What if the self you present to the world is not you at all—but a carefully curated, marketable doppelgänger, optimised for maximum value? As the recent awards season made clear, contemporary cinema is saturated with doppelgänger narratives in film, reflecting broader anxieties around self-optimisation in cinema and identity performance. From characters portraying their younger selves to surreal facsimiles engineered for perfection, these films offer a cultural lens into how biopolitical themes in sci-fi films have become a dominant vehicle for critiquing capitalism, control, and the commodification of the self.
Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1978) called this phenomenon bio-politics: the way power shapes us into perfect, productive subjects, policing our bodies and identities under the guise of “self-improvement”. Today, this is not just theory—it is our reality. Foucault saw this as a sinister kind of control: not brute force, but an “influence on life” that “administers, optimises, and multiplies” us into compliance (Foucault, 1978, pp.137–138) through shaping our very sense of self.
The doppelgängers haunting recent cinema—whether clones, younger doubles, or stolen identities—are not just plot devices. They are grotesque mirrors of our self-commodification. Edward in A Different Man sells his disfigured face for societal acceptance, or Elisabeth in The Substance injects herself into obsolescence, and even Mickey 17, who constantly exploits himself for the dictator’s commands; they are following the same script we do: optimise or disappear.
In doing so, Foucault’s lens shows that the doppelganger trope that has dominated recent films is not just a narrative device but a cultural symptom of a world where identity is capital. To “gather the most lucrative aspects” of oneself is to create a doppelganger—a version of the self-optimised for extraction. The horror (or satirical nature) in films arises from the realisation that we are. The discussion I had with myself ultimately made me amalgamate this notion of a world where individuals must market the most lucrative aspects of themselves to employers and social media.
The horror is not that these doubles exist—it is that we have already become them.
Using ‘A Different Man’ (2024), ‘The Substance’ (2024), and ‘Mickey 17’ (2025) as examples, it was damningly perspicuous to me that Foucault’s bio-power paradigm paves the road to investigate how these films criticise the desire for self-optimisation, identity commercialisation, and the dread of becoming one’s marketable doppelgänger.
Each film offers a unique perspective on how power works via eager acquiescence, in which individuals (and, by extension, spectators) are pushed into breaking and repackaging themselves for capital, whether social, financial, or cultural; both the monster and the maker willingly reproduce the exploitative nature of current systems. The discussion in the era of doppelgängers (which is what I truly believe we are in and have not entirely left yet) specifically relates to Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘bio-politics, examining how political power regulates and manages populations through various mechanisms.
In this context, the idea of the “doppelgänger” in movies such as Mickey 17 (2025), A Different Man (2024), and The Substance (2024) as a means of obtaining and maintaining some variant of capital, either social, financial, and/or cultural; in the grand scheme of ideas and discussions, it may be seen as a form of self-regulation and self-commodification that aligns with bio-political governance.
THE SURGERY PARADOX IN A DIFFERENT MAN
Schimberg’s ‘A Different Man’ (2024) offers a biting allegory for the subjugation of identity under late capitalism, tracing the dissolution of selfhood through the lens of bodily transformation and narrative expropriation.
With a rating of 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, ‘A Different Man’ (hereafter ADM), directed by Aaron Schimberg, follows aspiring actor Edward, who suffers from neurofibromatosis type 1 — a condition that causes benign tumours to manifest along the nerve endings. The case of Edward, played by Sebastian Stan but inspired by Adam Pearson’s condition [as well as Schimberg’s cleft palate he had gotten rid of], causes facial disfigurement on his face, affecting his speech, hearing, as well as his sight in one eye in the movie.
The film trails Edward Lemuel, a man with facial differences, who undergoes reconstructive surgery in pursuit of societal acceptance—only to find his post-operative existence usurped by an actor cast to portray “him” in a biopic, with the same condition he was so desperate to change. Despite Edward’s skin physically peeling to reveal a face that conforms to conventional and stereotypical beauty standards, his recursive displacement—where Edward’s lived experience is commodified into a performative facsimile—mirrors the bio-political machinery Foucault identified, wherein individuals internalise and reproduce the very systems that erase them.
