White Flag: 'its own country'

Erdedy, the yuppie ad exec, voices the educated newcomer's ironic resistance — not to the sobriety but to the register. The catchphrase dialect is what he can't stomach: being told "Good to hear you" and that he's "right where I'm supposed to be," which he "found a bit patronizing." His complaint is essentially aesthetic and class-based, the well-groomed Tufts-Harvard sensibility recoiling from a folk-liturgy that doesn't sound like people like him. The scene treats this with affectionate precision — his intense listening-look is really the account-exec's professional display of attention, a learned performance of sincerity aimed, in his old life, at "clients who are paying major sums." The ad man who manufactures sincerity for a living can't yet hear the real thing when it's handed to him in the wrong idiom.