ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the ability of film music to convey meaning through metaphoric correlation with a dramatic concept, rather than a particular physical action. More abstract and less conspicuous than instances of Mickey Mousing, such correlations translate the essential dramatic conflict of a film into a corresponding musical structure, and thus are often found in the main or end title music, the principal thematic material. The chapter explores narratives involving doppelgangers or alter egos offer numerous possibilities for mapping the concept of duality from the filmic domain onto the domain of musical structure and deals with a brief survey of its tradition as a narrative trope. While many scores for doppelganger films rely primarily on the semantic conventions of film music, the music discussed in the chapter engages on a structural level with the concept of split identity. The efficacy of the structure as a metaphor of entrapment, physical and psychological interdependence, or inexorable fate, is apparent.
