Hal alone in Viewing Room 6

Told by deLint that he "just never quite occurred out there" against Stice — a phrase that chills him "to the root," ontological erasure by another name — Hal skips study period and shuts himself in a soundproof viewing room to run cartridge after cartridge of his dead father's films: The American Century as Seen Through a Brick, Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell, Death in Scarsdale, on and on. It is the theme's quietest father-son scene and one of its most loaded: the only access Hal has to Himself is the work, and he spends a whole depressed evening inside it, torturing himself over the name of a child-actor he can't recall — reaching, in effect, for a face in the father's films the way he can't reach for the father. The raw is careful that Hal himself would deny the reading ("his nausea has nothing to do with watching his father's cartridges"); the scene lets him deny it and shows the vigil anyway.