the I.-Day-Eve call: desecrating an empty tomb

Hal names the fraud at the root of the manufactured sincerity: the tortured-vulnerability pitch requires a fictional beloved. The feeling can run real-hot in the moment, but its object — the adored wife — is invented, so the whole performance is "suborning somebody into helping you desecrate a tomb they don't know is empty," real affect anchored to nothing. Orin runs the identical engine on "depth" for the Helen Subject, faking the pondering-at-depth, "consider[ing] what she wanted to hear and how to ladle it on." And Strategy #4, the fake ex-Jesuit with "carno-spiritual yearnings" and a rented collar, is the same family. Sincerity-affect fully detached from any true referent — manufacturable precisely because it never needed to be about anything.