Blood Sister viewing: the point of the metasilliness

The central knot, posed as Hal's guess. Hal reads Blood Sister's metaparody as a machine engineered "to have nothing really felt going on" — irony as an escape hatch from "the far more wrenching creative work of making humanly true or entertaining cartridges," and he is uneasy at how Himself "always seemed to get seduced by the very commercial formulae he was trying to invert." The over-clever metacinematic stance looks, from the outside, exactly like the absence of feeling: aloofness perfected into a device for feeling nothing. But the scene has planted a trap under this reading — n289 — and the trap is that the machine built to feel nothing is in fact loaded with feeling.