Klein's 'Doppelganger': 'The thing that becomes unfamiliar is you'

A few takeaways from Naomi Klein's Doppelganger:

To start with, the doppelganger is an individual: "the thing that becomes unfamiliar is you." The double is "an unwelcome kind of mirror, showing the protagonist a vain and venal version of themselves." One's own double “represents the most repressed, depraved, and rejected parts of ourselves that we cannot bear to see — the evil twin, the shadow self, the anti-self, the Hyde to our Jekyll," such that "the person encountering their double is invariably pushed to their limits by the frustration and uncanniness of it all.” Emilio Uranga called it zozobra in 1952; Alfred Hitchcock called it ‘vertigo’ in 1958.

In literature,

“doppelgangers consistently signal that the protagonist’s life is about to be upended, with the double turning their friends and colleagues against them, destroying their career, or framing them for crimes, and — very often — having sex with their spouse or lover. A standard trope in the genre is a nagging uncertainty about whether the double is real at all. Is this actually an identical stranger, or are they a long-lost twin? Worse, is the double a figment of the protagonist’s imagination — an expression of an unhinged subconscious?”

Socially:

"There is a certain inherent humiliation in getting repeatedly confused with someone else, confirming, as it does, one’s own interchangeability and/or forgettableness. That’s the trouble with doppelgangers: anything you might do to dispel the confusion just draws attention to it, and runs the risk of further cementing the unwanted association in people’s minds."

It tells us that "no matter how deliberately we tend to our personal lives and public personas, the person we think we are is fundamentally vulnerable to forces outside of our control."

But it's more than just a personal or even social event. It tells us about the culture. “When reality starts doubling, refracting off itself," Klein says, "it often means that something important is being ignored or denied — a part of ourselves and our world we do not want to see — and that further danger awaits if the warning is not heeded.” Watching Wolf (the Other Naomi), Klein felt "as if I were seeing not only undesirable parts of myself but a magnification of many undesirable aspects of our shared culture as well."

During the “time of great loneliness” during the pandemic, “a lot of us were watching the world go by with our mouths hanging open.” Klein’s speechlessness wasn’t only “the result of my own highly specific Naomi-Naomi problem.” Rather, her feeling was more profoundly rooted in “a feeling of near violent rupture between the world of words and the world beyond them." Of all the meanings of the doppelganger, she's especially worried about "the fascist clown state that is the ever-present twin of liberal Western democracies."

Topics that progressives fail to address (successfully, or at all, in words or actions) are ripe for distortion in the right-wing conspiracy theorist Mirror World. That's a "larger and more dangerous form of mirroring — a mimicking of beliefs and concerns." That's what Wolf represents to Klein.

And so:

"all of politics increasingly feels like a mirror world, with society split in two, and each side defining itself against the other — whatever one says and believes, the other seems obliged to say and believe the exact opposite. The deeper I went, the more I noticed this phenomenon all around me: individuals not guided by legible principles or beliefs, but acting as members of groups playing yin to the other’s yang — well versus weak; awake versus sheep; righteous versus depraved. Binaries where thinking once lived."

The book

Naomi Klein. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

My story

Read my own doppelganger story, inspired by Klein's: "Transphobia is a bellybutton mirror" (unpaywalled "friends link". It's an 18-minute read on Medium.