It occurs to me that the words around film are often singular, perhaps reflecting the hierarchy that still thrives on a film set, where the director calls the shots (literally), actors fight for top billing. There is one silver screen, the leading man, One Perfect Shot. And so why was our inbox flooded with doubles: twins, remakes, adaptations, couples? For the viewer, the screen provides a double: an idealized self or a funhouse mirror.
We like to see pairs because we like to compare; the original to its remake, one actress to another, the book to the movie. We like to think we are seeing the secret patterns or the “soul” of a work of art that can’t be replicated. I appreciate what Cason Sharpe says in his piece on White Oleander (2002), a film based on a book about a daughter trying to escape the shadow of her mother: “The book is almost always better than the movie, if by better we mean the truest version of itself.” It is not because books (with the elitism or nostalgia we attach to them) are inherently better than movies, but because they are the first and most realized version, the author’s perfect object. Or maybe film is the bastard sibling of literature or painting or theater, but in its proliferation of remakes and copies, we see our striving, our laziness, our contradictions, and we reveal something about ourselves too. Every time we compare two things, we are making a claim for ourselves: How much of my sense of self was forged in comparison to my brother (tall, thin, blonde, musical, and shy)? How much of it was forged against the figures on the screen?
I was struck while watching Blonde (2022), with the double nature of actresses playing other actresses. Two people in performance: an on-duty actor playing an actor off duty (although: can a star be off-duty?) Of course, there is another double in Ana de Armas’ performance: Norma Jean and Marilyn. Perhaps the most persistent double in cinema is the star and the person, Marilyn still compels us because we are convinced we can find the real her underneath the veneer, and we are constantly disappointed when we only find more reflections.
I also thought of Austin Butler in Elvis (2022), performing Presley’s opening night at the International Hotel in Las Vegas. Watching the footage of Elvis’ real performance that night, we see a certified star, he captivates effortlessly, he doesn’t have anything to prove. But while Butler captures some part of Elvis, he also hits the moves harder, with more urgency, because Butler himself—a Disney channel star in his first major role—has everything to prove. Through Elvis, he is making his own bid at stardom: his sweat is real, this is his moment. It’s the performance of two stars, overlaid like a double exposure.
There is also the double life of the film, the reality once the scene ends, the way disparate details (costumes tightened with clamps at the back, painted skies tacked behind window panes) become one seamless image. Maybe that’s why we feel so smart when we catch continuity errors or gaffes, the boom mic in the frame reassures us that we haven’t fallen for film’s illusion. But we want to. When rewatching Some Like it Hot (1959) in a theater a few months ago, the audience laughed, clapped, discussed delightedly on the way out, but I couldn’t stop thinking of how torturous the shoot was for Marilyn, how ill she was, how she, it seems, wanted to be anywhere but on that soundstage. But I’m not willing to lose her films, and so I accept the fantasy that what we see is what we get, that there is no other side.
When you watch films–especially when you watch many films–they start to gravitate towards one another, creating resonances that may not be there. When pairing films, we see bastard brothers, troubled twins, kindred spirits, refractions of ourselves (or our mothers)… images, arcs, ideas are reliefs slotting into one another, like stepping into a footprint in the snow.
The sexiest scene of the year was one where de Armas as Marilyn looks at herself in the mirror while her lovers talk about her body. She needs to see herself through others, through a reflection. I’ve heard we tend to be attracted to people who mirror our own features, we are adaptively programmed to like what looks familiar and feels safer. But I’ve also heard that we prefer the way we look in mirrors to photographs. Sometimes a photograph of myself sends me into an existential tailspin. Maybe it’s photography, the perfect images on the screen, that have made our reflections unbearable at times, we see ourselves and we don’t look pleasingly familiar but like a strange shape in a funhouse mirror: Is that really me?
Gabrielle Marceau
Editor-in-Chief, In The Mood Magazine
It occurs to me that the words around film are often singular, perhaps reflecting the hierarchy that still thrives on a film set, where the director calls the shots (literally), actors fight for top billing. There is one silver screen, the leading man, One Perfect Shot. And so why was our inbox flooded with doubles: twins, remakes, adaptations, couples? For the viewer, the screen provides a double: an idealized self or a funhouse mirror.
We like to see pairs because we like to compare; the original to its remake, one actress to another, the book to the movie. We like to think we are seeing the secret patterns or the “soul” of a work of art that can’t be replicated. I appreciate what Cason Sharpe says in his piece on White Oleander (2002), a film based on a book about a daughter trying to escape the shadow of her mother: “The book is almost always better than the movie, if by better we mean the truest version of itself.” It is not because books (with the elitism or nostalgia we attach to them) are inherently better than movies, but because they are the first and most realized version, the author’s perfect object. Or maybe film is the bastard sibling of literature or painting or theater, but in its proliferation of remakes and copies, we see our striving, our laziness, our contradictions, and we reveal something about ourselves too. Every time we compare two things, we are making a claim for ourselves: How much of my sense of self was forged in comparison to my brother (tall, thin, blonde, musical, and shy)? How much of it was forged against the figures on the screen?
I was struck while watching Blonde (2022), with the double nature of actresses playing other actresses. Two people in performance: an on-duty actor playing an actor off duty (although: can a star be off-duty?) Of course, there is another double in Ana de Armas’ performance: Norma Jean and Marilyn. Perhaps the most persistent double in cinema is the star and the person, Marilyn still compels us because we are convinced we can find the real her underneath the veneer, and we are constantly disappointed when we only find more reflections.
I also thought of Austin Butler in Elvis (2022), performing Presley’s opening night at the International Hotel in Las Vegas. Watching the footage of Elvis’ real performance that night, we see a certified star, he captivates effortlessly, he doesn’t have anything to prove. But while Butler captures some part of Elvis, he also hits the moves harder, with more urgency, because Butler himself—a Disney channel star in his first major role—has everything to prove. Through Elvis, he is making his own bid at stardom: his sweat is real, this is his moment. It’s the performance of two stars, overlaid like a double exposure.
There is also the double life of the film, the reality once the scene ends, the way disparate details (costumes tightened with clamps at the back, painted skies tacked behind window panes) become one seamless image. Maybe that’s why we feel so smart when we catch continuity errors or gaffes, the boom mic in the frame reassures us that we haven’t fallen for film’s illusion. But we want to. When rewatching Some Like it Hot (1959) in a theater a few months ago, the audience laughed, clapped, discussed delightedly on the way out, but I couldn’t stop thinking of how torturous the shoot was for Marilyn, how ill she was, how she, it seems, wanted to be anywhere but on that soundstage. But I’m not willing to lose her films, and so I accept the fantasy that what we see is what we get, that there is no other side.
When you watch films–especially when you watch many films–they start to gravitate towards one another, creating resonances that may not be there. When pairing films, we see bastard brothers, troubled twins, kindred spirits, refractions of ourselves (or our mothers)… images, arcs, ideas are reliefs slotting into one another, like stepping into a footprint in the snow.
The sexiest scene of the year was one where de Armas as Marilyn looks at herself in the mirror while her lovers talk about her body. She needs to see herself through others, through a reflection. I’ve heard we tend to be attracted to people who mirror our own features, we are adaptively programmed to like what looks familiar and feels safer. But I’ve also heard that we prefer the way we look in mirrors to photographs. Sometimes a photograph of myself sends me into an existential tailspin. Maybe it’s photography, the perfect images on the screen, that have made our reflections unbearable at times, we see ourselves and we don’t look pleasingly familiar but like a strange shape in a funhouse mirror: Is that really me?
Gabrielle Marceau
Editor-in-Chief, In The Mood Magazine