Schimberg’s narrative operates as a mise-en-abyme of identity labour: Edward’s surgical “correction” mirrors the compulsory self-optimisation demanded by the attention economy, while the actor’s appropriation of his story literalises the extraction of marginality for cultural capital. The film’s climax—a distorted inversion of agency, wherein Edward is forced to audition to play himself—lays bare the paradox of “empowerment” under bio-power: the subject must willingly participate in their dispossession. Here, Foucault’s theory becomes visceral: power doesn’t just punish difference; it profits by forcing us to commodify our marginalisation.
ADM, in my understanding, thus crystallises the horror of Foucault’s “positive influence on life”: Edward’s body, once something that garnered a sense of malaise to the extras in the film, is disciplined into legibility only to be discarded once its narrative value is exhausted. In an era where identity is both currency and cage, Schimberg’s film is a provocation—one that asks who, in the end, profits from the stories we are coerced to talk about ourselves.
As we are eased into the movie, we see the advert that Edward auditioned for and was cast in. The script welcomes the narrator of the advert and goes into a monotonous soliloquy as the advert plays just past the 15-minute mark of the movie:
A montage of beautiful faces.
“Sad as it is, it will come as no surprise —
attractive people are winners in most areas of life,
and the workplace is no exception. You’re likely to be
startled or perturbed when you see a face like this.
A montage of people with apparent disfigured faces, including Edward’s plays.
You might stare tactlessly or, on the contrary, avert your gaze,
even if you’re generally kind. These uneasy feelings may diminish
or subside after repeated exposure to your facially different
coworker. Be gentle with yourself for having these reactions; we have no
control over the fight-or-flight responses of the reptilian part of our brain.
But as developed, empathetic beings, there are strategies we can adopt to
be more inclusive. Psychologists have begun to cover research on where
disgust comes from—some believing the emotion is similar to fear. “Fear
evolved to keep you away from large animals that want to eat you from the
outside,” says Valerie Curtis, a behavioural scientist from the London
School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.”
The intriguing part of this soliloquy is the jarring juxtaposition of these two montages—one of “beautiful faces”, the other of visibly disfigured ones—lays bare the bio-political scaffolding that governs societal perception. The narration’s clinical detachment when they say, “You might stare tactlessly or avert your gaze” reiterates Foucault’s disciplinary mechanisms, where power operates not through overt coercion but through the internalisation of norms.
The use of the word “reptilian” described here is not innate but culturally codified: disgust and fear are weaponised to enforce an aesthetic caste system, relegating non-normative bodies to the periphery of social and professional life. Edward’s disfigurement in ADM becomes a site of bio-political negotiation—his body is marked as aberrant, demanding either correction (surgery) or performative tolerance of “strategies we can adopt to be more inclusive”. The film’s genius lies in exposing how both responses serve the same neoliberal logic: the “ugly” body must either assimilate or be managed as a problem. The montage of “beautiful faces” underscores this violence by contrasting societal winners, those whose capital includes symmetrical features with those deemed visibly Other.
The reference to “disgust” as evolutionarily akin to fear is particularly Foucauldian to me—it reveals how power naturalises exclusion. By framing aversion as biological “fight-or-flight”, the narration absolves society of its role in constructing hierarchies. Yet ADM dismantles this myth: Edward’s eventual erasure (replaced by Stan playing him) proves that the “ideal” body is not just preferred but required for marketability. The film thus indicts an industry—and a world—that demands aesthetic compliance as the price of visibility.
The unsettling catharsis in ADM arrives not in redemption or reconciliation, but in a devastating confrontation with the commodification of identity itself—a moment where Edward is forced to reckon with the impossibility of reclaiming his narrative under capitalism. He is found again having to use the physical mask of his face when he used to be visibly disfigured to not only have sex but also to have his pre-surgery life stolen by an actor cast to play “him” in a biopic. Arguably, it is one of the most existentialist moments in the film.
