The "Attitude of Platitude": AA dismissed as substituted dependence — until desperation drives the newcomer back

texture · 11 Nov YDAU, evening

• When: 11 Nov YDAU, evening (E.T.A. Viewing Room, during the Blood Sister screening)
• What: The disease model's engine, stated as flat narratorial doctrine through an unlikely vector. Bridget Boone's crack about Blood Sister: One Tough Nun — that the deformed addicted girl's salvation is just "the exchange of one will-obliterating 'habit' for another" — is mapped by the narration onto how "not-yet-desperate-enough newcomers to Boston AA" see the Program: as swapping slavish dependence on the bottle/pipe for slavish dependence on meetings and robotic piety, an "Attitude of Platitude," a critique they then use as an excuse to quit trying AA and go back to the Substance — "until that dependence has finally beaten them into such a double-bound desperation that they finally come back in with their faces hanging off their skulls." AA works only on those the disease has already broken; the not-yet-broken are returned to the breaking. This is the doctrinal underside of event 10's Bottom (and event 19's "shattered enough to stick" is its meeting-floor face). See the Hal timeline (the frame — Hal's THC-Withdrawal film-viewing — is biography).