The Double: With Triple Analysis

The Double (2014) directed by Richard Ayoade, (the British actor you might know best from the famous Fire! video clip) is a visually stunning film that manages to be quirky without being cliche, and unique while harkening to past films. The flavors I detected within The Double came from The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), Eraserhead (1977), and Fight Club (1999). All films deal with themes of feeling like an outsider, the modern industrial wasteland, the corporate grind, the cruelty of bureaucracy, alter egos, being a fraud, and suicide.  

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

 

Hissing smoke, the distant clunking sound of metal on metal, a train horn in the distance. All dear and familiar sounds...

Within the first few minutes of The Double, I concluded that it was a technicolor Eraserhead. 

The awkward man clad in a suit makes his way through a barren industrial landscape to a sad studio apartment. It's perpetually night, and any daylight is suffocated by modern encasings. There is little to be enjoyed in this universe. The Double has Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg), who likes to watch one TV show about a strong, rough man. Eraserhead has Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), who looks at his radiator and dreams of a pure happy woman in a Vaudeville style act. 

 

There's something decidedly timeless about the universe they live in. Somewhere wavering between the 1950s and the 1970s, industry and machinery rule, and a formal approach to dress keeps characters rigid and conformed. The mechanical equipment in both films are unidentifiable but vaguely familiar. They are metal, have buttons and lights, produce items, but their function is based on fantasy.

The people they encounter are hostile. The protagonist just can't catch a break. No matter how meek, submissive and nonthreatening, he is berated, belittled and steamrolled - most notably by older women.

 

The films are both padded with elderly characters that contrast the youthful protagonist, but mirror his feebleness.  

He is in love with a young woman, but she doesn't love him back in the same way.

 

Her approval is just out of his grasp. In The Double, Hannah (Mia Wasikowska) is the victim of two extremes in male behavior, which Simon has the ability to execute (whether he knows it or not). Simon watches Hannah from afar, silently hoping to gain a connection. In an anecdote about a man who committed suicide in her building, Hannah explains that she is unnerved by this style of courtship - which he is guilty of himself. Simon's alter ego, James Simon, harms Hannah in a more aggressive way: loving and leaving, cheating, and even slapping her in an argument. Hannah attempts suicide and miscarries James's child. Simon James and James Simon are opposites, but both still land outside the spectrum of suitable. 

In Eraserhead, Mary X (Charlotte Stewart) finds herself indelibly tied to Henry by their illegitimate and deformed child. Mary is thrust into motherhood, living with Henry in his cramped apartment. The stress of raising this ill infant, who she can't recognize as her own, causes Mary to move out. Henry's meek spirit doesn't exactly encourage her to stay.  

Simon and Henry's romantic exploits are met with ridicule and embarrassment.

Even the elevators are cruel.

At least Henry is "on vacation." Eraserhead is already saturated with quintessential nightmare versions of everyday life; the Eraserhead workplace would be bleak and torturous on Jheronimus Bosch levels. Maybe we get a glimpse of this at the pencil factory - where Henry's disembodied head is sold to make erasers. 

Both Simon and Henry's stories end with their heads smashed on the pavement, and their spirits being taken to Heaven by people who truly understand them. More on that later...

 

The Hudsucker Proxy and The Double have their tones set by suicide early on. Simon is going about his usual routine of spying on Hannah across the courtyard, when he sees a man pirched above her apartment staring back. Suddenly he's dropped. The tragedy brings Simon and Hannah together as neighbors and co-workers. 

Waring Hudsucker, the founder and president of Hudsucker Industries, commits suicide by jumping out of the skyscraper window during a meeting. Knowing Hudsucker's stock shares will be sold to the public, board member Sidney J. Mussburger (Paul Newman), schemes to buy the controlling interest in the company and temporarily depressing the stock price by hiring an incompetent replacement. Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) a lowly mail room clerk on his first day, comes to deliver a letter to Mussburger, but decides instead to pitch his invention of a simple circular toy. Believing Norville to be the right idiot for the job, Mussburger immediately promotes him to president. 

