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Volume 10 Issue 4 (December 2008) Article 8
Pilar Andrade,
"Cinema's Doubles, Their Meaning, and Literary Intertexts"
<http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol10/iss4/8>
Contents of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 10.4 (2008)
Thematic issue New Studies on the Fantastic in Literature
Edited by Asunción López-Varela
<
http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol10/iss4/>
Abstract: In his paper "Cinema's Doubles, Their Meaning, and Literary Intertexts" Pilar Andrade
analyzes the figure of the double as an element of cinema. Andrade does not take under consid-
eration films in which the double is considered merely as a clinical case with no mystery (for ex-
ample as in David Fincher's Fight Club or Brad Anderson's The Machinist) or in which it is used as a
useful piece to make the plot without referring to the fantasy world (as in Joel Schumacher's Bad
Company); instead, Andrade focuses on films that make a clear connection between the alter ego
and fantasy, including those where this alter ego is inside the hero/heroine or character and such
films where the former and his/her double would live in a fantasy world as in science fiction.
Andrade postulates that the double is a fertile theme included in the fantastic that has been cho-
sen by many writers and film directors to deal with our fears and our anguish but also to embody
our desires, although sometimes is has been a helping character as well. The presence of a double
is perceived in most cases as a threat, an uncanny appearance, although sometimes the Doppel-
gänger can help. In many case he forces to question the rules of our ordinary judgement; his po-
tential as a fantastic element rests perhaps on this effect and that is possibly the reason why he
has inspired so many directors and writers in contemporary Western culture.
Pilar Andrade, "Cinema's Doubles, Their Meaning, and Literary Intertexts" page 2 of 9
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 10.4 (2008): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol10/iss4/8>
Thematic issue New Studies on the Fantastic in Literature. Ed. Asunción López-Varela
Pilar ANDRADE
Cinema's Doubles, Their Meaning, and Literary Intertexts
What is fantasy? I propose this brief definition: the irruption of the unexpected in real life. In this
way or similar ones defined by various scholars and authors and, in a wide sense, it can be a valid
definition for the literary genre during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A definition that
approaches the above one by Sigmund Freud is that of the ominous or uncanny (unheimlich): the
strange irrupting in the quotidian pace of life and generating a feeling of both wonder and terror.
Moreover, one of the most important fantastic themes is the double and the appearance of a dou-
ble, in general, should be perceived as the irruption of an unexpected threat in real life. This fact
concerns both identical doubles and resembling ones, and both objective doubles (external from
the perceiving subject) and subjective ones (the subject with two or more identities). The fact that
the irruption of a double causes certain unease or even a true terror is quite clear in literature,
from Guy de Maupassant's The Horla to José Saramago's The Duplicated Man. This effect upon
reception has been studied mostly by the psychiatrists.
Otto Rank was the first to relate the theme to anguish towards
death or loneliness; he also
suggested that the double showed lack of maturity and it meant a stage of regression to the nar-
cissist self. Both notions of the double complete each other, as when the subject finds impossible
to accept death, he/she develops an excessive love to himself/herself or an excessive fear of him-
self/herself. In both cases the psychological answer would be to produce another identical self,
protector or enemy. Rank's theses were developed further by Sigmund Freud and related the dou-
ble to several growth and maturity stages of the psyche. The double as a shield against death ap-
pears generally in childhood, while the double as castration or mutilation belongs to a phallic stage.
The double unfolding continuously is linked to repetitive compulsion, simultaneously defensive and
offensive, common to children and neurotic adults. The double as conscience or censorship must
be placed in an adult or young stage in which the self generates an excessive super-ego. The adult
stage can also generate a double as an expression of unfulfilled conscious or unconscious desires
.
