The Doppelgänger and his Master
Try to imagine that, in a crowd, maybe at a crosswalk, on a train, at a table right next to you—someone’s face, gestures, figure, and laughter suddenly capture all of your attention. As if your field of view suddenly expanded, lit up with a familiar color, as if someone turned on a neon light shaped like your own name. Before you manage to do anything, before you understand what’s happening—something inside you pulls you towards that person, says “Yes,” says “There.” It’s disturbing, an affect with a clear vector marked “There.” A perceptual apparatus that favors the familiar turns on a green light. It seems to signal—over there is something that seems close to you, familiar, something that you are bound to. And all of this takes place in the blink of an eye, far below the threshold of conscious action.
You begin to stare, to observe, maybe strain your eyes to take a better look, perhaps move a little closer. You begin to recognize and name the familiar. You know that face, those gestures, that figure, that laughter. The whole thing is pleasant—we enjoy, nay prefer, the familiar. It’s soothing—the familiar is safe, domesticated, predictable.
But suddenly, there’s a shift. With nary a warning, the green light turns red. You begin to feel overwhelmed, the familiar is suddenly too familiar. Absolutely familiar. You feel blood rush to your head, your muscles tense, flooded with a “fight-or-flight” response. It slowly dawns on you—you’re looking at yourself; at someone (or something?) who is you. They look like you, move like you, even laugh like you. Before you is your doppelgänger. A small voice of reason mumbles in your head: “It can’t be me,” it whispers, “only I can be me.”
The Polish word for doppelgänger, “sobo-wtór,” literally “self-double,” neatly sums up the paradox—the doppelgänger not only looks like me (cf. “lookalike,” another English word for doppelgänger), but it IS me, a double, another me, a reprise of me. The appearance of the lookalike engenders a fundamental crisis, a primary crisis, a crisis that is not only existential, but ontological. It strikes at the very heart of my own self—the belief in my separate individuality, uniqueness, and exceptionality. And we’re not talking here about the narcissistic belief in one’s own originality, but something much deeper—abyssal even. Yes, looking at your doppelgänger may give you vertigo. As we exchange glances with our lookalike, the ground seems to crumble from under us. Isn’t that precisely what Hitchcock’s Vertigo is about?
(By the way, I am not talking about those doppelgängers who are—as sometimes happens—identical only physically, while their psyches remain the opposite of the “original” template, a Jungian complement thereof, the embodiment of what the “original” rejects, what it fears in itself, what it doesn’t accept, and so on. Such a doppelgänger is actually different from the “original”—and in fundamental ways, too. What I am discussing here are radical doppelgängers—lookalikes which are identical in every possible way to their “originals.”)
Sigmund Freud described precisely the feeling that comes upon us when we encounter our doppelgänger—he called it “the uncanny.” And again—the Freudian “uncanny” is not purely an aesthetic ploy, typical of 19th century horror novels, but rather a signal that a critical error has happened, that the system—the psychological system—has lost stability, become overloaded, that a conflict has arisen that cannot be solved in a straightforward manner.
The Freudian uncanny is a product of the divergence between reason and sensual stimuli—although I KNOW that I am an individual entity, what I see—the doppelgänger—suggests the exact opposite. That’s why I say: “Impossible,” because everything I know in my mind contradicts what I see; I say: “I must be dreaming,” because only in dreams do I allow myself the ontological loosening that the doppelgänger forces upon me.
Psychology has since developed Freud’s concept into what we call the “uncanny valley,” that is to say the sudden shift from a positive to a negative affect resulting from contact with automatons, androids, and other humanoid creations. As long as an automaton RESEMBLES a human, as long as we see a crack, a rift, an imperfection that allows us to distinguish it from a human being, our reactions are mostly positive. We even appreciate the craftsmanship, the talent of the designers and engineers, marvel at the technological advancement we’re witnessing, and so on. The crisis breaks out when that difference is eliminated—when the automaton becomes man’s doppelgänger.