Is he a fraud?
Simon James is irked by the presence of a new employee named James Simon. It's like looking into a mirror, but no one seems to notice but Simon James. There's something about James that's so charismatic, he can get away with murder. James impresses with minimal effort. He lies and cheats on a psychopathic level. On the other hand, there's something so unremarkable about Simon, that he seems to be a "non-person." Simon's malfunctioning work ID causes him to be shut down on a bureaucratic level. If the ID doesn't work, you aren't in the system, and if you aren't in the system, you don't exist. The system is uncaring and exclusive, though it is run by humans.

The Hudsucker Proxy captures the insanity of bureaucracy as well. It's comical in it's absurdity, yet recognizable. My favorite scene from Hudsucker is the one pictured above right. It's Norville's first minutes in the mailroom, and he's being screamed at by a supervisor. Without warning the man rattles off, "6787049A/6. That is your employee number. It will not be repeated! Without your employee number you cannot get your paycheck." The rest of the quote can be found here. 

Work can feel this way at times; designed for automatons and not humans.

Simply on the basis of premise, The Double and Fight Club share the same story. A young man, fried by the corporate machine, splits into a second persona whom he believes to be his savior and also his tormentor, only to find that they were one in the same person.

The young man does not live his life to the fullest, he might be categorized as a nerd. The alter ego is the exact opposite. He is suave, and has good luck with women. He has the answers to everything, and seems to move smoothly through life by his wits. By all accounts this mysterious man is a jerk who should be punished and not praised for his behavior, but the prevalent theme appears to be "nice guys finish last."

Through bouts of self-harm, culminating in a suicide attempt, the alter ego is freed.

The main difference is that the alter ego in Fight Club, Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden, looks nothing like Ed Norton's character (simply called "The Narrator"), while Jessie Eisenberg plays both characters, as Simon James and James Simon. This creates a comically surreal nightmare scenario where the sanity of every other character is questionable. That anyone would believe these men were not twins or even see a resemblance between them is outlandish, but this is Simon's lament.

It's unclear in Fight Club if anyone besides the Narrator sees Tyler Durden as a separate person. This allows the charade to hold up, but ultimately lays the foundation for them to plausibly be the same person. Unlike The Double, Fight Club's Narrator is the only one who sees his alter ego as another individual, while we imagine the reality would involve the Narrator switching personalities as he interacts with people, and talking to himself a lot. The Double rides this line. There are many scenes where Simon confronts James to the point of revealing that he's an illusion. However, the rest of the characters are so certain that they are different men, Simon is left defending his personality, and attempting to prove that they are the same. The Double is part scifi fantasy, part psychological case study.

The suicide attempt by The Narrator in Fight Club is ultimately nonfatal, but the gun shot to the cheek appears to rid him of Tyler Durden. The suicide concluding The Double is most likely fatal, but left to our imagination. Simon is loaded into an ambulance after jumping from his apartment window, while James dies from the injuries as he is restrained inside the apartment. Simon appears alert, and Hannah is inside the ambulance. A happy ending seems likely. Then the Colonel (the owner and idol of the company Simon works for) appears in the ambulance with them.

In The Hudsucker Proxy, Norville almost falls to his death from his skyscraper, but is saved by a supernatural force, and visited by the angelic apparition of Waring Hudsucker. Near death, Norville and Simon are both visited by the beloved god/bosses of their respective employers. 

In the ambulance the Colonel comments that Simon is a special person. His untimely presence and encouraging tone is unsettling, considering the circumstance. It is then we realize the ambulance ride is most likely a heavenly dream.

At least Simon gets to go solo.

How The Elephant Man is Stylistically Similar to Eraserhead: with Twin Peaks Bonus

A black and white David Lynch directed film with a deformed individual and a nightmarish setting. That quick description can sum up both The Elephant Man or Eraserhead quite easily. The Elephant Man, David Lynch's first mainstream film from 1980, still holds many stylistic values from Lynch's 1977 art house debut, Eraserhead. Below are visual examples of nearly identical themes and mise en scene, and also SPOILERS abound!

