‘He was after me. Always had been. Why else would he target me months ago? Infiltrate my flat, my supposed safe space? Question was, what did he want from me. Who, for that matter, did I mean by me?” Isabel Waidner’s fifth novel, As If, opens with the meeting of two bedraggled strangers, Aubrey and Lindsey. Lindsey has materialised on Aubrey’s doorstep and Aubrey has asked him in, noting with pained curiosity how alike they look. “He had dark brown hair not unlike mine,” Aubrey tells us. “My unremarkable eyes they were looking back at me.” With this unsettling opener, the tone is set for a disquieting read, one that I found all the more uncanny as it overlaps so unnervingly with my own new book, Lean Cat, Savage Cat.
Both books draw their protagonists from the lower rungs of showbiz, both utilise the language of fashion in deliberately off-putting ways, both bring the sybaritic myths of artistic life into direct conflict with the realities of housing insecurity and wage instability. Both novels look at how unprocessed grief can fracture the psyche, and – crucially – they both centre on a mysterious pair of doubles. They were also published on the same day. All of which prompts me to ask: does my book have its own doppelganger?
From spyware as standard, to the conspiracy theorists who insist that Melania Trump has been replaced by an impersonator, we are in a deeply paranoid moment. I know I’m not alone in experiencing the creepy feeling that things aren’t quite as they seem. Fittingly, the figure of the doppelganger stalks right across contemporary culture, through books, fashion and film.
The double has haunted screens since the earliest days of cinema, appearing first in The Student of Prague (1913) and then in titles such as Rebecca, Vertigo and Black Swan. More recent horror films The Substance and Get Out have put a new spin on things, mining themes of identity and celebrity. Sinners, with its twin brothers both played by Michael B Jordan, won three Baftas last month and Famous, which stars Zac Efron as a Hollywood heart-throb and his obsessive lookalike fan, is now in post-production.
On the runway, Kate Moss’s dead ringer, Denise Ohnona, walks in shows and fronts campaigns “as” Kate, while H&M has created Al “twins” of real models for their ads. At Berlin fashion week, GmbH presented an autumn/winter collection called Doppelgänger.
This spectral figure is all over contemporary fiction, too. In Deborah Levy’s August Blue, a concert pianist is stalked by shadow selves. In Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang, a thieving writer is trolled online by the ghost of the girl who really wrote her book. In Tobi Coventry’s new release He’s the Devil, a down-at-heel waiter ogles a new roommate who is also a body-hopping demon.
Zoom out from the arts and we see similar phenomena. Dupe culture is flourishing, with shoppers talking excitedly about how easily (and cheaply) they can buy products that aren’t explicitly fake, but rather imitations of the original. The copy is developing an independent currency. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re also experiencing a bumper crop of what may politely be called political doublespeak. Empty promises to deliver for ordinary working people mask a policy of siphoning wealth to the world’s richest men, and freedom of speech has become a strategy for the powerful to silence and harass minorities. Not to mention Donald Trump’s new Board of Peace, launched shortly after Pete Hegseth’s rebranded Department of War.
Online, we’re equipped with our digital doubles, posting filtered photos of curated lives we aren’t actually leading. But this is only our public face. Most people use Instagram’s “close friends” setting, too, and many also have a secondary “finsta” (fake Instagram) designed to share content considered too personal.
Yet as we fragment on the internet, we are at the same time being cloned. Data mining allows big tech to effectively generate a second self for each internet user in order to track their behaviour and better target their ads. On dating apps, catfishing is rife: users upload other people’s photos or generate entirely fake profiles, whether from a sense of insecurity or for more sinister reasons. The increasing prevalence of online conspiracies and the attendant fixations with body doubles and false flag attacks express the same underlying unease. As Naomi Klein put it: “Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right.”
Offline, aestheticians relentlessly pioneer new ways for us all to look beautifully identical. It seems as though, every week, another famous woman steps out on the red carpet, soft-launching a new face that makes her look just like every other famous woman. A nose as distinctive as Anjelica Huston’s or a smile like Shelley Duvall’s is now refashioned into something much more restrained: a face capable of advertising handbags or mouthing second-screen dialogue. Such procedures are no longer the exclusive provenance of Hollywood stars, either. The spectacle of the Mar-a-Lago face shows how among civilians, too, this deliberately artificial look is spawning infinite duplicate countenances.
Yet this world of endless doubling is not new. The doppelganger first appeared in Jean Paul’s novel Siebenkäs, published in three volumes between 1796 and 1797, and has been with us as an almost constant companion since. From gothic touchstones such as Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, to modern classics such as Nabokov’s Despair and Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye, the double has outpaced every trend and appears in just about every genre.
In these novels, the double frequently functions as the embodiment of unacceptable, inexpressible desires and impulses. Brontë gives Jane Eyre an anima figure, in the form of Bertha Mason, a shadow self capable of expressing what Jane cannot. Conversely, the doppelganger of Poe’s licentious William Wilson tries to prevent him from committing further acts of wickedness – but ends up dead. In Hogg’s dual narrative, the repressed and righteous protagonist, Robert, is led to damnation by the devil, who appears as his exact likeness.
Other writers have sought to repurpose the double as something other than sublimation gone awry. Nabokov’s protagonist Hermann is convinced that the man he shoots dead is his double. Unfortunately, the two look nothing alike and Despair is ultimately a novel about being blind to the truth. The anti-hero of Spark’s Ballad of Peckham Rye, Dougal Douglas (who sometimes goes by Douglas Dougal), is his own double. He is in Peckham not to show people the true colour of their souls nor do their dirty work for them, but rather to sow chaos amid their dreams and aspirations. The double is now such a recognisable stock character as to be endlessly malleable.
Freud’s seminal essay Das Unheimliche (1919) posited this nightmare figure as the product of our inability to fully grasp our own mortality. The eternal soul and its promise of everlasting life allows us to overcome the fear of death, Freud writes. Only this fear returns to haunt us in mirror images, twins and, of course, the doppelganger.
I was freaked out by reading As If because it seemed to say that in spite of what I know to have been the process, Waidner and I were at work on the same project at the same time. Maybe they were standing over my shoulder as I wrote (or I over theirs). Perhaps we’re the same person.
Such paranoias may have once been accommodated by a worldview that encompassed witchcraft, phantoms and fortunetellers. Today, what do we have but corporate espionage and data leaks to explain the sinister feeling that someone else is looking back at us each time we unlock our phone with face ID? Our multiple digital identities can only help us escape so far. Our fears and paranoias will always chase us. Movies and books will doubtless remain populated with doubles – and when the boogeyman finally puts his hand on our shoulder, well, he’s going to look just like us.
• Lean Cat, Savage Cat by Lauren J Joseph is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99).