Finally, the double may appear in adult stage also as a self-punishment brought about from the
impotence of the subject. Some others such as Carl Jung or René Girard have added complemen-
tary or opposed reflections. Nowadays, psychiatry finds the phenomenon in patients who suffer
from neurosis, multiple personality disorder, or paranoid delirium. But the double can also be con-
templated from a different perspective, because it breaks, as the Romantics knew well, our usual
perception of reality. With the presence or appearance of another self or "other," some important
doubts emerge questioning first the identity of this double (who are you?), but also and as a coun-
terpart, the very self-identity of the original (who am I?) and of his/her perception of reality (is
what I am seeing real? Is it imagination, hallucination?). Thus, the double questions one of the
three basic rules of logic: that of the non-contradiction. It makes evident that (being A the original
and B the copy) the proposition "A is always equal to A and different from B" is incorrect. An exact
copy of a human being works with another proposition: "A is always equal to A and equal to B." As
Romantics discovered, a conscience splitting shakes the well-built system of rationalism, introduc-
ing new mental patterns, and with them, a new world to decode: the world of modern fantasy.
Modern fantasy burst into nineteenth century fiction and continued in the twentieth century and is
still prevalent in our age. It also opens out into the visual arts and, following the breach that
George Mélliès had opened into the cinema.
In this article I analyze the figure of the double as an element of and in cinema. I do not take
under consideration films in which the double is considered merely as a clinical case with no mys-
tery (for example Fincher's Fight Club or Brad Anderson's The Machinist) or in which it is used as a
useful piece to make the plot without referring to the fantasy world (such as in Joel Schumacher's
Bad Company). Instead, I focus on films that make a clear connection between the alter ego and
fantasy, including those where this alter ego is inside the hero/heroine or character, and those
where the former and his/her double would live in a fantasy world as in science fiction. All of them
show the presence of the ominous within everyday life and in the daily dose of rationalism. The
Pilar Andrade, "Cinema's Doubles, Their Meaning, and Literary Intertexts" page 3 of 9
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 10.4 (2008): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol10/iss4/8>
Thematic issue New Studies on the Fantastic in Literature. Ed. Asunción López-Varela
classic and first film story of the Doppelgänger is Stellan Rye's 1913 The Student of Prague (Der
Student von Prag). It takes place in this city imbued by mystery (remember the Golem, this other
artificial self, an ancestor of Frankenstein), where the young student Balduin (Paul Wegener) faces
his double in the rise to wealth and seduction. This story may be considered either the hypotext of
several other filmic texts or the hypertext of a group of romantic and postromantic literary texts. It
is a hypotext because it will be the reference text to create visual double stories; it is a hypertext
because it takes and mixes together elements from these literary works and fixes them in a very
convincing narration. The literary intertexts come from Chamisso, Hoffmann, Musset, and Poe.
From Hoffmann, Rye takes
the importance of the reflection, which will come to life in the first se-
quence. Hoffmann developed the idea in The New Year's Eve Adventure: a man called Spikher,
married to a motherly woman, gives his reflection to a wicked but seductive woman. Some schol-
ars interpreted the story proposing that the division real body versus body reflected comes from
the contradiction between the two opposite women and the inability to make a choice that the
protagonist shows. In any case, this tale uses the old theme of the image in the mirror meaning
the soul of a person, enriching it and placing it simultaneously in a romantic and modern context.
For his part, Chamisso is implicit in the film, as much as the theme of the shadow, a variation of
the reflection, and the theme of the diabolic pact, which has an important function in his Peter
Schlemihl. In this text Chamisso combines both elements to create a fascinating a magic adven-
ture in which the hero, Schlemihl, sells his shadow to a grey evil man in return for a "bag of
plenty." Rye took the image of the diabolical dealer who gives money for souls (reflections or
shadows), adding a slight Jewish touch (as the action takes place in Prague and one episode is
even set in the Jewish cemetery) with the long pointed beard and a black and shabby frock coat.
Another intertext for The Student of Prague is "December Night," a poem by Musset about a
strange orphan dressed in black who looks like a brother and shows up in the most important mo-
ments of his life. Rye quotes Musset's text many times and finishes his story using the same end-
ing employed in the poem: the double sits on the tomb of the literary original -- gently consoling it
-- as he is the only
survivor, although in the film he sits there with a queer expression. Finally, Poe
provides the most apparent meaning to the filmic double, through his famous tale William Wilson.
