The last five seconds at the end of this year's "King of Web Dramas" "White Night Pursuit" are frozen in such a picture: Pan Yueming, the actor who plays the twin brothers, sits in the interrogation room, the light paints his face as yin and yang, the light half is serious, composed, and the eyes are elusive, like brothers; and half of the corners of the mouth in the shadows have a cynical smile hanging from the corners of their mouths, like a brother.
The story of "White Night Pursuit" revolves around Guan Hongfeng and Guan Hongyu, two identical twin brothers. The elder brother Guan Hongfeng is the former head of the criminal police detachment, has rich experience in criminal investigation, and maintains the highest case solving rate in the whole team; the younger brother Guan Hongyu was originally the owner of a logistics company, but he became a wanted criminal because of a family of five extermination cases and hid in his brother's home. The older brother suffers from a fear of darkness due to the accidental killing of a colleague on a previous mission, so when night falls, the two brothers must exchange identities, the younger brother is a wanted criminal, and the older brother is a prisoner of the night.
The exchange of identities between the two brothers of good and evil and the personalities of the twin brothers is not a new setting, and if you go back, you can find prototypes in Hollywood's film noir and the gothic novels that emerged in the 19th century. In fact, from the beginning of Greek mythology, the twin theme has been used as a "rotten stem" in the literary art of the millennium, forming a fixed narrative routine, which even inspired the psychoanalytic school, and Freud carefully analyzed many works of the Gothic novelist E.T.A. Hoffmann in his famous essay "The Uncanny", using the example of "bumping into the doppelganger" to illustrate why the repressed desires of childhood can become the source of fear in adulthood.
But at the same time, the interpretation of the "twin" imagery cannot be completely confined to the framework of psychoanalysis, in addition to narcissistic complexes, childhood desires, sibling rivalry, it can also be related to deformed bodies, identity, heredity and upbringing, opportunity and choice, and even the politics of others...
<h3>From Greek Mythology to Shakespeare: The Comedy of Identity Confusion and the Hermaphroditic Imagination</h3>
In the myths, legends and dramas of ancient Greece and Rome, there is no shortage of twin stories. The most famous of these are artemis (the greek goddess of the moon and the goddess of the hunt) and Apollo (the sun god) twin siblings. But what is repeated in literature is the story of the twin brothers Heracles and Iphicles.
The story goes like this: Theban general Amphitryon and his cousin Alcmene were engaged from an early age, but on the eve of their wedding, Zeus seduced Alcmene in the form of Amphitrion. A new couple in the dark went to the prophet Ofes, Teresias, who revealed what Zeus had done and predicted that Zeus would have an immortal son with Archmene. Later Archmene gave birth to twins, Hercules and Iphiclus, the former the son of Zeus and the latter the son of Amphitryon. And as prophesied by the prophets, Hercules became the greatest demigod hero of Greek mythology.
Based on this story, the ancient Roman playwright Plautus created the burlesque Menaechmi, pioneering this comedic paradigm of creating dramatic conflicts and laughs based on "mistaken identities of the twins," which later became the comedy of two 17th-century theater masters, Shakespeare's Comedy of Error Errors) and Molière's Amphitryon. Due to its influence, until the romantic movement and the rise of the Gothic novel in the 19th century, the twin theme appeared mainly in comedy.
The Comedy of Errors is Shakespeare's early work and his shortest play, and in order to exaggerate the comedic effect, the young Shakespeare adds a pair of twins to the story of The Twin Brothers: two pairs of twins (the Antilles brothers and the Djomios brothers) are separated in a shipwreck and raised by different families, until they reach adulthood, and little Antires and Little Zomio pass through Ephesus island on their way to find their relatives, not realizing that this is exactly where their brothers live. The two are constantly misidentified by the islanders, sparking a series of hilarious stories.
From today's point of view, "The Comedy of Error" is a slightly naïve Shakespeare work, the dramatic conflict mainly revolves around the similarity of the appearance of the two pairs of twins, and in Shakespeare's other twin-themed work", "Twelfth Night", the philosophical meaning of the twins has been deeply excavated: it is also a shipwreck, which makes the twin brothers Sebastian and Viola mistakenly think that each other has died. Viola, dressed as a man, pretended to be a maid in the Ducal Palace, but was mistakenly loved by Miss Olivia, and later Viola's twin brother appeared and fell in love with Olivia at first sight, and the misunderstanding was finally solved, and Sibassin and Olivia were happily married.
