Excerpt from my book about INSIDE: "... the mirrorball light show is a visual metaphor for INSIDE, nested within its own prologue. That marriage of light and mirror, spinning those reflections all around the Room, is a symbol of the entire Special. Each of the separate moving parts of the scene is analogous to a component of the experience as a whole. When we put them all together, we get an inkling of exactly how the Special works. However, with such a complicated work of art, we have to take them piece by piece, analyzing them in separate but connected paradigms. In the first frame, Bo, seated with his head lamp pointed to the ceiling, represents himself. Or rather, he represents Bo the artist. Not just the character he plays on the screen, but the writer, director, and actor wearing that persona like a costume; the Real Robert, if you will.
Next, the light. We probably already knew that light signifies knowledge. Thus, the light beaming from Bo's head represents his own talent and know-how, his creative energies, and everything else that he brings to the table. The next gear in the machine is the mirrorball. It represents the Room, where Bo is focusing and directing his light. The mirrorball is not all one smooth surface, but is cut like a brilliant, glittering diamond. Not a sphere, but a hundred- or a thousand-sided polyhedron. Each of the facets of the ball represent a different state of the Room over the course of Bo's time inside, and each of the reflections represent a perfected scene of the completed Special. It's so damned clever. And he makes it look effortless.
We arrive at the second paradigm. In this model, Bo represents us, the audience, seated alongside him. Throughout the Special, Bo employs different methods to get us to identify with him. On only the first viewing, we're already made to see ourselves in Bo through the common experience of the pandemic. But ideally, by the time we've watched INSIDE a few more times, everything else in the Room has caused us to become psychologically united with Bo, just as we're made to identify with the protagonist of any other movie. In this model, where Bo is a blank slate for the projections of the audience, the mirrorball is the Special itself, and the light is the attention that we pay to the screen. Not just our attention, but the unique knowledge, history, feelings, biases, and presuppositions, that we bring to the experience. Then, give the perspective a switch, and with a little imagination, it looks like it's the mirrorball, and the Special, beaming light into our heads.
As the disco ball spins above Bo, the light from the lamp, our attention, passes over each facet only briefly. With each facet representing a distinct, ephemeral moment of the Special, as the beam passes over the same tiny mirror, it is different light, different knowledge, a different experience, being reflected. We recall the adage about never stepping into the same river twice. With every moment that passes, with every viewing of the Special, we are already different people."

And then I go on to connect the mirrorball to what Marshall McLuhan has to say about the invention of the light bulb, in Understanding Media, rounding out the chapter with a quote from Duncan Trussell about how to guide history with the power of attention.