The Counterpart
David Lynch's Longest, Dullest Movie Yet
Nearly every weekday for the past twenty years, my mom has gone on a walk to the same park, where she makes exactly three laps before heading home. Then her doppelgänger appeared. A woman roughly my mom’s same height and build, for a decade now, has walked the same path in the opposite direction for the same three laps every day. “The counterpart,” my mom calls her.
My mom usually heads to the park sometime between mid morning and mid afternoon. No matter what time, the counterpart is there. They pass each other three times in silent communion before exiting the park in different directions. “We never acknowledge each other,” my mom confirmed. “I’ve occasionally tried to make eye contact, but she won’t.”
I talk to my mom most days, while we’re both out on ours walks. I can confirm, through photo and anecdotal evidence that the counterpart appears every day (see below). Like my mom, the counterpart is almost always “talking on a device*.” She either has relatives of her own to check in on or she’s mimicking what she’s picked up from my mom to be human behavior.
*I assume a phone, though it remains one of the counterparts many mysteries.
“It’s like the first act of a thriller, dragged on for eternity,” I told my mom. “When is the doppelgänger finally revealed?”
“Not a Doppelgänger,” she corrected me. “She is usually in a skirt and dress boots. Never dressed in work out clothes, though I always wear appropriate clothing for the activity.”
This is the way of the counterpart. She resembles my mother’s general shape and behavior, but she is not her. They walk opposite directions. They enter and leave the park from separate entrances. I’ve suggested that she might be a misplaced being from another point in spacetime, my mom’s double in another life path. Maybe a glitch in the system? We’re both sure her presence has preternatural significance.
“I’ve been hesitant to circle in the same direction as her, because who knows what would happen to the universe,” My mom told me, “but once I attempted it and she disappeared behind a hill and never reappeared.”
A few other times, my mom has tried to follow the counterpart, but each time it ends this way. She vanishes until my mom gives up her search and then reappears to finish her three laps.
Testing the boundaries of the simulation and coming out unscathed, my mom made another attempt. “Once, I boldly decided to follow her when she slipped out through the back entrance, which I never use,” she said.
I remember being on the phone during this investigation. I kept telling her to turn around. I’ve seen movies. I feared she might be pulled into an unmarked van and taken to a nuclear facility as punishment for interfering with their test subject.
“I followed her about a block into a very residential neighborhood and she just disappeared at the intersection. I got to that spot and looked up and down the street and couldn’t see her anywhere.”
The counterpart disappeared for awhile after that, but eventually returned, as do the seasons.
Since then, my mom says, “I take my cues from the counterpart. The times I’ve tried to break the rules, she vanishes.”
@KardashianKolloquium posted a quote from Baudrillard’s Clone Story just the other day that echoes this sentiment:
“The double… is an imaginary figure, which, just like the soul, the shadow, the mirror image, haunts the subject… which makes it so that the subject is simultaneously itself and ever resembles itself again… everyone can dream of a perfect duplication of his being, but such copies only have the power of dreams and are destroyed when one attempts to force the dream into real.”
I have considered the possibility this woman is, perhaps, noticing that she’s being followed and hiding, but brushed it off. Our obsession with the counterpart and the myth we’ve made of her is more interesting to me than her true identity, which I fear deep down would be only: woman who lives near park.
In America, Baudrillard says, “Americans… have no sense of the simulation. They are themselves simulation in its most advanced state but they have no language in which to describe it.” We are all acting out life, constructing routines and images that make up our identity as individuals. Even more so today than when the book was written, Americans are participating in a simulation of life: “socializing” over social media, providing food indirectly by means of an office job, curating aesthetics, and moving at the gym in a way that only slightly resembles natural exercise.
I don’t agree though that we’re all ignorant to the simulation. Subconscious awareness (at least) of the simulation manifests in an unease about the state and patterns of modern life and leads to a cognitive dissonance that plagues society. This awareness is what also leads to our tendency towards magical thinking and our curiosity for the absurdities of life— the counterparts, doppelgängers, ghosts, and other universal glitches.
America loves doppelgängers as it loves the simulation. Look at Kanye’s latest stunt in his divorce from Kim Kardashian, where he brought a look alike of his ex-wife to his listening party-- a clone proves the significance of it’s original’s identity, but also reveals it’s original’s replicability. It sheds light on the curation of an image.
Sometimes, we also use doppelgängers in attempt to explore the possibility of reincarnation and deny our mortality. For example:
In simulating original figures from the past for our entertainment we engage in another form of death denial. “Elvis lives on! Maybe we can also be immortal.”
The doppelgängers’ pop culture emergence began with horror. In gothic stories from the Industrial Revolution like Jekyll and Hyde and the Picture of Dorian Gray they appear as manifestations of inner turmoil. In our even further industrialized world, their popularity persists. Probably because the increasing ease of life has afforded us more time to obsess over our appearance and identity.
There are countless examples in the modern day. David Lynch uses doppelgängers as a common theme to represent the duality of our existence and to portray internal battles. Hitchcock used one in Vertigo to make a point about how we construct our realities. Jordan Peele’s Us explored our fear of lookalikes directly. The popularity of this trope in horror reveals that as much as we crave our own reflection, we fear what we might reveal if we look too hard.
Doppelgängers act as a funhouse mirror, forcing us to look at ourselves from the outside, slightly deformed. What does it mean when someone resembles us in every way but is not us? We’re a society obsessed with looking at an analyzing our own existence and doppelgängers (or counterparts, if you’d rather distance yourself from their sartorial choices) provide a perfect lens for our self-obsession.
My mom has her own theory. “I go to that park to observe nature each season. The ducks in the pond, etc. I get the feeling that the counterpart and I circling the park is a powerful thing and we’re doing our part to keep the world in balance. We have to circle in opposite directions for the sake of universal harmony. And we can never make eye contact or acknowledge each other. Nor walk the path in the same direction.”
So, next time you see my mom, thank her. She’s keeping the world turning.
False Idol of the Week:
@lynchianbachelor, one of the few reasons to be on Instagram, a perfect look into the surrealism and absurdity of reality tv.
Friday Scripture:
“Only one is a wanderer. Two together are always going somewhere.” -Vertigo
Is God Watching Over?:
God may not be, but we are certainly watching ourselves.
Rapture Countdown:
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