Blood Sister viewing, with the others
Hal tries to imagine the tall slumped tremulous stork-shape of Himself inclined at an osteoporotic angle over digital editing equipment for hours on end, deleting and inserting code, arranging Blood Sister: One Tough Nun into subversive/inversion, and can’t summon one shadowy idea of what Himself might have been feeling as he patiently labored. Maybe that was the point of the thing’s metasilliness, to have nothing really felt going on.
Context
This is the theme's cleanest statement of the son's central deficit: Hal can picture his father's body exactly — the stork-slump, the osteoporotic angle over the console, the patient labor — and cannot picture his father's inside at all. The failure is so total that Hal converts it into an aesthetic verdict, deciding the film's emptiness must be deliberate, "nothing really felt going on," which quietly projects his own blankness about the man onto the man's work. What scene 132 set up as dramatic irony (the son doesn't know the film is confession) becomes here a felt inability: even trying, straining to summon "one shadowy idea," he gets nothing. The father is present down to his posture and absent in every way that would let the son grieve him.