David’s dreams of doubles: Lynch and the doppelgänger

This chapter analyses the presence of doubles and doppelgangers in the oeuvre of David Lynch, interrogating how they often exceed their role as counterpoints of Manichean evil to Lynch’s protagonists and open up questions about the unstable nature of identity. Duality and the figure of the doppelgänger has been of key thematic interest to Lynch for the duration of his artistic career, and has manifested in a variety of Lynch’s works, from the original Twin Peaks (1990–91) to Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006), and most recently in the contemporary return of Twin Peaks (2017). This chapter delineates the common variations of doppelgänger that populate Lynch’s oeuvre and examines the previous scholarly interpretations of their relevance to the artist, while also interrogating the limitations of these approaches. While previous interpretations have argued that Lynch’s films use the double to demonstrate a confrontation between the protagonist and its shadow, the borders between this shadow and its interrogator are often shown to be porous if not completely ineffective. Indeed, often both sides of the double are inextricably woven through diegetic overlap or a synthesis of identity. Although Lynch has employed the figure of the double as an evil reflection of his protagonists, in his more recent works he has emphasised a destabilisation of the perceived hermetic boundary around identity. In doing so, these works tend towards abstraction instead of the dynamics of Manichean dualism, in turn creating a profound and horrific affect for the viewer.