Crystal Downing

Messiah College
cdowning@mcis.messiah.edu

 

Multiplicity. Dir. Harold Ramis. Columbia Pictures, 1996.

 

Multiplicity, a showcase containing entertaining displays of Michael Keaton’s acting range, is not a great film. The showcase itself, however, with its startling lack of depth, reflects off its slick surfaces the postmodern “transvaluation of values” that Fredric Jameson descried years ago in his now famous New Left Review article.¹ Multiplicity (directed and co-written by Harold Ramis, of Animal House and Ghostbusters fame) is not a “postmodern film” in the sense that it develops “new rules of the game” which devalue the hegemonic perceptions and semiotic practices that encode mainstream movies (à la Lyotard); instead, it is a stylistically traditional entertainment vehicle whose content reflects the ineluctable power of what Jameson has called “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” wherein “depth is replaced by…multiple surfaces” (J 62).

 

In the film, Keaton plays Doug Kinney, a beleaguered, though conscientious, foreman for a construction company, married to the lovely, though lackluster, Laura (Andie MacDowell) who put her career on hold to mother their two young children. Doug’s multiplicity of stressful responsibilities leave him no time to finish remodelling his own home, to help out with the kids so Laura can return to work, or to engage in any leisure activity whatsoever. After a tantrum-like display of frustration on one of his many job sites–a “scientific” institute on the Malibu shore–Doug meets Dr. Owen Leeds (Harris Yulin), who, with no compunction at all, offers to clone for (and from) Doug a second self who can help him on the job. With a gesture toward Keaton’s eponymous role in Mr. Mom (1983), Doug soon discovers that, even with his professional activities alleviated, running a home with children still allows him no leisure time, so he has a second clone made to handle the house chores. These two clones then clone a fourth Doug to help out with the housework in their own apartment above the garage (which, though in full sight of the house, is never detected by Doug’s family as housing three not-very quiet look-alikes). This third clone, extracted not from the original Doug but from one of his clones, turns out to be a near idiot: “You know how sometimes when you make a copy of a copy, it’s not quite as sharp as the original?” Doug’s first two clones explain. “Original” is the operative word here and signals a problematizing not only of “origins,” but also of the autonomous, unified, “authentic” self of modernism.

 

The film itself mocks the mystifications of modernism when Doug first goes to Dr. Leeds’ office to discuss his problems. We cut to a full-screen picture of Doug’s talking head lying on a black leather couch, spilling out his frustrations to the “doctor.” As soon as we recognize this icon of psychoanalysis, it is undermined by Dr. Leeds’ response to Doug: “I’m not a psychologist.” Modernism’s depth model of the human psyche–which must be plumbed to discover the “origin” of behavior–is decentered by Dr. Leeds’ solution: a replication of the body, the surface of behavior. We have here what Jameson describes as the postmodern “shift in the dynamics of cultural pathology…in which the alienation of the subject is displaced by the fragmentation of the subject” (J 63).

 

The displacement of identity is reinforced by a trick the film plays on its audience: we see Doug, after the first cloning operation, waking up on a gurney to stare at an image of himself standing in the shadows. Because the camera looks over the shoulder of the well-lit Doug on the gurney to view the darker image which stands before him (and us), we identify with the waking man, amazed to see a replicant before him. However, we quickly learn that the man with whom we have “identified” is actually the clone. It is as though we have been given a visual instantiation of the de-centered self which defines postmodern subjectivity.

 

Multiplicity quite consciously explores Doug’s fragmented subjectivity by giving each clone a different manifestation of his “personality.” Made while Doug was still recovering from a testosterone-induced tantrum, in which he destroyed construction materials with a huge metal wrench while water powerfully ejaculated from a vertically erect pipe, the first clone embodies the macho side of Doug, not only kicking ass while on the job but trying to get some while off. The second clone appears soon after a scene in which the “original” Doug unsuccessfully tries to wrap up some pizza while struggling to talk on the phone above his children’s ruckus. This clone, therefore, adept at the home arts, loves to cook and is a master at wrapping up leftovers, and Keaton plays him as Doug’s “feminine side.” And then, of course, the third clone, made in both senses without Doug, gestures toward the “death of the subject” altogether; he is constructed from the superficial signifiers that mold Doug’s other selves. In fact, all the clones are quite literally “socially constructed,” made, we have seen, without much reflection on the part of Doug, by one who garners “authority” in our culture, a scientist who “authors” Doug’s various subject positions.

 

These plural positions are mis-taken to be one “autonomous bourgeois monad or ego or individual” (J 63) when Doug’s wife makes love to all three in the same night and notices no difference–no authentic self that is missing–except that their bodies function differently: one cries, one is “athletic” and one has an erection as premature as his diction. Laura has experienced the postmodern simulacrum as Baudrillard has defined it: “reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image.”²

 

The concept of the simulacrum is also employed by Jameson; however, he privileges Plato’s definition of the term–“the identical copy for which no original has ever existed”–to foreground the postmodern obsession with surfaces, wherein “the history of aesthetic styles displaces ‘real’ history” (J 67). Jameson’s reference to Plato is redolent of the “Allegory of the Cave,” in which people turn their backs to the “real,” naively convinced that the images on the surface of the cave wall, merely “shadows” of the real, comprise all that exists. Significantly, then, when the writers of Multiplicity describe Doug’s radically deficient third clone as “a copy of a copy,” they echo Plato’s indictment of the poet, who, “restricted to imitating the realm of appearances, makes only copies of copies, and his creation is thus twice removed from reality.”³ They go one step further, however, causing the viewer to question, with all postmodernists, the “reality” of Platonic “origins”; for the “original” Doug appears to have little substance other than the various subject positions he fails to coordinate in one body. Just as one of his construction sites is titled “Vista de Nada” (sight of nothing) Doug is the site of nothing other than his performance functions.

