Gately & Joelle: 'I am deformed with beauty'

Here is the theme's deepest knot. Joelle tells Gately the literal, catastrophic truth — she is so beautiful it is a deformity, the P.G.O.A.T. fact, beauty that drives anyone with a nervous system out of their mind — and it is completely unhearable. Gately files it under "Now with the sarcasm," "the nonrespectful acting-out," because in this register a woman saying she is too beautiful to be looked at can only parse as irony. Sincerity at the far end of the scale wraps around and reads as its opposite: the truest possible statement, pushed to its extreme, becomes indistinguishable from the flippant one. This is why Joelle wears a veil and why the truth stays buried — some sincerities are so extreme that no available register can carry them without collapsing into apparent sarcasm.