Double Vision

Films mentioned: Vertigo (1958; dir. Alfred Hitchcock), I Walked With a Zombie (1943; dir. Jacques Tourneur), Chocolat (1988; dir. Claire Denis), Trouble Every Day (2001; dir. Claire Denis), Cat People (1942; dir. Jacques Tourneur), My Twentieth Century (1989; dir. Ildikó Enyedi) & The Doll (1919; dir. Ernst Lubitsch).

The Double has been explored since the beginning of cinema as a narrative device, a visual idea, as a formal device and a thematic concern - from Metropolis to The Double Life of Veronique. The Double, as a character, rears its many heads in narrative through forms like the doppelganger, the twin, the clone, a reflection, the ghost…

The Double has its origin in myth and folk tales, from romulus-remus and the two headed Janus, - an externalised opposite being - later becoming an internalised other by the time of 18th century literature as seen in Faust and Frankenstein. The simple, moralistic opposites of good and evil, light and darkness, self and other are mutated into the ambiguous dualities of schizophrenia and uncertainty. The internalisation of the other - the outside, the evil - allowed artists to toe the line between the acceptable and unspeakable where the motif of the Double has been richly mined to question the status quo by seemingly upholding the dominant culture but subverting it in its reflection.

The Double as the manifestation of desire, is seen, in arguably the greatest films about doubles, Vertigo - a film about a detective’s obsession over a woman, claimed to be mentally ill due to an almost supernatural obsession over a dead woman, to the extent of trying to replicating her suicide, and so the detective’s object of obsession falls to her death from a bell tower, resulting in his obsession over a living person getting replaced by the obsession over a dead woman, only to be later revealed, in the style typical to the twists and turns of genre, through a seemingly unrelated doppelganger, that the object of obsession was an act, a double designed by another man to be an object, leading to an unspooling of the thread, a repetition of the events of narrative and actions of character, its reflection commenting on what came before, the detective now the author of his fantasies, forcing a doppelganger to be a double - from her hairstyle to her falling down the bell tower of the Mission San Juan Bautista.

Jacques Tourneur and Claire Denis are an interesting counterpoint - both born in France (several decades apart) but the former emigrated to America, becoming a reliable director of high quality “B-pictures”, while the latter spent the her childhood growing up in colonial French Africa, where her father was a civil servant, later becoming one of most esteemed and innovative filmmakers in the contemporary french cinema. Although their films differ in intentions and style, technique and mode of filmmaking they do have in common several themes and ideas.

I Walked with a Zombie, a film that was one of the high points of suggestive horror and anti-colonialist thought unseen before in Hollywood, especially from someone working in the industrial factory of low budget films. One of the famous string of horror films produced by Val Lewton (which includes Cat People), it was not seen for the atmospheric and startling film it was and still is. The Jane Eyre inspired plot posits the arrival of a new nurse on the Caribbean island to take care of the half-dead, half-alive, mysterious and ethereal daughter-in-law, now zombie-like after a tropical fever, of a decaying family unit. In Jane Eyre, Jane - the honest and clean governess- the symbol then of all good and moral, replaces the psychotic and savage Bertha, implied to be of a mixed race, as Rochester’s wife. These simple delineations are done away with in I Walked with a Zombie, where the white family, themselves a foreigner to the land and people, residing in a ghostly mansion, are descendants of the slavers who owned the sugar plantation, find themselves in a romantic quadrangle, four people, two couples, each on opposite sides where supernatural events break through the fabric of science and rationality while the poetry of eerie exoticism is replaced by visions of colonial exploitation.

Claire Denis’ debut film, Chocolat, also approached the effects of colonial legacy albeit in a highly autobiographical and nostalgic manner that forms a contrast to I Walked With A Zombie. Her films continuously revolve around the exploration of violence, desire, sex, and individuals as an outsider. The characters struggle with themselves and with how they fit in, and generally are themselves “the other”. “France”, the character’s name, reminisces about her childhood growing up in a bungalow in a remote region in French Cameroon, where her father served as a colonial administrator. It tracks the uncrossable boundary between the African “houseboy” and her French mother, the desire present between them and their inability to act upon it.

Trouble Every Day is an unconventional exploration of desire and violence, how they feed on each other, like the coiled descent of Eros and Thanatos. The film intertwines the stories of two couples, or rather the afflictions of two persons: one woman consumed by a compulsion to commit acts of violence during moments of intense passion, and the other struggling to control this impulse and his deteriorating mental state. With shades of Jane Eyre (and a subversion of it) and vampire films, Trouble Every Day defies traditional narrative structure, relying heavily on visuals, atmosphere, and sensory experience to convey the visceral and explicit portrayal of both physical and psychological appetites, showing the thin line separating intimacy and fury.

Cat People is a greater distillation of a foreigner in a foreign land - Irene, a serbian immigrant, finds herself trapped in a marriage to the dull, uncaring, all-american Oliver who sends her to a dismissive psychiatrist because he can’t deal with her anxiety, which stems from her fear of her own erotic impulses, believing that consummating her marriage will result in a bloody aftermath. Despite its low-budget origins, Cat People relies on the suggestive powers of shadows, constantly threatening, implying but never revealing her horrid transformation into the other - Irene’s terror (and our’s - the audience - as we are never without sympathy for the outsider) of turning into a panther when she orgasms (perhaps a gift from censorship laws) and the mysterious, exotic foreigner who is seen as a threat to decent folk, ends up becoming the victim.

The Double is a common trope in comedy films - the potential for misunderstanding and characters pretending to be an other is perfect for farcical situations. Actors playing a double role are a fixture seen in the next two films - My Twentieth Century and The Doll.

My Twentieth Century is a playful, ironic and erotic story that starts with the birth of technology and modernity, with Edison showing off his brand new, alien, almost magical devices, that coincides with another smaller miracle - the birth of twins - Dora and Lilli. Orphaned as children, they are separated on a stormy Christmas night and grow into different women, one into a pleasure-seeking siren while the other becomes a chaste, radical suffragette. Z gets involved with both, not knowing the existence of their twin sister, noticing the different personality but not questioning the appearance. It's a film nostalgic for a by-gone era, back in the early twentieth century where mystery and wonder could exist, about the hope for a utopian future and encroaching modernity, made at the end of the same century when the autumn of nations was in full swing. Fascinated with silent cinema, the medium that defined the era, it is inspired by it and pays homage to an art that no longer exists.

The Doll is an early silent film from Ernst Lubitsch, perhaps the most significant of his german work, having seeds of what would come later in his hollywood years. However, made in 1919, it does oddly possess some qualities of the then ongoing German expressionism - stylised sets with forced perspective backdrops, and slanted frames, even though it is essentially a comedy film about an effete man marrying a sex doll (or rather, a woman pretending to be one), with the characteristic zaniness and mischievous wit that came to define The Lubitsch touch.