Fractured Mirror 3.0: Mirrors Kicks Off with a Look at the Filmmaking-Themed Black Mirror Episode Hotel Reverie
I am in a curious place with The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book on American movies about filmmaking. It feels like I have been working on it as long as I’ve been alive, but it’s only been my primary literary focus for three very long years.
I am done! I am finally fucking done. While working on the book, I worried that I had set the bar too high, and I would never be able to clear it. I didn’t just set out to write about essential films about filmmaking, or notable movies on that subject. I set out to write about EVERYTHING.
My goal is to write about every narrative film on the topic that is available, regardless of its legal status.
I keep discovering new movies that fit the criteria. There’s a wonderful repertory movie theater here in Atlanta, for example, called The Plaza. One of the bizarre obscurities they showed was an unusually ambitious 1981 X-rated pornographic motion picture named Blonde Ambition, whose tagline audaciously boasted, “If you liked Deep Throat AND Singin' in the Rain, you're gonna love Blonde Ambition!
I didn't know Blonde Ambition existed until I saw it’d be playing at The Plaza one night only. Nobody in the world would object if Blonde Ambition were not in the book.
I’m not even sure Blonde Ambition belongs in The Fractured Mirror because it is the only X-rated pornographic movie in a book with 500 other movies about moviemaking that do not feature even a single money shot, let alone a porno’s worth.
Yet the weird deal I made with my weird brain—under duress, no doubt!—that I had to write about any movie I discovered that meets the criteria for inclusion in The Fractured Mirror, no matter how obscure, irrelevant, cheap, or pornographic.
I don’t want The Fractured Mirror to be merely a 524-page magnum opus documenting a century of American film. I want it to be a multi-media phenomenon. I want it to be a vibrant world unto itself.
To that end, I hope to launch a Fractured Mirror-themed podcast soon. With this article, I am launching the Fractured Mirror spin-off column Fractured Mirror 3.0—Mirrors.
I’ve seen and written about every narrative American movie about filmmaking. With Fractured Mirror 3.0, I will be writing about other filmmaking-themed media, including books, television shows, television movies, and concept albums.
I love movies about making movies. And I adore horror and science-fiction anthologies. So it felt right to start things off with “Hotel Reverie”, a filmmaking-themed entry in the new season of Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker’s iconic series about how, when you really think about it, smartphones are kind of weird and maybe too powerful.
In “Hotel Reverie”, a company called ReDream has developed technology that allows contemporary actors to enter the world of old movies for remakes where, through the sinister magic of AI, their cyber-consciousnesses interact with digital versions of the original film’s characters. It’s all filmed live, like a play or early television broadcast.
The goal is for the new addition to follow the script faithfully or risk plunging the whole production into a miasma of confusion.
Issa Rae stars as Brandy Friday, a top box-office attraction who agrees to star in an AI-assisted remake of Hotel Reverie, a swooningly romantic black and white drama from the 1940s, after Ryan Gosling and Ryan Reynolds pass.
The movie star will only accept the role if it remains the lead. They acquiesce out of desperation and her popularity.
What follows is an inverse Purple Rose of Cairo for an age of digital paranoia. Woody Allen’s best film is about a character from a hokey old movie leaving the world of film fantasy and entering our world in search of romance.
In Hotel Reverie, the opposite happens. A real person enters a world of cinematic fantasy. Brandy knows Hotel Reverie by heart. She knows all the dialogue and stage directions. What she does not know how to do, unfortunately for her and the production, is play the piano.
A ReDream employee played by a refreshingly restrained Awkwafina assumes that the movie star could play piano because she did so in a previous film. Despite working in film, she appears implausibly unfamiliar with the concept of movie magic, where filmmakers use trickery to create illusions.
Brandy’s inability to play the piano changes the fundamental dynamic of the film. It doesn’t just change some things; it changes everything.
This throws ReDream into a panic. This is uncharted territory for them, and they don’t seem to have any idea what to do or how to avoid an unhappy ending for Brandy and her character.
When Brandy calls Clara, her character’s love interest, Dorothy Chambers, the name of the actress playing her, it causes a glitch in the matrix. The digital actress becomes self-aware. She’s flooded with the actress’ memories, many of them painful.
Dorothy had a troubled life and died an early death by her own hand because she was a lesbian cursed to live in a time and place where she could live her truth.
When a clumsy technician spills water on the computer powering the simulation, everyone but Brandy and Clara/Dorothy freezes.
The world shrinks to two people. A woman whose passions were frowned upon by a world that did not understand them finds herself in a surreal realm where nothing exists beyond her and a woman she falls hopelessly in love with, while the folks at ReDream try to remedy the situation before Brandy perishes in our world.
The premise of Hotel Reverie feels particularly relevant in a world where digital de-aging, Generative artificial intelligence, and race and gender-swapped casting are subjects of feverish debate.
Hotel Reverie has surprisingly little to say about any of those subjects. It’s bittersweet, melancholy, and romantic —a story of star-crossed lovers who find an escape from judgment in a digital world where all that matters is their passion for one another, a love that's no longer forbidden but rather the center of their existence.
The third episode of Black Mirror’s seventh season is feature-length, clocking in at seventy-seven minutes. It would benefit from being shorter and tighter. The proceedings suffer from a pronounced lack of suspense and stakes.
Brandy’s life ostensibly hangs in the balance when supremely questionable technology predictably goes sideways.
Hotel Reverie resembles San Junipero, a heartbreaking standout 2016 episode that similarly took the form of a time-hopping star-crossed inter-racial lesbian romance.
Despite being a dude, Black Mirror mastermind Charlie Brooker has a real affinity for that strangely unique sub-sub-genre.
San Junipero isn’t just one of the best episodes of Black Mirror; it’s one of the best television episodes, ever. It’s so profound and shattering that it can’t help but make Hotel Reverie seem a little lacking by comparsion.
I found Hotel Reverie at once compelling and mildly underwhelming but it did make me want to binge the new season of Black Mirror, even as I suspect that I will find the rest of it compelling yet underwhelming as well.
This, nevertheless, seems like a good place to start this new incarnation of a column that I have been writing for a solid decade now, in various forms, and a book that has consumed a lot of my time, energy, and passion for the past three years.
What would you like to see me write about for Fractured Mirror 3.0? The Studio seems like an obvious choice, as does The Contract and that TV movie with Lindsay Lohan as Elizabeth Taylor.
Lastly, to promote the Fractured Mirror book and everything Fractured Mirror-related, I’ve started a Facebook group called The Fractured Mirror. Join if so inclined! It’ll be a lot of fun, and this piece will be the subject of its very first post.
You can pre-order The Fractured Mirror here: https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
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