White Flag: the unhip clichéd thing that works

The scene's second uniting shock (after shared hopelessness): that the corny thing works. Gately catalogues everything about AA that his cynical intelligence rejects — "goofy slapdash anarchic," "corny slogans and saccharin grins and hideous coffee," "so lame you just know there's no way it could ever possibly work except for the utterest morons" — and reports that it works anyway, is "the very loyal friend he thought he'd had and then lost." The register point is exact: what makes AA hard to accept is precisely its un-hipness, its being "the inverse of what they'd come too much to love," i.e. the inverse of the seductive ironic cool of the Substance. And the movement is proof against analysis: "You ask the scary old guys How AA Works and they smile their chilly smiles and say Just Fine" — the anti-intellectual register is itself part of how it defeats the disease of thinking.