While Rupert isn’t interested in a crisscross murder, he certainly wants Jerry to spot him a segment on Jerry’s show. This is more than a favor..And he appears to go to criminal extremes to get there. However, before Rupert kidnaps Jerry, he intrudes on the workplace and Jerry’s Connecticut home. Bruno Antony pops into Guy’s life several times, appearing at the tennis club and a party at the Senator’s home. Neither Bruno nor Rupert would be on anyone’s guest list. Given a few minutes both men will embarrass you. Bruno retains some interest for peopple with his eccentric party chatter. Rupert is only capable of extended imaginary conversations with cutout cardboard characters; he can also in his made-up conversations infer an invitation to stay at Jerry’s home.
* * *
STRANGERS INDEED
I cannot watch Guy Haines (Farley Granger) and Bruno Antony (Robert Walker) in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951) without seeing them as parts of the same person. Bruno acts as Guy’s shadow, his dark half, a double. I listen closely to Bruno talking to Guy, from the first scene in the train club car to the last amidst the debris of the merry-go-round, and hear a sort of courting by Bruno, a desire to know his other, better self, his frustration of non-recognition by Guy.
There are many ways to read this doubling. I prefer not to see Bruno as Guy’s evil side. Neither do I believe that Bruno’s character, in itself more interesting that Guy’s, is worth worrying about. I understand how his father-hatred and a doting mother defined his psyche. Rather, his murdering Guy’s wife benefits Guy, whereas there’s never a realistic chance that Guy will even think about killing Bruno’s father. In other words, the movie is all about Guy and Guy’s desires. Bruno is an instrument, a very willing if eccentric extension of Guy’s barely repressed desires.
Bruno also represents the incipient phase of the celebrity stalker in our society. He follows Guy’s exploits in the society columns. He knows a lot about Guy’s life – or thinks he knows it. He knows Guy’s professional life:
I saw you blast Faraday right off the court in South Orange season. What a backhand! Made the semi-finals, didn’t you?
If you don’t want to see Bruno as Guy’s double or submerged self, perhaps he merely wants to be part of the famous person’s life, if not revel in it:
It must be pretty exciting to be so important.
When Guy balks at this attention, Bruno as stalker can proceed on one course: destroying Guy’s life.
Bruno acts on Guy’s behalf because he really likes Guy. One could read this as homoerotic, and rightly, given the way others, like the Senator (Leo G. Carroll), speak about Bruno as weird, an oddball, or other 1950s code to suggest his homosexuality. Bruno’s infatuation with Guy is a sexual longing. Most telling is a comment from the Senator’s daughter Barbara (Patricia Hitchcock) to her sister Anne (Ruth Roman), when there’s a discussion about Guy’s wife being killed and Guy is the prime suspect:
I still think it would be wonderful to have a man love you so much he’d kill for you.
She’s talking about Guy killing for Anne. But taken literally, her comment talks about a “man” who has killed for love. Bruno’s the man!
Yet Bruno himself stresses Guy’s social and public standing as a center of interest. Bruno not only follows this tennis star celebrity but wants to aid the celebrity in the public sphere. Bruno becomes angry when Guy refuses to acknowledge Bruno’s actions for him. Take Bruno’s murder of Guy’s wife, Miriam (Laura Elliot), the “criss” of his crisscross murder theory. Bruno’s dumb-founded – to the point of naivete – when Guy denies ever wanting Miriam dead. If you watch the scene in the private car on the train when Bruno asks Guy if the murder theory is a good one, Guy answers “Sure, Bruno.” We, the viewers, understand what Guy means. Bruno, however, has already made up his mind to kill Miriam. He isn’t asking for Guy’s approval – his announcing the theory in itself is the approval. Guy does nothing to dissuade his other, less better half, because he does not know this part of himself. Guy, however, is not a stranger to Bruno.
Maybe Bruno planned to meet Guy. This may be true but only as far as one’s double “plans” a meeting. More important is the timing of the meeting. Guy is experiencing a crisis – a showdown with his wife in Metcalf – that will get worse before the day ends. After she tells him that she’s pregnant (not by Guy), he calls Ann Morton and blurts out that he could kill Miriam. So, yes, Bruno is on the train because he’s responding to the crisis too. He has a solution that involves a moral force of sorts. Bruno cannot comprehend why Guy, or anyone, wouldn’t do what had to be done to remove the impediment to one’s egoistic bliss:
Guy: You crazy maniac! Would you please get out of here and leave me alone.