When we meet Oswald (played by Adam Pearson), he is a charismatic ball of sunshine who bursts onto the screen and just so happens to have the same condition as Edward before his transformative surgery. For me, the importance of Edward meeting Oswald is that Edward saw his doppelgänger in Oswald, whilst Oswald refused to let his condition be a glass ceiling for him.
It was Edward who let it be his fatal flaw. We see this pivotal point in ADM in the scene in which Oswald decides to spontaneously do karaoke; as he sings, the camera goes back to Edward, who is oddly mesmerised by the confidence Oswald exudes and yearns for secretly throughout the movie. As the sequence progresses, the club/bar they are at shows that the strangers surrounding them are in the same eerie trance as Edward. This subverts what the narrator had previously said; rather than “avert[ing] your gaze” at someone who has a disfigured face, everyone in the room was staring at Oswald.
Oswald serves as the film’s living counterpoint to Edward’s internalised shame, embodying what Edward could have been—or perhaps still could be—if he rejected the biopolitical demand for assimilation. Their encounter is not just a narrative turning point but the film’s true emotional catharsis, precisely because it ruptures Edward’s (and the audience’s) conditioned perception of disfigurement.
In a film about the commodification of identity, Oswald is the unmarketable truth Edward could not face—and that is why the presence of Edward’s doppelgänger is the most uncanny, and cathartic rupture of all, leaving the audience to question if they were allowed to get rid of their insecurity, would they take it losing a core part of their existence?
Is there no escape? Foucault’s biopolitics suggests power always demands complicity, but Oswald’s unassimilated joy in ADM lingers like a thorn. Perhaps the true horror is not the doppelgänger’s victory but our refusal to imagine a world where the original self is enough.
AGEISM AS DISPOSABILITY IN SUBSTANCE
Starring Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, and Margaret Qualley as Sue, the “substance” of the title—a black-market drug that generates a younger, flawless double (Margaret Qualley’s Sue)—is more than a simple sci-fi film; it is the logical endpoint of an economy that treats identity as upgradable software. Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024) is not merely a body-horror film; it is a surgical dissection of late capitalism’s demand for perpetual self-optimisation.
Where traditional doppelgänger narratives explore duality or the uncanny, The Substance presents the double as something far more insidious: a corporate-engineered replacement designed to consume and erase the original in the pursuit of youth, beauty, and fame. The film’s horror lies not in the doppelgänger as a psychological double but as a neoliberal imperative: a forced upgrade that literalises the unsustainable demand for perpetual youth, exposing the intersection of ageism, beauty standards, and the precarity of social capital.
Through the transformation of Sparkle (Demi Moore), a fading Hollywood star who undergoes a Faustian “rejuvenation” treatment, the film embodies Michel Foucault’s bio-political nightmare—the administration, optimisation, and eventual disposal of life under market logic. In my opinion as a former Politics student, The Substance critiques the neoliberal commodification of women’s bodies by framing the doppelgänger not as a shadow self, but as a mandatory upgrade, one that exposes the violent intersection of ageism, beauty standards, and the precarity of social capital.
Foucault’s bio-power looms large here—the film’s terror is not the double’s existence, but the system that makes her necessary in gaining social capital as we see how Elisabeth has lost her social capital, ironically, she has lost that sparkle she once had. The crux of this film lies in his nightmare with visceral precision, offering an allegory for the bio-political demands of late capitalism.
We, as the audience, are presented with the doppelgänger not as a duplicate but as a corporate replacement. The drug’s requirement to “share” time between selves mimics capitalist notions of fairness while enforcing harrowing competition and exploitation: just as Edward must watch an actor usurp his identity, Elisabeth finds herself fighting her own perfected double, Sue.
