Back to Back 22 - The Double Double Bill

Contrasting two 2013 neo-expressionist films about doppelgängers

The Double 2013 - director Richard Ayoade, writer Avi Korine
Enemy 2013 - director Denis Villeneuve, writer Javier Gullón

Genre: Expressionist doppelganger comedy (Ayoade)/psychological thriller (Villeneuve)

Recommended snack: All-day breakfast with coffee and beer - just get me my damn food!

Recommended musical interlude: "Shadow Man" by David Bowie [Demo Mix]

I can tell you that having a double walking around is a profoundly unsettling experience. Uncanny, a feeling Sigmund Freud described as “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar” — but is suddenly alien. The uncanniness provoked by doppelgangers is particularly acute because the thing that becomes unfamiliar is you.
Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2023)

Thus Naomi Klein talking about her "big-haired doppelganger" Naomi Wolf. When I myself had a doppelgänger, some twenty years ago, it was different from that, more hilarious and less traumatic. Maybe I'm a less sensitive soul, but my own reaction to having a double was amusement at the bizarre circumstance of it rather than a dread gaze into the abyss of horror.

It started with people approaching me on the street and asking me to sing them a sea-shanty. Not exactly a sea-shanty as we know it in the English-speaking world, but a havanera. I live in Barcelona, and in Catalan culture there's a relic of the old colonial tradition of sailors' songs called havaneres, after La Havana the capital of Cuba. They are typically sung in the summer in concerts held on boats in the harbours of fishing villages. A highly nautical folksong tradition indeed. And my double was a singer of these old seadog ditties.

"Sing us a havanera".
"Sorry, I don't sing havaneres, I don't even know any."
"Yes you do, we saw you singing with your group last weekend."

But by this time it would become clear that I'm a foreigner, and so deeply indigenous is the Catalan folklore behind havaneres that it’s taken for granted that a foreigner would never sing them. So they were reluctantly convinced by my outsider status, though there was always that sidelong glance of suspicion, a sense that somehow I was tricking them by not being the sailor-singer guy.

This went on for some time and I always expected to see the nautical singer one day, a mirror image of me perhaps, but with a little sailor cap and Popeye-style corncob pipe. I wondered if I should learn to sing a couple of havaneres to mitigate the awkwardness of these encounters. Alas, it was not to be. I moved out of the district and the sailor-crooner never manifested in the flesh. If I were a better writer, like Naomi Klein, I would do a whole bit about the uncanny meeting between us. Sorry.

So rather than the alien frightening trip into the uncanny reported by Naomi Klein, I experienced instead a trivial folksong misunderstanding with some associated social embarrassment. Still, to be fair to Ms Klein, her doppelgänger was a second-wave feminist turned Alex Jones collaborator, so perhaps the sense of sinister dread is fully justified in that case. Moreover, she never claims that Naomi Wolf ("the Other Naomi") is her literal double, and in fact other than being female, white and middle-aged, they are not really that much alike. Instead, Wolf is more like an avatar espousing her own views distorted through a glass darkly:

My own Shock Doctrine research has gone through the looking glass and is now gazing back at me as a network of fantastical plots that cast the very real crises we face — from Covid to climate change to Russian military aggression - as false flag attacks, planted by the Chinese Communists/corporate globalists/Jews.

Klein is borrowing the tropes of Gothic horror, and psychotherapeutic theory (Freud and Jung) that piggybacks off that, to create a political and personal memoir about experiencing her own activism turned against her and us.

Such was not the case with the lookalike of mine who was going around singing sea-shanties while wearing my face. Though it could in theory create a sense of uncanny horror, it could equally provoke a feeling of social unease and a cringe of embarrassment. And it is that feeling that predominates in the first of the doppelgänger films today.

There is a style that we could call neo-expressionist or 21st Century Expressionist, which is quickly becoming the dominant style in art films today. Though it fractures the realist paradigm (which is still very much alive and well, by the way), it's differentiated from surrealism in that there is a narrative through-line, an A to B to C, which is fairly easy to follow.

The realism of the waking world is disrupted by all kinds of dream-like effects, but psychological realism still holds sway. Characters have motivations and actions have consequences that can be understood. The most critically and popularly successful films with this approach in recent years are Poor Things (2023), Beau is Afraid (2022) and Titane (2021).

