IF YOU MEET YOUR DOUBLE, YOU SHOULD KILL HIM!

The best art imitates life, but at a slant. Johan Grimonprez adroitly proves this in his highly original film, which locates and develops thematic conjunctions between escapist entertainment and real-life horror; more specifically, between the work and images of legendary film director Alfred Hitchcock and the escalation of the cold war in the 1960s. Appropriating and reprocessing film and television images of Hitchcock, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Nikita Khruschev, and others, Grimonprez expands droll generalizations about doppelgangers, guilt, and paranoia into a full-blown analysis of global politics, fear of the bomb, and the mad rush to mutually assured destruction. As public anxieties are sublimated in popular entertainment, so do they sometimes erupt in artistic expressions (such as Hitchcock’s The Birds). In addition to pinpointing the postmodern, movielike unreality of public life, Grimonprez convincingly indicates the precision with which an artist may sketch the public psyche in entertainment, and why Hitchcock still haunts our dreams.

Tom McCarthy, who wrote Double Take for director Johan Grimonprez, based his screenplay on a story by Jorge Luis Borges called August 25th, 1983, in which the author encounters and talks with his 83-year-old self on his deathbed as a slightly younger man, on the date specified. Quite apart from the wittily Hitchcockian weirdness that Grimonprez has confected in his movie.

Just the title of Borges's story puts one in mind of the opening caption in Psycho: "Friday, December the Eleventh," and the doubling of authors (also seen in Borges And I) recalls the almost manic use of doppelgangers and alter egos throughout Hitchcock's career, most famously in (giveaway title!) Shadow Of A Doubt, in which the two main characters (male and female) are both called Charlie, where doublings abound quite riotously, including in Hitchcock's own cameo, where he's twinned with an uncooperative double-bass, his physical counterpart among the stringed instruments. And of course, Hitchcock loved a little blindness, eyelessness and many another narrative or visual coup based on visual impairment – in The Birds alone, think of all-pecked-up farmer Fawcett, the crushed spectacles, the game of blind man's buff.

One wonders what Hitchcock might have done with a Borges story like The Shape Of The Sword or Theme Of The Traitor And The Hero (later filmed by Bertolucci as The Spider's Strategem), or if he ever delved into his works.