Bruno: But Guy . . . I like you.
Most people come away from Strangers on a Train with the “crisscross” idea for a murder. Meet someone with no connection to you who also needs someone to be killed. Swap the murders. Instant alibis, absence of motives, the police are baffled. This plot device I’ve seen in several television mystery and police shows (a 77 Sunset Strip episode, and a Columbo, for starters); my interests are less melodramatic. Indeed, the swapping of murders is the film’s MacGuffin if only because there’s never a real chance of Guy killing Bruno’s father. Any crisscrossing occurs on the level of guilt transference and the real ambitions of Bruno Antony as a celebrity follower.
Let’s dwell on the word “strangers” from the title. It aptly describes the relationship – inner relationship – between Guy and himself. He’s estranged from himself for no startling reason save that he’s become complacent with his life: tennis successes, his new relationship, and his prospective future in politics. The problem, and the cause of his immediate crisis, is his loveless first marriage. He does not consciously recognize how the nature of his ambitions have contributed to his personal life reaching marital critical mass. He is a man of ego, which demands that he must go forward in his career and society. From Hitchcock’s perspective, Guy’s ambition represents the normal circumstance for the American male of the mid-twentieth century. By this logic, it’s normal to trade in the first wife (a low-class slut) for a highly desirable catch, a Senator’s daughter. Miriam’s second scene, when Bruno follows her to the amusement park, instructs us, yes to her way of life, flirting with two boys (even making eyes toward Bruno and being impressed by his show of strength by ringing the bell), but also allows us to see where Guy came from, who he was before he was a celebrity. Stepping up the social ladder by marrying the Senator’s daughter is affected by Bruno killing her. Guy will become a stranger, also, to his past.
Bruno represents a discomfiting reminder that Guy’s upwardly mobile desires can be problematic. You have a party of socialites and Bruno shows up. Bruno shows up at several respectable places (his family has social standing), sometimes as an amiable conversationalist, other times as a public embarrassment. He’s clever and witty, especially to people who cannot admit that high society could have such an ignoble vessel spouting out things like:
How do you do, sir? I’d like to talk with you sometime, sir, and tell you about my idea for harnessing the life force. It’ll make atomic power look like the horse and buggy. I’m already developing my faculty for seeing millions of miles. And Senator: can you imagine being able to smell a flower – on the planet Mars?
This “stranger” is, indeed, quite strange. Any attempt to rein in Bruno is met with his contempt. His psychological side, an infantile emotional complex – over-mothered and under-fathered – reflects the type of man Guy may have been when he was courting Miriam. Bruno wants Guy to destroy his (their) superego. Then the two can live together in psychologically wedded bliss, unrestrained by society’s rules.
HITCHCOCK’S DOUBLES
In an essay on the doppelganger, Albert Guerard mentions how the double appears in stories precisely at a moment of crisis. The crisis could involve a mental breakdown or a dark desire; the double harasses the protagonist, acting either as a conscience or tempter or a mirror. Usually, the double is seen as a threat and must be expelled or expunged. Then the protagonist is either freed from the dark desires and temptation or, conversely, mortally wounds his own spirit. This double can appear in physical form or takes shape as a mental delusion. In Strangers, Bruno is real, from a well-to-do family, and exhibits all the traits of an adult not grown up. His father is stern and his mother, doting. He acts independently of Guy but, at the same time, gravitates around Guy’s life.
I have characterized Guy as the most important individual in the relationship. The film is about Guy. Yet, Bruno controls the events. Equally important, Guy never recognizes Bruno as his double or “other self.” The literary or cinematic doppelganger functions best like this.
When Guy vanquishes Bruno, all seems well from Guy’s perspective. He’s proven that he didn’t murder his estranged wife, Miriam. He can marry Senator Morton’s daughter, Anne, and have a political life when he retires from tennis.
Yet Hitchcock doesn’t let Guy off easily. The very last scene, after he and Anne are married, they are sitting in a train’s club car and a man sitting across from them asks: “Aren’t you Guy Haines?” The man is a priest or minister and Guy, remembering that the same question was asked by Bruno, takes Anne’s hand and leaves in a sort of mock panic.
