makes it sound as if the film were in black and white, although that’s never explicitly stated—all the “light” v. “dark” stuff sounds like a BW chiaroscuro. Something like German expressionism, I guess; a Murnau film of two people hugging. And then the kiss, and the flash and white-out. And this sends Cayce into rapture? After she’s seen it twice, she’s so exhausted that she has to go to bed—granted, she was tired before watching the film, but then she gets all hopped up on coffee in order to watch it. I just don’t buy it.

I don’t think I’m simply being an uncharitable reader, though. As I said, I think Gibson’s problem is bigger than just his having written some uninspired description. I think something similar happens in David Foster Wallace’s book Infinite Jest, actually. For those of you who haven’t read it, one of the several plots has to do with this mysterious movie made by an artsy filmmaker that’s so unbelievably captivating that anyone who watches it never wants to stop and so essentially goes into a coma—people die in front of their screens because they can’t stop watching the movie. Obviously, it’s a joke—Infinite Jest is part science fiction in that it’s extrapolative; the whole bit with the movie is taking idea of “mindless” entertainment and positing a world in which entertainment really had the ability to make people mindless. So the world of Infinite Jest is actually less governed by the rules of the empirical world than that of Pattern Recognition; it’s easier to believe that Infinite Jest the movie has the kind of power over people that Wallace says it does simply because his world isn’t the same as ours.

Still, though, whenever IJ gets around to describing scenes from the movie--which happens, I think, maybe in an endnote somewhere around page six-hundred--it really just doesn't sound that cool.

Wallace does the same dancing around the actual description of the film that Gibson does in this book. Before we have any idea what Infinite Jest the film looks like, we know that people become fatally addicted to it; before we have any clue at all as to what the “footage” is of, we know that there’s a significant underground of hardcore devotees. In both cases, then, the expectation of the film’s aesthetic content is pretty astronomically high.

And in both cases—it seems to me—the representation of a representation is doomed to fail. Plato already knew that, though.