Double Trouble
The Double / directed by Richard Ayoade
What is it about the appearance of our identical double that gets us so hot and bothered? Oh, this has not yet happened to you? Me neither - but Richard Ayoade’s The Double suggest that should either of us be forced into such an encounter, it will be far from a soothing one, though not without its moments of enchantment and personal growth, and that we should be braced for things to get messy (read: bloody) sooner rather than later.
In The Double, Jessie Eisenberg plays both protagonist Simon James and his nemesis James Simon. Simon James is an apologetic, long-suffering office drone, lonesome and in love with the cute girl in his office who works the photocopy machine (Mia Wasikowska). And what an office, and what a photocopy machine! In a world that never seems to achieve full daylight and where it’s frequently raining, the office feels like a bunker during the Blitz, both the apotheosis of Simon’s world and some sort of false shelter from it, all battered industrial strength elevators, dark corridors, and cramped wood cubicles. Needless to say, there don’t seem to be many windows. A blocky technological backwardness nips around the edges, a sort of mid-century Eastern block modernism, featuring clunky buttons, flip switches, and the above-referenced photocopy machine, which roars like a sports car or jungle cat when in operation. The scenario feels distinctly Orwellian, as if the world had been drained by war, drawn-out austerity, and too-long submission to dubious but insistent authority.
The story opens in blackly comic fashion, Simon’s existence limned as a succession of jammed turnstiles, unpredictable elevators, and defective subway doors that shloop away his briefcase to parts unknown. It’s as if something as literal as forward movement is nearly impossible; within the film’s murky hues, Simon sometimes reminds you of a little fish swimming to stay still against the water flow in a dirty aquarium. Rapidly revealed to be a self-aware non-entity, Simon is clearly tortured and outraged by the literal lack of recognition at work, not to mention the humiliation - the security guard forces him to show his identification although they’ve been known to each other for many years, and his work contributions go unacknowledged. Yet Simon’s anger is tamped down not only by his quickly-kicking-in inhibitions, but also by the seeming implacability of his situation. If he wants to keep having a job, he will have to play by their rules; his default response to criticism is simply to say “I’m sorry.” Apart from stylistic tone-deafness and penury, Simon’s single oversized suit suggests a boy who has not yet grown into a man. We sense a case of arrested development, but also of a world that prefers him this way.
Yet a wind of change is blowing in Simon’s life - though it will soon be revealed to be more a force 5 hurricane than a summer breeze - initially in the form of his closely-held flame for the beautiful photocopier girl, Hannah. A suicide that Simon witnesses brings them together for a coffee - the dead man turns out to have been stalking Hannah - and Simon makes so bold as to buy her a pair of earrings by way of declaring his love for her. Only, owing to his chronic ID badge problems, he is unable to meet up with her at the company ball, and hope is more or less dashed, or at least badly deferred.
Perhaps Simon has retreated too far in the face of the steady erasure of his identity, because it is now that the company takes on its newest employee: James Simon, the only person not laid off from a recently-closed office branch, and outwardly indistinguishable from Simon James. Getting his first clear sight of James, Simon faints dead away, a moment that, like many in the film, outwardly seems like slapstick but is something less fun and altogether more symbolic. That the office personnel’s reception of James is rapturous, and their capacity to see the resemblance between the two spotty, makes Simon’s fainting seem well-advised.
Cocky, smarmy, and charismatic, James is both Simon’s double and his antithesis; he rocks the oversize suit like he was David Byrne, not a ventriloquist’s dummy. The two enter into a tango that quickly devolves from curious comradeship to fraternal violence. Where Simon sees threat, the wily James sees opportunity, and it is not long before Simon’s well-being is violated as it never was before James’ arrival; James, clearly a cad but with the sexual confidence that Simon lacks, quickly makes his moves on Hannah while also exploiting Simon’s extensive (if perennially unrecognized) job skills. James seems to be cruising towards annihilating victory, both personally and professionally; Simon appears set on a downward spiral toward complete defeat on both fronts.
And yet, in the figure of James, his lost twin or dark angel, Simon has something concrete to fight back against - more concrete, anyway, than his own psyche and the rejecting world in which he lives. And so he does begin to do serious battle, although fairly catastrophically. It may be that Simon’s diagnosis of the situation is somewhat cracked - that this world only has room for one of them - but in retrospect it seems accurate. Darkly, he becomes more James-like than is comfortable; more charitably, he learns the necessary lessons and realizes that if everything in his world is going to be so damned symbolic, he’d better start acting symbolically, even if that’s the same as murderously.
The exaggerated absurdity of The Double's world grates at times, though I assume that is partly by design; it is, after all, a world that is effectively cheese-gratering Simon into nothingness. But one sequence in particular, in which an authority figure of some kind informs Simon that, effectively, he can no longer be at the company because he can’t be found in the system, and he can’t be added to the system because he’s not in the system, falls flat, and highlights the degree to which The Double relies on an overly familiar bureaucratic absurdity for its structure and humor, and perhaps unintentionally sucks some life out of itself thereby.
Yet the pleasure of Eisenberg’s dual performance does much to counteract some of these less successful elements of the film. Simon is a ridiculous character, an extreme of a type, but Eisenberg makes him accessible to us in all his pain and powerlessness. Likewise, it is a thrill when his James enters the scene and holds the office in the palm of his hand through what seems to come down to sheer audacity. If there is an unresolvable mystery in how these two sides of the same coin came to be, Eisenberg makes it work, uniting James/Simon even as we always feel that it simply must be two different actors playing these disparate parts.