You can glean more about yourself when you look at your mirror.
With popular culture feeling increasingly like a house of mirrors with duplicated and simulated and similar selves endlessly refracted, many more of us may soon be dealing with versions of doppelgänger confusion. What role is this proliferation of doubles, twins and clones playing? |
 | | Tim Enthoven |
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I have spent the past couple of years working on a book about doppelgängers, which uses as its jumping-off point the fact that I am perennially confused and conflated with the author Naomi Wolf. During the pandemic, Wolf took a hard Trumpian turn and now appears regularly alongside Steve Bannon (which, in a way, makes her a doppelgänger of her former, liberal self). She's not the only one to have taken this political express train in recent years. |
Because my friends knew about this unconventional project of mine, they were always forwarding me doppelgänger content: new streaming series featuring clones and twins; facial recognition websites where you can find your "twin stranger"; even weird crimes in which people try to kill their look-alikes. As I followed these various threads, it became clear that a great many people shared my fascination with doubles. In my guest essay for Times Opinion, I explore some of the reasons behind this proliferation of duplicates. |
"Doppelgänger" is a mouthful of a word that has acquired, through the centuries, a range of meanings. It combines the German words for double (doppel) and goer (gänger). Your doppelgänger could be your identical spirit self who roams the earth, and bumping into it could be a warning, or a harbinger of death. Or your doppel could be a complete stranger whose name and face are similar enough to your own that the two of you are frequently confused. When this happens in literature, chaos reliably ensues. |
Given that doppelgängers are often regarded as warnings, it seemed worth trying to learn something from my own identity confusion. What I have found is that by studying the drivers of Wolf's migration from the liberal left to the conspiratorial right, I was better able to understand the ways that Covid has redrawn political maps in many countries. In the process, I also learned a great deal about the right's electoral strategy, including how figures like Bannon hope to flip a portion of traditionally Democrat-voting white mothers over to the Republican Party. There were more ominous doppelgänger lessons too, which you can read about in my essay. |
| READ NAOMI'S FULL ESSAY HERE | | |
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