Hal alone in Viewing Room 6 — "Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat remains…"
Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucrat remains Mario’s favorite of all their late father’s entertainments, possibly because of its unhip earnestness. […] Hal secretly likes it, too, the cartridge, and likes to project himself imaginatively into the ex-bureaucrat’s character on the leisurely drive home toward ontological erasure.
Context
Of everything Himself left behind, this is the one short film both undamaged-and-damaged sons privately love — Mario openly, Hal secretly under cover of calling it "basically goo." It is the tenderest thing their father made: a man who chooses to miss his last possible train, and his job with it, to kneel on a platform and reassemble a strange child's dropped packages, at which point the kid asks "Mister? Are you Jesus?" and gets "Don't I wish." The sons inherit no fatherly counsel from Himself directly; what they inherit is the right to live inside the worlds he built, and Hal's habit of imaginatively becoming the film's gentle ex-bureaucrat is the closest the raw shows him coming to being fathered by the man — through a made character, on a loop, in a room by himself.