Mikey at the podium: the novelty-shop gong

The register point in the scene's machinery: the banal AA apparatus — a five-minute clock, a novelty-shop gong, the round-robin picking of the next speaker — processes genuinely terrifying material without flinching or dramatizing. Mikey is describing a restraining order, a "spring-loaded temper," a man one bad afternoon away from "lighting up" his own family and going "right back in front of the fucking judge" — and the whole thing runs on a schedule kept by a gag gong ("I see Vinnie's getting ready to fucking gong me"). The comedy of the apparatus doesn't undercut the danger; it contains it, gives it a form and a time-limit and a room full of people who laugh and shout and then let him "get some of that shit out." The trite machinery is exactly what makes the terrifying sayable.