"if we like, we can look at the rest of the book through Laruelle's eyes, as if it were his creation." – Malcolm Lowry, "Letter to Jonathan Cape".

Following up on the above hint, Antony Kilgallin explores Laruelle's role as film-maker, emphasizing his controlling consciousness and discussing the various cinematic techniques brought to the novel: the internal allusions to other films; the close but unobtrusive parallels between Laruelle and Sergei Eisenstein, whose Que Viva Mexico! was to have been an epic representation of Mexico's history; and the particular relevance of the setting in the cinema, Ch. I, where the luminous wheel turning backwards is, among other things, that of camera and projector as Laruelle prepares to shoot the film of his life.

Kilgallin's analysis offers a structural justification for what many critics have seen as the novel's central weakness, that is, Lowry's "excessive" symbolism, whereby everything seems to relate obsessively to everything else. If, however, Chs. II to XII are seen essentially as the product of Laruelle's controlling consciousness, as they must be, then the form of the novel contains its own justification of why it is as it is and not otherwise.