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The concept of 'character doubling,' which has deep literary roots, was developed with special force in the cinema. Carl Jung's theory of psychological types, first published in English in 1923, suggests an approach to understanding the use of stereotyped characters, especially doubles, so familiar in American cinema. The on- and off-screen career of actress Kim Novak is used as an illustration of this fascination with disjointed personalities, particularly in such films as Vertigo, Bell, Book and Candle, The Legend of Lylah Clare and Kiss Me, Stupid.
I like parts with what I call 'counterpoint' in them, playing against something to achieve something.1
Kim Novak
The idea of the double has been a recurring theme throughout the hundred years or so of the existence of cinema.2 Film-makers have returned again and again to this device in various ways in order to create dramatic conflict, to reveal hidden aspects ofacharacter's nature,andto provide stark contrasts between opposing narrative forces. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931) is perhaps the most famous early example of this, with a man leading a double life ('angel and fiend') across a clearly partitioned temporal split (day and night). In Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), replacement by an alien double was used as an allegory of (and a warning against) the dangers of the communist infiltration of middle America. In Psycho (1960) the most famous 'split personality' in film history - Norman Bates - doubled as his own mother to perform grisly murders. In TheManWhoHaunted Himself (1970) Roger Moore played Harold Pelham, a man who in the aftermath of a car crash was continually one step behind and then eventually replaced by his own perfect double, a process which could be interpreted as a metaphor of psychological transformation or collapse. In The Stepford Wives (1975) the entire female population was in danger of replacement by picture-perfect robotic doubles. And in Face/Off (1997) the two lead characters literally swapped faces and then tried to imitate convincingly their enemycounterparts in order to survive.
However, these films are usually analysed by scholars in terms of the role of the director and/or the writer in respect to auteur theory, or they are deconstructed in formal terms to reveal the binary oppositions which pervade these types of...