The scene represents typical Hitchcockian humor. Comic relief at the end. But the question lingers. Does Guy know himself: who he really is? Hadn’t Bruno acted out what Guy had thought? Wasn’t Bruno, that “evil double,” the agent of Guy’s happiness? Are Guy and Anne assured a happy, settled marriage?
A sort of answer comes in a Hitchcock film three years later, Dial M for Murder (1954). In that film, an ex-tennis pro, Tony Wendice (Ray Milland), plots to murder his wife, Margot (Grace Kelly), who has had a brief affair with a writer, Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings). Like Bruno, Tony gets someone else to do his murder, blackmailing an old college chum, Captain Swann (Anthony Dawson). Also, as for Bruno, the plan provides Tony the perfect alibi.
Dial M for Murder
Despite the film being based on a popular play by Frederick Knott (Strangers is based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith), I can’t help feeling that Tony is an older but not much wiser version of Guy Haines. Tony-Guy has learned from his past venture with Bruno that one should choose one’s surrogate murderer more carefully. Unfortunately for Tony, Captain Swann dies trying to kill Margot and the perfect murder blows up in Tony’s face. The one real difference between Tony and Guy is that Tony is the more interesting person, just as Bruno had been more interesting than Guy.
One of Hitchcock’s most interesting use of doubles is in Shadow of a Doubt (1943). In this case, they are a teenage girl and her uncle, both named Charlie. Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) is a serial killer specializing in rich widows. His niece (Teresa Wright) is bored with everyday life and wishes her favorite uncle would visit to liven up the town, Santa Rosa, California. One of our first views of them has each one lying in their respective beds, a continent apart, dreaming and depressed, waiting for something to illuminate their lives.
The Charlies are a strange doubling, nothing like Guy and Bruno. Yes, one of them represents a dark, pessimistic perspective on human beings. But they have a special bond, symbolized with a ring that he gives his niece, as if they are married. A bright, innocent view of life coupled with a brooding, troubled view. The niece unwittingly has released this dark force upon her small town.
Shadow of a Doubt
Slowly, inevitably, she learns the truth about her uncle. Even then, his charisma keeps her from exposing him to the police, who have tracked him across the country. When the police are about to give up their search, Uncle Charlie decides to leave Santa Rosa, unwilling to stay near the one person who knows his darkest secrets. But he can’t help trying to kill her; and in the process, while defending herself, the niece throws him from the train and kills him. Her uncle’s legacy as a killer dies with him. Her struggle with this dark force becomes a form of self-knowledge, unlike Guy’s struggle with Bruno, which is more an attempt to remain ignorant of his true self.
Another type of doubling occurs in Psycho (1960). Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) resembles Sam Loomis (John Gavin). Bates has killed Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), Loomis’ love interest. Late in the film, Bates and Loomis face each other in the office of the motel while Lila (Vera Miles), Marion’s sister, searches the Bates’s house for Norman’s mother. Behind Loomis is a mirror reflection of himself, suggesting another self lurking within his personality, perhaps a “Norman self.” Psycho is a film filled with mirror reflections of many characters, further pressing the issue of doubles.
The fact that Marion’s name is a near anagram for Norman’s links these two characters, who confess to one another that they are caught in traps. Norman says that he has been born in his, while Marion is the victim of a wild impulse to change her life. At the moment Marion is freeing herself from her personal neurosis – symbolically washing off her sins in the shower – Norman slays her. The mother-side of him will not allow Norman to desire another woman, sympathize with another human being, perhaps killing his last fleeting moment of self-knowledge and escaping his trap.
Rear Window
One other Hitchcock character, L. B. Jeffries (James Stewart), in Rear Window (1954), directly confronts his double, Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), who lives across the apartment court. Jeffries believes that Thorwald has murdered his wife and chopped her up. Unusually, in this film, it’s the double who ends up being harassed.
Jeffries’ crisis stems from his resistance to marrying longtime girlfriend Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly). He’s reluctant to give up his career as a globetrotting photojournalist. Indeed, many of the scenarios in the apartments around Jeffries’ enact different forms of relationships between men and women, including the pains of loneliness in those people lacking a relationship. Jeffries’ mental state is being played out before his voyeuristic eyes. One of these relationships includes the bickering Thorwalds.
After Lisa breaks into Thorwald’s apartment to find evidence that the wife had to have been killed, Lars seeks out Jeffries, who is laid up in the apartment with a broken leg. Lars enters and approaches Jeffries asking, “What do you want from me?” Thorwald remains a shadowy figure through the entire scene, further emphasizing the doubled aspect of the two men.