My Letterboxd List of Neo-Expressionist Films in the Contemporary Period

This style has always been prominent in the horror genre, but for many years it took a back seat in "serious" drama and comedy fare. Terry Gilliam kept the flame alive, as did Charlie Kaufman, though his later work might better be characterised as "full surrealist" in the sense that the narrative becomes fully fragmented and the identity of characters highly unstable. David Lynch oscillates between the two poles of expressionist-surrealist, his masterpiece TV detective series Twin Peaks (1990-91 and 2017) showing a progression from a modified realism at the start to full-on dream-state by the final series.

Defining a film as one or another style is not a sterile exercise in categorisation. If something is expressionist but not surrealist then meaningful statements can be made about the characters and their reaction to various situations, as unreal as those situations may be. If it is surrealist then the very existence of a character as such is in doubt. Lynch's Inland Empire (2007) is an example of the latter where the identity of the protagonist is fluid and shifts unnervingly. The reaction to such a character has to be different to that of a unitary character who lives in a dream-like world of shifting reality but is nevertheless one recognizable person.

The atmosphere of such films is often described as Kafkaesque, and the description is apt enough, but it also could be described as Poe-esque or Gogolesque. For it was Nikolai Gogol who created the fantasy-comedy-satire working from inside the realist camp, with his story "The Nose" (1836). The story tells of a nose detached from its owner which then goes on to compete in the career race with that owner, striving to rise through the ranks of an office hierarchy ahead of the noseless man who struggles to keep up.

The silliness of having a nose with ambitions to success inside a professional career structure is entirely the point of the tale. But once we accept the weirdness of that premise, everything else follows with an adherence to social-documentary realism, almost the defining hallmark of the expressionist realm.

SIDEBAR ON GOTHIC DOUBLES IN LITERATURE

Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, Siebenkäs (1796)
ETA Hoffmann, "The Sandman" (1817)
Nikolai Gogol, "The Nose" (1836)
Edgar Allen Poe, "William Wilson" (1839)
Feodor Dostoevsky, The Double (1846)
Wilkie Collins, Woman in White (1860)
R.L. Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
Vladimir Nabokov, Despair (1936)
Jorge Luís Borges, "The Other" (1972)
Jose Saramago, The Double (2002)
Stephen King, The Outsider (2018)

Feodor Dostoevsky was motivated to write an early novel called The Double (1846) in response to the Gogol story. In this story a low-level office worker with poor social skills is failing to impress his superiors despite high-quality work. Suddenly a double appears, with all the confidence and social grace that the original lacks. Now the two, original and duplicate, are competing for career and romantic success.

Which brings us to the Richard Ayoade adaptation of the Dostoevsky novel, written by Avi Korine (brother to the better-known Harmony Korine). Ayoade is famous as Moss from the TV sitcom The I.T. Crowd , and to fans of weird horror parody he is Lerner from Matthew Holness's Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. His great success as a TV entertainer and personality may well be a benefit to him personally, but if it means a distraction from film ventures it's a sad loss to cinema, to judge by this highly effective dark comedy.

But it is possible that a film version of The Semplica-Girl Diaries, a kind of modified retelling of The Handmaid's Tale, directed by Ayoade, may see the light of day in future. That is if Ayoade hasn't gone and cancelled himself by endorsing the book of Graham Linehan, former colleague (writer of The I.T. Crowd ) and now vociferous anti-trans activist. Who knows? Maybe the career-torching alignment of Ayoade with Linehan may well bring space for the former to work on film projects without the distraction of any more TV shows to host.

Let's cast aside all this wordy prolegomenon and get down to brass tacks. What's Ayoade’s film The Double like? The answer is that it's entirely successful at what it proposes for itself, which is to be a mordantly funny black comedy with melancholy touches. Ayoade's direction is quite excellent, using framing and editing to create a nightmarish world of grim and grimy squalor - what in the tvtropes.org community is called a "Crapsack World". Ugly acid-yellow lighting is used in nearly every frame, a trait it shares with the other film considered here.

