the locker room: 'Nothing's true'

The thirteen-year-old's nihilism, arrived at through a father's broken promise, is the flat statement Pemulis's sermon exists to answer. Postal Weight — near-nude, nose-bandaged, rocking on the bench — has generalized a specific paternal betrayal ("I get the drift Daddy's backing out") into a cosmic verdict: "Nothing's true," and its corollary "Nothing's fair because nothing's true." It's the ironist's premise stated by a weeping child who's just discovered it, the raw material before the pose sets in. The scene poses him at the exact fork the whole theme lives at — if the "ostensively loving patriarchal bosom" can't be trusted, "what can you trust, in terms of unvarying dependability?" — and then, unusually, gives him a real answer.