Thorwald’s question reminds me of Bruno’s final words in Strangers on a Train. Both killers seem to be saying: Why are you bothering me? Don’t you realize who I am? Haven’t I done what you – we – were thinking? How could you think of living without me?
CELEBRITY CULTURE
Earlier, I took Bruno’s perspective by saying that Guy hadn’t resisted the idea of the crisscross murders strongly enough. Guy’s passivity could also be explained as a reaction to someone that he doesn’t take seriously: a fan. The crisscross offer becomes an unbalanced contract to which only Bruno signs on. He’s assumed a “relationship” with Guy and is incapable of understanding that he has been blown off. This is essentially the root misunderstanding in many fan-celebrity encounters. A chance meeting, a friendly conversation, maybe even lunch, are interpreted by the fan as something greater than it is. Occasionally, this fan cannot accept being rebuffed or not being counted as a friend by the celebrity/public figure.
The movie The Fan (1996) portrays the situation bluntly. Robert De Niro gets close to a star baseball player, Wesley Snipes, and the more they are in contact, the more De Niro expects from his baseball hero. De Niro’s character is blue collar and psychotically in need of reciprocal approval. He’s not a fellow the millionaire athlete would want to be around for more than an autograph session. (Circumstances prolong their contact, which excites De Niro’s desire for a permanent relationship.) We can see where this is leading. Play Misty for Me-like (1971) hostage taking and violence. Not the first film, as my analogy suggests, that has gone that route. Nor is the celebrity completely innocent. The problem is that reality had already surpassed the movie’s terrors. The lack of The Fan’s timeliness and subtlety (as cited in IMDb, Adrian Scott of Radio Times stated that the film had little to say about baseball and stalking) reminds me of Mel Brooks’s weak parodies of Hitchcock, Star Wars movies, Robin Hood, and Dracula. The Fan tells us things we know and hints at nothing we don’t suspect. Can a mainstream movie that promotes and sells itself, in essence baiting the audience, in the very way that celebrities get idolatrous fans really make a bold statement about its subject?
In 1951, at the start of the television age, Strangers on a Train was not centered nor explicitly interested in celebrity-fan relationships. The film makes no reference to television. Guy’s key match at the U.S. Open is being broadcast on radio. We’re still in an age of media innocence. The occasion for an obsessive like Bruno Antony stalking a well-known person was exceptional. It’s as if society still had self-control, suggesting that television weakened if not destroyed that control and muted our self-image. And not slowly, either.
Another Robert De Niro film, Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1983), dramatized the fan-celebrity relationship, only now the fan, the stalker, has become the main character. This is the equivalent of having Bruno Antony or Lars Thorwald as the main narrative forces of their respective films. Ominously, De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin is infinitely less interesting. The film had a disappointing box office. I remember seeing it with ten people in the theater. Despite loving the film, I could understand how an audience would be repulsed by Rupert, having noticed that some of his qualities could be shared by anyone interested in the entertainment world. Who would want to identify with him? Best to stay away. Scorsese took a chance, perhaps, that De Niro’s appeal would overcome the audience’s potential revulsion, except that it seems some didn’t recognize him in the role. What remains is an experiment gone wrong but one that successfully explores the vortex created by the fan-celebrity obsessive relationship.
The dynamics of the relationship between Rupert Pupkin and Jerry Langford are presaged in Strangers on a Train.
While Rupert isn’t interested in a crisscross murder, he certainly wants Jerry to spot him a segment on Jerry’s show. This is more than a favor..And he appears to go to criminal extremes to get there. However, before Rupert kidnaps Jerry, he intrudes on the workplace and Jerry’s Connecticut home. Bruno Antony pops into Guy’s life several times, appearing at the tennis club and a party at the Senator’s home. Neither Bruno nor Rupert would be on anyone’s guest list. Given a few minutes both men will embarrass you. Bruno retains some interest for peopple with his eccentric party chatter. Rupert is only capable of extended imaginary conversations with cutout cardboard characters; he can also in his made-up conversations infer an invitation to stay at Jerry’s home.
Bruno has no job or noticable skills. Both men live their parents. Bruno’s resentments are aimed completely at his father – hence, his desire to kill him. Rupert’s motives are more involved. He’s a celebrity hound whose life meaning is bound in obtaining celebrity autographs. He aspires to this level of being well known when he shows his erstwhile girlfrind, Rita (Diahnne Abbott), his own autograph, scribbled in such a way that the name is unrecognizable: “The more scribbled the name, the bigger the fame.” Beyond that, as revealed in his fantasy of being married on late-night television (a la Tiny Tim and Miss Vicky), his former high school principal officiates the service and tells Rupert how wrong everyone was to slight and (perhaps) mock him in his high school years. Rupert wants to get back at nearly everyone.
His talent, unfortunately, has less weight than Bruno’s Mars project. Nor does Rupert understand what it truly takes to succeed in show business. On the surface, becoming a celebrity seems serendipitous and pure luck, a matter of getting a chance to show one’s material. Rupert has honed a routine, ONE routine, which he feels is the equivalent of all the comedy monologues he’s seen (on The Jerry Langford Show). He doesn’t understand that you don’t just walk into a gig, the material has to be tried out for years at different venues, receive critical feedback, then be remade. All of which does not compute within Rupert’s idea of the celebrity world.
Bruno has no desire to be a tennis star. He follows celebrities but has one in mind who might help him solve his problem. He might be as naive as Rupert, believing that Guy could murder someone. Perhaps the murder of his father mean that much to him, and he doesn’t think Guy has it in him to kill his father, and all that mattered was that he and Guy could share his murder of Guy’s wife. Bruno desired an intimate closeness to Guy. Rupert’s desire to be close to Jerry only appears to matter as far as Jerry can make Rupert “known.” His lack of feeling for Jerry suggests that Rupert would like to replace him by holding Jerry hostage.
Despite their relative isolation – Jerry in his apartment alone compared to Rupert in his basement with the cardboard cutouts – this pair operates as doubles, but they function in a much different way than do Guy and Bruno. The celebrity-stalker dynamic takes the doppelganger to a broader social landscape.
DOUBLING DOWN
A few other cinematic doubles can illuminate Guy and Bruno’s relationship.
Fight Club
Fight Club’s (1999) doubling, to offer a contrast, is based on a delusion. Tyler Dearden does not exist, despite his being the most charismatic and active character in the film, like Bruno Antony, but he functions dissimilarly compared to Bruno. Tyler enters our unnamed narrator’s (Ed Norton’s) life when Norton needs to move on and realize the full potential of his being. His crisis centers on his mental state, his world vision, his relationship to the consumer culture. Tyler responds by showing him what can be accomplished. The moral imperative goes beyond fulfilling his ego, whence the origin of the “fight club.” Norton must endure punishment and learn how the consumer society – the society of wanting – must be taken down, starting with the credit card. Tyler must be destroyed as Bruno was stopped but for different reasons. Tyler goads Norton into destroying him when Norton fires the gun through his own cheek. Tyler knows he must die for Norton to continue. Bruno, on the other hand, believes he and Guy can coexist, but it will not be long before Bruno or his type will want to take over the whole show, as Rupert Pupkin tries.
The Fight Club
The Shining
In Kubrick’s The Shining, doubles appear at the times Jack (Jack Nicholson) and Danny (Danny Lloyd) are in the incipient moments of personal crisis. Jack’s double takes the form of a hotel associate, Bill Watson (Barry Dennen), who sits beside Jack during the interview for the job. His presence starts a series of uncanny visual moments – several times later when Jack’s image appears in a mirror – but Bill is not seen again. Nor should we forget that Jack tells Wendy (Shelley Duvall) how he felt that he had been at the Overlook before. Jack’s son, Danny, experiences the most personal form of doubling with the presence of Tony, the little boy who lives inside his mouth, who appeared after Jack had broken Danny’s arm. Danny also meets look-alike girls, the victims of their father’s violence, Delbert Grady’s. When the situation worsens at the hotel, Jack finally meets his double from the past, the same ax murderer, Grady, only Jack calls him Charles Grady (perhaps signifying a split in the murderer’s identity).
