A few years ago there was a Hollywood trend of taking a commonly known TV series, comic, or movie and then remixing / reviving it into a brand new genre.  From comedy to drama, “black and white” to complex characters, or just rebranding from original to modern variants, there were a few different variations on this practice. 

It was a thing. 

There was the new series, Bel-Air, based on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, the Cobra Kai from Karate Kid movies, and Riverdale based on Archie comics (to name a few). 

So what if Nicolas Cage starred in a film that was a twist (remix) on one of his earlier films? What if it was a radical shift in genre, mood and plot points? This is speculative, of course, since it didn’t really happen, but I’d like to present you with just such a possibility in WATC(H) #84.

I’d like to imagine that Looking Glass (2018) could be a dark future sequel to Raising Arizona (1987). The names of the characters may be different, but let’s pretend for a second that the future family vision that H.I. McDunnough and his wife Edwina had envisioned for their lives did not go exactly as planned. Let’s speculate that life went sideways for them, and the two Arizonans didn’t end up with a “happily ever after” vision that H.I. dreamed about.

Let’s chase Alice down the rabbit hole and into the fragmented looking glass. 

It’s a stretch, sure, but thinking about Looking Glass this way made the film much more interesting for me than just watching it at face value. Behold!

The World According to Ray (aka Future H.I.)

At the end of Raising Arizona what do we recall happened with H.I. and Ed. We know that they returned little Nathan Jr. to his family. We know that Nathan Arizona, took pity uncharacteristically, and likely did NOT prosecute them for kidnapping. We can speculate (based on H.I.’s epilogue) that H.I. and Ed stayed together and followed the unfolding life of Nathan Jr. from a distance. Perhaps H.I. and Ed had children of their own or adopted or something, as they grew old together and had a full house full of children and grandchildren.

Or maybe that’s not how it happened. 

Maybe H.I. turned over a new leaf and stopped robbing convenience stores. Let’s say he changed his name to Ray (Nicolas Cage) to escape his criminal past and start anew. Maybe he decided to forgo the factory and instead learned a trade; he became an electrician and a handy-man. Let’s say modern medicine did “catch up” to Ed and she was able to conceive and bear a child. Like Ray, she decided to go by a lesser-known childhood nickname, Maggie (Robin Tunney) so they could foment their recreation.

But life didn’t go as planned. Maggie had some postpartum depression after their daughter was born and turned to painkillers and weed to get by. Ray, as a small business owner, was having some struggles as the  financial provider, and felt growing distance and frustration with his drug-addicted wife. To assuage his stress, he turned to booze and other women for love and affection, neglecting Maggie and their daughter.

Until one day tragedy struck. While Ray was at one of his many trysts and Maggie was most likely catatonic on oxycontin, their six-year old daughter accidentally fell from a window to her death. The tragic Dantic irony of their daughter’s death is not lost on Ray and Maggie who once (as H.I. and Ed) climbed through a second storey window to kidnap, and later return a child to their parents side.

The death was ruled an accident by the police (rather than criminal negligence) and the couple decided to escape to the desert and try to start their miserable lives over once again by taking on ownership of a dodgy little mom-and-pop place called the Motor Way Motel (Night Owls Sleep Here). The dank Hitchcockian motel was sold to them by an old guy named Ben (Bill Bolender), who decided in haste to sell it to Ray (sus), and didn’t bother to wait around to the hand-off the keys (sus,sus) or tell his employees, and even forgot to mention certain historical tragedies and conspiracies tied to his tenure at the motel (sus x3). 

But Ray and Maggie don’t mind living in a rural drive-by hotel in the Arizona desert since this is their fresh start at a new life together–where they hope to put the past behind them and find some solace in their grief for the loss of their daughter. The rooms need a refresh, the pool needs a deep clean, and the employees and clientele need a crash course in how the hotel is going to be run now that it’s under new ownership.

Mysteries seem to abound however. Ben left rather quickly without saying his goodbyes and Sheriff Howard Keller (Marc Blucas) seems particularly interested in getting in touch with his old friend (who is not to be found). The gas station owner and attendants across the street seem to constantly be surveilling the hotel like a hyper aggressive Neighborhood Watch Group / Stalker Association. There’s a sketchy trucker, Tommy  (Ernie Lively), who passive-aggressively expects to reserve room 10 whenever he likes so he can host his hooker without his wife catching on. And then there’s an exhibitionist blond who attracts Ray’s attention by swimming in bikinis and changing her clothes in front of her hotel window. She also hosts a dominatrix friend who flirts with Ray and seems very familiar with goings-on of the Motor Way Motel. 