In this tale the alter ego symbolizes the conscience (or the super-ego), a kind of twin which re-
minds us of Pinocchio's harassing conscience, Jiminy Cricket. He is always there to denounce the
mean behaviour of the original, whispering (he is unable to speak loudly for he is only a mental
voice!) but in public. Rye's double acts in a similar way, in private: he is first seen after Balduin
has written a billet doux to seduce the countess who is already engaged to a nobleman; then he
will appear every time Balduin tries to go on with his love affair. And although we could think it is
kind to try to prevent someone from having an immoral behaviour, nor Wilson neither Balduin
consider the double as a friend, but rather as an enemy: "I can be known as Baldouin, but my real
enemy is my image reflected," says Balduin even before the duplication. In addition to this obvious
meaning, Rye's double is ambiguous enough to offer other connotations. The double can also be
contemplated as honour, if we trust one of the interpretations given to Schlemihl's shadow: a man
without a shadow (without honour) is a fallen man, worthless to society. In the film, Balduin would
have sold his reflection (his honour) and that is why when he promises to the old count not to kill
the offended fiancé: his word has no value, and, indeed, his double will kill his fiancé.
This leads us to the last semantic clue that lies in Rye's double: death. Not only the double
kills his opponent, but also Balduin will murder the copy -- and therefore he will murder himself, as
in Poe's tale. The student was not mistaken when he felt horror the first time he saw his double, as
this one bore death. The scene in which both play cards together as opponents prefigures the end-
ing of the film: the double wins, the game and the life. In this sense we could also think about
supplanting which is a final effect of some double outlines: in Andersen's The Shadow, for instance,
the original will be completely taken away, and in Dostoïevsky's The Double the original Goliadkin
is the victim of a real process of mobbing led by his other self and finishes entering a mental hos-
pital. The Student of Prague is, then, an example of narration in which reason and logic are unable
to explain and justify facts. The final prosecution in the streets of the old city symbolizes clearly
the mental disease of the hero, who loses his grip on reality.
Pilar Andrade, "Cinema's Doubles, Their Meaning, and Literary Intertexts" page 4 of 9
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 10.4 (2008): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol10/iss4/8>
Thematic issue New Studies on the Fantastic in Literature. Ed. Asunción López-Varela
On the opposite side we can find texts where the author has chosen a rational explanation. In
these cases the notion of "fantastic" fits in with the definition of the term given by Tzvetan To-
dorov: the fantastic happens when we are not sure if something is real or just imagination. This
point of view is developed mostly in the genre of the thriller and we can find an excellent sample in
Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, based on the French novel D'Entre les morts by Pierre Boileau and
Thomas Narcejac. In the first part of the film a woman called Madeleine (Kim Novak) appears to
be possessed by a dead woman whose portrait she venerates. In the second part Madeleine is
supposedly dead (she fell from a bell tower); another woman, Judy, bearing the same physical
features and a similar voice, is found by the policeman (James Stewart) several months later. The
first phenomenon can be explained resorting to the genes: Madeleine might be a distant relative of
Carlota, the woman in the portrait. But how could we explain the second fact? How could a person
be an exact copy of another, unless she is a twin or a clone? And in this film she is neither of such.
Hitchcock has untangled the mystery with his celebrated cleverness, adding the well-known ending:
Madeleine-Judith are the same woman, having deceived the police pretending to be the wife later
murdered. The female character acts then as a double reincarnation of another woman and as a
double of the murdered wife, but also as her own double because she was indeed the murdered
woman. When the policeman first meets her she is overall a lovely woman; when he meets her
later, she is the double of this lovely dead woman. This implies two delusions for the policeman:
first, he is mistaken when he thinks Madeleine is his client's wife and then he is mistaken when he
thinks Judy is a woman different from Madeleine. In addition, he is wrong at the beginning think-
ing that Madeleine is someone's reincarnation. All these mistakes in the interpretation of facts will
cause the real vertigo, representing the anguish towards an uncontrollable gnoseology. Reality
slips out of the hands of those who want to decipher it with rational weapons.
