{"id":160890,"date":"2022-07-28T11:53:46","date_gmt":"2022-07-28T15:53:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=160890"},"modified":"2022-07-29T12:52:04","modified_gmt":"2022-07-29T16:52:04","slug":"the-face-that-replicates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/07\/28\/the-face-that-replicates\/","title":{"rendered":"The Face That Replicates"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Collage of Norman Rockwell, \u201cGirl at Mirror<\/a>,\u201d 1954. Licensed under CC0 4.0.<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

Sylvia refused to wear her glasses, which is why she saw me everywhere on campus. It seemed like it was every day that she\u2019d come to our dorm\u2019s living room and tell me about the not-Katy. \u201cI yelled at her again,\u201d she sighed, flopping onto the worn couch. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t you.\u201d It never was.<\/p>\n

There wasn\u2019t only one not-me. There were several other girls on our small liberal arts campus who had dirty-blond hair and shaggy bangs, girls who wore knee-high boots and short skirts, low-rise jeans and V-neck sweaters and too many tangled necklaces. In 2005, I didn\u2019t stand out. I still don\u2019t. My face, I suspect, is rather forgettable. I\u2019m neither pretty enough to be remarkable nor strange enough to be interesting. This is true for the majority of people, though I have wondered if I have \u201cone of those faces\u201d that is particularly prone to inducing d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. Some people seem like permanent doppelg\u00e4ngers. I became hypervigilant, on the lookout for not-mes that were also, sort of, me.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Looking back, I\u2019m not surprised that I became obsessed with these look-alikes during this particular time period, in those heady and exciting early days of social media. Although the idea of doubling and mimesis dates back to the ancient Greeks and flourished in the popular imagination in gothic horror, my experience with doppelg\u00e4ngers still feels distinctly contemporary to me, an anxiety that arose with the camera in the nineteenth century and was then compounded by social media and its endless catalogues of faces. Although Facebook back then was limited to college students, it was still a place where one could get lost. You could lose hours searching, as I did, for people with your exact same name and friend requesting each and every one of them. You could meander through the uncanny haze of \u201cdoppelg\u00e4nger week,\u201d a destabilizing moment in the early 2000s when my classmates’ pimpled, imperfect, earnest faces were suddenly replaced by thumbnails of Angelina Jolie, Natalie Portman, and Halle Berry. It was more than just embarrassing. It was a massive Freudian slip, a sudden reveal of latent desires and delusions. We wanted to replace our faces with better, more beautiful ones\u2014but not completely. We wanted to represent ourselves with images that weren\u2019t us, exactly, but that were close.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

One of my favorite doppelg\u00e4nger stories is Edgar Allan Poe\u2019s \u201cWilliam Wilson,\u201d which I read around the same time that my not-me began appearing in the edges of Sylvia\u2019s blurry vision. This Poe tale is about a boy named William Wilson who meets another William Wilson and is dogged, throughout his life, by the disturbing presence of this other William Wilson. As the story progresses, we learn that this weird fellow is not actually our narrator\u2019s evil twin, as we might have expected. He\u2019s better than our narrator. He stops our narrator from doing a number of bad things before the original William succeeds in reasserting his uniqueness\u2014by an act of murder, naturally.<\/p>\n

William Wilson is not a funny story, exactly. But it\u2019s full of little ironies that start to feel like jokes, from the name (William, son of Will, a pseudonym that\u2019s also an echo) to the weird origins of the text itself. First of all, the story is a homage to a story that Washington Irving wrote called \u201cAn Unwritten Drama of Lord Byron.\u201d Poe even wrote to Irving, sending him a copy of his tale, and asked him for a blurb to help sell the story. Later, in a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne\u2019s Twice-Told Tales<\/em>, Poe wrote that one of them, \u201cHowe\u2019s Masquerade,\u201d was very similar to \u201cWilliam Wilson,\u201d so much so that \u201cwe observe something which resembles a plagiarism\u2014but which may be a very flattering coincidence of thought.\u201d A few years later, in 1846, Fyodor Dostoyevsky published his own similar novella, The Double: A Petersburg Poem<\/em>, which he later rewrote and republished in 1866.<\/p>\n

This type of doppelg\u00e4nger story continued to multiply. Vladimir Nabokov called The Double<\/em> a \u201cperfect work of art\u201d<\/a> in his classroom lectures, though of course the story was ripe for rewritings\u2014hence Nabokov\u2019s own beleaguered and haunted narrators. The novels Despair<\/em> and Lolita <\/em>feature not quite doppelg\u00e4ngers but pairs of men behaving badly. In the twentieth century, we became adept at capturing, manipulating, and presenting precise visual copies of individuals through photography, film, and digital manipulation. Humans no longer had to use a hall of mirrors (or a skilled portrait artist) to see themselves doubled, tripled, quadrupled. We also became better at selective breeding and genetic manipulation. Dolly the sheep emerged from an adult cell in 1996, and attendant anxieties and sensational interest in the literal copies spiked Eventually, the concept of the double in art was superseded by the clone, as we slouched closer and closer to literal self-replication.<\/p>\n

