The mirror cave sequence in Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi is up there with the most iconic sequences of cinema. Stewart Gardiner reflects on that and other memorable examples of mirrors on screen.
By Stewart Gardiner // Imagine a scene that wouldn’t be out of place in a future season of Stranger Things. A movie-loving kid in the 1980s is round at his cousins’ house. The adults are downstairs and the kids are upstairs with the television on. Either the cousins are intentionally showing the kid a particular sequence from Poltergeist (highly probable) or else it just happens to be on already (unlikely). The sequence is unlike anything the kid has seen up until that point in his life. It totally disturbs and captivates him in equal measure. Watching a man on screen peel off his own face in front of a bathroom mirror is the sort of thing that will stick with a youngster. The kid was of course me and it has indeed stuck.
What makes this sequence so powerful isn’t just because the viewer is watching a man peel away his face, but it is the fact that the man is watching himself carry out the act. That it is actually a dream rather than a reality within the story matters not. By watching another’s reflection the viewer is made to consider what that would be like if it was happening to them. The mirror on screen becomes a portal into the soul of the character and of the audience. Small wonder that cinema has made such memorable use of mirrors over the years.
Embryonic Visual Idea
The latest instance, up there with the most iconic sequences ever filmed, occurs within Rian Johnson’s Star Wars masterpiece The Last Jedi. It plays to certain unknowable quantities in the films that mean the most to me, from David Lynch to 1940s film noir and indeed back to Star Wars. The mirror cave sequence in The Last Jedi is pure cinema as dream. Which is another way of saying it is cinema at its finest.
Rian Johnson had a week-long series of sessions with The Force Awakens co-production designer Rick Carter very early on in the movie’s development process. As Johnson explains in The Art of the Last Jedi, it was during these sessions that he:
“might have mentioned this embryonic visual idea I had of the mirror cave and the multiple versions of Rey. But I didn’t know where it fit.”
That it lies at the very core of the end product seems inevitable after the fact, as it is at once intensely personal and deeply mythological. Rey is allowed to reflect on her own story, as is the audience, in beautifully delivered visual terms. The classic magic of cinema is at play, with the multiple Reys being shot in a manner that is more sleight of hand than complex effects work. One could imagine David Lynch or Ingmar Bergman employing similar techniques in their pictures. That this is found within a multi-million dollar franchise picture speaks not only of the brilliance of Rian Johnson but of the boldness and uniqueness of Star Wars itself.
Has Always Known
Watch The Force Awakens after seeing The Last Jedi and the idea of Rey’s parents being nobodies is strongly implied. Maz puts it to Rey that she has always known about her parents. That they are never coming back for her is the immediate realization that bubbles to the surface, but there is more underneath. When Rey digs deeper in The Last Jedi she discovers that the answers do indeed lie within herself. She understands that the seemingly endless parade of Reys does in fact have an end and that answers lie at the end of that line. That these answers take the form of the singular self rather than a multitude suggests that they are buried beneath the layers upon layers of her inner life. Rey has built walls around unbearable truths; she must strip away the layers to lay those truths bare.
Rey reaches the last of her selves and she watches as two shadowy figures coalesce into one, which is revealed as another version of herself. Although it is also the version of herself who entered the cave in the first place. The camera cuts away and Rey is left looking into the infinity mirror world; faced with answers she is not quite ready to accept.
Magic Mirror House
The mirror sequence from Orson Welles’s 1947 film noir The Lady from Shanghai sprang to mind as a point of reference to the mirror cave. It was more a way of describing the sequence as being up there with the most iconic in cinema history than anything too specific; perhaps it was simply because it also had mirrors in it. However, take a closer look at the mirror sequence in The Lady from Shanghai and what is striking is how each person (in this case there are three of them) is reflected into a multiplicity of selves. The visual language of auteur cinema therefore connects The Last Jedi with The Lady from Shanghai, although they couldn’t be more different as films.
The action takes place in a “magic mirror house” which gives Welles an in-world reason for the staging of the sequence, as does the Jedi cave on Ahch-To for Johnson. The Lady from Shanghai sequence is one of death and the cutting of human ties. Shots are fired into the mirror images of intended victims; enough to ensure that the ‘prime’ image is hit too. Fractured personalities are a film noir staple and here it is made literal. In these climactic moments in the magic mirror house the lives of the three individuals are shattered, bullets-through-glass the kind of bold metaphor cinema can get away with in the right hands. Orson Welles, cinematic magician, gets away with it and then some. His character Michael O’Hara notably walks away physically unscathed, yet it is arguable whether he will ever get over the experience.
Lynchian Persona
Rey’s personality is split within the mirror cave in a way which suggests multiple inner universes. She is not becoming someone else, but her different versions must be projected within her own consciousness in order for her to discover who she really is. David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive thrives on multiple versions of characters and during an early scene Laura Harring’s amnesiac looks into a mirror, wondering who she is. Within the mirror a classic Hollywood film poster can be seen. The poster is for Gilda which is arguably Rita Hayworth’s signature picture. (Hayworth of course starred alongside ex-husband Welles in his The Lady from Shanghai.) When forced to come up with a name or admit she doesn’t know who she is, Harring’s character looks to the poster and claims the name Rita. The mirror shot therefore shows four versions of ‘Rita,’ fictional layers upon layers, with the Mulholland Drive character doubled and Rita Hayworth in the background as Gilda, the actor and her character. Mulholland Drive is a mirror cave sequence of a film.
Ingmar Bergman’s Persona could reasonably be watched in a double bill with Mulholland Drive, although the sheer intensity of these heightened explorations into self-hood may be too much for the sensitive viewer. Forget about Poltergeist! The two women of Persona could be said to represent different versions of the same woman, although it’s more complex than that, and there’s certainly a process occurring rather than stasis from the beginning. Bergman’s picture has a mirror sequence that perfectly illustrates its metaphysical complexities in the purest visual terms, the two women together in frame, movements blending to suggest a single personality. Or indeed, the many personalities of one individual occupying a multiplicity of roles. There’s even another scene in Mulholland Drive which reflects this one in Persona. It is perhaps unsurprising that if one peers into these on screen mirrors long enough then other films will be reflected therein.
Original Nature in the End
Welles’s Michael O’Hara in The Lady from Shanghai says something to Rita Hayworth’s Elsa Bannister that on the surface is about their characters as they relate to the plot:
“One who follows his nature keeps his original nature in the end.”
But that also speaks of mirrors and multiple selves. It could certainly be applied to Rey, since she is ultimately not defined by a heritage like the Skywalkers before her, but by herself. She just needed to ask herself the right questions. Perhaps self-discovery is about finding the right questions to ask oneself and having the bravery and insight to ask them. As my seven-year-old daughter said of her younger self when asked about how she’s always had a degree of knowingness:
“I only knew the answers. I didn’t know the questions.”
After the events of The Last Jedi, Rey is equipped with both questions and answers. It will be thrilling to discover where they lead her.