Eventually, as we
mentioned before, the policeman happens to know the truth: he could not reasonably be deceived
by a woman. This would have been too hard to accept. In any case, double and fantasy are here
used together beneath this perfectly symbolic title, Vertigo, that points not only to a physical dis-
ability or to the somatic display of a psychological trauma, but also to the incapacity to see clearly
and to interpret lucidly the reality. Hitchcock's film deals with an "objective double," that is, a dou-
ble not of the main character who provides the main point of view, but of a secondary character: a
woman (the object of the male glance).
An interesting novel that offers also a plot about an objective double is Bruges-la-Morte, writ-
ten by the Belgian author Georges Rodenbach at the end of the nineteenth century. In this text a
man married to a woman with beautiful red hair loses his wife but meets another one, red-haired
as well. The second woman is then a double of the first, as she is used to replace the former or to
replace the void left by the former. But when the second woman breaks the rule that forbids her
from touching the dead woman's hair, the husband's violence bursts forth and he kills his new wife.
As in Rye's film, the double is a threat that must be excluded from society, in this case because of
a sacrilege she makes unwillingly. Otherwise, the fantastic is set here in a misty town so as to fit
with the doubts about our perceptual ability, thus allowing the rise of mystery.
If we look for a commitment between rational explanation and magic event defying the rules of
logic, both in the same story, we can think of Christopher Nolan's The Prestige. This film is a hy-
brid example of doubles where the audience must accept both the rational and the irrational or
supernatural approaches because there are two doubles who struggle for the best magic trick and
whose rivalry will lead them to create the most amazing trick of disappearance. However, their two
tricks have different mechanisms: one of them is based on help by a twin while the other works
with a magical engine that literally duplicates a person. The theme of duplication invades the plot:
the two magicians have similar aims and goals, even if their moral evolution will be contradictory;
one of the magicians has a twin; the other magician creates clones with his engine and, after each
representation, kills his clone to prevent the trick from being discovered. As a matter of fact, the
natural double helps to build a healthy life, while the artificial double serves self-destruction. Sev-
eral themes related to the Doppelgänger take place through these elements: the part of goodness
and wickedness lying in the human being, the strong union that ties the couple of biological twins,
and also the tragic doom that threatens the double's life. This last feature is not so common, per-
Pilar Andrade, "Cinema's Doubles, Their Meaning, and Literary Intertexts" page 5 of 9
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 10.4 (2008): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol10/iss4/8>
Thematic issue New Studies on the Fantastic in Literature. Ed. Asunción López-Varela
haps it is less frequent than the one that forces the original to withdraw, but it runs along the
whole film from the beginning. In fact, the heap of top-hats spread on the floor, in the first shots,
pictures sadly the handful of clones that will be killed in a savage way, drowned in a fish tank, by
the evil magician (Hugh Jackman). The double is sacrificed in order to keep the secret of the trick,
as in primitive cultures twins were sacrificed to prevent rivalries and disorders that might arise
from their existence.
A special cinematographic case of the double's theme is offered in The Double Life of Vero-
nique by Krzysztof Kieslowsky (1991). The film takes place in an ambiguous way, not in the two
fields of fantasy and reality simultaneously, like in The Prestige, but in a field between them. It
tells us about the life of two similar young girls, Polish and French, respectively (both played by
Irène Jacob), who never meet but have a strange feeling of not being alone, as if they were always
supported by another person. Each girl has the hunch that someone, a thousand kilometres far
away, has the same thoughts and wishes, and even the same glamorous projects for life. Secret
affinities have been established between them that only one, in the end, will discover. The plot
develops in the romantic tradition, but dissolves simultaneously into the modern world serving as
the film's frame and scenery. Another interesting feature in this case is that destiny or a mystic
power binds the two people together for a noble reason: one of them will give the other enough
data to choose correctly in life and to avoid death. The experience of the first will serve the second
to skip a dangerous path. The first girl, the Polish one, dies of a heart attack when she is perform-
ing in a concert: she was not able to learn enough to realize that, for her, a more relaxed job
would have saved her life. Then the second girl, the French one, will receive an anonymous black
shoelace -- belonging in fact to the Polish girl's folder of music notes. The symbolic meaning or the
hidden sense of that shoelace comes up when it is placed on the French girl's cardiogram, exactly
over the line that describes the beats of her heart.
