Double Take (2009 film)

The multilayered metaphors of Double Take explore not only the character of Alfred Hitchcock meeting his double, but also the era's society as a whole.[10] Hitchcock is cast as a paranoid history professor shadowed by an elusive double against the backdrop of the Cold War, played out through the television tube; he "says all the wrong things at all the wrong times while politicians on both sides desperately clamor to say the right things, live on TV."[13] The themes explored in Double Take are all rooted in the following comment by Ron Burrage – the Alfred Hitchcock lookalike: "People always do a double take when they see me."[14] And as such the film's exploration into paranoia is also a double take on the Cold War, a mirror of the fear mongering played over the TV tube.

The five Folgers commercials for instant coffee that play throughout Double Take are referring to the commercial break of the television format, described by Hitchcock as "the enemy of suspense" and "designed to keep you from getting too engrossed in the story".[15] Moreover, the commercials represent the exploration of the theme that fear and murder lurks in the domestic setting, "where it always belonged". They also imply a yearning for successful 'falsehood'.[4] The question of why the Folgers housewives wouldn't simply prepare real coffee refers to the film's question why our culture yearns for successful imitation—for falsehood.[4] In this contradiction one act masquerades its opposite. The Folgers commercial is subverted in such a way that its message, "Drink Folgers," becomes coded as part of a murder plot.[7]

Double Take presents the Soviet Union and the US as doubles in a series of power plays attempting to assure the other's demise.[5] Besides that Double Take is also about how two man always do the talking:[16] in the 'Kitchen Sink Debate' of 1959, the first televised summit live, Nikita Khrushchev outsmarted Richard Nixon, "whose best retort to the Soviet leader's critiques of U.S. capitalism is to point to the latest in TV sets".[17] Double Take implies that the predominant purposes of the space race as well as the television were propaganda, "both individually and, to greatest effect, when acting together".[18] The infamous 'Kitchen Sink Debate' mimics the conversation between Hitchcock versus Hitchcock, which mimics the man and woman debate in the kitchen during the Folgers commercials in turn.

The mirroring of Hitchcock versus Hitchcock (as Hitchcock frequently doubled himself as the storyteller in his films through his cameos),[9] suggests a similar doubling of Rixard Nixon and the young John F. Kennedy during the first televised presidential debates, the same Kennedy who finds his match in Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and finally Khrushchev versus Leonid Brezhnev just as Brezhnev is plotting Khrushchev's downfall.[19]

The paranoia in Hitchcock's work becomes an allegory for the kind of fear that became so normal during the Cold War.[5] Echoes of and excerpts from Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) propose the film as an allegory for television – which has, according to Hitchcock, "brought murder back into the home-where it always belonged",[18] and as the threat of missiles descending from the sky, suggesting a psychohistorical analogy between the fear of nuclear attack and Hitchcock's suspense.[18]

Double Take plays with different genres against one another and with how fiction comes to stand for reality or the other way around.[10] It shows a recent history against a fiction even while it presents that history itself as an ongoing story of claustrophobic suspense.[18] In the end not only politicians but Hollywood as well are "invested in perpetuating a culture of fear".[18] Double Take also refers to the doubling of cinema versus television through an intimate fiction story versus a bigger political narrative as well as through the rivalry between cinema and its televisual double. This mirrors the plot that sets up Hitchcock the filmmaker versus Hitchcock the television-maker at a time television was taking over cinema.[16]

But Double Take adds a contemporary twist: "You think all the way through that cinema is going to be killed by television or television is going to kill cinema or America is going to kill Russia or Russia is going to kill America. But at the end, it’s the third one, the new one, the younger one, the YouTube version, that comes along and kills them all."[16]

Seeing one's own doppelganger is usually a bad omen; it might even be a "premonition of death".[9] The first narrated line during the 'Borgesian' confrontation between Hitchcock young and old in Double Take launches the plotline and comes with a warning: "If you meet your double, you should kill him."[20] This provocative statement one should kill one's identical suggest that doing so means nothing but self-protection or even self-preservation.[2] For it is believed that the double has no reflection in the mirror, it can be seen as a mirror itself: "because he performs the protagonist's actions in advance, he is the mirror that eventually takes over."[9] Double Take is based on a similar plot.[9] Hitchcock himself gets eliminated in the first round of a Hitchcock lookalike competition. But all the participants of the competition áre Hitchcock, so "he's losing to himself".[7] Hitchcock studies are "proliferated to such a degree that there are many different Hitchcocks".[7] As Thomas Elsaesser notes that we now have a Hitchcock defined as Nietzschean and as Wittgeinsteinian, as Deleuzian and as Derridean, as Schopenhauerian and as many more contradictory things. In this way Hitchcock returns "as so many doubles of his own improbable self".[21]

Jose Luis Borges' initial short story August 25, 1983 is based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Double.[2] as well as on Tom McCarthy's story Negative Reel in the book Looking For Alfred.[22] Authors like Adelbert von Chamisso, Hans Christian Andersen, Edgar Allan Poe and many more were inspired by the idea of the double as well.[23] The narration of Double Take is in fact already a double itself, for it is inspired by Borges' novella The Other (1972). Borges rewrote his novella into Agustus 25, 1983 (1983), and it was the latter one that was reworked for Double Take.[9]

Hitchcock often portrays strong females leads, who according to Grimonprez mirror his own fears and phobias projected back onto the female character as a way to try to contain her, or even poison her.[9] Similarly, this male hysteria is also installed between man and man in Double Take.[16] Hitchcocks makes this confession in Double Take: "we always fell in love with our characters, that's why we killed them." Grimonprez claims that "Hitchcock wants the woman to embody his own desire, but his dreamwoman never redeems his anxiety precisely because she refuses to fit into that mould. The man then is ultimately faced with a split reality."[16] He is doubled, as it were. Just like the moment Sigmund Freud was confronted with his double during a train journey, when the door of the washing-cabinet swung back and Freud didn't recognize himself in the mirror. For a moment he believed someone entered his travelling compartment by mistake. He only realized that the man was nothing but his own reflection when he jumped up to show the stranger the right direction. Freud "thoroughly disliked his appearance".[24] Whereas this encounter with his double, an anxious feeling crept over him. According to Freud, "meeting one's double is an encounter with the uncanny, occurring at the boundaries between mind and matter and generating a feeling of unbearable terror."[16] The double, once a figure "endowed with life-supporting power",[2] transforms itself "into the opposite of what it originally represented. [...] It becomes "the uncanny harbinger of death"".[2][24]

In an interview with Karen Black, the last in a row of Hitchcock’s famous female protagonists who featured in Hitchcock’s final film Family Plot (1976), Black confirms to Grimonprez that the story about Hitchcock actually not having a belly button was true.[25] This story became part of the plotline in the film Hitchcock didn’t have a Belly Button. "If Hitchcock didnt have a belly button he might be a clone and there might actually be many doubles of the master, of which Ron Burrage was one", wrote Grimonprez.[25]

In Hitchcock didn’t have a Belly Button Black does expressions of Hitchcock. And as she is pretending to be Hitchcock she becomes his vocal double. Jodi Dean writes on his blog I Cite that we experience two people but one voice: "we hear the one who is speaking and know that it is him, but we also hear another – only rarely do we mistake one for the other, we know the difference".[26]