And to wheat's point, the Entertainment works when it's watched by people who are ready to unhook/become uninvilved in their own internal life ... a willing audience is maybe the key to why it works. This wouldn't be inconsistent with the overall message of "Pay attention to what you pay attention to," In fact the Entertainment isn't too far away in its essence from mindlessly flipping through channels even when you know that you'd be happier doing whatever.
As to the critics' commentary on the film IJ V, if I had to guess, that could be a jab at critics in general who often review books (music, architecture, restaurants, et al) with little more than a passing glance. DFW would have had no little experience in having his work (mis/under)analyzed by a critical community that focused solely on his word choice, his age and all the other factors that seem to form the corpus of the early lit crit we see on him. As Himself had become an established - albeit nearly incomprehensible - filmmaker, it would be easy as a critic to go into Infinite Jest V with all of the previous versions working as a filter ... how possibly could a work stand on its own when examined in an intellectually unvigorous way as we might see from a critic who's covering "4 Boffo Beach Books!" in Entertainment Weekly.
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