The French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva speaks even more forcefully—it is not uncanniness we feel when encountering a doppelgänger, but repulsion; a repulsion that turns our stomachs and makes us look away. A repulsion that overtakes us when we suffer a crisis of the fundamental opposites on which we base our existence in the world—interior/exterior (that’s why we’re repulsed by wounds and substances oozing from the body), the living/the dead (that’s why we’re repulsed by the living dead and the catatonic) or, in the case of the doppelgänger, I/other. Drawing a line between oneself and other entities, a line that is blurred in the first weeks and months of our lives, is one of the greatest developmental milestones, a sort of primary “formatting” of reality. The appearance of a doppelgänger essentially disturbs this opposition—encountering the lookalike is encountering the other who IS me.
That’s why a relationship with a doppelgänger always entails hassliebe, the dialectic of love and hate. I love the lookalike, because I love myself. I hate it, because its entire existence subverts my own “separateness,” which I love as well.
(A specific version of confronting one’s doppelgänger can be found in a popular storytelling and movie trope—the absolute ban on meeting one’s younger or older self. Symptomatically, breaching that ban can result in terrible consequences not only for the protagonist, but also for reality itself. When the protagonist stands face to face with his or her own self, everything disappears in an chasmal vortex.)
That’s why the doppelgänger must disappear. It needs to be destroyed, removed from view, wiped from the face of the earth. Because its existence threatens not only my own self, but reality altogether.
The doppelgänger, however, fails to go quietly. And no wonder. The lookalike—with few exceptions—does not acknowledge its own “derivative” nature (one exception is science fiction narratives in which clones are aware of themselves being clones—although in some of them, clones begin to fight for this “ontological acknowledgement, sometimes going as far as to kill and replace their “originals”). But in the overwhelming majority of cases, the “doppelgänger” considers me to be the derivative; from its perspective, I am the copy and it is the original. And that carries considerable weight in cultures which, like Western culture, see the original as undeniably superior to the copy.
Confronting your doppelgänger, therefore, often ends in a fight to the death, a fight that will ultimately determine who is the master (the original) and who is the slave (the copy), deciding who will emerge as the “self” and who will emerge as the “derivative”—thus inferior and unworthy of existence.
I won’t be talking about doppelgängers in Grimonprez’s film—the young and old Hitchcock playing the role of young and old Borges, Hitchcock’s voice and physical doubles, or the love/hate relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. You’ll be seeing all of that in just a moment. What I would like to focus on is the sort of formal “lookalikeness” that Double Take is built upon.
First and foremost, Double Take is a found footage film—a film “made” from other movies, Hitchcock flicks, ads, newsreels. From the genre’s beginning, found footage films were accompanied by pervasive disquiet, embarrassment, sometimes even disdain or aggression engendered by the appearance of the doppelgänger. Images, sounds, and scenes used in found footage films are precisely identical—IDENTICAL—to images, sounds, and scenes that appear in the “original” movies. As they’re taken from the “original” film by the artist/director/found footage producer, they become a cinematic “doppelgänger” whose very existence undermines the identity of the original. (Due to length constraints, this essay will not discuss other examples of cinematic doppelgängers, including faithful remakes of Hitchcock’s Psycho or Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, or remakes of early films from the very beginning of cinema, believed long lost). The original film and its doppelgänger are also locked in a fight to the death—the former accuses the latter of being derivative or, in more extreme cases, of plagiarism and theft; the latter proves that only through manipulation of the original can we reveal its true meaning, unearth its actual potential or hidden messages. One is constantly trying to master the other.
Both the original film and its doppelgänger are, therefore, trying to prove their authenticity (and thus reveal the other as a fraud)—but they use different arguments to achieve that objective. The original film tries to depreciate the doppelgänger with technological and legal arguments, whereas the doppelgänger attacks using epistemological and artistic arguments.
Does Double Take emerge the victor in this fight? You will have to judge for yourselves.