Doppelgängers, Clones, and Videotape

There should be a name for this phenomenon.  It’s the moment when you first look into a public security camera, the kind they have in front of stores or behind the fast food counters, and you see yourself live on the surveillance screen.  You see yourself in profile and from overhead, and by slightly moving your head you can deduce where the camera will be.  You might feel an urge to wave or step to the left just to be sure it’s you, and you might  even backtrack when you realize you’re stepping off screen.

In retrospect, it’s a moment I’d been unknowingly craving ever since I encountered a mirror.  As a kid, I’ve always tried to catch myself looking elsewhere.  I’d casually look in one direction, and then suddenly turn to the mirror, hoping to catch myself off-guard.  Because I always had to make eye-contact with myself in the mirror, I could never catch myself not looking at myself.  This is what public-security-camera finally allowed me to do: to see myself in third person, looking elsewhere.  (If this seems trivial, consider all the analogous connections between video feedback and consciousness/transparency.)  It was an illusion, of course, just a carefully displaced set of mirrors if you think about it.  But it’s hard for me to dismiss the whole thing as just a cool trick because of how incredibly creeped out I was by it.  For some reason, I couldn’t reconcile myself with doppelganger-me on the screen as easily as I could with a mirror.  (Tangent!  Wouldn’t it be fun to test all the animals self-aware enough to recognize themselves in the mirror with a public-security-camera?  And maybe add a two second delay/ fun-house distortion?  Could you induce Uncanny moments out of bottlenose dolphins?)

Which brings us to Never Let Me Go.

Virtual doppelgangers and imaginary doubles are bad enough, but Ruth’s situation is far worse.  Technically, she is the double.  My favourite moment in the film occurs just after Ruth sees her possible “original”.  Kathy reassures Ruth that the girl looked nothing like her, while Tommy unhelpfully tells her they looked pretty similar.  Ruth remains in denial, and how could she not?  It’s one thing to be told in a classroom that you were based off of some other person, and another thing altogether to see that person.  Think of all the psychological collisions going on. All the mirror stage work you did as a child would crash.  Your left temporoparietal junction would drive you to distraction.

(On a side note: how awesome are clones/doubles as fictional devices?  The protagonists’ realization that they might be copies paradoxically reaffirms their existence to the reader.   They also break the reader out of the traditional narrative and bring the reader’s attention to the non-narrative patterns in the text, which may be why modernist writers love them so much.)

Can we separate our identities from our bodies?  Ruth is forced to ask herself this question when she sees her double, and the audience is forced to do the same when Tommy’s artistic efforts and Kathy’s love are made irrelevant.  Gattaca implies that the mind-identity/soul is far more important than the body-identity, and it’s easy to feel sympathetic for the plights of Ruth and Tommy and Kathy.  But the answer is not so easy if you consider how surprisingly affecting the images of your body can be, and how utterly creepy it is to imagine someone else in your body.

Original Sin

I was completely fascinated by the idea, in Never Let Me Go, that all of the donors have “originals.” At different moments, Ruth and Kathy’s obsessions with finding their originals emerge. Ruth is heartbroken when the woman at the travel agency isn’t hers, and Kathy pores over porn magazines because she figures her overactive sex drive might be a sign of some kind of natural predisposition.

To me these two persons, the “original” and the donor/copy of them, reflect the tension we discussed with Lacan’s mirror stage between the real and ideal, the self and the image.