doubleness

What is new in the development of antidemocratic politics is that Trump brings all this comic doubleness—the confusion of the real and the performative, of character and caricature—to bear on the authoritarian persona of the caudillo, the duce, the strongman savior.

The burden of that doubleness falls especially on Abdul-Mateen, whose character has a more surprising arc and must somehow make both ends of it meet.

A sense of doubleness reverberates throughout the show as it continues to chart year after year of bigotry and resistance, institutional repression and artistic sovereignty, struggles that were literally embodied by performers working in old Hollywood and outside its cruelly restrictive gates.

As with Michael’s doubleness, some care is taken to let us see her as conceivably the victim of a murder or an accident, as perfectly happy and less than perfectly happy, a true-crime Schrödinger’s cat.

But the seeds of it, I think, were in that very doubleness which made it so powerful.