the Inner Infant meeting: grief indistinguishable from mirth

A register-observation dropped mid-spectacle, and quietly central. Watching Kevin Bain's projectile-weeping tantrum, Hal notices that at sufficient intensity the face of total woe and the face of total hilarity converge — the extremes of sincere feeling and its comic collapse become one image. It's the whole theme's anxiety in a single clinical aside: past a certain pitch you cannot tell earnest anguish from farce, which is exactly why the ironist distrusts the earnest (it's always one degree from ridiculous) and exactly why the earnest is so exposed (its most intense form looks like a joke). Hal, characteristically, registers it as detached data even as he sits three feet from a grown man's genuine despair — the observation itself an act of the ironic distance the scene is diagnosing.