JOI as tennis-father: the dawn flask, the drills, and the inherited "dark gift" of talent

pivotal · UNDATED (Hal's childhood/early adolescence, B.S. into early Subsidized)

• When: UNDATED; recollected across Hal's feral-prodigy formation ("years, after the man's death, cannot keep your keys anywhere but on the floor")
• What: JOI trained Hal at dawn — feeding "a thousand serves to no one" while "Himself sits and advises with his flask" (the dipsomania on court, cf. scene 005's "pitches over sideways during dawn drills"); running follow-through drills where Hal scoops keys off the court after each serve; hunching down "to put a long pale arm around your shoulders" to pass on the doctrine his own father gave him — "that talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost." JOI's own arc is glossed as the cautionary case: "a father who lived up to his own promise and then found thing after thing to meet and surpass the expectations of his promise in, and didn't seem just a whole hell of a lot happier or tighter wrapped than his own failed father." Hal also recalls sitting through "small openings of your father's first art films." [Bears on the death and its open motive: the generational talent/silence lineage is the affective backdrop to JOI's death, left open.]