Gem­i­ni Man, dupli­cates and crises of masculinity

Ang Lee is always won­der­ing about our fathers. From his ear­ly roman­tic com­e­dy Eat Drink Man Woman to con­tem­po­rary block­busters like Hulk and now Gem­i­ni Man, his fas­ci­na­tion with patri­archs and the imprints they leave on us has long been a facet of his work. In his Jer­ry Bruck­heimer pro­duced sci-fi thriller, Lee explores cycles of tox­ic mas­culin­i­ty per­pet­u­at­ed by father fig­ures with a ten­der­ness more read­i­ly asso­ci­at­ed with his fam­i­ly dramas.

Gem­i­ni Man is the lat­est in a long line of dop­pel­gänger movies about crises of mas­culin­i­ty – the most famous, Alfred Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go, deals with a man’s pos­ses­sive and destruc­tive lust, while the likes of David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers and Denis Villeneuve’s Ene­my look at self-destruc­tive men with a deep-seat­ed fear of inti­ma­cy. Lee’s film dif­fers slight­ly in how it tack­les the idea of inher­it­ed tox­ic mas­culin­i­ty, its dual pro­tag­o­nists raised in an envi­ron­ment where mas­culin­i­ty is defined by one’s capac­i­ty for mon­stros­i­ty. Here, the dop­pel­gänger is a man­i­fes­ta­tion of emo­tion­al prob­lems long sup­pressed by our hero.

The pro­tag­o­nist in ques­tion is gov­ern­ment assas­sin Hen­ry Bro­gan (Will Smith). Hav­ing escaped the clutch­es of his abu­sive father only to fall into a career built on vio­lence, he’s tired, his guilty con­science weigh­ing heavy after retire­ment. The appear­ance of his younger clone ​‘Junior’ (a dig­i­tal fac­sim­i­le of Smith) intro­duces fur­ther angst, lead­ing Hen­ry to reflect on his past. Junior’s com­mand­ing offi­cer Clay (Clive Owen) is a stand-in for Henry’s father, manip­u­lat­ing him and mould­ing him into a weapon by sup­press­ing his emotions.

Junior is lone­ly (and vir­ginal, per­haps a first for a Will Smith role), and Hen­ry instant­ly recog­nis­es and laments this lone­li­ness. Junior rep­re­sents the missed oppor­tu­ni­ties that stemmed from Henry’s self-imposed iso­la­tion, and the script is par­tic­u­lar­ly didac­tic about this point, with one char­ac­ter stat­ing, ​“he’s the mir­ror you don’t wan­na look into.”

Junior and Henry’s inti­ma­cy strug­gles are sta­ples of the dop­pel­gänger movie, where psy­ches split between two dif­fer­ent peo­ple expose psy­cho­sex­u­al patholo­gies. Villeneuve’s Ene­my also uses the dop­pel­gänger as a mir­ror for the main char­ac­ter, con­sid­er­ing the asso­ci­a­tion of mas­culin­i­ty with author­i­ta­tive pow­er over one­self and oth­ers. The dupli­cates, Adam and Antho­ny (Jake Gyl­len­haal), are con­nect­ed by their feel­ing pow­er­less in a com­mit­ted rela­tion­ship, the women in their lives tak­ing the form of giant spi­ders in their night­mares, their fear of being con­sumed tak­ing phys­i­cal form.

Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, mean­while, fol­lows twin gynae­col­o­gists Elliot and Bev­er­ly (Jere­my Irons), who share every­thing, even women; Elliot pass­es his sex­u­al part­ners on to the ​‘younger’ Bev­er­ly. Their per­verse rou­tine is soon dis­rupt­ed by Claire (Geneviève Bujold), who sees through their act and fig­ures out Beverly’s inse­cu­ri­ty over his depen­den­cy on Elliot. As in Ene­my, his inse­cu­ri­ty is giv­en life in a night­mare where Claire bites into a grotesque, fleshy appendage con­join­ing the twins. It’s a moment that couldn’t be more dif­fer­ent from the cadence of Lee’s film but nonethe­less shares its fear of inti­ma­cy, despite Beverly’s desire for Elliot’s con­fi­dence and sex­u­al prowess.

Anoth­er film fea­tur­ing an assas­sin try­ing to kill his old­er self, Rian Johnson’s time trav­el thriller Loop­er might have the most overt con­nec­tion to Gem­i­ni Man. Where Lee’s film chal­lenges notions of father­hood, Loop­er, led by Joseph Gor­don-Levitt as Joe, focus­es on moth­ers. The absence of Joe’s moth­er (who sold him to a gang) has left him self­ish and mate­ri­al­is­tic, deter­mined to ​“hold on to what is his” since his life stopped belong­ing to him. He does this as a ​‘loop­er’, hit­men con­tract­ed to kill tar­gets sent back from the future, and even­tu­al­ly their future selves.

“This job doesn’t attract the most… for­ward-think­ing peo­ple,” Joe quips about those so des­per­ate to gain some auton­o­my that they would sign their lives away to this organ­i­sa­tion. But what oth­er choice do they have? Looper’s cen­tral arc has Joe realise the con­se­quences of this struc­ture, his accu­mu­la­tion of wealth only lead­ing to more vio­lence, that lit­er­al­ly reach­es back in time and begins the cycle anew.

Just as the struc­ture of organ­ised crime fash­ions Joe into an emo­tion­al­ly-stunt­ed instru­ment, Junior is turned into a weapon for the gov­ern­ment with no life or ambi­tions of his own. Like Gem­i­ni Man, Loop­er details a life giv­en struc­ture by organ­ised vio­lence which pro­vides an out­let for sup­pressed anger and fear. In each of these films, a character’s jour­ney is defined by their resis­tance to authen­tic human con­nec­tion, as vio­lence and repressed emo­tion lead only to more vio­lence; a vicious cycle that seems des­tined to be repeat­ed in perpetuity.