Establishing this link between the two Veronikas, Kieslowsky could also have tried to reflect on
the search for the other, meaning the search for anything that stands out of the solipsistic sphere
of the self. Both characters are confused and unsympathetic human beings, whose only light is the
feeling of not being alone: it seems that only when they discover the other's reality (in the French
girl's case), they do assume their own identity and the existence of the "other." In the same way
as Hitchcock's semantic gist was fixed to the spiral as metaphor, here it is the variety of lenses
and glasses that mediate vision. From the beginning the eye of the camera, identified with one
character or the other, perceives the objects in an inverted, deformed or imperfect way. This does
not happen very frequently but it does so at crucial moments of the film.
These defects of vision
lead, on the one hand, to the mediated perception of the world each girl has, since they see
through the other's vision; and on the other hand, to the idea that each one is the reflection of her
alter ego. The deformed image suggests then the soul's affinity, the mysterious correspondence
between the girls, the Polish one and her double, or vice versa.
In literature the beneficial double seems to be less frequent. A valuable instance could be the
novel The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad. In this book a ship captain has to prove his skills in a
new ship and with a new crew. Unexpectedly a man comes at night to the ship and is hidden by
the captain in his cabin; some clues in the text allow us to suppose that he is the captain's double.
He will stay with the original, hidden from the crew, until the test of competences has been passed,
that is, until the captain has saved everybody from a certain shipwreck. A psychological interpreta-
tion would indicate how, in this novel, the double is a mental creation of the hero, who has a trial
to overcome and needs to prove his authority. The double would be the embodiment of the fear
and weakness he feels. That would also explain the fact that, when the test is over, the double
disappears. It would even allow a Freudian interpretation, because the first time he sees his dou-
ble, the hero thinks that he is a kind of beheaded body, and mutilation/castration, according to
Freud, symbolizes fear of the powerful father (authority), or fear of death. This double is also a
beneficial one, similar to Kieslowsky's example: while he is there, he helps the protagonist not to
feel lonely and relieves the anguish of being under pressure. And when he leaves, his hat, a white
hat on a shadowy sea, helps the captain to dodge the dangerous and symbolic black reefs.
Pilar Andrade, "Cinema's Doubles, Their Meaning, and Literary Intertexts" page 6 of 9
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 10.4 (2008): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol10/iss4/8>
Thematic issue New Studies on the Fantastic in Literature. Ed. Asunción López-Varela
Another and particular group of double stories are those which either offer a rational solution
inside their own fictional universe or those that do not need this solution at all. This happens of
course with the old marvellous tales and legends (which, by the way, would be out of Todorov's
definition of the fantastic) and also with science fiction. In this last genre, robots, cyborgs, and
other replicants
that deal with human dreams and aims and which are, in this sense, doubles, the
more usual alter ego is represented by the clones. Michael Bay's striking utopia (or distopia?) of
society in which a colony of clones are used as organ banks or hired wombs, in his film The Island,
shows the fact that concerns us here: the apprehension that links genetic manipulation that cre-
ates clones and natural manipulation that creates twins. The same reluctance commented on pre-
viously towards two equal brothers lies behind a couple of clones. The horror towards another self
emerges also when someone in confronted with his/her clone, even if he has requested it, as in
this film. The scene in which the original Tom Lincoln (Ewan McGregor) finds his clone Lincoln 6
Echo (his "life insurance") at home illustrates this phenomenon. Again, in this case the original will
react wickedly, trying to kill this harmless
"Doppelgänger despite himself."
