Doubles and the Shadows in Plato’s Cave

If distance, identification and doubling in the cinema are interrelated, the position of the spectator is one that is ‘neither here nor there’. This chapter unpicks this tissue of themes into such thematic plies as those of projection, the Sublime, display, point-of-view and mirroring, beginning with a comparison between Walter Benjamin’s theorization of the role of reproduction in modernity with the use of doubles and dolls in E.T.A. Hoffmann. It builds upon the work performed by Marina Warner in her Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self, in particular developing her references to the cinematic qualities of the Brocken spectre in De Quincey’s Suspiria De Profundis. The Benjamin/Hoffmann comparison extends into the relationship between doubling and the confounding of near-far distinctions, achieved through the handheld lens of the telescope in Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ and the camera lens in Benjamin’s ‘Mechanical Reproduction’ essay. The doubling employed in Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) gives an example of explicit filmic treatment of leitmotifs of Romantic provenance.