Marathe & Steeply on the temple: affected idiocy

The scene stages the essay-thesis as a duel of registers, and this is the frame the register angle hangs on: Steeply's American flippancy is not temperament but tradecraft. He can dial his idiocy up at will — "Did that war even really take place, that anybody knows of?" — because he has learned that studied unseriousness is a lever, that meeting an earnest interlocutor with mock-obtuseness will bait him into saying more than he means to. Irony here is a professional instrument, the interviewer's version of a national reflex: manner deployed to extract, the deflection that is itself the technique.