JOI's father's tennis monologue — "those thoughts in your mind are…"

The father's metaphysics, drilled into a scientific-prodigy son as a corrective to exactly the thing that makes the boy himself: the mind. "Head is body" is the whole doctrine — the tennis ball as "the ultimate body," "pure potential," touch as the one virtue, Brando as its patron saint — and it's aimed straight at dismantling the "quick little scientific-prodigy's mind" the boy's mother prizes. There's a cruelty folded into the philosophy: the father can only love the son as a body (a player, a machine, meat), and needs the son's interior — the physics, the books straining his pronator teres — reduced to "neural spasms" before he can be proud of him. Jim will grow up to make films obsessed with heads, bodies, and what can't pass between them; the seed of that obsession is his father telling him he doesn't have an inside.