“Constance Wilmott was born right before the turn of the twentieth century in a tiny mining town somewhere in dusty Nevada; she moved to Los Angeles when she was eighteen, was cast as the wife in a silent film adaptation of the Bluebeard story that year, and married Avery Riggs before she turned twenty. She never made another film.

“So why do we know her name?” Christine L. Tompkins asks. “Most silent film actresses faded into obscurity as their talkie counterparts rose to prominence. In fact, most films of that era no longer exist, due to careless archivists and the film’s extreme flammability.”

Lulu finds it weirdly comforting to think that even the things people have tried to save have disappeared off the face of the earth. Like an accidental Flash, almost. Eventually, no one will ever be able to watch her kiss Sloane ever again. It might be a long while, but it will happen. Probably. Right?

“The answer to this question comes, as it so often does, in the form of her husband. Avery Riggs made sure that the film was preserved. He bought a then-unheard-of professional projection system so that he could screen it at his first hotel property, The Aster, every year on her birthday. The hotel, by the way, was named for Wilmott’s favorite flower; the storied space ultimately couldn’t hang on to its glamour, and was shuttered due to bankruptcy in the early 1990s.”

So much for avoiding blue light. Lulu flips her phone over again and googles “the Aster hotel Los Angeles Riggs.” The photos she turns up show a structure that’s bigger and much more elaborate than the one she knows, but Lulu recognizes the landscape, and the thing Ryan’s built to mimic it. So that’s what The Hotel used to look like.

“Much has been made of Wilmott’s decision not to act again after Bluebeard,” Christine continues in Lulu’s ears. “She insisted that it was a personal choice, rooted in her desire to be a mother first. But those who knew Riggs suggest that he was a jealous man and that, having seen the way the public loved his lovely wife in her debut, he refused to share her like that ever again.

“Why, though, would he then insist on screening the film repeatedly, creating and maintaining a legacy where he might simply have allowed her to be forgotten?

“Riggs’s work as a developer was the building of monuments, and his tastes ran to structures that would dominate men, and outlast them. Whether or not he was behind his wife’s decision to leave acting, he found a way to monumentalize her. He turned her into something lasting, attached to his name and under his control. Connie would age and fade; she would become a woman and a wife instead of a celluloid fantasy. But he would always own the vision of her body as eternally nubile and functionally mute.