White Flag: the pleasantly earnest men at the door
two pleasantly earnest, weirdly calm guys in conservative attire appear smiling at your door sometime before dawn and speak quietly to you for hours and leave you not remembering anything from what they said except the sense that they used to be eerily like you
Context
Against the Substance's ironic mask the scene sets the AA carriers' register: "pleasantly earnest, weirdly calm," speaking "quietly," their whole affect the un-hip opposite of cool. What lands isn't the content (you don't remember a word) but the fact of the register — sincerity embodied by men who "used to be eerily like you" and somehow "aren't anymore." Earnestness is presented not as naïveté but as evidence, a demonstration that something has happened to these calm smiling strangers that the ironist at the Bottom can't argue with because it's standing in his doorway before dawn.