Lolita
Another Kubrick doubling is even more germane to the Guy and Bruno type, in Lolita, where Humbert Humbert (James Mason) and Claire Quilty (Peter Sellers) are conjoined in a morbid relationship. Humbert brings a doubling of his name into the film, suggesting an ongoing crisis related to his salacious desires, but his troubles really start with his meeting Lolita (Sue Lyon) and, very soon after, the appearance of Claire Quilty. Like Humbert, Quilty knows Lolita sexually. Humbert aestheticizes his desire for nymphets to counter society’s taboo for such desires. Quilty disguises himself as an impresario at a high school dance, a state policeman questioning Humbert at the hotel where Humbert will have his first sexual contact with Lolita, and, lastly, as a psychiatrist analyzing Humbert after Lolita gives Humbert a hard time. Each time Quilty’s presence unnerves Humbert, in ways Humbert doesn’t fully understand. The fact Quilty is a pornographer best sizes up the final judgment on Humbert’s character. Yet Quilty seems forever outside Humbert’s reach, a secret sharer of Lolita’s body. After Lolita’s final rebuff of Humbert, he desperately searches for Quilty, wanting to destroy the man who blocked his path to happiness with Lolita. He must slay the worst part of himself but too late to do himself any good.
Lolita
Their confrontation, which starts the film, reminds us how a character like Humbert cannot recognize or understand the truth about himself. Quilty’s instinct for preservation is strong enough that he tries to cajole Humbert out of killing him. If we take Quilty’s view of their relationship, he was at times cruel to Humbert, making Humbert a fool, yet Humbert was necessarily undeserving. Quilty “knows” Humbert better than Humbert knows himself. Just as Bruno knows what Guy really wants. Only Quilty is not in need of affection or recognition from Humbert. He has more ambition than Bruno. Indeed, Quilty is somewhat of a celebrity. Lolita has a picture of Quilty in a cigarette advertisement, suggesting some form of public persona for him. Bruno’s type reflects more the celebrity hunter, needy for news about his favorite public figure.
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Rupert Pupkin is such a repelling, creepy figure that his connection to Jerry Langford, the connection between their psyches, appears tenuous if not nonexistent. Compare his first personal contact with Jerry to Bruno and Guy’s. The latter meet spontaneously, in a train car, have lunch, enjoy a civil conversation. Rupert forces himself on Jerry, jumping into a limo ostensibly to save Jerry from a crowd of rabid fans. Rupert is also a rabid fan but has repressed his aggressive desires so that he can make a personal plea. He’s not like “them” and feels Jerry owes him a favor. Jerry treats the situation as he should and tells Rupert to give a tape of his act to his personal assistant. Just as Bruno thinks Guy’s passive approval of the crisscross murder idea represents a go-ahead for the plan, Rupert turns Jerry’s brush-off as a tacit acceptance of Rupert’s comedy routine. Rupert can’t take “No, you’re not good enough” for an answer because in his mind Jerry has already said “Yes.”
The tenuous connection between Rupert and Jerry is represented, negatively, when Rupert hands a card with the products Pride and Joy on it. A joke. Symbolizing the triteness of Rupert’s mind. But it also tells us that one of them has no “pride” and the other, no “joy”. The connection is represented by our consumer culture, only in The King of Comedy, the celebrity hunters are the consumers (Rupert’s consumption of Jerry taken to the extreme).
The doubling, hence, is cultural, social. The Guerardian crisis leading to this doubling is one troubling the entire society. Bruno and Guy’s doubling is personal, the celebrity/cultural crisis had not reached a toxic level. In embryonic form, it appears relatively innocuous. Bruno, for example, can be invited to a social gathering with Senotors and elites. He’s only personally a bit sketchy (homosexual). The counterpoint to this is Rupert’s invasion of Jerry’s house in Connecticut. There may not be a more embarrassing, difficult scene to experience (of a non-violent variety) in cinema. We see Rupert acting on his delusions as we see Bruno doing it. But it’s different.
Even before television, celebrities cultivated outlandish images with the aid of press agents. The world has changed between 1951 and 1982. Thirty years of television saturation. A new relationship between society and celebrities has arisen. The other side of the celebrity axis is the people who follow it. These people have intensified their interest, expectations, and desires. The simulacrum of the showbiz world has become more real than the humdrum, unexciting world where celebrities are followed. Rupert’s epigraph speaks for the outlanders:
Better to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime.
Jerry doesn’t recognize his double in Rupert. At the Connecticut house episode, he blurts out (after Rupert says he going to work very hard to be better than Jerry):
Then you’re gonna have idiots like you plaguing your life!
Guy did not see himself for what he is. In King of Comedy, the doubling reaches from individuals to the entire society. Celebrities’ lives are desired to be emulated, envied, shared, taken over. The last is a new element. The unworthy of the world feel as if they are worthy. Because they have misapprehended the world, trying to see the worth through the lives of the famous. The idiots have triumphed.
