Gately's Boston AA / White Flag
then the last layer of jolly friendly mask comes off your old friend the Substance, it’s midnight now and all masks come off, and you all of a sudden see the Substance as it really is, for the first time you see the Disease as it really is, really has been all this time, you look in the mirror at midnight and see what owns you, what’s become what you are—
Context
The screen's catch, inside the long second-person Boston-AA catechism of how the Substance turns: the moment of recognition is staged as a mirror scene, and a timed one — masks come off at midnight, and what the mirror then shows is not you but "what owns you." A few lines further on the same passage closes the loop: the Substance "has finally removed its smily-face mask to reveal centerless eyes and a ravening maw" ("smily" as written), it's the Face In The Floor, "and the face is your own face in the mirror, now, it’s you, the Substance has devoured or replaced and become you." The mirror here is AA's diagnostic instrument — the surface where the Disease becomes visible as one's own face — which is exactly the trope scene 166's catalogued (C, reading) develops: AA's mirror "hauled out in front of" newcomers versus the A.F.R.'s road mirrors, the same instrument pointed opposite ways. This raw carries the trope's first full statement.