Automatisme, Mirage Centers

The screenwriter Bob Gale put speculation to rest in 2015 when he revealed to The Daily Beast that Biff Tannen’s character in Back to the Future II was indeed based upon Donald Trump.

What is uncanny about this revelation is that that film, which predicted the nightmarish rise of a vulgar and dystopian strain of hyper-capitalism, was released in 1989, a full 25 years before Trump would seek election for president of the United States.

Donald Trump in easily the most fan fiction-inspired story of the summer was widely reported last week to have used a catering container to spirit himself from Air Force One and onto an unmarked military jet to leave the NATO summit in Turkey on 8 July. The story seemed tailor made for well-placed jabs from late-night talk show hosts. Still, Trump is impervious to satire because the truth in Trump’s case is invariably stranger than fiction.

Subterfuge, decoys, and body doubles are frequent themes of conspiracy theorists on all sides of the political spectrum. Social media sleuths following a CNBC interview with Joe Biden on 5 December 2019 claimed to detect a “skin tone mismatch” between the then-president’s face and neck, leading to suspicions that the individual in question was a ringer in a rubber mask. And theories that body doubles often replaced Melania Trump at public events date back to 2017. Trump himself decried these theories as “fake news,” one of his favourite deflections.

Fake news in the modern broadcast media age might have originated on 30 October 1938 with Orson Welles’s notorious CBS radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, which sparked widespread panic that a Martian invasion was actually taking place on a farm near Grovers Mill, New Jersey. At that time, Welles, among America’s busier celebrities, was also reputed to have hired ambulances to rush him both swiftly and anonymously between gigs in New York City.

Is this where Trump got the catering cart idea? God forbid anyone interfere with the president’s dessert.

Though of all the celebrity doppelgangers that Donald Trump resembles, Andy Kaufman’s alter ego, Tony Clifton, the foul-mouthed crooner and troll extraordinaire, fits the bill better than real-life Orson Welles or fictional Biff Tannen. Clifton, with his mismatched skin tones between jowl and jaw, seems in retrospect like the ultimate Trump prototype, the matinee villain that audiences jeer and boo and love to hate, and yet, for whom their appetite appears insatiable.

MUTEK 27 launch, Société des arts technologiques, 11 August 2026

Simulation is one of the military’s most effective and frequently used forms of training. Think of the 1983 film WarGames, which depicts a computer hacker, portrayed by Matthew Broderick, who accidentally gains access to a supercomputer programmed to continuously run war simulations against the former Soviet Union. Broderick’s character, David Lightman, believes that “Global Thermonuclear War” is only a video game, until he realizes that World War III is about to become a reality.

The film is not just a simulation; it is a simulation of a simulation, twice removing the narrative from the order of the real. In other words, WarGames is not even a real simulation.

Nonetheless, the film was credited by some of the world’s top computer scientists as a big inspiration. Sergey Brin told the audience at a Google-sponsored 25^th anniversary screening in 2008 that WarGames was the “key movie” of the generation that pioneered computing.

WarGames is an instance of Jean Baudrillard’s notion of “precession of simulacra,” where a simulation of a simulation paradoxically produces the reality — where the map effectively manufactures and tatters the territory.

L’OSM à l’Esplanade du Parc Olympique, 12 August 2026

In the concluding season of Lars von Trier’s cult miniseries The Kingdom, doppelgangers of Bulder and Karen manifest spontaneously to thwart their efforts to return all of the hospital’s troubled spirits to their rightful resting place. Where the real Bulder and Karen constantly lumber around the Rigshospitalet looking forlorn and anxious, their malevolent counterparts have permanent grins pasted upon their faces, happy in their work transforming angels into demons, good into evil. Willem Dafoe’s Grand Duc character, too, demonstrates the pure joy of performing wickedness.

Like its closest T.V. relative, Twin Peaks, The Kingdom delights in representing evil as an inversion of virtue. Important symbols appear upside down, maps and diagrams are reversed, and doppelgangers are not merely simulations but rather mirror images of their referent selves.

Naomi Klein in her 2023 book Doppelganger describes in exhaustive detail her own experience tumbling into what she terms the “Mirror World,” wrestling with “Other Naomi,” the conservative social commentator Naomi Wolf, and coming to grips with the doubling and multiplying selves that we actively create every day through online personas, social media accounts, avatars, icons, and other digital incarnations. Klein paints a stark portrait of the unheimlich in which neither mirrored identity is objectively authentic.

“The point is,” Klein writes, “that on either side of the reflective glass, we are not having disagreements about differing interpretations of reality — we are having disagreements about who is in reality and who is in a simulation.”

Nightshift, Blouin | Division, 31 July — 29 August 2026

“The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present when there should be something.”
—Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie

It is not the presence but rather the absence of a double self that now evokes the eerie sense. We expect to see ourselves reflected in media — it’s simply called “representation.” If we are not represented, our very existence is called into question, like a ghost that fails to see its own countenance reflected in the mirror.

Ilisattaugialik: Something That Needs to be Learned, La Guilde, 30 July ­— 12 September 2026

“Local natures are thrown out of joint not by monsters but by disequilibria…”
—Lorraine Daston, Against Nature

It is difficult for us not to interpret the changing climate — the devastating wildfires and floods that characterize a warming planet — as nature’s revenge. And yet this posits humans in opposition to nature, the mirror-image artifice to some idealized notion of a natural order.

In fact, there is nothing, whether synthetic or organic, that is unnatural. The sooner that we recognize ourselves as an integral part of nature, the sooner we will make peace with our simulated selves.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Thomas Whiteley, Uirniik 3/5 (detail) 2025, woodcut print on Japanese paper, 48″ x 168″. Photographed for NicheMTL.}