But the real action of the film centers on a fact that Ben failed to inform Ray about which he later discovered on his own. Ben failed to mention that there was a two-way mirror (a looking glass) that could be used to spy on patrons in room #10 (which could only be accessed from a secret passageway underneath the janitors building). So if you remember H.I. was a guy who enjoyed a gander at the naked female form (scanning his Playboy magazine before welcoming Nathan Jr into his home) and Ray, the older H.I., found himself tempted in a similar way. When Maggie is not in the mood, Ray would creep out their bedroom and down to the peepshow behind the window in room 10. Sometimes he’d find Tommy and his Mexican call girl and other times he’d find Jessica Philips and her kinky friend.

This is no comedy, however. Lusty Ray gets more than he bargains for when his hotel guest Jessica winds up dead (which he misses seeing from the looking glass as a masked stranger grabs and strangles her). Maggie starts to suspect Ray’s up to know good (with all his voyeur stares) and the Sheriff Howard gets more and more belligerent about Ray making him coffee, telling him where Ben is hiding out, and digging into Ray and Maggie’s past. 

Then a pig gets killed and left in Ray’s pool. Jessica’s body gets discovered in the desert. And Ray handles a snake that found its way into one of the hotel guest rooms. If you think there’s something paranormal going on here, I wondered that same thing myself. The sheriff starts to cast doubt on Ray, Maggie threatens to leave because she suspects he’s cheating, and Ray begins to wonder if Ben is somehow involved in another death that took place at the hotel some time ago. 

Finally, Ben comes out of hiding to talk to Ray and they meet out in the desert away from town. Of course Ben saw something from his peepshow looking glass that incriminated someone else. Of course he had to flee and he recommended that Ray do the same thing before it’s too late. Ben gets shot and Ray flees the scene.

Now worred for his wife, Ray returns to the hotel and sees that the Sheriff’s car is parked outside. No sign of his wife, Ray decides to check the looking glass one more time and is horrified to see that Maggie is tied up and terrified in room 10. Sheriff Howard is just outside of the view of the mirror but then approaches Maggie. Before he can take further advantage of her Ray taps on the glass (which no one knew about I guess except for Ben) and then crashes through it. Ben and Ray fight it out with shards of glass, punches, and guns and Ray finally overcomes the sheriff and shoots him dead. 

Ray and Maggie flee the hotel (leaving at least two dead bodies and all that DNA evidence in their wake) as Tommy pulls up asking if he can have room #10. They head out of town as the Neighborhood Watch looks on from the gas station. 

We must assume they will now have to start over once again and try to build a life somewhere else–maybe in far off land like, I guess, Utah.

Potential, But Wasted

Even without imagining this movie was the sad saga of later life H.I. and Ed McDunnough, it had great potential. Anytime you have an old hotel with a secret passageway and potentially voyeur peepholes in every room, there’s bound to be some intrigue. I was drawn in and interested by the concept, especially because it kind of gives off Hitchcock’s Psycho meets Rear Window vibe. Spying on someone unaware always presents an opportunity to discover a person’s deepest and darkest secrets and it provides a moral dilemma for the watcher. Do I intervene and make my presence known even if it means I’ll be caught in the unethical act OR do I let the bad thing happen? 

This is the set up, but really this happens before Ray ever gets involved. The Sheriff is the (too) obvious bad guy in this film and I jotted that down after his first scene. “This guy did it.” Ben must have seen the Sheriff take advantage of the townie (that he secretly crushed on for many years) and in doing whatever kinky thing he did with or to her, he killed her. Ben knows that this happened, but never tells the Sheriff? This is where it gets confusing to me. The Sheriff suspects that his secret is known by Ben and wants to “take care of Ben” so that his secret is safe (which he eventually does), but how would he even know he’d been found out? 

Does he just suspect because Ben left the hotel so quickly? I guess that makes some sense. 