Right off the bat, both films have cool double exposures.

But those cool double exposures have deeper meanings behind them concerning creating life, and the fragility of that life. Both films discuss the theme of giving birth to something deformed and irregular. In Eraserhead Henry, the main protagonist, has dinner at his girlfriend Mary X's parent's house. Mrs. X grills Henry about his sexual relationship with Mary and breaks the news that Mary gave birth to... something. 

"Mother, they don't even know if it is a baby!"

In this scenario the product of sex is more than the responsibility of a child, it's an abomination against humanity. It's a punishment and a shame.

Beautiful mothers.

In The Elephant Man, John Merrick (the Elephant Man) is known to have a beautiful mother and no known father. The opening shots imply that his mother was raped by elephants, causing his deformity, but that is obviously highly improbable, and more of a fantasy origin story. Though the thought of bestial rape is horrible, it is maybe somehow less horrible than the hard truth of raping a fellow human being, or that diseases like neurofibromatosis exist.

This is a frame from the beginning of The Elephant Man, showing Dr. Treves (Anthony Hopkins) walking through the freak show, and it sums up the film in a matter of a second.

I noticed that the sign here says "The Fruit of the Original Sin" and it shows only Eve, the tempting snake, and a fetus in a jar. It's hard to see the fetus, but one can assume that it was deformed by the mere fact it's featured in a freak show. The symbolism is huge here, showing only the mother, no father, and the animal this poor soul is associated with, very much like John Merrick's story. It's obvious that the "original sin" here is copulation, and the "fruit" is the deformed child.

The two main protagonists of The Elephant Man are Dr. Frederick Treves and John Merrick. The two main characters of Eraserhead are Henry and "the baby." It can be argued which characters are the lead or supporting. Connections between John Merrick and the baby can be bridged by the superficial idea that they are deformed.

The baby

The baby, regardless of it's deformities, is still a baby, and therefore cannot do much more than cry and exist. John Merrick is an individual who's initial worth was only to exist for a freak show, but despite his difficulties communicating, is found to be a man capable of higher thought and appreciation of the arts.

John Merrick

Both individuals have handicaps, and must be looked after. The baby is never moved from it's pillow bed. It is always swaddled, but when Henry decides to cut off the wrapping all Hell breaks loose, and it is clear (well maybe not clear) that the baby needed the swaddling.

John Merrick must sleep very awkwardly hunched forward with his head between his knees. If he were to sleep flat on his back like a regular person, he would suffocate and die.

He also has a covering; the hood and cloak he wears in public.

In viewing the visual similarities between these films, the use of men's suits struck me as well. Of course John Merrick wore a suit like any other man from his time period. Having him wear a suit was not a stylistic choice of Lynch as much as a necessity to properly tell this true story.

The nightmare scene in Eraserhead, (or is it all a nightmare? -  no one can really know, but this was the most surreal part of the film, so let's refer to it as "the nightmare") when the baby's head replaces Henry's, is a visual precursor to the deformed John Merrick wearing the gentleman's suit. This scene in is obviously symbolic of Henry's paternity to the infant, and the horror of this truth. The Elephant Man becomes a functioning member of British high society, because he is a man - not an animal - and he is someones child, despite the horror that may bring some people.

The sets in The Elephant Man are stylistically similar to Eraserhead. Lynch made Eraserhead's setting an industrial fever dream based on his experience living in Philadelphia. Therefore the sets are filthy, metallic, and treeless.

Eraserhead

They are filled with pipes and barrels and valves. The sound of trains, machines and steam fill the soundtrack. Steam is it's own character in Eraserhead. In the industrial wasteland Lynch places his characters, it hangs in the air around buildings, and hisses out of radiators in homes.

Mary X's house, Eraserhead

Grim, industrial, smoking, steamy, with virtually no natural beauty; nineteenth century life in Europe was the perfect palate for Lynch following Eraserhead.