On the contrary, in literature the theme of cloning has not been frequently explored, with ex-
ceptions such as J.H. Rosny's L'énigme de Givreuse (1917) and Ken Follet's popular Third Twin
(1997). Yet another theme very close to this one has been more fortunate in literature: supplant-
ing, and many authors dedicated their efforts to write about doubles who supplant originals. In
Plautus's Amphytrion, and his at least thirty-eight different literary versions to Anthony Hope's
Prisoner of Zenda, supplanting often raises questions which are similar to these noted in the for-
mer double stories, although the frame of the text is comedy where tragic nuances are mixed with
comic effects as gods are taking part in the comedy. This happens overall in the scene in which
Jupiter appears before Amphitryon. The god has previously seduced the man's wife, under
Amphitryon's guise, and now wants to mock the harassed husband who cannot understand. His
fury and his amazed attitude do not make us laugh, like in the scene where the servant Sosia
faces his own double. The clone, even if he is a god as in this case, is perceived as negative for he
has lain with the wife. A variation of supplanting might be the changeling, which in West European
folklore occurred when the offspring of a fairy, troll, elf, or other legendary creature that has been
secretly left in the place of a human child. A well-known example occurs in Shakespeare's A Mid-
summer Night's Dream, where Titania and Oberon are fighting over the possession of a changeling
boy, and because of their argument, nature is in upheaval, and all the subsequent action of the
plot ensues. Other examples are Yeats's poem "The Stolen Child," Mew's The Changeling (1916),
Lovecraft's Pickman's Model (1927), among many others. Frequent episodes of changeling occur in
the Star Trek series.
Supplanting literary stories may then be considered not only intertexts of supplanting film
stories, but also intertexts of clone film stories. Perhaps The Prince Ganzgott and the Singer
Halbgott (Arnim, 1818) would be a remote ancestor of The Whole Town is Talking (John Ford,
1935). Also related to the supplanting theme are the stories about soul exchange. The tale The
Distances by Julio Cortázar or Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham by Wells deal with this subject. In
the first story the soul of a rich and bored girl goes to a body of a wretched poor woman; in the
second one, a young student finds himself in the body of a wealthy old man who wants to live
longer. The bored girl will then know the struggle for life; the old man, now young, will die shortly
afterwards in an accident. Cortázar's tale wants to be not only a curious story but also a social
reflection and even a meditation on chances in life. Well's tale is rooted in the romantic tradition
and deals with the human desire to avoid death, at any price.
And there are also texts in which no
rational explication is provided but which do not belong to the science-fiction genre, because they
take place in a perfectly known and ordinary environment. They could be considered "neofantastic"
stories, in the sense Alazraki gives to this word. A baroque example is O Homem Duplicado, a
novel by Saramago. In this text the original, Tertuliano, who lives in a modern city, makes up his
mind to murder his double because he will not let people know that he is not unique -- he is a
moral coward, the narrator says. We can think that Tertuliano is in fact refusing alterity in the big
modern city, otherness represented by his alter ego and by his nice girlfriend; as we know,
contempt for alterity is paradoxically a common phenomenon in the contemporary megapolis.
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Thematic issue New Studies on the Fantastic in Literature. Ed. Asunción López-Varela
Under the label of "double" is not only included autoscopy, which embraces all the types I
discuss here, but also double identity, that is to say, the cases in which the same person bears two
identities inside her/him. The prototype of this kind of texts is Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde I referred to previously and a very similar plot is developed in Théophile
Gautier's Le Chevalier double (1840). Gautier tells us about a knight having two tendencies inside
him, the good and the evil, until the day he can fight and kill the bad tendency embodied in a red
knight. This outline would also be used by Italo Calvino in his work called Il visconte dimezzato
(1952). A more modern version of the psychological combat in a New York dwelling is represented
in The Jolly Corner (1908) by Henry James. This text bears many autobiographical elements but it
can also be interpreted as a psychological adventure about a man who comes home after a long
stay abroad and finds his double in the abandoned family house. He wonders what he would have
been like if he had stayed there instead of going away and concludes that he would have been like
his double, a tragic and sad man. The process of going through the other virtual life (embodied in
the ghost-double) helps him to understand that he made the correct choice. As we can see,
doubling very often means a descensus ad inferos, providing in James's case the strength to bear
the rest of his life, and to find the woman he loves. This plot is interesting to me because, even if
it is not a pure example of double identity, it deals with the virtual possibilities that lie in a human
destiny and reflects on the nostalgia or the guilt left by non-accomplished possibilities.
