Wave Bye-Bye: 'Are you Jesus?'

The film Hal loves secretly is maximally unhip — a man choosing to gather a stranger kid's scattered packages over catching the one train that stands between him and "ontological erasure," a plainly moral choice of the kind Himself's films almost never stage. And its capping line is the exact structure of post-ironic sincerity: "Don't I wish" deflects the sanctification ("Are you Jesus?") while fully accepting the deed. It is earnestness that knows it is risking corniness and does the earnest thing anyway, refusing the halo without disowning the act. This is the register Hal has been trained to call goo, and the register he secretly craves — the reason he runs the cartridge twice and rides home imaginatively in the bureaucrat's seat. (The filmography itself is film-optics'; landed here is the earnest-that-risks-corniness register Hal responds to in private.)