The enduring fascination of discovering a lookalike – and the darker side of seeing double
For a week, I put it off. My deadline crept closer, but I did not want to click the button, I did not want, actually, to “find my doppelgänger”. Perhaps I could write around it, I suggested, weakly. I went to lunch; I kept my eyes on the pavement for fear of catching my own eye.
The subject of doppelgängers swims regularly in and out of popular culture, mirroring, revealing, bringing varying degrees of discomfort. Naomi Klein’s new book grapples with the idea of a doppelgänger after the writer and academic realised she was regularly mistaken for Naomi Wolf. On Twitter, recently, she asked her followers if they’d ever encountered their own lookalike and the replies were filled with familiarly gripping stories, including a comedian who’d been on stage when, as a whole, the audience and he started to become aware of his lookalike sitting in an early row – the two went on to perform the set as a double act.
