Plot
An insecure, unsuccessful gangster named Jackie Rhoades waits in a cheap, dirty hotel room for his boss, George. George orders Jackie to shoot a barkeeper, or else he will kill Jackie on his return. George then exits, leaving Jackie wrestling with his conscience. Terrified and frustrated, he starts talking to his reflection in the mirror. He puts a cigarette in his lips but finds no match.
A puff of smoke comes out from the other side of the mirror, and he sees a different version of himself in the reflection: a strong, self-assured, confident Jackie Rhoades. Jackie looks into the mirror and asks, "Are you talking to me? Are you talking to me?" Jackie and his reflection enter a lengthy argument about how badly his life has turned out as a result of his listening to others and never himself. Jackie stubbornly resists the alternate Jackie's request to take over, and tries to flee, but he sees more mirrors in the hallway, the closet and the bathroom, and his reflection continues to argue with him out of each one. Finally, Jackie backs away in terror from the doppelganger he cannot escape. Jackie's double goes closer and closer to the real Jackie, and the screen goes black.
George returns, furious that Jackie has not done his job. "Whattaya gotta say for yourself, Crumb?", he sneers. Jackie turns around, and responds confidently, "I resign! You can have your gun back plus the following." He then kicks and punches a surprised George, throwing him out of the room along with his gun. Ringing the room clerk to check out, he refers to himself as "Jackie—JOHN Rhoades." He then tells the nervous Jackie, now the one on the other side of the mirror, that they're going to make something of their life.
Read more about this topic: Nervous Man In A Four Dollar Room
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)