Hal alone in Viewing Room 6 — "a cartridge called Blood Sister: One…"
a cartridge called Blood Sister: One Tough Nun that he’d always found kind of gratuitously nasty and overwrought, but which Hal has no idea that this piece of entertainment actually germinated out of James O. Incandenza’s one brief and unpleasant experience with Boston AA, in the B.S. mid-’90s, when Himself lasted two and a half months and then drifted gradually away, turned off by the simplistic God-stuff and covert dogma.
Context
Hal queues up Blood Sister next "as a kind of weird self-punishment," dismissing it as gratuitous — and the narrator drops the fact the son will never have: the film grew out of Himself's own failed pass at Boston AA, his own brush with the God-stuff and the two-and-a-half months before he drifted back out. The son is about to watch his father's coded confession of a real defeat and read it as overwrought schlock. It's the exact blindness scene 138 turns into its subject: the father encrypts his suffering in the one language he trusts, film, and the son who spends his evenings inside that film still can't find the man in it.