- The Age of Adaline
Warning: This post contains spoilers.
- Steve Martin in All of Me
The motif of the uncanny double is much older than movies—it’s central to Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors and Dostoevsky’s The Double, to name the first two examples that come to mind. Yet Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and its many imitators confirm that this motif also resonates in cinema. James Stewart’s attempt to fashion Kim Novak’s Judy Barton into a duplicate of the dead woman she resembles is a rich metaphor for what most narrative filmmakers do when they make any actor conform to their image of a fictional character. But Stewart’s shock at seeing a double of his dead lover also suggests a more galvanic version of what most of us experience when we go to the movies. In most narrative films (that is, the ones that don’t aspire to emulate documentary realism), the people we relate to onscreen are at once like us and nothing like us. They’re more handsome and charismatic than most people in life—they always know exactly how to walk and what to say, and they never trip over their words. If one were to encounter a Hollywood-movie heroine in the real world, he or she would probably find the experience unnerving, just like Ford and all the other folks in Age of Adaline who are dumbfounded by Blake Lively’s preternaturally poised young woman. (Incidentally, Lively’s performance comes off as a stilted Grace Kelly impression—just like Novak’s performance in Vertigo whenever she’s playing Madeleine Elster.)
