Himself's reticent earnestness

The great ironist caught in a rare undefended sincerity. Refusing to forbid but preferring Orin not watch hard porn yet, Himself speaks "with such reticent earnestness" that Orin can't help asking why — and out comes the naked wish that Orin "wait until he'd found someone he loved enough," that sex could be "a profound and really quite moving thing" rather than "organs going in and out of other organs, emotionless, terribly lonely." The filmmaker who strips realism from his work with wooden nonactors — "the apparent irony of the fact that it required nonactors to achieve this stilted artificial I'm-only-acting-here quality" — is earnest here to the point of near-inaudibility, sincerity about love surfacing exactly where the parody-armor is thinnest: father to son. (The liaison/family substance is family-hamlet's; the register is the reticent earnestness and the nonactor-irony.)