Doppelgänger Plots: Double Your Horror, Double Your Thrills

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood . . . . 

 

—Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”

Each choice that we make shapes us. Every alternative choice is an opportunity to take one path or another. Every decision is a sculpting of the hands over the present and future direction of our lives. We graft and prune and weed with each action we take. Yes, I have mixed my metaphors; life is too complex for a single trope, as are the many moments that demand we shape our lives, our selves, our beings.

 

Tweedledee and Tweedledum

 Click the image to enlarge it.

 

Sometimes, horror fiction allows readers to read about (or, in the case of horror as it is depicted in theater, television, and cinema, viewers) to “see” not only the culmination of the results of the decisions and actions that a character has made, but also those of the decisions and actions that he or she could have made, revealing not only the actual character, but also an alternative character—or even alternative characters—that the one could have become, were he or she to have made other choices and taken other actions than those he or she chose or took.

 Fiction that offers multiple potential versions of the same character is existential, suggesting that, as Jean-Paul Sartre declares, “existence precedes essence”; we are, or become, what we do. However, fiction of this sort, not the least of which, has often used mythical and psychoanalytical (some would say these are redundant terms) models to present the fictitious doubles, or doppelgängers by which such multiplicities of possibility are exhibited.

Perhaps one of the most familiar examples of the double, or doppelgänger, is Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The title of the novel suggests that there are two characters, but, there is only one: the good Dr. Jekyll and the evil Mr. Hyde are one and the same character.

  Oscar Wilde also explores the possibilities of alternative pathways; the protagonist of his novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray sells his soul to the devil so that he may remain young and beautiful while his portrait ages and takes on ever more hideous and deformed aspects each time Dorian sins.

 In a short story, “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts,” Shirley Jackson's doppelgänger takes the form of a married couple who take turns aiding and afflicting strangers, the husband acting with charity toward all, while his wife acts with malice to everyone; later, they switch roles.

Hitchcock's Rear Window: The Well-Made Film

According to John Fawell, author of Hitchcock's Rear Window: The Well-Made Film, Alfred Hitchcock employs the doppelgänger with a vengeance in Rear Window.

 

  A fan of such writers as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Heinrich Heine. Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde, Guy de Maupassant, and Alfred de Masset, all of whom used the device of the double, Hitchcock also frequently uses “doubles . . . as the basis for his stories” (73). The double, Fawell says, is used in Strangers on a Train, Psycho, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and other films, including, of course, Rear Window.

Indeed, Fawell suspects “perhaps no other Hitchcock film has as many doubles in it as Rear Window, creating the effect that the neighbors of the voyeuristic photographer, protagonist L. B. Jefferies, who is laid up in his apartment with a broken leg, are merely images of himself, rather like the figures in one's dream (76): 

The windows [in the apartments through which, using his camera's telephoto lens, he secretly spies] can be seen either as a visualization of Jeff's dream or unconscious world as paraliterary devices, means of reflection and therapy for Jeff . . . . For [critic Robin] Woods, the windows “all in some way reflect his own problems,” whereas, for Hitchcock's biographer, Donald Spoto, “each of the spied-upon neighbors offers . . . a facet of his present psychic life or possibility of the future” (77).

Hitchcock makes his audience aware of Jefferies's thoughts, attitudes, feelings, and judgments concerning the things he sees his neighbors do. In fact, Jefferies nicknames some of them for the trait of each that stands out to him: Miss Torso, Miss Lonelyhearts, The Composer, The Newlyweds. His thoughts about them are his thoughts, so his views of his neighbors allow viewers to “see” the real Jefferies who resides behind the persona of the adventurous, rather arrogant photographer.

 

 His view of them, is his view of himself. Thus, the ideas and emotions he projects on them represent the different persons he himself might have been, had he made different choices and performed different actions than those he did. Perhaps impotent, perhaps homosexual or asexual, Jefferies wants to get rid of his girlfriend Lisa, a beautiful model; Lars Thorwald, his neighbor, does just this, when he murders, cuts up, and hauls away his nagging wife.

 

 There are many other similarities, too, between Jefferies, the voyeur, and the neighbors he spies upon. For example, as Fawell points out, “just as Miss Lonelyhearts made dinner for a man who literally was not there while Lisa made dinner for a man (Jeff) who metaphorically was not there, so Miss Torso literally waits for a man to return just as Lisa waits metaphorically for Jeff to return to her” (103).

 

Throughout several seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon and his stable of writers provided fans of the series with an extended sequence in which Buffy is flanked by two other characters who seem to represent possible alter egos for her: Kendra and Faith. In this context, these young women can be viewed as either mythical or psychoanalytic terms:

Apollo	Socratic Soul	Dionysus
Kendra	Buffy	Faith

Mythical Model

Superego	Freudian Self	Id
Kendra	Buffy	Faith

Psychoanalytic Model

Beset from both directions, by the demands of Kendra, representing Buffy's Apollonian tendencies (or the demands of her superego) and by those of Faith, embodying Buffy's own Dionysian impulses (or the demands of Buffy's own id), Buffy, as the Socratic Soul (or the Freudian Self), must decide in which direction to go (that is, which impulse or demand to follow). From both Kendra-Apollo-Superego and Faith-Dionysus-Id, Buffy-Socratic Soul-Self acquires strengths and weaknesses, enriching and complexifying her own character.

 

 She also learns the benefits and the dangers of both extremes, that of the Apollonian (or superego) and that of the Dionysian (or id). Kendra tells Buffy that Buffy that whatever is specified in The Watcher's Handbook must be done—that is, Kendra goes strictly by the book, obeying authority without thought or challenge. Faith, on the other hand, follows her own precepts; when it comes to sex, she says she “get[s] some, [and] get[s] gone.” Likewise, when Faith sees something in a shop window that she likes, she doesn't buy the item; she steals it: “want, take, have” is the credo that guides her actions.

 

 Kendra's sense of duty and her unquestioning obedience gets her killed; Faith's amoral lawlessness almost gets both Buffy and herself killed. At the end of the series, however, Buffy and Faith survive the Hellmouth; Kendra does not survive even the attack of the vampire Drusilla.

 

Ultimately, Whedon's series suggests that, although both the superego and the id are valuable to a warrior, over-reliance on the Apollonian (basically, reason) or the demands of the superego (essentially, one's conscience) could get a fighter killed, whereas over-reliance on the Dionysian (basically, instinct) or the demands of the id (again, essentially instinct) although potentially dangerous, might save a slayer.

 When the chips are down, Whedon suggests, go with the gut, not the head—certainly a debatable point.

 Whether the topic of concern to a writer is morality, one's unconscious perceptions of reality, or survival, the use of the double, or doppelgänger is a proven, time-honored device by which writers of any genre, including horror and the thriller, can investigate the perils, strengths, flaws, benefits, and disadvantages of extremes, Apollonian and Dionysian, psychoanalytic, or otherwise.