Self-reflexivity in Spiral

Rottentomatoes.com says Spiral is a movie where " [Joel] Moore also stars as a man whose attempts to paint a beautiful young woman (Amber Tamblyn, The Grudge 2) aren't as innocent as they seem. Spiral also features the talents of Zachary Levi (Chuck) and Tricia Helfer (Battlestar Galactica)."

This week's entry on "self-reflexivity" proved more difficult than previous entries. I can spot mise-en-scenè and method acting much easier than "self-reflexivity." For instance, in the following shot:

The way Mason, the main character, is lit in his bright white shirt in contrast to the dark shades of everything else demonstrates mise en scenè. It highlights how awkward and out of place he feels around others, and how even though there is a party going on around him, he still feels alone. So instead of blindly watching movies for specific terms like mise en scenè, I conducted Internet research on self-reflexive movies. I found that M. Night Shamalan's Signs is deeper than most think and that Solaris seems to be one of the defining movies for self-reflexivity. Then, I noticed Spiral, which came out in 2006. A movie critic mentioned described it as "homage to Hitchcock and M. Night Shyamalan." Signs, Rear Window, and Vertigo sprang to mind as self-reflexive movies. Based on these findings, I decided to watch Spiral. The opening shot is of rain and puddles, while the ending is an extreme close-up of a rain falling on a puddle, as depicted in the following:

Water at the beginning and end of the movie is a sure sign of self-reflexivity. Mason plays a vinyl record of jazz and an extreme close-up of the spinning is shown:

The spinning of anything represents a movie reel. Self-reflexivity seems to be quite obvious in this indy movie. The writer's intent is a little fuzzy. I interpreted the movie as a comment on Hollywood's tendency to chew up pretty girls and spit them out. I arrived at this theory based on a number of reasons. The movie keeps the audience in the dark about Mason's personality and past. He rarely speaks and other characters rarely speak to him. At work, the new girl begins to flirt heavily with Mason after she notices him sketching. She ropes him into painting her in a series of paintings, during which she really falls for him. They sleep together evetually. She finds out Mason's dark secret the morning following their night together. He hates that she discovered his secret and leaves the city on a bus. On the bus, another pretty girl comments how beautiful his sketchings are. The scene evokes the earlier one in which his coworker first complimented his sketchings, suggesting the cycle was to start anew. Mason represents Hollywood in that females seek him out without any prompting or interest on his part. Many actresses flock to Hollywood looking for that big break, only to be flatly rejected. My interpretation might be a bit ambitious, but that is what I thought.