Blood Sister viewing, with the others (pp. 705–706)
What’s intriguing but unknown to everyone in V.R. 6 is the way Boone’s take on Himself’s take on the substitution-of-one-crutch-for-another interpretation of substituting Catholic devotion for chemical dependence is very close to the way many not-yet-desperate-enough newcomers to Boston AA see Boston AA as just an exchange of slavish dependence on the bottle/pipe for slavish dependence on meetings and banal shibboleths and robotic piety
Context
A room full of the dead man's students — plus his son — sits decoding Blood Sister as an "ironic anti-Catholic subthesis," a clever lampoon about swapping one habit for another, and the narrator quietly notes that their smart reading is the exact reading that keeps not-yet- desperate addicts out of the rooms that might save them. Every viewer here treats the father's film as a theory-object to be cracked; none of them, Hal least of all, can hear it as the report of a man who actually walked into AA, couldn't stomach the God-stuff, and walked back out to drink. The son's inheritance is a body of work he reads fluently as technique and cannot read at all as testimony — the whole family's failure to reach Himself, reproduced by his son in front of the father's own confession.