Gately, the wraith, and the figurants (pp. 838–839)
to do something well enough to be heard and seen but not so well that you became just a screen for his own (the Dad’s) projections of his own failure and self-loathing, failing ever to be really seen, gesturing wildly through the distilled haze
Context
The wraith's own boyhood, narrated in projection-room vocabulary: the impossible calibration of the auteur's childhood was between figurant (not seen at all) and screen — a surface receiving the father's projections. Being seen, in this family line, has only pathological modes, all of them optical; the generational chain (the wraith's father's father, "the blank wooden man", down to the mute son) transmits the condition the films keep trying to solve.