The Twenty-Seventh Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE TWENTY-SEVENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970), directed by Basil Dearden and based on a novel by Anthony Armstrong.

A pre-Bond Roger Moore stars as a button-down British businessman named Pelham. He so rigidly adheres to set habits that his marriage has become sexless and acquaintances regard him as tedious. One day, while driving to work on a London expressway, he experiences some sort of identity transfusion. He sees himself at the wheel of a silver Lamborghini Islero instead of the sensible Rover P5 sedan he is actually driving. He unbuckles his seatbelt, swerves into the fast lane, and floors it. This leads to an accident that lands him in the hospital with a head wound. He flatlines on the operating table. When he is resuscitated, two synchronous heartbeats appear on his heart monitor for a few seconds. Upon recovering, he resumes his habit-bound lifestyle. However, over the course of the next few days, various people mention having seen him gambling at a club, playing pool in a tournament, and chatting up an attractive young photographer—all of which he adamantly denies. And he has proof that he was at home during the alleged sightings. At the same time, his wife notices someone parked in a silver Lamborghini Islero outside their house. Things become serious when Pelham’s doppelgänger is accused of conspiring with a competitor to buy out the company he works for. Ironically, Pelham’s frantic paranoia and determination to unmask the imposter cause his wife and colleagues to conclude that he is not himself. Is Pelham suffering from a unique form of Capras delusion (i.e. "l'illusion des sosies," the illusion of doubles), as Pelham’s psychiatrist believes, wherein his own dissociated behavior has formed an independent identity? Or did his accident allow in another world’s version of him—a version that is more fun, sexier, and overall better liked than he is? 

This is a well-made conceptual chiller. Like The Tenant, I find the idea of the narrative more interesting to think about than actually watch play out. But Armstrong’s slick Hitchcockian directing together with Roger Moore’s abundant charm and layered acting make it a late-Swinging London treat. I think the pitch with Moore must have been to cast him against type as the dull Pelham so as to sell the idea that there is a restless tiger of a man lurking under the starchy surface. Moore wouldn’t star as Bond in Live and Let Die for another three years, but he had already played the TV version of The Saint’s titular man of intrigue. And for his part, Moore said that his favorite of his own films was this. (Not being a Bond fan, like at all, I’d tend to agree.)

TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS:

As much as The Man Who Haunted Himself maintains a tone of frantic paranoia throughout, every scene ends on a melancholy note. It’s as if Pelham is already grieving the loss of his life to a worthier usurper, since no one really likes Pelham-prime anyway, least of all himself. This melancholy is inherited from the true source of the film’s narrative, a short story by Edgar Allen Poe called “William Wilson.” 

See, the novel that The Man Who Haunted Himself is based on, The Strange Case of Mr. Pelham, is itself just a twentieth century reboot of Poe’s story. The first person to steal this story was Poe’s Russian translator, Dostoyevsky, with his novella The Double. Probably the most recent iteration of the story is 2018’s Cam, which makes the double-haunted main character a cam-site sex worker. “William Wilson,” like all of the works derived from it, is about a protagonist whose life is progressively taken over by a doppelgänger with the same name and face. More on this story in a few nights (stay tuned), but suffice to say that it strikes the same melancholy note of resignation. 

The most interesting spin that The Man Who Haunted Himself puts on this story is the idea that refraction of identity through trauma can release a repressed version of oneself into the world as a physical copy. Pelham’s doppelgänger is both livelier and crueler than he is. Pelham-secundus is sexually vital, risk-taking, and confident, but he is also deceitful, mocking, and selfish. Pelham-prime is none of these things. So the self that is set free by the accident can be seen as a demon that has seized upon an opportunity to escape hell by manifesting as the id-oriented version of an existing man. Pelham caused this demon to be let loose by being untrue to himself. This new fold to the narrative speaks to what an antagonistic doppelgänger truly represents: an aspect of oneself that one is at war with. Whether one works to imprison one’s chaotic lustful side, as Pelham does, or one is instead enslaved by an addiction, the doppelgänger can symbolically embody one’s opponent in an internal struggle. On the other hand, as the psychiatrist who traffics in such psycho-symbolic explanations is horrified to discover in the finale, sometimes the inexplicable duplication of bodies and personas is all too real.