In the inaugural issue of this zine – an exploration of doubles, triples, repetitions, inversions, subversions, and any other ions – I thought it would only be appropriate to revisit one of the ur-texts of the doppelganger genre and its many orbiting acolytes. Here are my 4 favorite Vertigo-vanias. –ga

Vertigo (1954)

Duplication is a primordial ingredient in cinema. In French magician-turned-director Georges Méliès’ films from the end of the nineteenth century, one boy is cleaved into two boys, identical chattering heads are lined up along a table, and clones of Méliès perform a ‘one-man’ musical act. But it’s Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo that has become synonymous with doubles. Not just with its diegetic doppelgängers, but also its iconic double-spirals. In Vertigo, Hitchcock astutely asserts that duplication is a symptom of greed – to want more than is possible, to control more than is attainable. And when greed turns to obsession it becomes a downward spiral – a descent down a hypnotic looping path that becomes mesmerizingly inescapable. Vertigo and the imitative Vertigo-vanias that follow, have attained such enduring appeal because they brutally hold a mirror to our crudest desires – to duplicate an image and to arrogantly force the double into the mold of our own fantasies.

Obsession (1976)

Years after his wife and daughter’s violent death, a Louisiana businessman travels to Italy and discovers a woman who’s the spitting image of his young wife. His dizzying circular movements across time and space blur the distinctions between people and places until all that’s left is libidinal propulsion.

An earlier De Palma imitation of Hitchcock, featuring a script from Paul Schrader, Obsession doesn’t have the same lurid, pornographic, gaze of De Palma’s later films. Instead, Obsession drowns itself in a haze of obfuscation and the slow tortures of long memories and repressed desires.

Body Double (1984)

Brian De Palma’s Body Double is second only to Hitchcock’s original in the Vertigo-vania canon by nature of chronology. In Body Double, a struggling actor takes a housesitting job high in the Hollywood Hills where he discovers he can use his new position to spy on a beautiful neighbor. Of course, not everything is as it first appears. In a classic cinematic metaphor ala Hitchcock’s Rear Window, the voyeurism ignites both his primal desires and his fears. Unsurprisingly doubling abounds in Body Double – stalkers / stalkees, tunnels / telescopes, cinema / pornography, graves / coffins, reality / performance – there’s always a new lens refracting, distorting, or revealing De Palma’s mirror images. Body Double is fouler and lewder and, by way of imitation and repetition, manages to iterate on Hitchcock to capture something brand new. 

Phoenix (2014)

Christian Petzold’s films always circle an empty space – there’s a black hole in his universes that we can’t look directly at, but we can see the edges. In Phoenix that hole is the holocaust. And although the things on either side of that hole (the before & after) look alike, we know that they are fundamentally alien. In Phoenix, a jewish survivor of the camps returns to Berlin after facial reconstructive surgery. There, an old flame mistakes her for her own doppelganger and asks her to play the role of her old self. Is all we ever are a performance? Can we ever truly know anyone? Can we ever truly know ourselves?