Netflix's Echoes and Hollywood's 'Evil Twin' formula

Netflix ’s thriller miniseries Echoes starts on a promising note: we meet Gina McCleary ( Michelle Monaghan ), a successful writer living in Los Angeles. Years ago, Gina moved out of her Virginia hometown, leaving behind her family, including her identical twin Leni (also Monaghan) who still lives there with her husband Jack (Matt Bomer). In the first episode, Leni goes missing, prompting Gina to return to their hometown in search of answers, with a little help from local sheriff Louise Floss (Karen Robinson). By the end of the episode, however, comes the show’s hook-twist: the woman we have just seen as Gina is actually Leni, and Gina’s the one who’s missing. As it turns out, the twins have been “sharing” lives for a long time and Gina eventually grew sick of it. She has left a letter behind for Leni (currently pretending to be Gina) asking her to choose any one of the two lives, Virginia or LA, to return to. After a strong first couple of episodes, Echoes falls by the wayside, sadly, despite a commanding performance by Michelle Monaghan. The screenplay loses steam, the clues become more and more predictable through the course of the season. The show could have benefitted from some tighter editing as well. When it works, though, Echoes makes great usage of a time-honoured device in Hollywood, especially in thrillers and horror movies — the twin. From Stanley Kubrick ’s usage of the spooky twins in The Shining (1980) to David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988), Christopher Nolan ’s The Prestige (2006) and more recent efforts like James Wan’s Malignant (2021), twins have been used for a variety of symbolic purposes. They can represent a protagonist with a strong element of duality about them, or they can stand in for the light and darkness within every human soul. The latter context is, of course, why they are found so often in stories with a supernatural element. In Echoes, of course, the twins represent two very important elements of the story—secrets and the idea of “sharing a life”. Neither of the twins can make up their minds about either Virginia or Los Angeles. Leni, in particular, wants discrete bits of both lives, with nobody being wiser about the twins’ arrangement. Until, of course, Gina calls it quits and disappears, triggering the events of the first episode. Psychologically speaking, living two disparate half-lives takes a toll on her; in this context they learn that life really is more than the sum of its parts. Poe’s William Wilson, the influence of Diane Arbus One of the earliest examples of a doppelganger—not a literal twin, mind—being used in ‘weird fiction’ is Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘William Wilson’, first published in 1839. In this story, the eponymous protagonist is a man of noble parentage who first comes across his doppelganger at boarding school, a boy who claims to have the same name. As William Wilson grows up and commits acts of debauchery and treachery, his namesake/doppelganger shows up at crucial moments and lays his best-laid plans to waste. Ultimately, William Wilson fatally stabs the doppelganger near a giant mirror and watches, horrified, as the corpse is revealed to be his spitting image, down to the last detail. The concluding passage of the story manages to scare this writer to this day. “It was my antagonist—it was Wilson, who then stood before me in the agonies of his dissolution. His mask and cloak lay, where he had thrown them, upon the floor. Not a thread in all his raiment—not a line in all the marked and singular lineaments of his face which was not, even in the most absolute identity, mine own! It was Wilson; but he spoke no longer in a whisper, and I could have fancied that I myself was speaking while he said: “You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead—dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou exist—and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”” The story has been adapted for the screen several times around the world, including three separate German movies. Most famously, the British director Peter de Rome adapted ‘William Wilson’ into the horror movie The Destroying Angel (1976), where the climactic stabbing scene is quite faithfully depicted. Stanley Kubrick, famously, used identical twins in his film The Shining (1980), a pair of little girls dressed up identically, staring right at the camera, seemingly, as they say childish but ominous- sounding dialogue. The twins fit right in with the film’s air of psychological horror, but their visual look was modelled after an entirely different piece of art, This was one of American photographer Diane Arbus’s (1923-1971) most famous works, Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, which depicted a similarly dressed pair of identical twin girls. According to Arbus, this photograph was supposed to capture ‘differentness in identicalness’. The twin on the left has a neutral, even slightly morose expression on her face while the twin on the right is smiling amiably. Once you notice this, however, you are drawn into the other minute differences in the way they’re standing, the way they wear their hair and so on. At some level, this photograph is a stand-in for the way all art functions—it simulates real life in a way that’s both authentic and at the same time, pure invention, thereby complicating our own sense of what’s ‘real’. Twins in the modern cinematic era Echoes reminded me, in a few all-too-brief moments, of the David Cronenberg classic Dead Ringers (1988), starring Jeremy Irons as a pair of neurotic gynaecologists who share everything, including lovers. The master of body horror, Cronenberg’s twin protagonists are obsessed with bodily symmetry—a road that ends with body dysmorphia, of course. One of the twins, Beverly, is obsessed with mutant women with abnormal genitalia and commissions a metallurgical artist to craft creepy-looking surgical tools that he intends to use on these women. Cronenberg’s principal achievement here is showing the mind-body connect that twins appear to have (or have in a greater degree than everybody else) and its sinister implications. That, and of course, the spectre of neurotic men fiddling about, playing God with women’s bodies (an issue that American viewers, I imagine, are looking at with renewed horror these days). In the book Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture (2005), Juliana de Nooy writes about how the twins’ occupation as gynaecologists, plus the way they have been shot, makes the film an elaborate allegory about sharing a womb. “Linda Badley notes that the film crew dubbed their work ‘Foetal Attraction’. Drawing attention to the twins’ blood-red robes, the claustrophobic interiors bathed in filtered amniotic-blue light, and the intra-uterine nature of both their domestic environment and their professional activity, she argues that the film is a ‘view from the womb’. Drugged, the twins regress to an increasingly infantile condition.” De Nooy also analyses a slew of 20th century thriller and horror films where the ‘evil twin sister’ is a trope, noting that in most of these films, the primary incentive for the evil twin is “stealing” her sister’s husband. The 90s, in particular, saw an explosion of this subgenre, with dozens of releases in this vein: the Mirror Image films, Double Edge, Double Vision and so on. “For twin sisters have become standard fare in twentieth-century film. There are two privileged moments of this phenomenon: the 1940s woman’s film and, following a couple of 1980s remakes of the earlier films, 1990s thrillers. Most of these stories involve a contest between a good and an evil twin – or more simply the ‘good girl’ and the ‘bad girl’ – and the problems of telling them apart. One particularity of female twin films is the frequency with which the bad girl steals her sister’s husband. Indeed, this is often her primary aim.” Most recently, the James Wan horror film Malignant is the most imaginative interpretation of the evil twin theme. In this film, the twin is literally a tumour, a force of evil that is activated when the other twin is too stressed or scared for her life. Gabriel (the aforementioned evil twin) shares a body with our protagonist and when he emerges from inside her, he walks with legs backwards, a spooky mirror image of everything she stands for (literally and figuratively). Twins, therefore, continue to be fertile ground for makers of ‘weird fiction’. In the hands of skilled actors and directors, the evil twin story can be a straightforward but formidable (and versatile) weapon, bringing to the surface long-dormant fears and insecurities. Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook ,  Twitter  and  Instagram .