TL;DR: The CareerSprinter Pro Plan lifetime subscription is available for $49.99 (reg. $499), providing job seekers access to AI tools for résumés, cover letters, interviews, and salary research.

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By Robert Scucci
| Published 4 seconds ago

Working as an office drone is the worst possible way to spend your time, especially if your doppelganger is showing up for work, running circles around you, and tarnishing your good name. Not only does Jesse Eisenberg’s doppelganger do all of these things in 2013’s The Double, nobody else at work seems to notice that his primary antagonist is his exact body double. It’s a bleak reminder of how little your coworkers actually pay attention to things like who they’ve been working with for the past seven years, what they look like, and what they do for a living.

After thinking about it for a minute, it’s not even that far-fetched of a scenario. Having to wear a shirt and tie, commute to a central office, and sit in a cubicle inside a windowless room, all while attending meetings that could have been an email, only to be rewarded with a slice of room-temperature pizza left over from yesterday’s sales meeting, is more than enough to suck the soul right out of you and turn you into a shell of a man who locks in without soaking in their surroundings.

While The Double is clearly an unrealistic story, what’s depicted here doesn’t feel that far removed from what office culture could easily devolve into over the next decade. 

An Office That Makes Office Space Look Like A Beach Paradise

Set mostly in oppressively dank apartment buildings, corner offices, and cubicles, The Double centers on Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg), an office drone of the highest order who’s wandering aimlessly through life. Though everyone at the office works for a cold-hearted authority figure known only as The Colonel (James Fox), it’s never made entirely clear what anyone actually does for a living. It’s obvious they’re clerks for some wide-reaching, dystopian government agency, but beyond that, your guess is as good as mine.

This level of impersonality in The Double feeds directly into its central conflict. Simon frequently forgets his ID badge and is never recognized by the security guards or his coworkers. He has to sign a visitor’s form just to go to work, as if he barely exists. Simon feels this same kind of invisibility when it comes to his coworker Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), who lives in the apartment building across from him but doesn’t even know he’s there. He admires her from afar, often collecting her torn-up art projects and saving them in a notebook for himself.

It’s a lonely existence for Simon James, until he meets his doppelganger, James Simon (also Jesse Eisenberg), who appears out of nowhere and suddenly starts working at the same office.

James Simon is everything Simon James is not in The Double, which immediately creates a number of problems. Simon is shy, reserved, and lacking confidence, content to blend into the background and quietly move through life. James, on the other hand, is charming, assertive, and instantly recognized as a standout employee, despite doing similar work to Simon, who barely gets acknowledged by anyone. Slowly but surely, James begins intruding on Simon’s life, eventually earning Hannah’s affection, much to Simon’s dismay. To make matters worse, nobody at the office seems to notice that Simon James and James Simon are identical, calling Simon’s grip on reality into question.

As Simon spirals, he gets to know James better, and the two even swap places on occasion in an attempt to live in each other’s shoes. These exchanges usually backfire, further straining their already toxic relationship and forcing Simon to question what it even means to be alive.

Sounds Like Another Movie That Came Out At The Same Time

Based on the 1846 novel of the same name by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Double shares a similar premise with 2013’s Enemy, starring Jake Gyllenhaal. While it might be tempting to chalk this up to parallel development, the coincidence is actually stranger than that. Enemy is based on a completely different novel from 2002, also titled The Double, written by José Saramago.

Both films explore what happens when two perfectly identical men occupy the same space, and the personal fallout that follows when one’s likeness is used by someone else with questionable intentions. While they tell very different stories, they make for an interesting double feature if you want to see how two doppelganger narratives released in the same year end up echoing each other in unexpected ways, as if they were each other’s doppelgangers all along.

Strangely enough, both films also exist within liminal, brutalist environments, trapping their protagonists in fluorescently-lighted spaces as their identities fracture and their personal lives collapse while they try to figure out where they belong in the world.

As of this writing, The Double is streaming for free on Tubi. Enemy, which explores similar themes and came out the same year, is currently streaming on Max.

By Jonathan Klotz
| Published 1 minute ago

For 15 years, CSI reigned on CBS as one of the highest-rated shows after perfecting the procedural formula. Every now and then, the series broke its formula, from “Lab Rats” focusing on the side characters to “4×10” telling a series of short stories, but none shattered viewer expectations quite like Season 11’s “Sqweegel.” The night-shift team was trying to figure out the motives and identity behind the gimp-suit-clad serial killer, leading to the most unexpected ending of the entire series: They failed. 

The Bad Guy Wins

Every now and then, there’s an episode of CSI where the villain’s triumphant, going back to Season 1 that occur din “Chimera,” except the doctor with twisted DNA eventually was brought to justice in a later episode. Sqweegel, named after the noise a little girl heard in a carwash, is never arrested, his identity is never uncovered, and he’s never seen again. When the episode starts, viewers know something is off about what they are about to see by the way the killer moves through a posh, upscale Las Vegas home. Slipping in through a window is one thing, but the way he walks up the stairs in a strange, herky-jerky motion that’s also inhumanly smooth and fluid is immediately unsettling. 

The team, led during this era by Catherine Willows (Marg Helgenberger) and Dr. Raymond Langston (Laurence Fishburne), starts piecing together Sqweegel’s motive when they realize each victim was a hypocrite. The first was a disability-rights advocate who killed her son, but she admitted what she did and was allowed to live. Of the rest of the victims, a firefighter who starts fires to be a hero, and a cheating wife who serves on the Family Values Committee. As far as motives go, it’s par for the course for the procedural. It’s also the only part of the episode that’s normal. 

The visual of Sqweegel stalking his victims and slipping into spaces too small and tight for a normal human is somehow more disturbing than the usual dead bodies. Sqweegel’s final shot, lacing up the gimp suit and saying, “I am no one,” is more dark and more haunting than you’d expect from a network show. After the episode first aired in 2010, CBS didn’t outright ban it; instead, the network quietly pulled it from the regular rotation, but it’s available today wherever CSI is streaming. 

A Killer From A Different Series

“Sqweegel” felt like an episode from another series dropped into CSI. That’s essentially what it was. Series creator Anthony E. Zuiker wrote a series of novels alongside Duane Swierczynki called Level 26, which featured Sqweegel as the villain. The episode’s release date coincided with the release of Level 26: Dark Prophecy. Disturbingly, Sqweegel in the book was even darker and more disturbing than what was shown on network television. 

The character was brought to life by Daniel Browning Smith, a talented contortionist, who also co-hosted Stan Lee’s Superhumans. Smith has hypermobile Ehlers–Danlos syndrome, which allows him a superhuman degree of flexibility. On the one hand, knowing that a real human was performing Sqweegel’s stunts and they weren’t special effects may make them worse, but on the other hand, Daniel Browning Smith also performs comedy and hasn’t killed anyone. 

Corporate synergy is the real horror of CSI’s most disturbing episode. Because Sqweegel wasn’t created for the series, there was never going to be a resolution. Instead, he managed to kill, traumatize a child, and get away into the night, not because he was a criminal mastermind, but because of corporate licensing. Millions of fans were left wondering when he’d return, never realizing that they’d only learn his fate if they took a look, because it’s in a book.