In her recent autobiography, A Thousand Threads, singer, icon, and all-round i-D legend Neneh Cherry remembers the moment when she first became famous. Seeing a picture of herself on a billboard, she describes the giant Neneh as “me-but-not-me.”
Fast forward 30-odd years, and the me-but-not-me experience is one all of us have, not just the newly famous. Thanks to the internet, a fractured reality between on and offline selves is standard—we exist in both spaces at the same time, and sometimes in more than one. Who hasn’t binged a boxset while chatting on WhatsApp and scrolling socials simultaneously?
In fact, the me-but-not-me experience is so widespread that it’s now influencing the stories in our fiction. In the past year or so, we’ve seen this in stories that take on divided selves—The Substance (there’s Sue and Elisabeth, sure, but “REMEMBER YOU ARE ONE,” as the substance itself scolds), and Severance, with its outies and innies—and multiples, as with Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s latest film that sees Robert Pattinson cloned 17 times on a kind of human photocopier (the indignity!).
There are also more traditional twofer narratives, as with Sinners, where Michael B. Jordan plays identical twins, or The Alto Knights, where Robert De Niro plays two roles. And the trend is in fashion too—another type of fiction, if you will. Last month, Marc Jacobs released an ad campaign for the Mini Dual bag, featuring Gabbriette and Amelia Gray, two women that the very online have already judged to look the same.
The concept of seeing double is something we encounter every day. It’s there in everything from the sickly-sweet twinning trend for matching outfits between mother and daughter, to H&M’s controversial AI “twins” that stand in for models in ad campaigns, and the clip of those Australian twins speaking in sync that went viral last week. “The term ‘Lynchian’ gets misused a lot but this is actually very Lynchian,” wrote one Twitter user.
If a lot of chatter about this trend puts it down to the rise of AI—technology that threatens to become the better twin of human expression—ask any clever person and they will likely call recency bias. “It is a trope as old as time [in fiction],” as Idil Galip, a researcher into the internet and founder of the Meme Studies Research Network, told me. “[As with] the evil twin, the secret impostor, and spiritual dualism in religion and myths.”
But if we have seen stories of doubles, evil twins, and multiple realities from Shakespeare via Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, The Shining, The Matrix and Gucci Spring 2023, Galip does say the current trend could also “be a reflection of fears about how normalised ‘multiple selves’ have become as a result of the different ways people can represent their ‘selves’ on different platforms.”
Speaking of platforms, there’s also the unpaid labour of it all. Alfie Bown, a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Culture at King’s College, points to the time and thought behind an Instagram post—“it costs the individual in order to maintain this public image,” he says. Michelle Santiago Cortés, a writer who specialises in life online, thinks this might be why something like Severance—a show built on the literal separation of work and life—hit. “When it comes to stories about labour and what the future of capitalism would look like, these stories of doppelgangers and copies and others come very handy,” she says. “It seems like fictional spaces are to deal with that anxiety and that dread.”
Conversely, fiction also provides the “what if?” framework where we are able to take back our image, and therefore ourselves, through creating a copy. “There is a potential, in sci-fi, for people to imagine that technology can give you that ability to free yourself from having to be one person,” says Santiago Cortes. Bown argues that these twinning narratives potentially resist the individualism of capitalism. “We often feel that by being unique, we’re doing the authentic thing, the non-conformist thing,” he says. “But actually, it’s very interesting to posit it the other way and say that maybe we need to be looking not for our uniqueness, but for our sameness… That’s a nice way of opposing some of these dominant threads in how we’re supposed to see ourselves as these unique commodities.”
While the majority of twinning stories in fiction have an element of dystopia—who wants to share youthfulness with another body, as in The Substance, or be reproduced multiple times like poor old R Patz?—there is a lesson here: we can own our multiple selves online, and disrupt Big Tech in the process. “Obviously, don’t scam, don’t break the law,” says Santiago Cortés. “But there is no rule that you have to create fully fleshed out portraits of your offline self online. Online is almost the best space to be—as I say—a duplicitous bitch.”