Blood Sister's buried allegory: the self-hate-festival

The buried sincerity that detonates Hal's reading, and JOI's fatal register-allergy named outright. The film that seemed built "to have nothing really felt going on" is "in fact a very sad self-hate-festival," a veiled AA-allegory — and its engine is Himself's "miserable distaste for the vacant grins and reductive platitudes of the Boston AA." That distaste is precisely the irony-allergy the book will identify (162, the wraith) as what kept JOI from the thing that might have saved him: he could not stomach the Program's register, its banal clichés and vacant grins, and so he encoded the whole struggle as metaparody, and the metaparody hid the sincerity so completely that even his own son reads it as feeling-nothing. Irony as the place feeling goes to be unfindable — including, fatally, by the man doing the feeling. (Endnote to the 138 viewing; the AA-content is addiction-recovery's, the register-allergy is ours.)