The Aesthete

Burning Cars and Evil Twins

"The beast in me is caged by fragile bars." - Johnny Cash

by Cintra Wilson illustration Glen Hanson

It is probably not news to anyone that they are psychologically manipulated by advertising. Capturing real attention in our ADD-afflicted society is so difficult that when an image in the worlds of fashion and/or pop culture actually gets and keeps my attention, I find it deeply unsettling because I know that I am being successfully manipulated. 

Not that advertising is necessarily evil, it's just that we've gotten too good at it. Ad imagery seems opaque, abstract and meaningless. But that is precisely what makes it dangerous. It is actually ram-packed with sophisticated psychological nuances that swarm right past your conscious mind and into the control room of your psyche where it manipulates arcane levers that send robot claws into your wallet. If pop culture infects your life to the point of unconsciously regulating the way you experience your own desires, the corporate mechanisms that control pop culture virtually own you.

A particular print-ad trend for luxury fashion brands has really been getting under my scalp the past few years. The trope, with minor variations: two “identical”, glazy-eyed girls staring zombie twins with tortured hair and massive handbags. They look like they’ve just had transcendental lesbian sex while fully dressed in 6-inch alligator pumps and matching blouses, and this bliss was so narcissistically fulfilling that they both died instantaneously and are now flash-frozen for eternity on a dark velvet couch or a white staircase or lying like silicone sex dolls in grass.   

So I looked a bit deeper into this because I was overcome with an absorbing curiosity as to why doppelgangers are helpful to designers in their quest to sell me handbags. 

"The sight of a disembodied you is regarded as a paranormal harbinger of doom evoking the kind of shock and fascination that Freud referred to as the uncanny."

The doppelganger, seeing a glimpse of your own double, is a psychological phenomenon that has been around since the dawn of time. It can be a medical issue; the result of brain lesions or cerebral thrombosis. However, in most cultures the sight of a disembodied you and not just an accidental twin, but YOU, is regarded as a paranormal harbinger of death, evoking the kind of shock and fascination that Freud referred to as the uncanny.     

But as an image, it floods the brain with a sophisticated cocktail fusion of subconscious desires anxieties: your longing for acceptance (and having an approving twin). The fear of being replaced - in your relationship or in your job - is the idea that you are expendable. The fear that your husband will desire more than one woman and the fervent hope that with such a handbag you can actually be two women to wit: you can be your own lesbian twin. 

For Freud, the doppelganger was a symbol of compulsive repetition – the compulsive repetition of  self-destructive patterns - the motivations of the death-drive, which, it turns out, are far stronger an impulse than those of the life-drive, or Eros, the pleasure principle (the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain). Eros tends to gutter out into reasonable behavior e.g. going to work every morning to pay the rent. Repetition compulsion, however, is the domain of Thanatos, the “daemon” - the Death Drive; the will to transgression, taboo and self-destructive perversions that are the domain of drug addicts, masochists and adrenalin junkies. Life-drive in reverse. Eros in retrograde.

Which leads me to Fast Five, the fifth and latest installation of Vin Diesel’s “Fast and the Furious" franchise, which IMHO, is the best brain lesion on the video market.  

For Freud, the doppelganger was a symbol of compulsive repetition of self-destructive patterns - the motivations of the death-drive...

Fast Five is pure ubermensch, will to Thanatos a libido beyond good and evil, and cranked out of its skull on nitrous oxide, teens in bikinis and the Joy of Crime. The film was shot in Brazil, but psychologically it takes place in the domain of the daemon - a post-moral paradise of wish-fulfillment and Total Authoritarian Control. And it achieves this unreasonable wish-fulfillment through a covert use of doppelgangers. 

{SPOILER ALERT: We are now dissecting Fast Five for science}

The plot kicks off with Vin (playing ‘Dom,’ the hero of the ‘Fast’ franchise) breaking out of a prison-bound bus in California. With help from the sister (played by Jordana Brewster) over whom he has a strangely incestuous control, and her lover (Dom’s best friend, an ex-cop compelled by love to join the crime team), he escapes to Brazil to rejoin his sexy “family” of a multicultural renegade car-stealing syndicate.  

Fast Five features no less than two Vin Diesels - Vin’s evil twin being Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, a super-cop-doppelganger assigned to bring Vin down (a role signified by a badge on a chain banging between his oily brown pneumatic pecs. This adornment is mirrored by the gigantic silver crucifix worn betwixt Vin's iron-pumped man-breasts). 

The Brazilian lady cop who becomes Vin/Dom’s love interest doesn't just bear an uncanny resemblance to Jordana Brewster, she is virtually indistinguishable from Jordana Brewster. Then, as if that wasn’t gratifying enough, midway through the film, a third, even hotter Jordana Brewster pulls up on a motorcycle and joins Vin’s crime crew -- a dreifachganger! Volcanoes in the subconscious are projectile-ejaculating psycho-sexual magma, at this point.

"Fast Five is pure ubermensch, cranked out of it's skull on nitrous oxide, teens in bikinis and the Joy of Crime."  

And it just gets better. Every scene surfs the gap of forbidden pleasure between Thanatos and Eros unto a total destruction of any infrastructures or taboos that seek to limit Vin's will to unlimited power. He casually sets fire to whole Costco carts of paper money. He jumps a 1972 Pantera DeTomaso out of a moving train. He seduces his hot sister's evil doppelganger-twin; his big crucifix bashing between her breasts. Vin and the Rock grapple like gladiators in grunting slo-mo in a Greco-Roman struggle stole straight from the under Tom of Finland's mattress; When Vin triumphs and extends his meaty hand to the Rock and lifts him off the gravel in a sublime homoerotic climax of pure victory-porn, the joy is unbearable. The physical world explodes into an all-out orgy of wrongful bliss. Trucks fuck trucks and cars fuck trains and Vin fucks his sister, himself, all earthly authority, basic principles of physics and finally, all notions of God. Fast Five is dangerously gratifying on the level of projectile nosebleeding. 

So, take the morphine, buy the handbag and hurl yourself into the ravine between Thanatos and Eros. 

Love thy doppelganger. Live the brand loyalty that is franchise loyalty that is repetition-compulsion that is ultimately Death Itself. It's sexing your own evil twin in a heaven that smells like a new Hermes saddle and looks like your hot lesbian twin.  

You love it, even if you don’t know why you do.