Both films reveal the dark reality of bodily autonomy under capitalism—whether through surgical alteration or biological replication, the “enhanced” self simply becomes capital’s next product, Yet the transformation is neither liberating nor voluntary; it is a coerced act of self-annihilation, where the original self is rendered obsolete by her own upgraded version.
What lures and manipulates Sparkle to indulge in the drug is the advertisement’s threatening monologue:
“Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself?
Younger. More beautiful. More perfect. One single injection
unlocks your DNA, starting a new cellular division that will
release another version of yourself. This is the substance.
You are the matrix. Everything comes from you. And
everything is you. This is simply a better version of yourself.
You just have to share. One week for one and one week for the
other. A perfect balance of seven days each. The one and only
thing not to forget: You are one. You can’t escape from yourself.”
Throughout the film, the unwitting nature reveals the bio-political trap: in an economy that commodifies identity, the original is inevitably discarded. While ADM demonstrates the theft of personal narrative, The Substance shows the literal consumption of the physical self, proving that under late capitalism, the doppelgänger is not merely a copy—it is the heir, their successor, the “better version” of them that is “younger, more beautiful, more perfect” at the price of female visibility. In doing so, it successfully serves as a metaphor for the expendability of older women under patriarchal capitalism simply in the first line of the advert.
Additionally, the relentless repetition of “you” in The Substance’s monologue operates as a linguistic sleight-of-hand, weaponising the second-person pronoun to enact the very bio-political coercion it superficially disavows. Initially seductive in its address, “Have you ever dreamt…?”, the recursive “you” mimics neoliberal rhetoric’s false promise of agency—positioning the listener as both architect and beneficiary of their transformation.
Yet this illusion unravels as the pronoun’s insistence grows claustrophobic “You just have to share”, exposes the underlying threat: the “you” is not a sovereign subject but raw material, partitioned and disciplined into compliant self-replication. By the monologue’s end, the hollow declaration “You are one” collapses under the weight of its contradiction, revealing the pronoun’s function as a trap.
Each invocation of “you” performs the film’s central horror—the fiction of individual choice under late capitalism, where selfhood is alternately commodified and cannibalised. The rhetoric mirrors Foucault’s biopower in its most insidious form: not merely addressing the subject but constructing it through a grammar of inescapable obligation, where even dreams of reinvention become mandates written in the second person.
While Edward’s disfigurement in ADM marks him as a subject of bio-political ‘correction’—his value contingent on erasing visible disability—Elisabeth’s ageing body in The Substance is deemed obsolete unless replaced. Both films expose how bio-power operates along intersecting axes of marginalisation: for Edward, the demand is to conform to normative beauty, while for Elisabeth, it is to defy time itself.
Disability and ageing are thus rendered as diverging yet parallel crises under capitalism—one requiring assimilation, the other perpetual renewal—yet both reduce identity to a commodity that must be endlessly optimised or discarded. Both our protagonists’ doppelgängers promise capital (beauty = employability for Edward; youth = fame for Elisabeth) but at the cost of the original’s annihilation. This reflects capitalism’s brutal efficiency. The doppelgänger is no longer a Gothic twin but a neoliberal product—a version of the self that is more legible, profitable, and disposable.
In both films, the doppelgänger wins. Edward is reduced to auditioning for his own life; Elisabeth is consumed by her replacement. There is no rebellion, only obsolescence—proof that under bio-power, the self is not owned but leased.
The films hold up a merciless mirror to our complicity in this unwinnable game, where every “upgrade” brings us closer to our erasure.
DEATH AS PRODUCTIVITY METRIC IN MICKEY 17
The film trails Mickey, played by Robert Pattinson, a low-level “expendable” worker in a dystopian space colony (owned by Kenneth Marshall, played by Mark Ruffalo), whose consciousness is uploaded into a new clone each time he dies. This setup mirrors Foucault’s concept. The colony’s rulers—like real-world corporations—frame this exploitation as “progress” masking violence as efficiency. It’s not sci-fi; it’s our gig economy pushed to its logical endpoint; the worker is not merely disciplined but reproduced for maximum utility.
