The "double" is a well-known Hitchcockian motif. Widely reviewed under a psychoanalytical perspective, the issue of the double still presents other important challenges and this article aims at discussing the queer doubles in Hitchcock's films as "falsifiers" who are opposed to non-queer doubles that emphasise narrative coherence and legibility. In films such as Rebeca, Rope, Vertigo, The Birds, Psycho, and Frenzy, a double condenses impulses that are well described by Lee Edelman: "the violent undoing of meaning, the loss of identity and coherence, the unnatural access to jouissance" (132). These doubles release the powers of the false as they complicate the return to an "order". Therefore, we could argue that such characters are closer to being Deleuzian simulacra than psychoanalytical doppelgängers.
Alfred Hitchcock; Doubles; Queer; Powers of the False