Literature Film Quarterly (1985) - Double, Double: Toil and Trouble
Details
- article: Double, Double: Toil and Trouble
- author(s): Barbara Bannon
- journal: Literature Film Quarterly (1985)
- issue: volume 13, issue 1, page 56
- journal ISSN: 0090-4260
- publisher: Salisbury University
- Sloan's Alfred Hitchcock: A Filmography and Bibliography (1995) — page 478, #758
- keywords: "Hitchcock's Films" - by Robin Wood, "The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock" - by Raymond Durgnat, Alfred Hitchcock, Andrew Sarris, Cary Grant, Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero, Claude Chabrol, Defense mechanisms, Documentary: The Men Who Made the Movies - Hitchcock, Eva Marie Saint, Farley Granger, Foreign Correspondent (1940), François Truffaut, Henry Fonda, John L. Russell, John Russell Taylor, Kim Novak, Leo Braudy, Lindsay Anderson, Macdonald Carey, Mistaken identity, Motion pictures, Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, New York City, New York, North by Northwest (1959), Notorious (1946), Patricia Hitchcock, Peter Bogdanovich, Psycho (1960), Raymond Durgnat, Richard Schickel, Robert Walker, Robin Wood, Roger O. Thornhill, Santa Rosa, California, Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Spellbound (1945), Suspicion (1941), Teresa Wright, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The Wrong Man (1956), Thornton Wilder, United Nations, New York City, New York, Vertigo (1958), Éric Rohmer
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Abstract
Otto Rank tells us: the most prominent symptom of the forms which the double takes is a powerful consciousness of guilt which forces the hero no longer to accept the responsibility for certain actions of his ego, but to place it upon another ego, a double, ... the detached personification of instincts and desires, ... once felt to be unacceptable, but which can be satisfied without responsibility in this indirect way. By using the double, authors can externalize and resolve moral tensions, as well as create worlds full of dramatic conflict. The world of the double, being the realm of the subconscious, possesses many characteristics of the dream world, or its perverted mirror image, the nightmare world of the modem thriller, where the normal rules of reason no longer apply, ... a spectrum of realities having the common characteristic of strangeness and varying from the comic through the absurd, the sinister, and the daemonic, to the explicitly sane.