With its premise rooted in cloning and disposable labour, Mickey 17 interrogates Foucault’s biopolitics by conceptualising the reduction of human beings to replaceable units within an economic machine. Where ADM explored identity expropriation through performance, Mickey 17 exposes the violent erasure of individuality under systems that demand infinite reproducibility—turning the self into just another consumable resource.
If ADM and The Substance frame the doppelgänger as a neoliberal nightmare of self-optimisation, Mickey 17 plunges into the absurdist void where identity is not just commodified but rendered laughably disposable. Enter Kenneth Marshall—the colony’s Trumpian overseer, a satirical jab at capitalist demagogues who preach ‘efficiency’ while treating human life as spreadsheet fodder. Marshall’s blustery rhetoric, “We’re making history, folks—most clones per capita!” mirrors the logic of late-stage biopolitics, where bodies are ‘good meat’ only until the next batch rolls off the assembly line.
The film’s clones, caught in a cycle of death and replication, embody Camus’ Sisyphean absurd: their labour is meaningless, their protests unheard, and yet they persist, not out of hope but because the machine demands it. In this world, Foucault’s ‘administration of life’ curdles into farce—Marshall’s hollow slogan “You’re all very special—especially the next you!” underscoring how biopower, when stretched to its limit, reveals itself as pure, unchecked farce. The doppelgänger here is no longer a double but a punchline, a cosmic joke about replaceability under capitalism, where even rebellion is just another line item in the budget.
Mickey’s clones are not autonomous beings; even if they do fall in love like Mickey did with Nasha Barridge, their deaths are pre-programmed into the labour cycle. Bong Joon-ho’s signature satire sharpens in the film’s critique of corporate bio-power: the colony’s ruling class justifies cloning as necessary for survival, framing expendable labour as a noble sacrifice for collective progress.
In my response to this film, it actualises the bio-political nightmare by removing individuality altogether. Unlike Edward or Elisabeth, Mickey is not a singular identity fractured by capitalism but a serialised product—each clone is a replaceable worker in an interstellar colony. The horror here is not the existence of a double, but the system’s indifference to which Mickey dies or lives; identity is reduced to a number, and the body is mere raw material. In a twist on The Substance’s ‘sharing’ mandate, Mickey’s clones do not even compete—they’re pre-emptively discarded, exposing bio-power’s final stage: when life is stripped of narrative, and humans become inventory.
Where The Substance forces women to cannibalise their youth, Mickey 17 reduces men to replaceable parts—proof that bio-power tailors its violence to identity’s market value.
CONCLUSION
Whether through surgery, substances, or cloning, these films reveal the same bio-political script: the body is not yours; rather, it is “achieving the subjugation of bodies” (Foucault, 1978, p.140).
Together, these films expose a shared horror: under capitalism, you are the prototype. Whether through surgery, drugs, or cloning, the system demands you endlessly upgrade—until the ‘better’ version replaces you entirely. Foucault called this bio-politics: a world where power hides in the language of self-improvement, turning life into a product with an expiration date. The doppelgänger wins because the system designed it to. So, when you next curate your online self or consider a ‘life hack’, ask: who’s the real you, and who’s the upgrade waiting to replace you?
In ending this rather long-winded but relevant analysis of these films, I want viewers to think critically about them because popular fiction/culture mirrors our society, despite their whimsical and light-hearted nature. Let yourself explore what you react to when you consume some form of media, but more importantly, question why you reacted to it in the manner that you did. For me, I produced this body of work. What does it evoke in you?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Foucault, M., 1978. The History of SexualityVolume I: An Introduction. [online] Available at: <https://monoskop.org/images/4/40/Foucault_Michel_The_History_of_Sexuality_1_An_Introduction.pdf>.
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