Bugaeva, L. (2025) The Divided Self on Screen: Concepts of Memory and Identity. – МЕЖДУНАРОДНЫЙ ЖУРНАЛ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЙ КУЛЬТУРЫ

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Lyubov D. BUGAEVA
Saint Petersburg State University
7-9, University emb., Saint Petersburg, 199034, Russian Federation
Professor
Russian Christian Academy for the Humanities named after F.M. Dostoevsky
15, Fontanka emb., Saint Petersburg, 191023, Russian Federation
Professor
Doctor of Science in Philology

e-mail: ldbugaeva@gmail.com
ORCID: 0000-0003-3984-8386

Bugaeva, L. (2025) The Divided Self on Screen: Concepts of Memory and Identity.

Abstract: This paper discusses the double in its traditional form and its novel variations in cinema and on the TV screen. Being one of the most successful expressions of the Other, the double reveals not only the secrets of the self, but also its hidden features. As cultural history shows, the images of the double are mutable – they change with time and due to the development of science. Echoing new cultural challenges, the double functions as a reflection of hopes and phobias. For example, new reproductive biotechnologies, especially prospective human cloning, are a serious challenge to the autonomy and integrity of the self, to both the body and the mind. Hence, the clone (the ‘new double’) discourse, which reflects utopian expectations of biotechnologically eternal life, causes serious anxiety, making the duplication imagery highly demanded in fiction and films. This discourse is formed in such films as “Solaris” (1972 Andrei Tarkovsky; 2002, Steven Soderbergh), “The Island” (2005, Michael Bay), “Moon” (2009, Duncan Jones), “Never Let Me Go” (2010, Mark Romanek), etc. At the same time, the canonical doppelgänger, shadow and imposter, as well as the mechanical double, are by no means ousted from contemporary culture, and often those images go side by side or overlap. The TV series “Severance”, created by Dan Erickson (2022 and 2025, Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle), gives a new and interesting twist to the phenomenon of the double, presenting the double as the self, divided between different spheres of life. The phenomenon of the double, and especially of the ‘new double’, is in a way a challenge to the existence of a human being, who until recently was confident in himself as the sole owner of intelligence and bodily uniqueness. Contemporary cinema reflects the pragmatic applicability of duplication: the ‘benefit’ of doubling for the sake of human betterment, on the one hand, and the ‘threat’ to identity, on the other. It could be said that the visual drives the ethical. It seems that narrative techniques that mark identity ‘in trouble’ form emotional patterns associated with different variants of the double and changing attitudes toward it. It also seems that the prevalence of non-autonomous characters and characters with memory gaps in various film and television examples calls into question the very concept of a unified, “knowable” identity. Often, it is the double that carries the cultural meanings of what it means to be “human”, or at least actualizes those meanings. The paper attempts to understand what it is that stimulates the various manifestations of the clone in recent cinema and TV, what social discontents predetermine its reenactment, what forms and shapes the clone takes, and the doppelgänger, how the clone and the divided self differ on screen.

Key words: double; divided self; philosophy of memory; episodic memory; autobiographical memory; identity; film; TV series; society of control; Tarkovsky; Erickson.

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For Citation:

Bugaeva, L. (2025) The Divided Self on Screen: Concepts of Memory and Identity. International Journal of Cultural Research, 4 (61). 88–104. DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2025_4_88

DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2025_4_88