Double Story

I’ve recently been re-watching the Wire (to get through the winter training season on my turbo - known as an ‘indoor bike’ to the normal world), and one particular narrative trope keeps coming back: the double story. I feel like I’ve seen this a lot lately, not just on the Wire, or even just on TV, but everywhere. 

A double story is essentially a long-winded parallel story, replicating characters, even lines. The most obvious is often found in visual montages, where - for dramatic effect - the double stories will be juxtaposed cutting from one back to the other. It seems, particularly in the Wire, this double story is the big narrative that runs throughout the series, coming to a climactic head a various junctures when the two stories get closer and closer to one another and then in one dramatic montage are, quite literally, visually spliced together again. We’ve all seen these double stories… it’s nothing particularly new. 

But why are we telling these double stories? They seem to be one defining characteristic of most successful television programmes these days.

Double stories make people feel intelligent because they confuse us, forcing our minds to read a narrative for connections. We unintentionally start thinking more laterally when we watch double stories. It becomes difficult to clearly delineate good vs. bad and other such comforting facts because every character archetype has both two versions. Neither one is easily defined because they essentially act out the exact same story. 

I’m a little ashamed to say it took me a second watch of the Wire to be able to articulate that this is the show’s big narrative. The beauty of a double story is that it works on very very simple levels (like Black guy/White guy) as well as nuanced, complex levels. No audience member left behind! 

We’re not just talking about so-called ‘complex characters’; in fact, the characters aren’t exactly complex. But we read them as such because each character is in fact two characters, acting out the same narrative in parallel. The double story trope weaves two separate entities into one, enabling a narrative to feel more complex than it actually is. We feel conflicted because our minds are forced to reckon with one idea in two separate ways, at the same time. 

Perhaps this double story is working out some sort of zeitgeisty social schizophrenia. I’m not entirely sure, but I reckon we like to think of ourselves as complex individuals, but the double story seems to identify that we actually like to think of ourselves as complex multiples. The ability to be one thing and also be something else entirely different simultaneously seems to be a uniquely 21st century phenomenon. 

Double stories don’t just happen in TV and cinema, though. I’d like to see more of this employed within exhibition practices, in particular…. perhaps where it’s most necessary to tell a complex idea. 

The trick of the double story is that it has ‘multiple entry points’… or something. There are lots of ways to find a first connection with a character or singular idea within a double story. They provide lots of options (“which is more me?”) and then only once you’ve identified the most relatable entry point and have become immersed in the narrative, do you realise how conflicted you’ve become. But by that point you’re hooked and feel the need to embrace the complexity. 

Double stories make lateral thinkers of us all… and that’s quite nice. 

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