Accomplice!, the blizzard, and the Weston house — "though a self-conscious footnote subtitled along…"
though a self-conscious footnote subtitled along the bottom of the screen rather irritatingly points out that the scene is honoring a convention. […] the boy sobs into the chartreuse satin and shrieks ‘Murderer! Murderer!’ over and over, so that almost a third of Accomplice!’s total length is devoted to the racked repetition of this word—way, way longer than is needed for the audience to absorb the twist and all its possible implications and meanings. […] As I see it, even though the cartridge’s end has both characters emoting out of every pore, Accomplice!’s essential project remains abstract and self-reflexive; we end up feeling and thinking not about the characters but about the cartridge itself. […] the cartridge’s real tension becomes the question: Did Himself subject us to 500 seconds of the repeated cry ‘Murderer!’ for some reason, i.e. is the puzzlement and then boredom and then impatience and then excruciation and then near-rage aroused in the film’s audience by the static repetitive final of the film aroused for some theoretical-aesthetic end, or is Himself simply an amazingly shitty editor of his own stuff?
Context
The lecture's thesis question, stated by the son as film criticism: a film that footnotes its own conventions on-screen, then torments its audience with 500 seconds of one repeated word, until the viewer's real experience — puzzlement, boredom, impatience, excruciation, near-rage — becomes the film's actual content and the only live question is intent vs. incompetence. Hal's "we end up feeling and thinking not about the characters but about the cartridge itself" is the cleanest statement anywhere of what Hal thinks the whole oeuvre does; note it's also a description of a film whose subject is its own spectation, one step shy of the samizdat's viewer-consuming design (adjacency inferred; the raw argues aesthetics, not weaponry).