In the final scene, Antonio, who saved Sibasin from shipwreck, asks the siblings, "How did you end up?" Cutting an apple in half would not be more akin to each other than these two people. Here, through Antonio, Shakespeare explores a long-standing imagination of the origin of hermaphrodites, namely that the original form of human beings was a hermaphroditic "the whole", which was later split in two and recombined only through sex.
As Aristophanes says at the beginning of The Drink, before Zeus cut the man in half like a sorb-apple waiting to be pickled, "the human form is a circle, the waist and back are round, each has four hands and four feet, the head and neck are also round, the head and neck are also round, the head has two faces, the front and back are opposite, the ears have two, the genitals have a pair, and the number of other organs is doubled proportionally." And the desire and attraction between people stems from this strong desire to return to the original "complete" state, and a pair of identical twins is undoubtedly the best metaphor for this "complete" state. Therefore, in "Twelfth Night", the character setting of the twins is not only to create a "terrier" of "identity confusion", but more importantly, to borrow the double business image to explore the root of love and desire.
<h3>From gothic novels to psychoanalysis: "fractal" imagery and "weird" theory</h3>
After Shakespeare's time passed, the twin theme fell silent in literature until the rise of the Romantic movement and the Gothic novel in Europe in the early 19th century. However, in the literature of this period, the double business elephant is no longer limited to blood twins, but appears more in the form of "Doppelgänger". Doppelgänger is a German word that is said to have been first invented by Jean Paul, a pioneer of German Romantic literature, and refers to the simultaneous appearance of two people who look very similar (literally translated as "double goer" or "double walker"). The great poets Shelley and Goethe both wrote in letters or autobiographies about their "twins," and Allan Poe and Dostoevsky wrote novels about the "twins" (William Wilson and The Dual Personality).
In Poe's first-person short story William Wilson, the male protagonist, William Wilson, while at boarding school, meets a boy with the same name and the same name, born on the same day in the same month of the same year, and not only that, but the boy can easily imitate his gait, dress, and even speak in a voice; the only difference is that the boy seems to suffer from some kind of congenital disease, cannot speak aloud, and always makes subtle whispers. In Wilson's view, this doppelganger "although the intelligence and sophistication are not superior to him, but the sense of morality is far better than his", one day he finally could not stand his moral supervision, sneaked into his dormitory in the middle of the night, like teasing him, the moment he opened the bed, Wilson was frightened out of a cold sweat, and the boy's face became exactly like his own.
After that day, Wilson left boarding school, but the "double" did not disappear, he has been following him, from Eton College to Oxford University, from London to Paris, when he cheated in the poker game, indulged in alcohol, the "double" will appear in the middle of poking or educating him. Finally, after a sexual encounter in Rome is destroyed by the "fen", the enraged Wilson drags the "fen" into the living room to duel with it, and stabs him in the chest with a sword. At this moment, a mirror suddenly appeared in the room, and Wilson took a closer look to find himself in the mirror pale, bloodied, with a messy gait, and shaking weakly. Wilson spoke again, this time instead of whispering, "You win, I lose." However, from now on, you are also dead. ”
Today, this is a typical psychoanalytic case in which Wilson opens the bed and sees another Wilson's face as a textbook "uncanny moment"; and at the end he stabs himself in the mirror, reminiscent of Lacan's mirror theory.
In fact, the birth of psychoanalysis had important historical roots in the Gothic novel, and the German Gothic novelist E.T.A. Hoffmann was once called "the unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature" by Freud. He has written a number of novels with "doppelganger" plots, one of the more famous of which is Called The Devil's Elixirs, which, similar to William Wilson, is about a Catholic monk tempted by the devil and entangled with his doppelganger for a lifetime. The story became famous because it was written by Freud into the famous essay "The Uncanny."
In The Eccentric, Freud makes a detailed semantic analysis of the German word "unheimlich" for "uncanny." "Unheimlich" refers to a class of frightening things or scenes, which are so-called frightening, not because they are strange or heterogeneous in nature, but because in the process of constant repression, some things that were once familiar and intimate are alienated; in other words, what really frightens us is some familiar things that we are buried deep in our hearts, some secrets that cannot be openly suddenly appeared before our eyes, and because of the long-term repression, they have become somewhat distorted and strange, the most common." The strange moment is that the old house is haunted, and finally it is found that the "ghost" is an old acquaintance, but it has been completely unrecognizable.
