The Double

[Murphy]

communitas, alembic vessels and the carnivalesque

 

[sus]

Nico has a Doubles-themed dream screening series she's never gotten around to putting on, but it includes Vertigo obvi, and Body Double, but also Mulholland Drive, Skin I Live In, Basic Instinct, Birth, Show Girls, Silvia Prieto, Parent Trap, 3 Women, The Headless Woman

Been meaning to watch Silvia Prieto but she loves it. 3 Women is obviously a classic in this genre, but with triple (maiden, mother, crone) rather than double. Birth is fucking crazy lol

 

[sus]

I think there's a big difference between the double outside (other as mirror) and the double inside (divided self). One is about homogeneity and its discontents. The other's about heterogeneity.

 

[ver$hy ver$h]

the double inside (divided self)

That bit in A Scanner Darkly where he's told the two hemispheres of his brain are competing.

 

[ver$hy ver$h]

One of the struggles of the double is working out whether it needs integrating or eradicating. Is this some fundamental part of you or is it some sort of invader? Do you kill it or reason with it?

 

[line b]

I feel like there's a society-level version of this, which includes like, Carnival and Bacchanalia and standup comedy. Anti-structures where the dominant values of a society are flipped. A pressure valve release.

Millenial character studies that mirror the audience but actually do indulge in their worst quotidian impulses

 

[line b]

Nico has a Doubles-themed dream screening series she's never gotten around to putting on, but it includes Vertigo obvi, and Body Double, but also Mulholland Drive, Skin I Live In, Basic Instinct, Birth, Show Girls, Silvia Prieto, Parent Trap, 3 Women, The Headless Woman

Been meaning to watch Silvia Prieto but she loves it. 3 Women is obviously a classic in this genre, but with triple (maiden, mother, crone) rather than double. Birth is fucking crazy lol

I also just saw vertigo but didn't even realize it was related to this cause it was so boring

 

[sus]

That bit in A Scanner Darkly where he's told the two hemispheres of his brain are competing.

One of the struggles of the double is working out whether it needs integrating or eradicating. Is this some fundamental part of you or is it some sort of invader? Do you kill it or reason with it?

Yes totally. A metaphor for the unconscious I suppose, for forbidden and conflicting desires. Baldur's Gate has this parasitism/symbiosis theme too with the brainworms. The Alien franchise flirts with similar themes. Leland Palmer.

 

[sus]

Plato's chariot allergory, in Phaedrus, talks about passions as a white horse and a dark horse, and the charioteer has to harness/harmonize them. The charioteer is Reason, the white steed is thumos/spiritedness, and the black is desire I think?

Interesting too that this tripartite structure gets echoed all over, from Christianity to Hegel (thesis, antithesis, synthesis)

I've seen discussed in numerology that 1 naturally creates a 2nd (as woman comes from man's rib bone). And that a 2nd naturally creates a 3rd to mediate between 1 & 2. (A child perhaps?)

Similar stuff in software engineering—you have an original entity, then a second entity that wants to relate/link/hook up to the first entity. And often the interfacing/communication channel becomes so complex that it evolves into an entity in its own right, the mediator or translator. Reminded of how London Bridge was a city in its own right:

 

[sus]

Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct, or even Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, is the third who must discern ("sieve") the woman-image from the real-woman.

 

[line b]

The dialogue was just so clumsy. Everything said was characters describing the plot of the movie. There was some really conpelling passages but I didn't feel like it all came together. I was also really sleepy though

 

[sus]

It's like meditation you can't watch it laying down, you've got to fall into a waking trance without falling asleep, is the trick

 

[ver$hy ver$h]

The dialogue was just so clumsy. Everything said was characters describing the plot of the movie. There was some really conpelling passages but I didn't feel like it all came together. I was also really sleepy though

Great film to look at though.

 

[ver$hy ver$h]

I think there's a big difference between the double outside (other as mirror)

Baudrillard was always on about duality and doomed attempts to dispose of the Other. His contention was it can't be completely eradicated and attempts to do so will result in the Other striking back, e.g. globalisation's attempt to homogenise the world would be avenged by all the things it thought vanquished.

 

[sus]

We wiped out those American Indians pretty good though

 

[sus]

Not sure I foresee a reconquista on their horizon

 

[ver$hy ver$h]

True, but his area of interest was the symbolic. He'd probably point to white liberal guilt, land acknowledgements, etc. as their revenge. Their perpetual resurrection in service of their exterminators' self-flagellation.

 

[.....]

Yes totally. A metaphor for the unconscious I suppose, for forbidden and conflicting desires.

Reminds me of studies of post-split brain surgery on epileptic patients.
One hand goes to grab something and the other hand slaps it out of the other hand.

 

[ver$hy ver$h]

A film Gus called "one of the very best of the 21st century."

 

[ver$hy ver$h]

The Man in the Iron Mask and The Prince and the Pauper are interesting as the double colliding with power seems both momentous and arbitrary. The ruler being replaced by his double's a colossal scandal which doesn't really make much difference in itself. If the double's a qualitatively different kind of ruler then there's that, but that would apply to any successor or replacement and not just a double. It's the sleight of hand that feels scandalous, the trick.