Imaginary Worlds - Doppelgangers 2.0

Episode Date: July 1, 2015

I have a thing for doppelgangers. Partly it's because my brain always falls for this trick and believes on some level that the doubles are being played by different actors. Thanks to digital effects, it's easier to create doppelgangers on a TV budget (Orphan Black, Fringe) or in independent films (Moon, The One I Love.) But perhaps doppelgangers are multiplying because they tap into a very modern concern: social media. With Alissa Wilkinson, Ryan Britt and Elayne Tobin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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it was 1994 i just got out of college, and I moved to Los Angeles to pursue animation. Wait a second. This is, like, exactly the way I started the last episode. Well, that's okay. Sometimes things start in the same place, and then verge off, and then just veer off in a different direction. It was 1994. I had just gotten out of college, and I was doing that thing where you call people to do informational interviews in the career you want to go into. And my parents recommended that I call this friend of a friend of theirs, who was doing computer animation in the San Francisco Bay Area. And the only computer animation I had seen at that time was really clunky and soulless. and soulless. But my parents said I should really talk to this guy because his company just made a deal with Disney to produce a feature-length computer animated film about toys that come to life. I was like, okay. I mean, it sounds kind of weird, but okay. And I just called this guy to

find out, you know, what his career path was. But apparently I made a good impression because at the end, he said that he had internships and, you know, why don't path was. But apparently I made a good impression because at the end, he said that he had internships and, you know, why don't I come up for an interview? And I was surprised. I mean, I just moved to Los Angeles with my best friends from college. I love to draw.

I want to do hand-drawn animation. So I politely turned him down. I politely turned him down. We've all had moments like these, these sort of sliding door moments. And whenever I visit the Bay Area, I sometimes think about the other Eric Malinsky. The one who said, you know, I just got out of college. My future is just a blank slate right now.

I'm sure, what the hell? Come up, I'll visit your studio. It's the only internship I've been offered. What's it called, Pixar? What's that Eric Malinsky like? How happy is he? Does he ever wonder about me and my life over here? You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend

our disbelief. Today, I want to talk about one of my favorite genres, doppelgangers, and why they're getting more popular. Alyssa Wilkinson is also fascinated by doppelgangers. And like me, she went through a career change. She was going to be a ballet dancer, and now she teaches film at King's College in New York. So her favorite doppelganger story is Black Swan. Natalie Portman played a ballet dancer who could only achieve greatness by imagining a dark, edgy version of herself. I think that for a lot of, well, girls in particular, but especially if

you grew up dancing or being in kind of high performing music situations or something like that, the idea of having a self that could choose to not practice or go out late at night and do all the things you're not supposed to be doing or go behave badly was very appealing. And it wasn't something that was available to a lot of sort of type A firstborn girls in particular. And I've watched it several times and every time I watch it at the end, I just feel like I have a great intake of breath because I've been holding it the whole time. I mean, that's interesting. As a woman, this particular kind of doppelganger story is one that you find interesting that a guy could never really quite get as much. find interesting that even that a guy could never really quite get as much you know girls are kind of socialized to be cooperative and sit in the seats and do the thing at school and kind of be agreeable and girls are no different than boys in that they would like to act out and a lot of

times they've just kind of been acquiescent so it's kind of fun to see that happen on screen, even if it's terrifying and brutal. Doppelganger is German for double walker. And for most of history and folklore and literature, doppelgangers were supposed to be terrifying and brutal. Shelley, for example, believed he saw his doppelganger several weeks before he died. That's Elaine Tobin. She's a cultural studies professor at NYU. Abe Lincoln believed he saw his own doppelganger in the mirror in back of him. And his wife was so upset by this because she was convinced that he was not going to make it through his second term of his presidency, which in fact, of course, he did not.

When I was growing up, I didn't know the serious history of doppelgangers. They were kind of a joke in pop culture. Playing your double was a rite of passage for actors in sitcoms or soap operas. But the journalist Ryan Britt says we shouldn't write those shows off as silly. When he was a kid, he was obsessed with one particular doppelganger. This chemical compound will make me cool. The doppelganger that time forgot is Stefan Urkel from Family Matters, who is Steve Urkel's doppelganger.

There is no Steve here. I'm Stefan, sweet thing. But did you think it was cool? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, because it's wish fulfillment. Because if you're a nerdy kid, you're Urkel. You know, and that's a way to be cool. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, because it's wish fulfillment. Because if you're a nerdy kid, you're Urkel.

