Mirror Mirror
Through the looking glass. Essay 900 words, 5-minute read
Mirror Mirror
By Ray Tabler
As a metaphor, mirrors are ready-made for science fiction and fantasy. One might even say bespoke. Gaze into a mirror, and you see yourself, or what seems to be yourself. But the image is reversed. Left is right, and right is left. There is a technical reason for why up isn’t down. Still, the effect is enchanting, and begs for use in tales of all kinds.
Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass is a sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and follows the girl through mirror on the mantlepiece to another fantastic place. The Picture of Drian Gray tells the tail of a man who sells his soul so that a portrait grows old while he remains young. As his portrait becomes older, and more sinful, he cannot bear his own reflection, habitually smashing mirrors. Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott informs us of a noble lady who views the world only through her looking glass. When she looks outside, to behold the handsome Lancelot, the mirror announces her doom, and cracks. Mirrors are all over literature, and often don’t survive to the end of the story.
In folklore, mirrors are linked to the soul, offering a window upon that elusive facet of humanity. Vampires don’t cast a reflection because they have no soul. Babies, with developing souls, should avoid mirrors or they’ll stutter. Or so it its said. Breaking a mirror results in 7 years of bad luck, because it takes that long for your soul, trapped in the shattered glass to regenerate. Mirrors are essential equipment for some rituals to summon departed souls. The evil queen in Snow white employed a mirror with some kind of trapped spirit as a medieval NSA to keep tabs on the fugitive princess and check on how her beauty regimen was working.
I am certainly not the first to notice the literary possibilities of mirrors, and have included some other perspectives in the reference links (below or in the comments). Speculative fiction, however, is uniquely positioned to make the most of the mirror’s potential. It has been said that science fiction holds a mirror up to society, allowing the author to comment upon current ills from the safety of a future age.
Sometimes that takes the form of a funhouse mirror, distorting reality to emphasize some aspect the writer wants to highlight. The British TV series Black Mirror embraces the game-changing effects of technology upon human society. A technical advance is introduced, and the unintended consequences are explored. Black Mirror continues the tradition pioneered by The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. As time goes on, we are starting to deal with many wrinkles once only encountered in science fiction, like AI, private space travel, virtual realities, and intrusive computer-enhanced surveillance. The feeling of stepping through the looking glass is inescapable.
Mirror Mirror is an episode of Star Trek, wherein a transporter malfunction (I know, another transporter-related issue) swaps Kirk and a landing party for the same group from an alternate universe. In the mirror universe, The Federation is an evil and war-like empire. The Klingons are peaceful goodie-goodies. Drama ensues. Spock is, strangely, much the same in both universes. Like many Star trek plots, Mirror Mirror was influenced by the ongoing cold war conflicts of the 1960s. It challenges the audience to ponder roads not taken, and the validity of unexamined opinions.
One unintended consequence of Star Trek’s Mirror Mirror episode has been the internet phenomena of slapping a roguish goatee upon a character to signal status as a bad guy. Usually from a dystopian alternate universe. Mr. Roger’s Mirror Neighborhood would be an interesting show to watch.
All matter reflects light to some extent, scattering the photons according to surface properties. The flat, smooth surface of a mirror, or the underlying metallic coating if we want to be persnickety about it, bounces that light back with a relatively high degree of consistency. Human eyes perceive the reflected image as a window into another realm. A foolish mistake, but inescapable.
The illusion of another world just beyond the glass is an alluring one. The right/left reversal aside, a mirror throws back an accurate reflection. The mirror doesn’t lie. It leaves that job up to us. We can ignore negative aspects of our appearance. Or we can fixate on imperfections which are small, perhaps nonexistent. The alternate world in the mirror is constructed entirely within the eye, and mind, of the observer. That’s why Dorian Gray smashed so many mirrors.
From a physics perspective, the photons encountering the plane of a mirror rebound from collision with an atom of that mirror. [Alert, handwavium incoming.] But, do they? On the quantum scale, photon could avoid collisions, passing between atoms to transit somewhere else. Is the image we see in a mirror influenced, even a tiny amount, by light leaking through from some alternate realm? A ridiculous thought. But, a concept ripe for harvest by some creative writer, inspired by the possibilities.
END.
Reference links:
· Left/right vs. up/down https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/mirror-reverse-left-right-not-top-bottom.html
· Through the Looking Glass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_the_Looking-Glass
· Dorian Gray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray
· Lady of Shalott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_of_Shalott
· In Lit & Folklore
o https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/oct/30/john-mullan-mirrors-literature-review
o file:///C:/Users/Owner/Downloads/ReflectingtheSoul_SymbolismofMirrorsinEnglishLiterature.pdf
o https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/everyday-innovations/mirror4.htm
o https://www.mirror-shop.co.uk/famous-mirrors.irs
· Black Mirror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror
· Star Trek, Mirror Mirror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror,_Mirror_(Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series)
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Great essay! I’m a fan of Black Mirror, but no binge watching as it’s too depressing. I was also a fan of Night Gallery and remember quite well the Star Trek episode you referenced. It was far easier for the crew to shift into aggressive nasty behavior than for the opposite. Unfortunately, we are seeing too much of that negative shift in society. Too many examples of famous and powerful people displaying their worst behaviors and normalizing it.
Looking in the mirror is hard, especially as the years pass and a much older version of ourselves looks back. The one affirming look I had in the mirror was when in December I was told I was in stage three heart failure and needed open heart surgery to replace a heart valve. I was terrified but before surgery I looked in the mirror and promised myself I’d be back. A few months later I’m doing much better.
Mirror Rogers looks a bit like JD Vance….