Accomplice!, the blizzard, and the Weston house — "One way of looking at the…"
One way of looking at the film-obsession’s endurance is that Himself was never really successful or accomplished at filmmaking. This was something else on which Mario and I had agreed to disagree.
Context
Two sentences that quietly reframe the entire filmography: the obsession-chain's rule was that JOI stayed obsessed "until he became successful at it, then transferred his obsession to something else" — so film, the obsession that endured to the death, is on Hal's reading the one field the polymath never conquered. Mario dissents, as everywhere in this scene. If the Entertainment is real and perfect, Hal's theory has a terrible corollary — success at last, therefore nothing left to transfer to (corollary inferred; the raw states only the disagreement).