It makes sense, then, that in twentieth-century cinema and television the question was no longer \u201cWhat if there was another?\u201d but rather \u201cWhat if there were many others? What if there were closets full of others, or storage facilities packed with others?\u201d Slowly, the fear of the double stopped being about individual bodies and their capacity for violence and perversion. In the early double stories, characters were often forced to confront their failures, their fragility, their mortality. Clones could present this sort of threat, too, but they gestured toward even larger menaces. The Twilight Zone<\/em> and The X-Files<\/em> both featured story lines about clones, suffused with that same ambiguous mixture of desire and loathing that I\u2019ve always felt toward my own mirror image. In these narratives, the clone could be a replacement for a lost loved one, or it could be an extra self employed to do our dirty work, but it was also always, by necessity, a reminder of powers vaster and greater than any one person could possess. Structures, institutions, governments, laboratories\u2014these things all came together to make clones, just as movies and TV shows are products industry, vast teams of people working to represent visions of futuristic dystopia.<\/p>\n

In the twenty-first century, bioethical questions about cloning took a back seat to the driving narrative force of physical replication. The idea that one could be replaced\u2014or perhaps that one is a replacement\u2014is closely tied to our obsession with authenticity, mimesis, and originality. People are supposedly unique. But what if we weren\u2019t? What if we had already been divided and reproduced? What if it wasn\u2019t the future we needed to fear but the present? In the 2009 movie Moon<\/em>, astronaut Sam Bell is a clone of a clone of a clone, a chain of men with hangdog expressions. In the television show Orphan Black<\/em>, there\u2019s a group of clones who team up to take down the Big Bad<\/a>. In Never Let Me Go<\/em>\u2014a 2010 adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro\u2019s novel\u2014we\u2019re given a tale of body horror and cloning, longing and dread. Usually in these narratives, the enemy isn\u2019t the cloned body or consciousness. It\u2019s the biotech corporations that created the clones, the governments that want to control the clones, the police who are hunting the clones, the religious sects that want to murder the clones. In these science-fiction dystopias, we\u2019re not supposed to be afraid of a couple of extra bodies. We\u2019re supposed to fear instead their connection to something far more diffuse\u2013the illuminati-like, omnipresent powers of surveillance and control. Jordan Peele\u2019s 2019 film, Us<\/em>, hits a similar note. He sets the viewer up to fear the doppelg\u00e4ngers, slowly building dread around their upsetting intrusion into one family\u2019s rosy reality. Eventually, Peele pulls back the curtain and reveals the true source of horror. It\u2019s not the twin-like bodies who fail to follow the rules of society that we need to fear; it\u2019s the state. The horrible thing isn\u2019t intruding upon us. It was already there, under our feet. It\u2019s not invading our homes. It lives here, too.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another type of doppelg\u00e4nger. More ephemeral than the look-alike is the double self that is actually, in some fundamental and destabilizing way, really you. This second sort of doppelg\u00e4nger is trickier to pin down and rather older, more mysterious, and often coded more feminine. Unlike the biological marvel of the clone or the intrusive physicality of the body double, this trope tends to be psychological or supernatural or both. This not-you might appear as a ghost, a mirage, or even an unwanted alter ego. In some stories, it\u2019s a version of you that hides from your consciousness, doing things you wouldn\u2019t normally do. (Though maybe you want to.) It\u2019s your Tyler Durden, your Mr. Hyde. It\u2019s not your replica; it\u2019s maybe even more fully you than you are yourself.<\/p>\n

By the time I went to college, I had already been acquainted with my depressive side for years. I\u2019d gone on and off SSRIs, never finding quite the right fit. Like most depressives, I was a bit self-obsessed when I fell into my pits. I tended to mythologize the blue periods, turning them into phases of inescapable, indescribable, utterly unique suffering, though of course they were nothing of the sort. When I was well, I told romantic stories about my shadow self without even realizing how boring I was being, or how repetitive.<\/p>\n

My vision of feminine suffering had been shaped, perhaps a little too heavily, by Romantic and gothic narratives. I\u2019ve always loved stories about girls and their ghosts. These evergreen tales tend to follow certain patterns: the beautiful protagonist is going mad\u2014or maybe she\u2019s really haunted. She\u2019s unfamiliar with her surroundings or entering into a new stage of life. She\u2019s destabilized somehow. She\u2019s a governess on a new job (Jane Eyre<\/em>), a second wife brought to her new home (Rebecca<\/em>), or even a ballerina playing her dream role (Black Swan <\/em>was inspired by Dostoyevsky). Often, mirrors are central to the plot, or at least a device used to both reveal the characters\u2019 vanity and their split nature. The reader or viewer can see that her demons are real, or at least partly so, but no one else can see the flames that lick the sides of her face. No one else can see the face that floats behind her own.<\/p>\n

