doubleness

The band’s latest album carries the hard-earned knowledge of age and the strange doubleness of feeling both young and old, like “18-year-old software on 50-year-old hardware,” as Anderson puts it.

What is new in the development of antidemocratic politics is that Trump brings all this comic doubleness—the confusion of the real and the performative, of character and caricature—to bear on the authoritarian persona of the caudillo, the duce, the strongman savior.

The burden of that doubleness falls especially on Abdul-Mateen, whose character has a more surprising arc and must somehow make both ends of it meet.

A sense of doubleness reverberates throughout the show as it continues to chart year after year of bigotry and resistance, institutional repression and artistic sovereignty, struggles that were literally embodied by performers working in old Hollywood and outside its cruelly restrictive gates.

As with Michael’s doubleness, some care is taken to let us see her as conceivably the victim of a murder or an accident, as perfectly happy and less than perfectly happy, a true-crime Schrödinger’s cat.