In cinema, the most famous film about the double identity is perhaps Psycho, an unforgettable
analysis of a multiple personality disorder. But as I mention at the beginning of my paper, I am
not focusing on stories in which the double is a clinical case, for they do not wholly belong to the
fantastic. Other interesting films such as Primal fear (George Hoblit, 1996) or, more recently, Un-
known (Simon Brand, 2006), deal with similar concerns but must also be placed outside the fan-
tastic. On the contrary, plenty of fantastic stories indeed are stories about possession. The history
of film offers many interesting examples, from Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of
Dr. Mabuse) by Lang
to Session 9 by Anderson. They are all significant because they use cine-
matographic resources to solve problems that concern the fact that one person (one image) is
really two (although the same image). Perhaps Hoblit's provides the wittiest solution in his film
Fallen. The first important feature in this film is the methods used to create an atmosphere of real-
ity in which the supernatural event will take place. These methods come from realist literature
which developed close descriptions of the environment, extradiegetic or homodiegetic narrators,
common and real places, allusions to quotidian life, and so on. Hoblit uses similar resources and
locates the action in a New York or a slum in the U.S.; he also profits from the classic frame pro-
vided by police stories. Perceived naturally by the audience, the presence of the police, the night,
the wet streets, and the sound of sirens replace descriptions and banal dialogues. In this real
world of a conventional reality arises the unexpected. The most important feature of the film is the
use of specific cinema resources to solve identity problems, as suggested before. Hoblit uses
voice-over in an original way to make the audience think that this voice belongs to the character
on the screen, when it really belongs to a kind of spirit whose comments run all over the film. We
could presume, then, that the policeman (Hobbes, interpreted by Denzel Washington) who is tell-
ing the story, is guilty or even that the plot is about corruption. The end shows that two identities
have to be dissociated: the devil's spirit who makes the comments and the policeman, who is try-
ing to kill the first. Although if the dissociation is not easy to discover, Hoblit has added another
element which gives provides clue to help understanding: the image. Increasingly, he introduces a
deformed image every time the spirit looks around and every time the camera looks through him.
The difference between this anomalous glance and the normal one gets clear when the spirit pos-
sesses a cat and the camera has to approach the floor (a technique which could be related to the
great story of possession in Kubrick's Shining).
At this point I cannot but mention the master of queer worlds, the creator of disconcerting and
nightmare atmospheres, David Lynch. Obviously the double is an obsession to him and remains
tightly related to these odd worlds. Like Hoblit, he leans sometimes on a thriller to start the story.
In Twin Peaks, for instance, two murders start an enquiry that will end abruptly when a very dif-
ferent plot begins. And we can add other techniques of characteristic of fantastic and horror cin-
Pilar Andrade, "Cinema's Doubles, Their Meaning, and Literary Intertexts" page 8 of 9
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Thematic issue New Studies on the Fantastic in Literature. Ed. Asunción López-Varela
ema, such as music, range restriction, quick zooms on an object or face, adequate lighting effects
or intelligent chiaroscuros, the climate created at night, etc. Lynch has also a very personal tech-
nique to create supernatural situations: he associates two images, apparently disconnected, that
can be inserted in an ominous world parallel to the real one. It is not exactly the equivalent of a
literary metaphor (there are indeed filmic metaphors of this kind) but of an irrational analogy used
with a clearly fantastic aim. The film maker, like the surrealist poet, wants to introduce supra-
reality into the real world of the plot. We can see this trick in, for instance, the scene with the old
couple in Mulholland Drive. The way they laugh after they have seen off the young protagonist is
exaggerated and by no means motivated by the previous events. This laugh, in fact, connects with
the unreal realm, the pure fantastic, represented also with the usual symbols of Lynch's work: blue
objects, the theatre, the dwarf, etc. However, the matrix of Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks is the
double. In both movies the two main characters are women, different and complementary.
Throughout the story they will become connected and, particularly in the first film, the couple ap-
pears to reflect a twin relation. That is the reason why when they split up one of them must die --
tragedy is always prowling around in twins' stories. Lesbianism in this film seems to subsumed
under the double's theme, and from there it leads, paradoxically, to a reflection about unity, be-
cause attraction for the other means at last attraction for oneself, a narcissist tendency and, as a
result, death-drive, out of the reality. We can also point here, however briefly, to another impor-
tant duplication: the more intellectual one made between the author (the real man) and his alter
ego (the writer or director). Borges in literature, Cukor in cinema (A Double Life, 1947) have given
good examples of the complexity of this variation, and some decades ago, King wrote The Dark
Half, anchored in the fantastic and quickly adapted to the screen by George A. Romero (1993).