Impossible to be any more yellow than this, you might imagine

The comedy in this film ranges from uncomfortable awkwardness creating a rictus of embarrassed amusement to full-on belly laughs, particularly in the way the dialogue is sometimes such rapid-fire merciless attack on any concept of sympathy. But the diloague doesn't always sparkle and for many stretches the camerawork is much wittier than the script.

What really makes it shine as comic material are the performances, from the strong central pairing of Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska to the many superb supporting actors such as Cathy Moriarty as a flinty waitress, Wallace Shawn as office manager Papadopoulos and Noah Taylor as a sleazy office coworker. Tim Key is also fantastic in a tiny role as a literally grasping hospital manager, holding out his hand in greedy anticipation of emptying the protagonist's wallet. Later he is at the centre of one of the few really solid laugh-out-loud moments.

But the one who amused me most is the hilariously weird Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, whose fishy stare and uncanny look is chillingly delightful both as a security guard and a doctor - his inclusion in these two roles another duplication of the double motif of the protagonist. I suspect that walk-on roles glimpsed passing through the scenery are duplicates of the main characters, and I had the sense that a briefly-seen cleaning lady was a double of Wasikowska's Hannah.

Of course the motif of copies and mirrors is repeated at intervals throughout the film. It would be an inexcusable failure of Symbolism 101 not to include them, but the film never loses sight of what the doppelgänger really represents as a core psychological theme.

It is the Jungian Shadow, that side of us that is unacceptable to our conscious self. In the case of Simon, a man whose docile and timid nature is so well conveyed by Eisenberg, the Shadow self is grasping, manipulative and aggressive - but also charismatic where the original is a forgettable doormat.

The cruelty of being upstaged by a more charming and ruthless version of yourself is underlined by the way Hannah falls for the double James, and her unknowing cruelty does not impede our sympathy for her as a person, a tribute to the depth of Wisakowska's performance.

—-INTERMISSION—-

Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat
- Hypocrite lecteur - mon semblable - mon frère!

Reader, you know this squeamish monster well
- hypocrite reader - my double - my twin !
Charles Baudelaire, "To the Reader", Flowers of Evil

A film in which very little indeed actually happens, but a mood of agonizing suspense and sickening tension builds remorselessly, keeping the viewer - if willing to go along for the ride and not resist the dream logic with too much craving for rationalisation - in a state of increasing queasy dread. It is Villeneuve's Vertigo (1958), a psychological thriller about doubles, sexual pathology and obsession, with the Toronto of Cronenberg's early movies as a backdrop.

What is it about Metro Toronto? If you go there it seems a normal enough place, too wannabe American perhaps, but essentially a banal Western urban anywhere. When filmed by Cronenberg and Villeneuve it becomes the landscape of alienation and uncanny lifelessness. Perhaps it is that urban could-be-anywhere quality that so resonated with J.G. Ballard in the suburbs of Staines and Shepperton. In any case it lacks the glamour of Hitchcock's San Francisco, and Villeneuve drains it of any visual attraction it may have by filming it in a gray-yellow mist which is the toxic colour of hopeless ennui.

Adam, the first of the characters portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal, is the perfect inhabitant of this sickly-yellow alienated space. He's a hsitory lecturer in a university and his theme is the Marx quotation about Hegel's repetition of history: “Once as tragedy, and again as farce.” We see several repetitions of his draggy life, drained of all emotion or joy: repeating the same political themed lesson to students, less coherent and convinced each time; meeting his girlfriend for unengaged sex.

When a colleague asks him if he likes films, he replies that he needs something to cheer him up. So he rents a physical DVD from a physical shop - what weird times way back in 2013, when physical media existed! And this film launches him on his strange voyage to find his physical double, the actor Nicholas Saint Claire who is really Anthony Claire. And possibly his brother, his rival, and even himself, but most assuredly his enemy.

From the moment he wakes from a dream - a brilliant moment showing how in dreams we recall details that we've missed in our waking lives - and recognizes the double Anthony appearing ridiculously as a bellhop in a walk-on part from the film, the music effectively signals, and creates, a building-up of dread.

