From Mickey 17 to The Substance: How the Rise of Doppelgangers in Film Represents Our Need to Compartmentalise

Words: Gabby Forsyth

The doppelgänger – literally “double walker” – has long been a site of analysis in literature. Lending physical form to the splintering contradiction of self-identity and the duality of human nature has resonated with readers in the prose of Poe, Dostoevsky and Nabokov, to name just a few. That this abstraction continues to resonate in modern texts speaks only to its pertinence to the human experience.

In the last year alone, the doppelgänger has formed the core of numerous acclaimed productions. Severance, The Substance, Mickey 17, and A Different Man all employ the doppelgänger to wrestle with internal contradictions. Doubles, real or imagined, have the capacity to hold a mirror up to our insecurities, our trauma, our self-loathing and our vanity. As society reckons with the encroachment of the online into the offline self—our multitudes made to integrate and synthesise with one another as never before—the doppelgänger provides the perfect symbology for our increasingly compartmentalised psyches.

In her article Butterflies, Memesis and The Double, Polly Dickenson paints the doppelgänger “not just as a representation of otherness inherent in subjectivity,” but “a timely pointer to the sad artifice of modern identity, caught up in the fear of its own duplicity.” That sad artifice is the throughline these films and TV shows all follow, serving us four different allegories for the rapidly intensifying ways in which we fracture ourselves, digitally enhancing and enlarging, or minimising and manipulating, in order to conform to the demands of late stage capitalism.
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In The Substance, Elizabeth, overwhelmed by self loathing, physically realises her youthful other half into existence – a half who drains and ultimately kills Elizabeth before turning monstrous herself. By rendering Elizabeth’s vanity into flesh, “Coralie Farageat deftly refigures the cinematic trope of the doppelganger in order to delineate the=most extreme conclusion of women’s self hatred under capitalist patriarchy”. The parallels between this and the unrealistic beauty standards we both adhere to and uphold via our digital selves are not hard to draw. The phone operator Elizabeth calls instructs her to “Remember you are one.” In this reminder lies the paradox – the digital self is made from the physical self. Who among us has not thought of a witty Letterboxd review in the middle of the film? Who hasn't preempted an Instagram post before even getting to the function?

In Severance, innies are used as a stand-in for the more traditional doppelgänger, representing the oppressed worker. Marxist analysis and real world parallels abound. The severance process seems barely a leap from the process through which we sell our data, via the digital self, in order to form our online innies. 

A 2019 Amnesty International report investigated how, through harnessing our data, the business model of Google and Facebook threatens human rights by building a digital surveillance state. This is data we give willingly, though often unwittingly, but it has untold consequences, as menial as targeted ads and as far-reaching as election interference.

This quasi-severance procedure has had an effect on our real-world selves too. ‘Compassion Fatigue’, a phenomenon previously reserved for those in the care industry, has seeped into popular lexicon as we are inundated with catastrophe, death and suffering through our timelines. 

Susan Sontag refers to compassion as “an unstable emotion” which “needs to be translated into action or it withers.’’ Certainly we can see this is the case, as we become desensitised to the horrors we witness on our phones, or become inert in our abilities to affect real change. We are fed, algorithmically, a version of reality which adheres to our moral persuasions, and we react with outrage or empathy as these events unfold on our timelines, with no effects to our ‘outies’, other than the psychic damage we are causing ourselves in the process. A red cross analysis states “Outrage here, then, is a containment of, rather than a conduit for effect.” 

“We have another allegory for our splintered online selves, each of our opinions or identifiers becoming magnified or sacrificed in the name of ‘personal branding’.”

And so we come to Bong Joon-Ho’s Mickey 17, with metaphors less subtle but just as applicable. Mickey Barnes (played by Robert Pattinson) opts to become an “expendable”, and by doing so allows his consciousness to be uploaded into a transferable database, while his body is reprinted every time he dies in service of a colonial expedition to a new planet. 

In Freud’s theory of the uncanny, doppelgängers are referred to as a ‘vision of terror’. In the universe of Mickey 17, having two printed bodies, or multiples, is so feared that it has been designated as a crime against humanity. Each version of Mickey is slightly different, an aspect of his persona more prominent with each print. Thus we have another allegory for our splintered online selves, each of our opinions or identifiers becoming magnified or sacrificed in the name of ‘personal branding’. Much as in Severance, Mickey 17 also serves to demonstrate how the worker is perceived as (in this case literally) expendable. Steven Yeun’s character puts it plainly in the film: "if you die today, they will just replace you tomorrow.” 

A Different Man explores doppelgangers as a conduit for fears of stolen identity and the unattainable ideal self. Edward (Sebastian Stan), a man with neurofibromatosis that causes facial disfigurement, undergoes an experimental surgery and is transformed into a handsome new version of himself. Enter Oswald (Adam Pearon) who through sheer charm and magnetism ‘steals’ Edward’s life. “It seems that it’s only when Edward finally gets what he wants that he realises he has nothing,” says one review. Much the same as The Substance, the doppelgänger is presented as all we do not have, and all we can never attain.
A user on X put it aptly: “the doppelgänger is a means of gaining capital (social, financial, cultural), to represent a world in which we must gather the most lucrative aspects of ourselves and market them to our employers, social media, etc”. Further to this, as I’ve pointed out, the doppelgänger represents the compartmentalisation of our online and offline personas, and our increasing reliance on social media to compound and amplify the ‘best’ or most productive parts of ourselves, as our offline counterparts become more isolated, less active, less community oriented. 

We are in an era of heightened individualism, despite being more interconnected than ever. Perhaps now is the time to take the warning these doppelgängers are giving us and Reintegrate.