French circus camp, The Elephant Man

Grimy windows are a given in this atmosphere. Both films feature a "looking through a dirty window" scene.

I think Henry is here.

Mr. Treves looking for John Merrick.

Sad studio apartments are also something Henry and John Merrick have in common.

At least I have that paper church I'm building.

At least I have my mound of dirt.

Unbelievably grim realities aside, it wouldn't be a David Lynch film without a creepy dream sequence.

A hole from Eraserhead.

Lynch used rings and holes in Eraserhead as portals to apparent dream sequences and/or and changes in time. Twin Peaks also uses the symbol of the ring throughout the series, ultimately as a reference to the opening of The Black Lodge. In The Elephant Man, Lynch used the hole/ring symbol again to introduce John Merrick's dream sequence.

Sucking the viewer through the one eye hole in John Merrick's modesty hood, we are drawn into his insecurities, his fears, and general view of life. This shot below from the dream sequence is of men working in a factory.  

This could be an actual  machine and factory process for all I know, but since it's David Lynch, and a dream sequence, I won't rule out that it's just a completely made up surreal action.

It reminded me of the "Man in the Planet" (as he is referred to on IMDB). Shirtless, men of industry. Just replace the steam with sparks.

Throughout Lynch's works gross close-ups can be found in almost any film project. It is still worth noting that Lynch took that instinct from his first film, Eraserhead, and included it in The Elephant Man.

The baby's eye in Eraserhead.

The elephant mouth is nearly unrecognizable, but it visually calls back to John Merrick's lumpy disfigurement; a closer match to his ailment than the external view of the creature he is named after.

Inside the elephant's mouth in The Elephant Man.

Both films have concluding scenes with angelic figures presumably taking the protagonist to Heaven.

"In Heaven everything is fine."

In Eraserhead the Lady in the Radiator makes several appearances in Henry's fantasies, and she once again meets him in a blinding white light. She embraces him in the white light and resounding humming sounds after the sequence of his apparent beheading.

After John Merrick lays down for his first and last peaceful slumber, his mother's face appears in a halo in the stars making this comforting statement: "Never. Oh, never. Nothing will die. The stream flows, the wind blows, the cloud fleets, the heart beats. Nothing will die."

When I first watched the The Elephant Man, I heard that familiar Lynchian roar. It's when he takes the sound of a woman screaming and slows it down so the voice deepens and distorts. The Elephant Man must have been one of the first instances of this. John Merrick's mother is felled by a group of elephants and her screams sound like the elephant's roar.

Cut to 1:15 to hear the GIF above.



One of the best examples of this sound effect in Lynch's work is in episode 14 of Twin Peaks. When cousin Madeline is attacked by Bob, the scene toggles back and forth between regular speed and slow-mo. Her voice is deepened as she screams, sounding like an animal, a roaring fire, or Bob's own maniacal laugh.

Cut to 2:25 to hear the slow-mo scream.



In Fire Walk With Me, Laura Palmer has a painting in her room of an angel sitting at a table with children. It looks like an illustration that would be in a child's room.

Laura, having lost her innocence long ago, sees the angel disappear, symbolizing her lost innocence, lost hope, and the idea that the angel is no longer looking after her.

This painting is referenced to several times in Fire Walk With Me, while a similar framed illustration in John Merrick's room is only seen at the very end of The Elephant Man.

This illustration of a sleeping child represents the peace and a normalcy that John wished he had. As mentioned earlier, due to his condition, John Merrick had to sleep sitting up with his head between his knees. After being honored at the theater, and having one of the best nights of his life, John studies this illustration and seems to decide he wants to sleep that way. John is well aware of the danger.

Going to sleep like a regular peaceful child was just the cap to his wonderful day in his life, and he did not believe it could get any better. The act was apparent suicide, and definitely not a naive action. He sees this illustration soon before his death much like Laura Palmer sees the angel disappear soon before hers.

Also, Laura Palmer went to Heaven too.

Sweet dreams!