Villeneuve had in those times a wonderful relationship to music, creating a wide range of emotional affects. This has all but disappeared in the present with his adherence to the bombastic Hans Zimmer, who only seems to know one affect: gripping rising tension and white-knuckle stridency. All other musical textures are ignored. This is not the case in Enemy where the Daniel Bensi/Saunder Jurriaans score effectively works to create a slow burn of horror. These composers are unknown while Zimmer is a worldwide star. Go figure.

The film is cannily scripted by Javier Gullón, with a structure that effectively mirrors itself. At the exact midpoint, the two men meet in a hotel room, as if for a seedy tryst. Adam comes in alone and waits. Up to now it has been him with the agency, his desires driving the plot forward. But the encounter unnerves him and he leaves, and Anthony is left alone now in the room. From now on he will be doing the stalking, his will be the desire that drives everything on.

It is worth recalling at all times that the film is not titled The Double as is the source novel by Jose Saramago (which was sort of taken in that year by our previous entry anyway), but Enemy. This is to say that the film wants to underline that a non-integrated person - in Jungian terms, a Self that has not assimilated its Shadow and thereby brought a degree of control over its more uncontrollable desires and addictions - is an enemy to itself.

My Letterboxd List of Doppelgänger Films

This is the case both of Anthony, who seems to have compulsive obsessions with the spider-squishing sex club as well as cheating on his spouse, and Adam, whose alienation and ennui is at the terminal stage - notice the weary way he sighs as he collapses onto the bench beside Helen. A man who hates himself and his life, one of the most dangerous things in existence. They are enemies both of themselves and finally of each other and, not coincidentally, of the women in their lives.

It's interesting how the women in relationships with these men, Mélanie Laurent as Mary who has a casual uncommunicative relationship with Adam, and Sarah Gadon as Helen, Anthony's wife who becomes the locus of both desire and terror, are almost exact duplicates of each other too. Blonde, slim and attractive, with a tendency to wear high-heels. They also, perhaps not accidentally, both resemble the protagonist's wife in Cronenberg's Crash (1997), which is set in the same urban anomie of Metro Toronto.

Meanwhile Isabella Rosellini as The Mother has a small but significant role in the developing enigma. When she meets her son for lunch she seems to be berating Anthony for his dream of being "a third-rate actor", but on the phone she is shocked at the squalor of her son's apartment ("how can you live like that?"). Notably, Anthony's apartment is well-appointed and tidy, beneficiary of a woman's touch, while Adam's flat is squalid and gross, prompting a similar remark from Anthony when he forces his way in: "Is this how you live?"

So is she Adam's mother, or Anthony's? Or the mother of both? There's a realistic narrative that you might construct of this hint where these two really are twins separated at birth, though in fact to go there will add nothing at all to the story.

There are so many mysteries in this film, scenesthat at first glance might be taken as dreams or fantasies but apparently have a diegetic reality, such as the secret voyeurs' club which is entered with a key. It is apparently at first a fantasy of either Anthony or Adam, or both, but Anthony's doorman later reveals that he has been granted entry and "can't stop thinking about it".

The surface-level action in that place is so bizarre but at the same time so innocuous - cruelty to arachnids not generally frowned upon by many folk - that it almost has to be standing for something else, as many believe is the case in the parallel secret-club sequence from Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999). It’s also notable that though the men there seem totally absorbed in the floorshow, there is no joy in it. If such transgression brings no delight, no jouissance, then what the hell is it even for?

There are other puzzles too. There are the political references to a dictatorship eliminating individuality. There are the spiders seen all over: in sexualised images of women and in a monstrous Louise Bourgeois-type figure menacing the city, in the cobwebby tracery of tramlines and shower screens.

And above all there is the elusive significance of the final image of the film, which has spawned a veritable cottage industry of "Ending Explained" videos on YouTube. There must be a deep signifiance to this scene, right?

But just as Villeneuve introduced a talking fish as an alienating device in Maelström (2000), the symbolism of this and other “spider moments” need not necessarily be anything more than a technique for alienating and unsettling the viewer. If nothing else that final image serves as a way to cement the film in the memory.

The central symbol - that of the mirror image double - continues to occupy the centre of the narrative. It is the Shadow, the Other, the Brother, and the Hypocrite Voyeur.

It is our very own being, and if not embraced as a friend it can become our greatest Enemy.