 

“Nada,” for the modernist, as reflected in Ernest Hemingway’s famous lines “Our nada, who art in nada, nada be thy name,” meant that “In the absence of a God each person must take responsibility for his own actions.”⁴ There is no such faith in existential authenticity for the postmodernist; as the “authentic” Doug admits, “I am not in my own life.” Even when he presumably “gets it together” for the denouement, he achieves no self-transforming enlightenment; at the end of the movie Doug has the exact same perception as at the beginning: he needs to spend more time relaxing and with his family. He is even shown doing the same activity at the end of the film as in the opening scene: coordinating the demolition of a concrete driveway. The only difference is that the later construction work is for his own home, with a view to winning back the favor of his wife. The “happy ending” of Multiplicity is grounded in the reification of commodity: Doug’s four selves turn a shabby Los Angeles bungalow into a gorgeous house, complete with outdoor fountain, fit for the glossy pages of Better Homes and Gardens. This construction, like the earlier condominium construction, like the very construction of Doug’s subjectivity, looks not to some transcendent ideal of human connectedness or Godly benevolence, but only to a vista de nada.

 

Appropriately, Ramis sets the film in Los Angeles, its opening aerial sequence of endless intersecting freeways and relentlessly drab buildings concretizing a true vista de nada. However, what makes the location especially significant to Multiplicity is its mythic association with the simulacrum: the locus of “the rise of Hollywood and of the image as commodity” (J 69). In Hollywood, as Jameson notes, we get the “‘death of the subject’ in the institution of the star” (J 68). Indeed, even the “original” and “authentic” Doug Kinney is “an identical copy for which no original has ever existed” since he is merely a fictional character (even if obliquely named after one of Ramis’ late friends, Doug Kenney). And Michael Keaton, like any movie star, displaces his subjectivity as he becomes identified with the characters he plays. In fact, we might see Keaton’s various film roles as his clones, constructed by the hegemony of Hollywood which replicates roles, as Los Angeles does its freeways, if even taking them in different directions. (I think especially of Harrison Ford’s multiplicity in the Star Wars films, the Indiana Jones movies, and the Tom Clancey showpieces.) Indeed, Keaton’s Doug is a replicant of Keaton’s “Mr. Mom,” and Andie MacDowell is a replicant of the straightwoman she played in another Ramis film: Groundhog Day, whose plot is based upon the diachronic replication of a day in a weatherman’s life (Bill Murray) rather than upon the synchronic replications of Multiplicity.

 

Hollywood even creates marginal “copies of copies”: idiot fans who seek to act and dress like characters from their favorite films, mimicking the shadows on the walls inside movie theaters. Without these simulacrum servers, businesses in Los Angeles like Star Wares, Reel Clothes, and It’s a Wrap, which sell, for outrageous prices, clothing once worn in “the movies,” could not survive. As the owner of Reel Clothes states, “Ninety percent of my customers are L.A. residents looking for something to wear to work,”⁵ fulfilling Jameson’s sense, expressed over a decade ago, that “we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current experience” (J 68, emphasis mine).

 

Ramis ends Multiplicity with a simulacrum of another beach town. The three clones, at Doug’s behest, have gone off on their own, and have ended up in Florida running a pizza parlour called “Three Guys from Nowhere,” an obvious echo of a California chain called “Two Guys from Italy.” The name appears on a sign above the door, also inscribed with three cartoon heads which look a lot like the iconic figures of “Manny, Moe, and Jack” once used on the sign for “Pep Boys” automotive stores. Thus the film ends with yet another manifestation of postmodernism: what Jameson calls “pastiche.” While parody usually has a purpose, “pastiche” is the arbitrary juxtaposition of unrelated, nostalgia-generating signifiers–like “Two Guys from Italy” and “Manny, Moe, and Jack”–which entirely empties them of any meaning other than recognizability. They are signifiers cut off from their origins, severed from any transcendental signified; they are signifiers like Doug, Doug, Doug, and, yes, even Doug.

 

Notes

 

1. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (July-Aug 1984) 53-93. Quotations cited in my text as (J).
 

2. Jean Baudrillard, “The Orders of Simulacra,” Simulations, trans. Philip Beitchmann (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983) 150.

 

3. As summarized by Hazard Adams, ed., “Plato,” Critical Theory Since Plato (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 11.

 

4. The first quotation is from Ernest Hemingway’s short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” The Hemingway Reader, ed. Charles Poore (New York: Scribners, 1953) 421; the second quotation is spoken by a paradigmatic existentialist portrayed by Woody Allen in Crimes and Misdemeanors (dir. Woody Allen, Orion, 1989).

 

5. “Brief Brush With Fame,” Patriot News (Harrisburg, PA) 5 Aug. 1996: C1.