Sometimes these apparitions appear as omens. There are dozens of examples of ghostlike doubles appearing, and some of these are supposedly true stories. The American writer Robert Dale Owen made \u00c9milie Sag\u00e9e, a French schoolteacher, world famous when he published the supposedly substantiated account of her wraith. According to Owen, Sag\u00e9e\u2019s students saw her apparition frequently on campus. Once, she even appeared to be both in a classroom and on the lawn, within sight of over forty people. John Donne supposedly saw his pregnant wife\u2019s doppelg\u00e4nger appear to him, holding a baby in her arms, at the very moment when she was actually delivering her stillborn child. Percy Shelley saw his own wraith once, reported Mary Shelley, as did a few of their mutual friends. His second self approached him on a garden path and asked him how much longer he planned to be content. Not long, apparently.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s appealing about these ectoplasmic excesses and shadow-self lurkers is the same thing that\u2019s terrifying: they could be real. You might really want to cook human fat into soap. You might really crave destruction. You might actually have unaddressed crimes, secret knowledge, and repressed memories hidden within you. There might be darkness in your mind, a place you can\u2019t see. It\u2019s an idea that underpins our entire understanding of psychology\u2014that we have an unconscious mind, a second self beneath the surface.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

It was only after I had a baby\u2014a daughter\u2014that I stopped looking for my doppelg\u00e4nger. I was suddenly more absorbed in her face than in my own. Of course, this is when I finally stumbled across a doppeg\u00e4nger story that would really scare me. I picked up Helen Phillips\u2019s novel The Need <\/em>without knowing much at all about its plot. It was, I thought, a horror story about an intruder. This is correct, but the intruder that climbs out of the hallway trunk in the middle of the night isn\u2019t a rapist or a murderer. It\u2019s the narrator herself, visiting from another timeline. In this timeline, her children are dead. The doppelg\u00e4nger wants what doppelg\u00e4ngers so often want: to take the place of the original. She wants to breastfeed her baby, take her children, share her responsibilities. To offer her body for consumption; to be consumed.<\/p>\n

According to horror theorist Mark Fisher, the weird<\/em> is a category defined by the presence of something that shouldn\u2019t be there. The eerie<\/em> is the absence of something that should be present. The Need<\/em> is horrible because it\u2019s both. There\u2019s a longing and a lack. The intruder is, in a way, both types of doppelg\u00e4nger: the external replacement and the shadow self. The other woman is an existential threat to the narrator, but she\u2019s also a mother who wants to breastfeed and hold the baby. Reading this, I felt sick to my stomach. The idea that my baby could die is abhorrent in a way that feels contaminating\u2014just thinking it is dangerous. None of the other double stories have affected me in this way. I\u2019ve always found the idea of a second self a bit exciting, a frisson of possibility that borders on the sexual. While so many of these earlier stories end with a slash or a bang, Phillips ends hers with something far stickier. It\u2019s not clear whether one mother supplants the other or if they somehow meld into one woman. The Jungian shadow self is integrated\u2014or is she banished? The depressive lack is gone\u2014or has it taken over completely? With \u201cWilliam Wilson\u201d you know more or less what happens, even if it ends violently. Phillips gives us no such resolution.<\/p>\n

This ambiguous ending conveys the instability of my own experience. Motherhood has been nothing if not destabilizing. It drew my focus inward during pregnancy, then outward during my daughter\u2019s infancy. Suddenly, as she grows into a toddler and pulls away from me, I\u2019m left alone again with my vague face and unfinished self. The truth is that I\u2019ve been looking in the mirror far too much lately. I\u2019ve been snapping selfies and setting my phone up so that I can record a video on the front-facing camera, since I\u2019ve heard this is more accurate than a flipped screen. I\u2019ve been trying to figure out what I actually look like, who<\/em> I actually look like. When I scroll through photos on my phone or look at images I\u2019ve posted on social media, I have trouble figuring out which of the many flat versions actually represents me. Even pictures I have taken in the past year look terribly strange, not at all like the person in the mirror with her tired eyes and long nose. My face has changed over the past few years. It\u2019s partially because of pregnancy, but it\u2019s also stress, a pandemic, and the result of Zoom distortion. My face no longer feels like my own.<\/p>\n

The other day, I used a Russian search engine to reverse image search my face, revealing hundreds of women with shaggy blond hair and bangs, women with white faces and blunt chins. I was curious if I\u2019d recognize any of them as being my exact match, my true doppelg\u00e4nger. I found a few that made me pause, but no one was close enough. There was no thrill of discovery, no warm feelings of belonging. I had hoped for more, for some evidence that my face is out there, living and breathing, moving through some city I\u2019ve never visited, kissing people I have never met, maybe even smoking a brand of cigarettes I\u2019ve never smoked. I wanted there to be someone who, despite looking just like me, isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Katy Kelleher is a freelance writer whose book of essays,<\/em> The Ugly History of Beautiful Things, is due out in 2023 from Simon & Schuster.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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