I feel like I am not alone,’ a sentiment that is shared by her Parisian counterpart. In Kraków, Weronika says to her father, ‘I have a strange feeling. While Weronika performs until her untimely demise, Véronique quits her professional pursuits to teach music to children. Both of the film’s protagonists, Weronika in Poland and Véronique in Paris, have musical gifts, like Elsa. Interestingly, the film shares more than a few things in common with Levy’s novel. This is certainly true of Weronika in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Veronique (1991), who after seeing her doppelganger at a protest in Kraków, dies on stage shortly after.
Traditionally the appearance of one’s double is a bad omen, a harbinger of death. She considers this woman to be her double.ĭeborah Levy, August Blue, 2023, book cover. Rattled, Elsa washes up in Athens where, amid tacky souvenirs and wagons of nuts, she spies a woman in a trilby hat making an unusual purchase at a local flea market: a pair of mechanical horses. Anderson, a 34-year-old, blue-haired concert pianist, has recently walked off stage during a performance of Sergei Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. Against the uneasy backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, Elsa M. Such ideas take centre stage in Deborah Levy's disorientating new novel August Blue (2023). Goldin’s uncanny mirror images ask questions of our identities, be they the personas we inhabit on and off stage the gendered identities we perform or any of the multiple identities we assume as a simple condition of being a person in this world.
In art, the motif is memorably realized in the hazy dressing room photographs of Nan Goldin, whose subjects stare into mottled mirrors while adding finishing touches to their makeup. A myriad of mysterious doubles populates the works of director David Lynch from Laura Palmer’s dark-haired cousin Maddy Ferguson in Twin Peaks (1990), to Betty and Diane in Mulholland Drive (2001) and the doubling of Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). Jekyll in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1866). The monster is the gruesome double of Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Edward Hyde is the cruel alter ego of Dr.
Doppelgangers and their counterparts – doubles, split personalities, evil twins – have stalked popular works of fiction and art since the Romantic period.
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