From posh ‘dupes’ to literary doubles: why doppelgangers are everywhere now | books

‘hAnd he was after me. It always has been. Why else would he have been targeting me for months? Sneak into my apartment, my supposed safe space? The question was what did he want from me? Who do I mean by me?” Isabel Weidner’s fifth novel, As If, begins with the meeting of two ragtag strangers, Aubrey and Lindsay. Lindsay showed up on Aubrey’s doorstep and Aubrey asked him in, noting with painful curiosity how similar they were. “He had dark brown hair not unlike mine,” Aubrey tells us. “My unnoticed eyes were looking at me.” With this unsettling opening, the tone is set for an unsettling read, one that I found all the more strange because it overlaps worryingly with my new book, Lean Cat, Savage Cat.

Both books draw their protagonists from the lower rungs of the entertainment industries, both use the language of fashion in deliberate ways, and both place the opulent myths of artistic life in direct conflict with the realities of housing insecurity and wage instability. Both novels deal with how unprocessed grief can break the soul, and most importantly, both focus on an ambiguous pair of dualities. It was also published on the same day. All of this makes me wonder: Does my book have its own counterpart?

From standard spyware, to conspiracy theorists who insist that Melania Trump has been replaced by an impersonator, we are in a moment of profound paranoia. I know I’m not alone in experiencing the scary feeling that things are not quite as they seem. It is appropriate that the doppelganger figure exists throughout contemporary culture, through books, fashion, and films.

This duo has haunted the screens since the early days of cinema, appearing first in The Student of Prague (1913) and then in titles such as Rebecca, Vertigo and Black Swan. Recent horror films The Substance and Get Out put a new spin on things, mining themes of identity and celebrity. Sinners, with its twin brothers played by Michael B. Jordan, won three Baftas last month, and Famous, which stars Zac Efron as the Hollywood heartthrob and his obsessed fan, is now in post-production.

On the runway, Kate Moss’ dead star, Denise Onona, walks in shows and fronts campaigns “as” Kate, while H&M has created “twins” of real models for its ads. At Berlin Fashion Week, GmbH presented a fall/winter collection called Doppelgänger.

This spectral character is present throughout contemporary fiction as well. In Deborah Levy’s Blue August, a concert pianist is chased by shadow selves. In Rebecca F. Kuang’s Yellowface, a writer who is an online thief is haunted by the ghost of the girl who really wrote her book. In Toby Coventry’s new release He’s the Devil, a grumpy bartender eyes his new roommate who’s also a body-hopping demon.

If we move away from the arts, we see similar phenomena. A culture of scams is thriving, with shoppers talking enthusiastically about how easy (and cheaply) it is to buy products that are not clearly counterfeit, but imitations of the original. The copy is developing an independent currency. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re also seeing a bumper crop of what might politely be called political duplicity. Empty promises to ordinary workers mask a policy of transferring wealth to the world’s richest men, and freedom of expression has become a strategy used by the powerful to silence and harass minorities. Not to mention Donald Trump’s new Peace Council, launched shortly after Pete Hegseth’s renamed War Department.

Online, we are equipped with our digital doubles, posting edited images of curated lives that we don’t actually live. But this is only our public face. Most people use the “close friends” setting on Instagram as well, and many also have a secondary “finsta” setting (fake Instagram) designed to share content that is considered very personal.

However, as we fragment the Internet, we are simultaneously being cloned. Data mining allows big tech companies to effectively create a second persona for every internet user in order to better track their behavior and target their advertising. On dating apps, catfishing is rampant: users upload photos of other people or create completely fake profiles, whether out of a sense of insecurity or for more sinister reasons. The growing prevalence of online conspiracies and the accompanying obsession with body doubles and false flag attacks express the same underlying anxiety. As Naomi Klein said: “Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong, but they often get the emotions right.”

Offline, beauty experts are relentlessly coming up with new ways for us all to look beautifully matched. It seems like every week, another famous woman shows up on the red carpet, releasing a new face that makes her look like every other famous woman. A distinctive nose like Anjelica Huston’s or a smile like Shelley Duvall’s has now been reshaped into something more discreet: a face capable of advertising handbags or speaking dialogue on a second screen. Such procedures are no longer limited to Hollywood stars either. The sight of Mar-a-Lago’s face shows how among civilians this deliberately artificial look also generates countless duplicate faces.

However, this endlessly multiplying world is not new. The doppelgänger first appeared in Jean-Paul’s novel Siebenkäs, published in three volumes between 1796 and 1797, and has remained with us as an almost constant companion ever since. From gothic touchstones like Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and the private memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg, to modern classics like Nabokov’s Despair and Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Ray, the duo has transcended every trend and appears in almost every genre.

In these novels, the duo often functions as the embodiment of unacceptable and inexpressible desires and impulses. Brontë gives Jane Eyre an anime character, in the form of Bertha Mason, a shadow figure capable of expressing what Jane cannot. Conversely, Poe’s debauched doppelganger, William Wilson, tries to stop him from committing further evil deeds – but ends up dying. In Hogg’s dual novel, the repressed but self-righteous protagonist, Robert, is led to damnation by Satan, who appears exactly like him.

Other writers have sought to repurpose the double as something other than the sublimation that has gone awry. Nabokov’s protagonist, Hermann, is convinced that the man he shot dead is his doppelgänger. Unfortunately, the two do not seem alike, and Despair is ultimately a novel about blindness to the truth. The anti-hero of Spark’s Ballad of Peckham Rye, Dougal Douglas (who sometimes goes by Douglas Douglas), is his own counterpart. He is in Peckham not to show people the true color of their souls nor to do their dirty work for them, but to sow chaos among their dreams and aspirations. The duo is now a recognizable stock character that is endlessly flexible.

Freud’s seminal essay Das Unheimliche (1919) posited that this nightmarish figure is a product of our inability to fully understand our own mortality. Freud writes that the eternal soul and its promise of eternal life allow us to overcome the fear of death. Only this fear comes back to haunt us in mirror images, in twins, and of course in doppelgangers.

I was dismayed to read “as if” because it seemed to say that despite what I knew about the process, Weidner and I were working on the same project at the same time. Maybe they were standing on my shoulders when I wrote (or I was standing on their shoulders). Maybe we are the same person.

This type of paranoia may have been internalized by a worldview that included magic, ghosts, and fortune-tellers. Today, what do we have but corporate espionage and data leaks to explain the sinister feeling that someone else is looking at us every time we unlock our phone with Face ID? Our multiple digital identities can only help us escape so far. Our fears and paranoia will always haunt us. Movies and books will undoubtedly continue to be populated by gay people — and when the boogeyman finally puts his hand on our shoulder, well, he’ll look just like us.