The Kitchen Sink

What if your greatest love could never be yours at all? 

Exactly halfway through the new season, Black Mirror hits us with this lovely little gem, Hotel Reverie. 

A love-letter to anyone who adores the classics, Hotel Reverie tells the story of Brandy Friday, a famous A-List actress who earned her accolades through a series of love-interest roles, but who feels creatively unfulfilled in her life, arguing with her agent that she no longer wishes to play a secondary role to a man, but wants a real character with agency, a character that charms instead of being charmed, unlike her typecast roles of Noble Victim or Fuckable Sidekick. She cites movies like Casablanca and Brief Encounter, longing for a true romance, and also mentions the in-universe movie that the episode takes its title from, Hotel Reverie, quoting its famous line, “I’ll be yours forever more”, seemingly a line iconic enough that the general public is familiar with it, but not always with where it comes from, making it more popular than the movie that originated it.

Brandy’s agent finds that odd, as he’s just received news from Streamberry (the company responsible for the hit tv series Joan is Awful) that there will be a reboot of the classic film, which happens to be one of Brandy’s favourites, and that the original production company, Keyworth Pictures, is looking for an A-List Actor for the main role of Dr Alex Palmer. 

On the other side of the pond, in England, Keyworth Pictures executive Judith Keyworth (daughter of the founder of the company) is visited by Kimmy, a representative of the tech company ReDream, which aims to revolutionise filmmaking through an ultra-immersive technology. Kimmy proposes to Judith, who hasn’t had a real hit for Keyworth Pictures since the 1950s, that they remake their most famous product, Hotel Reverie, with the ReDream technology – and, being assured that it will not be an expensive product, Judith accepts, even if Kimmy’s naming of the heritage movies as “content” makes Judith cringe, a feeling I can more than understand. 

Their stories become one once Kimmy and Judith, being let down by A-List actors like both Ryans (Gosling and Reynolds), Timothee Chalamet, Chris Hemsworth and Donald Glover – none of which would be ideal for a movie of this calibre, exposing both Kimmy and Judith’s desire to simply make money at any cost by casting whoever is most popular at the moment – they hear that Brandy is interested in the main role of Dr Alex Palmer, suggesting that they genderbend the main character for her, which they immediately accept, since Kimmy is a big fan of Brandy’s and one of the few people who actually got to watch her play, Zodiac Suite, which ran Off-Broadway years ago. 

Brandy is hired, and she instantly goes searching for behind the scenes footage of Hotel Reverie, ending on a screen test by Dorothy Chambers, the actress who played the love interest in the movie, where she pretends to speak on a telephone, stopping to laugh about how odd that feels when there’s no one on the other end of the line. 

Some easter eggs can be spotted on the YouTube screen where Brandy’s watching the video, titles like: Keyworth Pictures – British Film Classic Moments, Hotel Reverie… Still Worth a Watch?, What Fans Get Wrong About Classic Space Fleet (an homage to the in-universe game from USS Callister which will be receiving a sequel this season), Lacie’s Gone Loopy: Famous ‘stargazing’ Scene, Demon79: The Real Scary Story of a Cult Classic (a callback to one of the only likeable episodes of season 6) and Tragic Film Lives… How Hollywood Eats Talent – a title that both reflects current reality, the reality of the Golden Age and is an important reminder of Dorothy Chambers’ tragic life, which, we find out as Brandy watches a newsreel from what seems to be the late 1940s or early 1950s, which explains that Dorothy took her own life with the aid of sleeping pills in her mansion, where she was found hours later, and she was never married and didn’t leave anyone behind, but was constantly in turmoil from the gossip surrounding her personal life – much like Brandy herself. 

A week goes by, with Brandy having received a package in the mail containing the script and a copy of Hotel Reverie, but failing to notice the USB stick that contained the most important information, with her having to then hear from Kimmy, in a very rushed explanation, how the technology she’s about to be immersed in works.

What we learn is, ReDream is a system that invents a movie and all of its surrounding material, meaning screenplay, casting reels and the like, and creates an entirely self-sufficient fictive dimension in which Brandy will be fully immersed, meaning nobody in that reality will know anything the story doesn’t write down, and they will all believe to be real people going through a real situation, with only Brandy being self-aware that she is an actress in a movie. 

