Are y’all watching Severance? Did you watch Dark Matter? Could I recommend Counterpart with J.K. Simmons and Olivia Williams? Have you seen Mr. Klein with Alain Delon? Surely you’ve seen Vertigo? How about Coherence? Look, what I am saying is that I love a doppelganger story.
Published in 2023, Doppelganger is not exactly an under-the radar book. Naomi Klein, already a well-known author, has won several well-deserved awards for it. and I think it’s in a lot of people’s periphery, at least. In Doppelganger, Klein follows her own doppelganger, Naomi Wolf, once a liberal feminist icon, into the conspiracy-saturated far right. Due to the frequent confusion of the two Naomis in the media–both are Jewish women writers, both named Naomi, both have written books about big, important topics and identify as feminists–Klein is often mistaken for her other. She must come to terms with what this means for herself, her career, and then, naturally, her communities, our countries, and our planet.
Along the path, Klein not only lays the foundation of the historical and literary understandings of doppelgangers, but prods our own doppelganger culture(s): what is social media if not a doppelganger? Our own likenesses live online lives that may or may not be similar to our in-person experience. And personal branding – a double we cultivate in these late-stage capitalism days. And from there it’s an easy intellectual leap to the doubles in our collective experience – vaxxers vs. anti-vaxxers; the twisted conspiracy versions of reasonable assumptions and facts; the strange and hyper-individualized mental and physical world that Covid has rendered; the double-world we have created that subjugates so many for the frictionless lives of the few.
In a particularly interesting section, she talks about how and why so many people recently have flipped from “reasonable liberal” to “unreasonable far right”, seemingly skipping everything in between – something I myself have wondered aloud on MANY occasions.
And then after she’s laid all this out, she delivers the clincher:
But partitioning and performing and projecting are no longer working. The borders and walls don’t protect us from rising temperatures or surging viruses or raging wars. And the walls around ourselves and our kids won’t hold, either. Because we are porous and connected, as so many doppelganger stories have attempted to teach us (p 313).
I mean, damn. And then:
The self as perfected brand, the self as digital avatar, the self as data mine, the self as idealized body, the self as racist and anti-Semitic projection, the child as mirror of the self, the self as eternal victim. These doubles share one thing in common: all are ways of not seeing. Not seeing ourselves clearly (because we are so busy performing an idealized version of ourselves), not seeing one another clearly (because we are so busy projecting what we cannot bear to see about ourselves onto others), and not seeing the world and the connections among us clearly (because we have partitioned ourselves and blocked our vision). I think this, more than anything else, explains the uncanny feeling of our moment in history—with all of its mirrorings, synthetic selves, and manufactured realities. At bottom, it comes down to who and what we cannot bear to see—in our past, in our present, and in the future racing toward us.
A great, sobering, read, that constructs a solid framework for our present era, and actually gave me hope and calm for how to face the future. I saw someone say this is one of Klein’s more “fun” books, and I get what they mean – it’s a well-crafted essay with lots of meaty cultural and literary references – but I think I’d use the word “clarifying.” Published in 2023, it’s even more relevant today.