So there was potential here for Ray to be a real suspect, but that evidence is never all that compelling given what we see. Maybe if he’d had a fling with the girl OR her mistress, there would have been more doubt cast as to who the real suspect was. Maybe we would have questioned if Ray was somehow involved. The dead pig in the pool added some tension to the potential “thriller” aspect of the film, but who was it intended for. Did the gas station guys work with the policeman? Or was this all Sheriff Howard? Did he kill the pig and throw it in the pool because he was convinced that Ben and Ray were working together against him?

None of it made too much sense to me. It also negated an even more interesting idea, that perhaps there was something else going on entirely. A haunting, a revenge story, something else entirely. None of that came about. Even when Ben shows up to meet Ray, he comes with a Geiger counter to check radiation levels? Why? I was still hoping for aliens or paranormal activity, but I would be sorely disappointed on that front.

And why the hell did Ray take the pig’s body out into the desert and burn it? Even Tommy the trucker, who was privy to this info was like “Huh? You did what now?” 

The Suspension of Disbelief Problem

If you think my Raising Arizona theory is problematic, you’re not wrong. But there are so many other “suspension of disbelief” problems with this film. For example:

• People who are grieving the death of their child decide to give up their lives / careers in one city to run a shitty motel. OK, but why?
• A voyeur decides to put in a two-way mirror in just one room of their hotel. In for a penny, in for a pound I say. Why wouldn’t they do it to every room? The infrastructure is built. Creepers gotta creep.
• Maggie thinks this lifestyle choice will be ideal for rebooting their lives and having another child or adopting (after what they’ve already been through). Yeah, OK. I’m not buying it. 
• After barely taking on ownership of the hotel (basically just getting the keys), they just decide to start letting rooms almost immediately. What about fire codes, banking accounts, licenses, etc. There has to be a bunch of red tape in the hospitality industry–even for a subpar dive hotel. 
• Circumstantial evidence is still evidence. So, what evidence is there that the policeman (perpetrator) was actually involved in any of this? None. But we have Ray whose daughter dies under mysterious circumstances, who was the last person to see Ben and the Sheriff alive, and now there’s two dead bodies and a sketchy broken two-way mirror at Ray’s hotel (which he has fled the scene of a crime). There’s no way this story doesn’t end in Ray’s arrest (especially given how he behaved at the garage and local bar).  His wife may go to jail, too. 

Firsts for Nicolas Cage as Ben

• Sporting a sort of Mephistophelean trimmed beard
• First time playing an electrician
• First time playing a hotel owner
• Having an erotic dream about a cleaning lady
• Cleaning pool / removing a dead pig carcass from a pool
• Getting keys made at a hardware store
• Jumping through a two-way mirror
• Has sex in black tank top
• Handling a snake
• Forces a hysterical woman (his wife) to take a cold shower.
• Gets kicked in the nuts for it (the above)

Recurrences

• Loss of child impacting his marriage (Pay the Ghost, Raising Arizona)
• Keeping gun in his glove box (Multiple)
• Voyeurism (8MM, Inconceivable)
• Spurned in the bedroom (Inconceivable)
• Angry at his wife’s alleged drug abuse (Inconceivable)
• Smoking (Multiple)
• In a casino (Multiple)
• Geiger counter used (The Humanity Bureau)

Quotables

“It’s as big as it needs to be I guess.” [It’s not what you think…]

“Strange how cold it can get out in the desert.” 

“So, who’s the guest?”

“I just…just needed some air.”

“Yeah, you were there, you were HIGH!”  

“I guess sometimes, you just need a change of scenery I guess.” 

“Did I do what? Did I do what? Did I do what?!?” 

“Never seen anyone who’d ask for coffee in this kind of heat?” 

Conclusion

If there’s any last callbacks to Raising Arizona in this fantasy sequel I’ve created in my mind, it’s gotta be with Tommy the too-horny trucker. He definitely could be a more “mature” version of Gale or Evelle. Out of prison and tied down to a “ball and chain” of a wife, Tommy drives his longhaul truck across the country, and finds his sinful pleasure in the arms of a different woman every night. Tommy finds his own version of bliss in room #10. He even brings a little bit of the humor and levity from Raising Arizona into refracted image of Looking Glass when he tells Ray, “I’ve got to do my duty to my weiner.” And H.I., now Ray plays the true friend and confidant when he tells him, “As long as you pay for the room, what you DO in there is your business…as long as you’re not killing anybody.”

Yeah, just as long as no one’s killing anybody, guess that’s how things go at the Motor Way Motel.