You know, and that's a way to be cool. And then the morality play there is it's not really you. Maybe you're better off being awkward and strange, you know, the way he was. But the first shows to take doppelgangers seriously were The Twilight Zone and Star Trek. previously were The Twilight Zone and Star Trek. What's so compelling about Star Trek is that in their first season, they had two doppelgangers of the main character. How appropriate. And one of them was, you know, literally him split into two beings and the other one was a robot. Well, which was the one where, which was Mirror Mirror where they went with the all the goatees? And that is in the second season. Star Trek is obsessed with acknowledging our dark side.

You know, if there's one big difference between Star Trek and Star Wars is that Star Wars is you can't turn to the dark side. And Star Trek is you have to control the dark side where you say, hey, this is a part of me. I have to reconcile this. Shatner literally embraces his other self in the end. You need me. I need you. I need you. I need you. An obsession I think that Roddenberry and those guys that wrote on Star Trek had was,

you know, are we good or bad inherently? And so if we split that up, if we split those up into specific creatures that resemble us, I think that the idea of facing your shadowy self, you know, is more compelling than just finding out that, hey, if you grew up this way, you'd be a jerk. Elaine Tobin says this Star Wars versus Star Trek approach to dealing with your dark side actually plays into a larger debate that we're having in our culture now. On the one hand, we have a narrative that sort of originates in Freud that the only way to kind of be your better self is to tap into repressed emotions. And then that moves us into a glowing position of wholeness.

But then the other side of it is this kind of positive, like, get rid of, get away from the negative energy. Don't think negative thoughts. Positive thinking will make you successful no matter where you started out in life. That's the American dream. So the American dream starts to fall apart as it is now. Then you kind of have to figure out how you're going to come up with other psychological ways to handle that. You know, we're very torn as a culture on which of those is a better path. And that kind of thinking inspired the TV show Fringe,

where FBI agents met their doubles in a parallel universe and discovered how different they'd be if history were different. It's her mom? Yeah. She's alive. Well, the last few years have been hard for her. My sister died during childbirth. You have a sister, too.

And a niece. Ella. She's seven. Ella. Ella. You gotta trust me. I'm you. Modern doppelgangers are not just bad omens or dark versions of ourselves.

And we might have scientists to thank for that. Physicists in Switzerland are using the Large Hadron Collider to look for evidence of a parallel universe which they say could exist if you believe the mathematical models of string theory. And cloning humans is also a real possibility. So a show like Orphan Black can now jump to the main hurdles, which are now moral, legal, philosophical. Yeah? Sarah, you can't make a deal.

Why not? Any freedom they promise is bullshit. They're liars. That synthetic sequence, the barcode I told you about, it's a patent. A patent? We're property. Our bodies, our biology, everything we are, everything we become, belongs to them. My patent.

One of the reasons why I love doppelganger stories is that I always fall for this trick. Like, there's really a part of my brain that believes Tatiana Maslany is only playing Sarah Manning, the main character, and all the other clones are played by somebody else. And whenever I remind myself that she's actually playing all those characters, every time there's a part of my brain that goes, what? But that's another reason why we're seeing more doppelgangers. They're just easier to do with digital effects. 15 years ago, a show like Doctor Who or Battlestar Galactica wouldn't have been able to pull off this trick with a TV budget. But they could a few years later. A filmmaker like Mark Duplass wouldn't have been able to produce a low-budget indie like

The One I Love, where he and Elizabeth Moss go on a couples therapy retreat and discover doubles next door that have none of their character flaws. Sophie, what are you talking about? We had a fight and you stormed out. We didn't make up. Maybe are you okay? I'm fine. Are you okay? Okay, Mr. Hangover, I think it's time for some food. Huh? Let's get something in your stomach.

You're kind of freaking me out a little bit, Sophie. Is that bacon? Yeah. You hate it when I eat bacon. But there's another reason why doppelgangers are multiplying. Alyssa Wilkinson believes it's because they tap into a very modern concern, social media. I'm my own PR machine in that way, and everything that I put on the internet is a version of me. And, you know, back 20 years ago, we used to talk about how you could pretend to be someone else online you know you might really be you know a middle-aged man in the middle of nowhere and you're pretending to be a 12 year old girl but today it's more like I use my own name I have my own likeness I might not even have video of myself so it'd be very complicated for me to be pretending to be someone else but in a sense I still am since I can't represent, I don't know the full name, I'm stuck

to whatever Mark Zuckerberg says I can be or whatever, you know, Twitter says constitutes me, which can't possibly be all of me. She knows everyone's playing the same game, but she still gets wrapped up in FOMO, fear of missing out. Yeah, well, so I have to create a double who appears to be having that much fun. So I might actually turn around and go to a party simply so I can be in the picture. So nobody thinks I'm a loser. Yeah. I feel that way too in the summer where everybody's posting their amazing vacation photos. I'm like, we got to go somewhere.

