Gately's Trauma Wing: the wraith and the M.P. — "His last resort: entertainment. […] A…"

This is the key that unlocks half the novel's father-son material: the films were never really about film. The wraith says he spent his sober last ninety days trying to "contrive a medium" through which he and the muted boy could simply converse — a toy "magically entertaining" enough to make the infant still alive in Hal open his mouth and laugh, to reverse his fall "into the womb of solipsism, anhedonia, death in life." The whole Work reframed as one desperate paternal apology, an "I AM SO VERY, VERY SORRY" the son was meant to hear, "his most serious wish" merely "to entertain." Read back against scenes 132/138 — Hal in the viewing room decoding these same films as cold metacinematic technique, unable to summon what his father felt — it becomes almost unbearable: the father made the message, poured his apology into the one language he trusted, and the son can watch it on a loop and never receive it.