The Double Comparison

Novels, plays, and movies often depict characters caught in a conflict with their doubles. Such collisions call a character’s sense of identity into question. The film The Double by Richard Ayoade takes Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s original book The Double and plays it with a modern twist. Upon closer inspection of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Double and its movie adaptation by Richard Ayoade, we see that though both share many elements and plot progressions, the movie, as a more modern medium, utilizes its unique conception to provide a different outlook on Dostoyevsky’s philosophies. From the start of his book, Dostoyevsky’s tragic but comic tale depicts the decline of mental stability. Dostoyevsky opens his novella with Goyadkin Sr.’s unusual schizophrenia: from the paranoia of passing his boss to the eccentricity of shopping. This contrasts with the quiet, friendly person Dostoyevsky characterizes in the rest of the book. Soon, a double interrupts the nervous lead; Goyadkin Jr., the double, looks like him, sounds like him, but is not …show more content…
But, at the same time, Ayoade carries the film into a different direction: entertainment. The movie treks on the line between Dostoyevsky’s existential contemplation and conceptual fear of mortality and Hollywood’s typical thrillers and “mindblown” attitude. Despite having Dostoyevsky’s undertones of mortality, the movie breathes in dark humor and, through the pair of detectives, laughs at the movie’s own portrayal of mortality. As one cop asks “Should I put him down as a ‘no’,” the other quickly glances up and down at Simon: “Put him down as a ‘maybe.” These quick retorts draw away from the gothic, gloomy scenes and throw in a light metamodernistic view on itself. This lightheartedness continues in Simon’s incompetence and impotence with the repeated subway and elevator door