Hitchcock’s queer doubles

Resumo

The “double” is a well-known Hitchcockian motif. Widelyreviewed under a psychoanalytical perspective, the issue ofthe double still presents other important challenges and thisarticle aims at discussing the queer doubles in Hitchcock’s films as “falsifiers” who are opposed to non-queer doubles thatemphasise narrative coherence and legibility. In films such asRebeca, Rope, Vertigo, The Birds, Psycho, and Frenzy, a doublecondenses impulses that are well described by Lee Edelman: “theviolent undoing of meaning, the loss of identity and coherence,the unnatural access to jouissance” (132). These doubles releasethe powers of the false as they complicate the return to an “order”.Therefore, we could argue that such characters are closer tobeing Deleuzian simulacra than psychoanalytical doppelgängers.