In Freud's view, "bumping into the doppelganger" is also a typical "strange moment", imagining a doppelganger who is exactly the same as himself, often a manifestation of child narcissism, but as he grows older, this narcissism is gradually suppressed, until one day after he grows up, he meets the person who is exactly like himself in real life, and the long-suppressed childhood desire is nakedly externalized and concretely presented in front of his eyes, and it is no longer a beautiful imagination, but a source of terror.
<h3>Twin Sisters V.S. Twins: Popular Culture and Gender Bias</h3>
After the twentieth century, the imagery of "twins" or "twins" also began to enter popular culture, especially in the film industry. Due to the gender norms carried by popular culture in different historical contexts, the film also has some "different treatment" of "twin sisters" and "twin brothers".
In the history of Hollywood, there have been two "twin sisters" film creation peaks, namely the women's film that emerged in the 1940s and the thriller that became popular in the 1990s. Most of them portray the relationship between twin sisters as a war between "good girls" and "bad girls" for a man. "Good girls" are passive, gentle, honest, and dedicated, while "bad girls" are the typical "femme fatale" of "film noir": sexy, bold, competitive and deceptive. Sometimes, the film also adds neurotic or supernatural qualities to the bad girls to deepen the evil side of the characters.
This role setting reflects an extremely dualistic stereotype of men towards women, namely that women are divided into only "virgins" and "bitches", and that any woman necessarily falls into one of these two types. And the ending of the film — "the bad girl" dies, and the "good girl" wins back the man who was once seduced by the bad girl - has a moral indoctrination, which tells the woman that sexual pleasure is temporary, and in the long run, it is virtue that can ultimately keep the man.
By the 1990s, the twin sisters in the thriller had not been able to escape the binary of virgin and bitch overall, but one of the notable changes was that the "good girl" who combined all the traditional virtues of women began to be portrayed as a cold and chaff wife, and "not sexy" became her original sin; and the motive of the "bad girl" to grab a man also changed, she no longer needed a satisfactory husband, but to satisfy her insatiable sexual desires, after successfully possessing a man. She wouldn't choose to marry him, but kill him.
In addition to this, the thrillers of the 90s usually do not end with "triumph of virtue", virtue is no longer recognized, and instead the sexual frigidity of "good girls" must be cured. The role of the "bad girl" is no longer the foil for the good girl, and her appearance allows the "good girl" to discover the "other half of herself". Thus, at the end of the film, after the "bad girl" dies as usual, the "good girl" becomes a combination of twin sisters, which is usually presented by a "good girl" pretending to be a "bad girl" to seduce her husband. At the same time, in the process, the husband who has cheated on him will also be symbolically teased or frightened as a "punishment". Although this setting breaks through the dichotomy between virgins and bitches to some extent, in fact, it still creates a kind of "perfect" woman who combines "virtuous wives" and "hot girls" according to men's imagination and needs, and Twin Sisters and Mirror Images I&II are both films of this genre.
Unlike the single contradiction between the twin sisters (competing for men), the differences between the twin brothers are relatively diverse, and the twin brothers in "White Night Pursuit" can represent some common character settings: one law-abiding (usually a policeman), one criminal; one strong (the younger brother Guan Hongfeng is a retired soldier who won the army sanda championship), one is weak (the older brother Guan Hongyu has no kung fu and often faints because of night phobia); one is worldly (the younger brother has mixed black and white before being wanted, and has strong social skills), A Qinggao (the older brother is cold-hearted and self-enclosed); a Gu family (the younger brother is very good to his girlfriend, and the girlfriend gave birth to two children), an ego (the brother is alone, the intimate relationship is incompetent) and so on...
What's more, even if one of the twin brothers is relatively positive and the other is relatively villainous, the relationship between them is not necessarily antagonistic, and cooperation between brothers is common, and when contradictions arise, brotherhood can often overcome differences. For example, in "White Night Pursuit", even if he learns that his brother is the culprit who framed him, the younger brother still chooses to "carry it with him". Sisterhood is always broken by men, and brotherhood often transcends the love of men and women, and even the opposition between good and evil, which seems to be a gender bias deeply rooted in popular culture.
An interesting example of the camaraderie between the twin brothers comes from a medical record by Freud. In an obscure footnote, he wrote: "I know twin brothers who are very sexually aroused. The brother is very popular with women, and has had countless sexual encounters with adult women and even little girls. The younger brother also took this route at first, but because he often 'invaded his brother's territory' or was mistaken by his female companions on intimate occasions because of his similar appearance, the younger brother gradually became unhappy. His way of overcoming this dilemma was to turn himself gay, and he left the woman to his brother and quit the fight for him. ”
In this case, fraternal camaraderie is not only more important than male-female love, but may lead (or translate into) a same-sex love. With the continuous opening of gender culture, the same-sex love between twin brothers, feminine male bodies and masculinity have also been presented in some art films. Cronenberg's film "Iniquity" also has such a pair of twin brothers, the brother and brother have similar interests from childhood, growing up to run a gynecological clinic together, until they have a relationship with a female patient at the same time, the younger brother gradually realized the difference between himself and his brother, the brother treats the female patient as a game or the object of experimentation, and the younger brother longs for a real relationship. When the female patient advised her brother to alienate her brother and live her own life, the younger brother replied, "But the medicine he takes will also enter my blood." The estrangement from his brother eventually caused his brother to have a nervous breakdown, and the two brothers died together.
<h3>Epilogue: With a rotten twin narrative, is it a classic or a cliché? </h3>
At this point, you may have realized that in the past few centuries of literature and video writing, the twin has become a "rotten stem". This "rotten stem" was once mercilessly ridiculed by Nabokov in his novel Despair.
Desperate is a novel written during Nabokov's stay in Berlin, serialized in the Soviet literary journal Contemporary Waste (Современные запииски) in 1936, and later translated into English by the author himself. The novel tells the story of Hermann, the owner of a chocolate factory on the verge of bankruptcy, who meets Felix, a homeless man, on the streets of Prague, and Herman believes that Felix is his "doppelganger" and tries to plot a "perfect murder": first lure Felix into pretending to be himself and then kill him to get life insurance. But after killing Felix, Herman not only did not cheat the bail, but was quickly arrested, it turned out that Felix was not his "doppelganger" at all, the two had no similarities, all this was Herman's wishful thinking.
More interestingly, while Herman planned his imaginary "perfect murder," he also wrote the whole process in his diary, and at the end, the novel shifted to a diarized narrative. The diary shows that the day Herman was arrested happened to be April 1.
Many commentators, including the French philosopher Sartre, have considered Despair to be a parody of Dostoevsky, since in the latter's work, "fen" is a recurring theme (including the aforementioned Dual Personality). In fact, the title of the novel hints at the author's intentions, and Nabokov, who is fluent in French, must have known that "despair" means "des pair" in French, and it can also mean "dis-pair" (undo a pair). Through this story of the untenable twin, Nabokov mocks the solipsistic tendencies in creative practice and the clichés of the "fractal" meme.
And Charlie Kaufman, a Hollywood gold-medal screenwriter who has written classics such as "Becoming John Markovich" and "New York Metaphor", once ridiculed the cliché of "insufficient plot and twins" in the 2002 film "Adapted Screenplay" in an almost "performance art" way. Kaufman took over a project in 1997 to adapt a screenplay to bring to the screen a nonfiction story written by New Yorker writer Susan Orrin about an "orchid thief." Because he did not want to turn it into a "Hollywood blockbuster" that combined elements of crime, love, action, etc., Kaufman encountered unprecedented difficulties in the creative process, and later he simply wrote his painful creative experience into a script.
Interestingly, in Adapted Screenplay, Kaufman fictionalizes a twin brother for himself, Donald Kaufman. Donald is a commercial screenwriter with a cheesy mind, but it is precisely because of his intervention that this story about how a screenwriter in a career bottleneck struggles with repeated self-denial has the so-called "dramatic conflict", so that the plot returns to the routine of "twin narratives" - first the brother's commercial success gives the brother pressure, and then the two brothers create and fight side by side, the younger brother sacrifices for the brother, and the brother lives as a combination of two brothers. Kaufman uses such a self-deprecating story to tell us how logical and irresistible the narrative routine of the "twins" is under the Hollywood film industry, not only because it is attached to the powerful logic of commercial genre films, but also because the tension with a "nother" (or "other me") who is close and opposite to us, similar and different, can easily win the audience's sympathy.
This is perhaps why the twin theme has long been written over and over again in literary works of art— from Greek mythology to Shakespeare, from Gothic to film noir, it's about narcissism, about identity, about a latent self, about fate and choice. The theme of inevitable coincidence may be rejuvenated today, when the panic of artificial intelligence and "replicants" is raging, may be rejuvenated.
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