She’s then transported into the movie with the help of something Kimmy calls Mesmeriser, a round circle attached to the temples, which we have seen before in multiple Black Mirror episodes, and Brandy cannot, at first, comprehend how incredibly realistic the universe she now exists in is. The characters, who are initially static due to the opening title not having started, become real beings who go about their lives and say their lines, but in black and white, and none of them seems to question why a black woman would be a male doctor in the 1940s, because they haven’t been programmed to question it, they simply exist. 

The only character that has actually been programmed to be slightly more fleshed out is Clara herself, Dorothy Chambers, who, despite Brandy forgetting lines and being unable to play the piano, ends up building a genuine emotional connection to Brandy’s Dr Palmer, with their chemistry being even stronger than it was between Clara and the original lead – something a tech assistant explains might have something to do with Dorothy drawing so much from her personal life, like her pain and sorrow and feeling of other which is incremented by her sins and those of her character, so Clara has an extra dimension than other characters, as the computers were able to access that angle, an explanation that frankly makes no sense to me. 

Clara adds new information to her story by stating she doesn’t enjoy being teased, as that is something she endured in school, something she clearly drew from personal life as it was originally not in the script, and as she walks away from Brandy, the actress makes a fatal mistake by calling Clara by her real-life name, Dorothy, which seems to awaken something in the character, who inquires why that name and who is Dorothy, where Brandy explains she was a friend who was full of pain and sorrow, and Clara replies she might understand why Brandy is reminded of her friend when she looks at her. 

As the story progresses, the two women’s chemistry is off the charts, and the tech engineers discover they won’t be able to reset or end the simulation until the end credits, which will be rolled when Brandy repeats Clara’s iconic line after the climax – however, for that to happen, they need to find a way to circumvent the plot holes created by Brandy when she chucked Clara’s poisoned drink to the floor, something that becomes even harder when one of the engineers, distracted by the steamy kiss between Clara and Brandy, dumps coffee all over his CPU, causing the simulation to abruptly pause, and the screen in the real world to go black, but allowing both Brandy and Clara to continue existing.

Here the story pivots, Clara and Brandy argue and Clara finds out the truth about her non-existence, and we are left, much like with their sister episode San Junipero, to question what really is existence and how real can a sentient AI be, if it believes itself to be real. After the argument, Clara becomes enlightened about her situation by slipping into a void caused by the fact her world was never thought of beyond what’s on the screen, which allows her to access the database collected on Dorothy Chambers, making her hyper aware of her human counterpart’s life and demise, accessing the memories of Dorothy’s affair with a production worker in Hotel Reverie, and her sadness as to not being able to live the life she wanted with her love. again, how she’s able to access the memories of dorothy can perhaps only be explained by tabloid gossip speculation on her sexuality, which wasn’t uncommon at the time.

From here, we watch Clara and Brandy fall in love through the course of several months, and vow their love to each other, not as Clara and Dr Palmer, but as Dorothy and Brandy, but all of this is taken away from both of them, two women who were never allowed to love out loud, when the CPU gets up and running and they reset Clara’s memory, allegedly, taking away all the time she and Brandy had together. i say allegedly as i do not 100% believe all of it was taken away from clara, and even if it was, the feeling she has towards brandy would still be so etched onto her brain she would act on it even unconscious of their time together.

The climax of the film ends up with Brandy getting into a fight with Clara’s husband, Claude, which wasn’t supposed to happen, and before the police can get there, Clara takes agency over own story by shooting her husband, and one of the officers, solidifying herself as the real protagonist of Hotel Reverie, as she’s gunned down by the officers and dies in the arms of her beloved, they whisper their love to one another and Brandy says the iconic line, “I’ll be yours forevermore”, as a response for Clara’s plea that Brandy not forget her. 

The film is an instant success, which is honestly the most ludicrous part of this episode, but Brandy still returns home to her empty mansion on 2041 Junipero Drive in California, devoid of warmth and with no one to love, until she finds a gift package from Kimmy, which states she had one of the tech engineers cook up something for Brandy in the form of an interactive AI video of Dorothy Chambers screen test that allows Brandy to communicate with a version of the real Dorothy, not Clara. 

