Hal on JOI’s and Mario’s films
Hal knows perfectly well that Mario gets his fetish for cartridges about puppets and entr’actes and audiences from their late father.
Context
Watching Mario's film from under his preacher's hat, Hal diagnoses the inheritance in his own head: Mario's whole fixation — puppets, entr'actes, audiences-watching-audiences — comes straight "from their late father," whose anticonfluential middle period ran on exactly those obsessions. The sighting puts Hal and Mario on the same side of the father for once, both his heirs — though the passage that follows (Hal cataloguing The Medusa v. the Odalisque and The Joke from memory) quietly shows the difference in how each holds him: Mario makes films in the father's mode, Hal narrates the father's filmography like a grief-inventory.