In conclusion, the double is a fertile theme included in the fantastic that has been chosen by
many directors and writers to deal with our fears and our anguish but also to embody our desires,
although sometimes is has been a helping character as well. The presence of a double is perceived
in most cases as a threat, an uncanny appearance, although sometimes the Doppelgänger can
help. In many case he forces to question the rules of our ordinary judgement; his potential as a
fantastic element rests perhaps on this effect and that is possibly the reason why he has inspired
so many directors and writers in contemporary Western culture.
Works Cited
Alazraki, Jaime. "¿Qué es lo neofantástico?" Mester 19.2 (1990): 21-33.
Anderson, Brad, dir. Session 9. London: October Films, 2001.
Anderson, Brad, dir. The Machinist. Madrid: Filmax Group, 2004.
Bay, Michel, dir. The Island. Hollywood: DreamWorks SGK, 2005.
Cukor, George, dir. A Double Life. Hollywood: Garson Kanin Productions, 1947.
Fincher, David, dir. Fight club. New York: Art Linson Productions, 1999.
Freud, Sigmund. "Beyond the Pleasure Principle." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1964. Vol. 18, 7-64.
Freud, Sigmund. "Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycho-
logical Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1964. Vol. 23, 275-78.
Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.
Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1964. Vol. 17, 217-56.
Girard, René. La Violence et le sacré. Paris: Grasset, 1972.
Hitchcock, Alfred dir. Vertigo. Hollywood: Alfred J. Hitchcock, 1958.
Hoblit, George, dir. Fallen. Los Angeles: Atlas Entertainment, 1998.
Jung, Carl Gustav. "The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious." Two Essays on Analytical Psychology.
Collected Works of C.G. Jung. By. C.G. Jung. London: Routledge, 1973. Vol. 7, 127-241.
Kieslowsky, Krzysztof, dir. The Double Life of Veronique. Montréal: Sideral Productions, 1991.
Lang, Fritz. Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse. Berlin: Nero-Film AG, 1933.
Lynch, David, dir. Twin Peaks. New York: Linch/Frost Productions, 1990.
Nolan, Christopher, dir. The Prestige. New York: Newmarket Productions, 2006.
Rank, Otto. The Double: A Psychoanalytic study. 1919. Trans. and ed. Harry Tucker. Chapel Hill: U of North
Carolina P, 1971.
Rye, Stellan, and Paul Wegener, dir. Der Student von Prag. Berlin: Deutsche Bioscop Gmbh., 1913.
Schumacher, Joel, dir. Bad Company. Buena Vista: Touchstone Pictures, 2002.
Author's profile: Pilar Andrade teaches French literature and comparative literature at Complutense University
Madrid. Andrade's book publications include El universo poético en la obra de Pierre Emmanuel (1993), La
Pilar Andrade, "Cinema's Doubles, Their Meaning, and Literary Intertexts" page 9 of 9
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 10.4 (2008): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol10/iss4/8>
Thematic issue New Studies on the Fantastic in Literature. Ed. Asunción López-Varela
filosofía de Paul Valéry (2000), and Madame de Staël (2002) and her more recent articles in journals include
"Quelques aspects de la liberté et de l'éthique du devoir dans les romans hugoliens," Thélème. Revista
Complutense de Estudios Franceses (2001), "Grandes voces de la poesía romántica: Lamartine, Vigny,
Musset," liceus.com (2002), and "Música para Maeterlinck: de Debussy a Dukas," Palabra y música (Ed. UCM,
2006). In her recent work, Andrade studies cinema and literature and has published "Desestructuración y
estructuración en cine y literatura: Robbe-Grillet y Godard," Percepción y realidad (2007) and "La resolución en
el cine: el ejemplo de la doble identidad," Escritura de imagen (2008). E-mail: <
pandrade@emp.ucm.es>