Yep. Yep. Totally agree. Everybody is definitely having a better summer than I am. Except that nobody is, right? I mean, there's probably one guy. Yeah. I hate that guy.

Actually, I don't really have a problem with all this. I mean, it's funny how often people my age go on the sort of kids these days rants, but I actually wish social media existed when I was growing up. I mean, you know, I was a very awkward, dorky teenage kid. I felt like I was always making faux pas. I was my own worst enemy. And yeah, I could have been cyber bullied instead of just bullied. But I also could have created an avatar that went out way beyond the confines

of my school or my neighborhood and made friends out there in the world. And if that didn't work, just try and find more people. I mean, there's an endless amount of people I could have found out there, you know, to make friends with and girls to flirt with. You know, there's people really love like authenticity and vulnerability, but I don't know. I've been there. I mean, it's got drawbacks. What you're saying I see is the idea that social media is allowing us to kind of invent our better selves in a certain way, which is really interesting to think about, except it's really anxiety inducing too, because like how much time in a certain way, which is really interesting to think about, except it's really anxiety-inducing too because how much time in a day do you have

to try to keep up with all of this curating that you have to do to create another person? I mean, sometimes I almost feel like I am the evil twin, you know, that my doppelganger on Facebook and Twitter is the good version of me, and I'm the one with all the ugly feelings and bad hair days that, you know. Right. You're the one who doesn't censor.

And you're the one who says stuff that probably won't get a like. Right. The person on Facebook is the person who's like really has good comic timing. They're the person who's super witty. I think that might be one of the reasons why so many people feel constant, constant anxiety, low-level, constant cultural anxiety. Elaine Tobin thinks that we're experiencing the kind of anxiety that people felt when the Industrial Revolution began. Until that point in history, a chair was something that could only be made by a single craftsperson. was something that could only be made by a single craftsperson.

And suddenly a machine comes along that can make 100 identical versions of that chair, and that triggered an existential crisis in America. Elaine says we're kind of experiencing the same thing now. Yeah, we're infinitely reproducible. I mean, my students, for example, don't realize how weird it is to be able to Google yourself and suddenly see images come up of yourself that are global. There's like fragments of me everywhere, right, that have lives of their own in certain ways.

And there's nothing to be done about that. And it's only going to increase. My fragmentation, my reproduction, it's only going to increase. fragmentation, my reproduction, it's only going to increase. And I mean, just think though, what a strange development of mankind. This didn't happen in the Roman Empire. Like you knew like 10 people, right? You know, you didn't have this happen, right? Wasn't Caesar on a coin? Every so often Caesar would go to the street and you go, hey, it's the guy on the coin. It's the guy on the coin. I think he's our leader. That's what I hear.

I asked Elaine if she had a favorite doppelganger story, and she picked one that I never would have expected. The picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Of course, in that story, Dorian Gray doesn't age, but his portrait does. And he feels free to do whatever he wants, to be completely amoral, because the portrait is experiencing

all that guilt and shame. It doesn't just get older, it gets uglier, and he remains beautiful. But it plays with all the notions and all the fantasies that we can be living two lives at once, right? And that's, I think, at the heart of what a doppelganger fantasy is, is that you can be living evil Eric and super good Eric at the same time, and you don't have to combine them into a unified person. Although at the end of the story, Dorian Gray stabs the picture in a fit of rage and breaks the spell.

I guess one of the modern equivalents of it is when people sort of stop doing Facebook as this kind of weird social experiment, and they go on talk shows, and I went on Facebook. I spent six months without social media, and I got invited onto Meredith Vieira's show. The idea that we kill our electronic self, right, in order to live a more authentic life.

I mean, part of the reason I love these stories is actually the moment when I'm done with them, the moment that I kind of unplug from the fantasy, turn off the TV, log out of social media, and then have this sort of stark moment of being reacquainted with the one version of me that exists in the real world and all the choices I made to be that person. That's it for this week's show. Thanks for listening. My editor is Carrie Hillman. Special thanks to Alyssa Wilkinson, Ryan Britt, and Elaine Tobin,

who had more stories about duplicates than I can fit into a single piece. Scientists and a graduate student, whose name is escaping me, created an android of Philip K. Dick that could answer, a robot that looked just like him, that could answer rudimentary questions about his own work. And then the graduate student who had created this at great expense lost the head on an airplane when he unexpectedly had to change flights. So no one's ever found that head, to my knowledge. Wow.

You know, on the way over here today, I left my umbrella on the subway, and I feel way better about that right now. Yes, you did not lose Philip K. Dick's android head. You can like the show on Facebook or leave a comment on iTunes. My Twitter avatar is named E. Malinsky. The show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.

Panoply.