"in His Own Image": Genre, Memory and Doubling in Schwarzenegger's Films‪.‬

INTRODUCTION The double, and the processes in which doubling becomes apparent or significant, are standard features of science fiction, action and horror cinema, from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1957) to the Mantle twins in Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1987), from James Whale's inspired double casting of Elsa Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein (1931) to the reproduction of characters as computer simulations in The Matrix (the Wachowski Brothers, 1999). The persistence of doubling in these genres suggests a diverse set of concerns: the doubling implications of new technologies or new ways of imagining the world; a preoccupation with the uncanny potential of the double--the uncanniness of two things which seem identical but are different; a preoccupation with doubling as a form of subversion of the stable subjective ego, a theme which constitutes a common territory of SF and horror in general; a concern with being seen to exploit the potential offered by special effects technologies as they develop; and, ultimately, a concern with the very structure of film as itself involving a doubling, the doubling both of external realities and of internal psychic anxieties.