Doppelgänger: Encyclopedia - Doppelgänger

Doppelgänger

A doppelgänger is the ghostly double of a living person, adapted from German Doppelgänger (look-alike). The word comes from doppel meaning "double" and Gänger translated as "goer". The term has, in the vernacular, come to refer to any double of a person, most commonly in reference to a so-called evil twin, or to bilocation: Somewhere, in a parallel universe, your evil twin exists. Identical to you in every physical attribute, its mind is twisted, evil and hell-bent on destruction; it is everything you are not. Occasionally a doppelganger stumbles upon a portal into our universe, and there are many twins living quietly among us, their powers weakened by the Earth. However, if by chance your twin should cross your path and make eye contact with you, his evil will be unleashed.

Alternatively, the word is used to describe a phenomenon where you catch your own image out of the corner of your eye. In some mythologies, seeing one's own doppelgänger is an omen of death. A doppelgänger seen by friends or relatives of a person may sometimes bring bad luck, or indicate an approaching illness or health problem.

The Doppelgängers of folklore cast no shadow and no reflection in a mirror or in water. They are supposed to provide advice to the person they shadow, but this advice could be misleading or malicious. They could also, in rare instances, plant ideas in their victim's mind or appear before friends and relatives, causing confusion.

Doppelgängers appear in a variety of science fiction and fantasy works, in which they are a type of shapeshifter that mimics a particular person or species for some typically nefarious reason.

A temporal Doppelgänger is any version of oneself one may meet during time travel. It is an exact likeness of one at a specific time in your history (or future). Meetings with oneself may occur when one version of oneself travels backwards through the timestream and encounters a younger version of oneself, or when two or more of the same person from different timestreams travel to the same moment in their futures.

Doppelgänger - Famous reports of the Doppelgänger phenomenon

• Guy de Maupassant recorded his own Doppelgänger experiences in his story Lui.
• Percy Bysse Shelley claimed to have met his Doppelgänger foreboding his own death.
• John Donne, the English metaphysical poet, apparently met his wife's Doppelgänger in Paris, foreboding the death of his yet unborn daughter.

Doppelgänger - Emilie Sagée

• Mimicking writing and eating, but with nothing in its hands.
• Moving independently of Sagée, and remaining motionless while she moved.
• Appearing to be in full health while Sagée was badly ill.

Apparently also, the Doppelgänger exerted resistance to the touch, but was non-physical (two girls passed through the Doppelgänger's body).

Doppelgänger - The doppelgänger phenomenon in popular culture

Doppelgänger - Literature

• Bram Stoker's novel Dracula
• Heine's poem Der Doppelgänger famously adapted to music by Franz Schubert
• Poe's short story William Wilson
• Nabokov's novel Lolita
• Robert Louis Stevenson's novella Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• Oscar Wilde's novella Dorian Gray
• Dostoyevsky's The Double
• Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy
• Jorge Luis Borges' The Book of Sand
• Peter Straub's novel Mr. X
• Mary Shelly's novel Frankenstein (and its many film adaptations)
• Joseph Conrad's short story The Secret Sharer
• Haruki Murakami's many novels
• José Saramago's "O Homem Duplicado" ("The Double") (2002)
• Charles Williams' "Descent into Hell" (1937)
• John W. Campbell's story Who Goes There? (made into the films The Thing From Another World and The Thing)
• Stephen King's novel The Dark Half
• Anne Rice's novel Blackwood Farm
• JRR Tolkien's famous epic The Lord of the Rings

Doppelgänger - Film

• Stellan Ryes film, The Student of Prague (Der Student von Prag) (1913)
• Hitchcock's film Strangers on a Train
• Stanley Kubrick's films The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut
• Krzysztof Kieślowski's film The Double Life of Véronique
• David Cronenberg's film Dead Ringers
• Teddy Page's film Deadringer
• Jet Li's The One
• Gerry Anderson's 1969 film Doppelgänger, released in the United States as Journey to the Far Side of the Sun
• Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2003 Japanese film Dopperugengâ
• Peter Hyams's 1994 film Timecop starring Jean-Claude Van Damme
• David Lynch's film Mulholland Drive
• Brian De Palma's films, among which Obsession, Body Double, Snake Eyes and Femme Fatale
• Steven Soderbergh's film Solaris (film) starring George Clooney
• Holly Gooding's 1993 in film Doppelganger; a.k.a. Doppelganger: The Evil Within (USA) starring Drew Barrymore
• Chuck Palahniuk's 1999 film Fight Club

Doppelgänger - Television

• Kolchak: The Night Stalker episode "Firefall"
• The X-Files episode "Fight Club", written by Chris Carter and named after the Palahniuk novel
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Doppelgangland", written by Joss Whedon.
• David Lynch's television series Twin Peaks
• The evil Captain Kirk from Star Trek's Mirror Universe
• Sealab 2021, "Lost in Time"
• NCIS television series episode 2-12 "Doppelgänger"
• Supernatural episode "Skin"
• Sliders episode "Season's Greedings" written by Eleah Horwitz first aired: 12/20/96. As well as a number of the shows other episodes since they move through different dimensions and sometimes encounter themselves on these other "Earths".
• The Vision of Escaflowne episodes 10 (The Blue-Eyed Prince) and 11 (Prophecy of Death).
• CSI: Crime Scene Investigation episode 213, "Identity Crisis," serial killer Paul Millander, pretending to be a Las Vegas judge, claims to have a doppleganger who Gil Grissom has mistaken him for.

Doppelgänger - Other media

• Freud's essay The Uncanny
• Spider-Man's evil Doppelganger from the pages of Marvel Comics

• The Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, and adaptations thereof, such as the Baldur's Gate series
• In the computer game Guild Wars, the player must defeat their doppelgänger
• In the comic Bob and George, the characters are constantly meeting past, future, and alternate reality versions of themselves.
• Metal Sonic, of the Sega game company's Sonic the Hedgehog series of video games, is a robot copy of the flesh-and-blood Sonic, created by Dr. Eggman, and he (Metal Sonic) repeatedly fights Sonic in Sonic CD, Sonic the Fighters (Sonic Championship in America), most recently, Sonic Heroes, and other games. Other Sonic Doppleganger is Shadow the Hedgehog, an also fast hedgehog, but with different motivation.
• Wario and Waluigi are evil conterparts of Mario and Luigi, the Mario Brothers.
• In Magic: The Gathering's first set, the Vesuvian Doppelganger was a well-known blue creature that allowed a player to copy another creature, with the option of changing the creature the doppelganger copied.
• In the video game series Metroid, two Doppelgängers of Samus Aran exist, Dark Samus and the SA-X.
• In Suikoden II it's revealed that the vampire Neclord that you vanquished in the first Suikoden was nothing more than a doppelganger of the real Neclord.

See also

• Apparition
• Body double
• Homunculus
• Impersonation
• Look-alike
• Political decoys
• Shadowman
• Simulacrum

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Doppelgänger", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki