Big Buddy session: insolence undecidable

The register has gone fully undecidable, and the scene locates why it galls Hal so specifically. He literally cannot read whether the boy means his ironies — insolence and irony have become indistinguishable — and Lyle's earlier diagnosis, which Hal has "acquiesced to," names the reason: Ingersoll repels him because Hal sees in the kid "certain parts of himself he can't or won't accept," the reflexive self-advancing irony, the intelligence squandered on impression-management. The ironist can't decode the boy because the boy is his own disowned mirror; unreadability at close range is the cost of an armor Hal wears too.