Us
Jordan Peele’s Us (2019), the most recent doppelganger extravaganza, explores the same society-wide form of doubling. Although it has links to media-obsessed America, the crisis manifested by the doubles seems largely linked to a guilt-ridden society, one that enjoys the best things at the expense of an invisible under(ground) class. Significant for the argument of this article is that the doubling emerges from a society-wide crisis. When Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) asks who are these people invading her house, her double, Red, responds “We are America!” For Peele, the crisis in our society has become its increasingly callousness and complacency toward the masses who pay the price for the society’s prosperity. It may have always been this way, to a degree. Based on Adelaide’s childhood encounter with her doppelganger, we can place the starting date for the underclasses’ rising consciousness in the mid-1980s. They will no longer be pushed out of sight. Like Rupert Pupkin, they want their share of the world so tantalizing close to them. Also like Rupert, they want to take over this world, only more savagely and permanently.
DOUBLES CUBED
The crisis manifested in The King of Comedy starts within Rupert’s world and extends to those who watch the film. Rupert’s imagination and his immersion into Jerry Langford’s public persona prompt showbiz fantasies exemplified by the cardboard cutouts in his basement and the imaginary conversations with Jerry. In the basement, Rupert hosts his own show, sitting between Jerry and Liza Minnelli. He speaks and waits for an answer, which we don’t hear. Other scenarios include his instructing Jerry on the basics of comedy, Jerry coming to Rupert to ask him to replace him temporarily on the show, and culminates with Rupert marrying Rita on national television.
Conditioned to Rupert’s fantasies, we are knocked off balance when Rupert goes to Jerry’s house in Connecticut. It has the earmarks of the unreal because Rupert’s going there is prompted by a remark made by Jerry during one of Rupert’s fantasies. We see that he can’t separate the real from the unreal. But the fantasies stop as he embarks on his plan to kidnap Jerry and extort his way onto the show.
With a possible exception.
We learn Rupert goes to jail and, upon release, publishes a best-selling book. This success leads to his getting a television gig, The Rupert Pupkin Show. He appears on stage. The announcer keeps saying “Rupert Pupkin” as Rupert accepts the thunderous applause from the audience. Did he really get a show? Have we descended to the point where the untalented have decisively triumphed over the talented? It leaves the viewer with an uneasy feeling, a feeling that this cannot be happening. The awful, swarmy character who barged into Jerry’s home, committed a federal crime to become famous (AND SUCCEEDED) has achieved his wished for success. The fulfillment of his dreams seems more appalling than his actually having the show.
It makes more sense that The Rupert Pupkin Show never came into existence. Rupert imagines this while in prison. He may believe it is or still can become a reality. Or he simply can’t distinguish his fantasy from reality. Then again, we are in the same boat (mind). The difficulty in seeing the difference reflects the essence of our cultural and social crisis that the presence of Rupert as Jerry’s double represents. Our society is increasingly unable to distinguish real events from the unreal as the simulacra appears more authentic.
We are caught in this simulacrum involuntarily, though ultimately it is our responsibilty for being overwhelmed. At some level, we participate in the entertainment/celebrity universe. Rupert creates such a strong response in us because there’s the tiniest part of ourselves in Rupert. The desire to get an autograph or meet the star of the show. A fantasy to be part of the world the actors or their characters inhabit. We may remark to others about “brushes with greatness” after we’ve seen someone we recognize from movies and television. In fact, we might think of that person as his most famous characterization (this seems to be truer for television stars). What’s wrong with that?
The world of Bruno and Guy seems so innocent. For one, the relationship between a celebrity and a follower could be civil! For a while. Until the celebrity is asked to do something for the fan. Hitchcock shows an aspect of human nature, individuals succumbing to temptation or, at worst, wish fulfillment. The center is still holding. Television is in its infancy.
Now we are thirty-seven years from The King of Comedy. How much more have been subsumed by the celebrity/entertainment continuum? Is there any real left to hold onto? Do we share most of our lives with the spiritual children of Rupert Pupkin? Can our world get much worse? We have had entertainers become Senators, Governors, and President. Is the next step: the most important person in the country is a simulacrum to haunt our lives and dreams permanently?
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All images are screenshots from the films’ trailers or DVDs.