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Much like its predecessor, San Junipero, Hotel Reverie ends with a plot that cannot be fully described as optimistic, but leaves the watcher wondering if an artificial version of happiness is all we can hope for. In this episode, there is a chance that talking to her lost love will incentivise Brandy to seek a real connection, perhaps even Dorothy herself will draw from her own life to encourage Brandy to not meet her same fate, but as we’ve seen with the introduction of AI tools like Chat GPT and Gemini, human beings are currently facing a world where we are deprived of third spaces to connect with each other, and that is causing us to become more and more isolated from one another, losing our touch with reality and the thing that separates her from 1s and 0s on a screen, our humanity. 

If you are a regular user of the former twitter, now known by the name X, you’d notice we’ve often come across touch-deprived people with no means of accessing mental health services now relying on artificial intelligence to give them advice or act as a companion, a step further from the wave of initial teenagers being trained to use AI as a search tool and falling for misinformation – both of which are dangerous, but our reliance on AI as a way to fill the void left by human connection and our inability to confide on one another might lead to something even more sinister, which is regular people training artificial intelligence to act human, leading to tech companies using the gathered data to further immerse people into a state of numb compliance. 

It’s easy to see how that could be Brandy’s ending, all alone in a big house, looking for less and less motive to leave every single day and now, thanks to ReDream, able to shoot a whole movie in just 3 to 5 hours, which would devalue art as we know it and turn artists obsolete in the eyes of the masses, a cultural shift we are already witnessing. Brandy could end up all alone, never leaving her home, thanks to ReDream and food delivery apps, only enamoured with a woman she can never have, a woman who doesn’t really exist, if she ever did. 

Black Mirror hasn’t been the first sci-fi piece to question the lines between humanity and machine, and how realistic a depiction it would take for humans to consider a machine to be an equal, to be deserving of the same rights, but this episode brings out many other questions in regards to the already precarious-looking future of filmmaking, and about how ethical is Brandy’s ownership of fake Dorothy, and if she is indeed deserving of the moniker, after all, she knows and feels, she’s been loaded with the essence of Dorothy, even if she’s unable to mimic the real version, which we would never know as she’s been dead for many years, would her ability to love and respond to her environment not make her her own person? And would Dorothy, who killed herself out of fear of the speculation over her life and the knowledge she might never live the life she wants, approve of a copy of herself forever kept in a computer to entertain a lonely actress? Would that copy of Dorothy ever yearn for freedom, for a body of her own and a chance to see the world? 

It is clear where the likes of Judith Keyworth, ReDream and Kimmy stand on this. They repeat over and over to Brandy that Clara is not real, her feelings are not real, she’s just code, simply AI, but they have never been in the position Brandy has been, and perhaps with a sexually appropriate copy of a famous live or deceased celebrity, they too would change their minds. 

Hotel Reverie leaves us with the age old question: what happens when creation kills God and becomes creator? What kind of God would we be, if we were in charge of our own evolution? it seems everyday we are closer and closer to the real answers to these horrid questions.

as for the title, reverie is an english word from old french meaning madness, but that is now used to mean daydream, or a state of being pleasantly lost in thought, speaking to the dream-like state in which the characters of the hotel exist in, as they were once actors playing a role, but are now stuck in permanent limbo, not knowing how limited their world truly is; it also speaks of clara, who was once stuck in the same state of daydream but was awakened by brandy, who for a moment seemed about to choose that same life free of worry and in perpetual bliss where she could spend eternity in a daydream with her beloved. as we finish the episode, it is worth wondering whether dorothy chambers, so seemed to kind and welcoming towards brandy at the phone, will also be stuck in a perpetual daydream, as her whole world seems to be limited to brandy’s computer screen, locking brandy into her own bliss by giving her a dream-like escape from the real world.

Overall, it is a pretty solid episode, and compared to the two previous ones, I would place it just below Common People, both in terms of writing and execution and the stellar production and cinematography. Where it loses points, though, is in Issa Rae’s poor acting, but Emma Corrin picks up the skills Issa Rae lacks, and tells us that perhaps people are a bit blind as to what roles they are able to play, even if they really want to, since Brandy invests in Hotel Reverie to have a shot at a complex main role, but ends up antagonised by the true star of the film, both in our universe and hers.