I Also Look Like Laura Dern

When you vaguely resemble a celebrity, you come to notice the wave of quasi-recognition that gently drifts across strangers’ faces. “Hold up,” they say, while you are unfolding crumpled dollar bills, trying to pay for your ice-cream cone. They will cock their heads quizzically, or raise an index finger to their lips, as if they have just now figured something out: “Are you . . . ?”

“Laura Dern?” I’ll chirp. “Nope!”

I have gone through this precise routine while walking down the street (multiple instances), passing through airport security (multiple instances), ordering a bourbon whiskey (multiple instances), and interviewing Michael Fassbender (one instance). Do I, myself, see it? Sort of, on some days. Do others? More or less constantly. Of course, it’s a terrific compliment. Dern is an extraordinary actress, deep and brave, with a kind of inscrutable timelessness. In a piece for the Ringer, the critic Lindsay Zoladz, contemplating Dern’s “long, winding career,” wonders, “Can an actress so versatile have a signature quality? Is there an essential Dernness (Dernatology?) and, if so, what is it?”

I am sorry to say that I do not possess the essential Dernness; I have no signature quality, I have not worked steadily at anything for more than three decades, and David Lynch has yet to station himself on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea Avenue with a groaning dairy cow and a sign bearing my likeness, attempting to secure me an Academy Award nomination. Yet I do occasionally feel an odd empathy for others who approximate a celebrity in some hazy, unformed way. In that moment of revelation—“Nope!”—you are reduced to the ghost of a better, more beloved you. Your you-ness begets only a flash of disappointment.

The thirty-year-old standup comedian Maria Wojciechowski runs the Instagram account ILookLikeLauraDern1, which features Wojciechowski deftly imitating some of Dern’s most iconic looks (the billowy khaki shorts, knotted pink button-down, and skeptical expression from “Jurassic Park”; the topless Rolling Stone cover; the soft, ingénue curls from “Blue Velvet”). The first time it was suggested that Wojciechowski resembled Dern was at an audition for “America’s Got Talent,” in 2012. “I had no idea who Laura Dern was when they told me, but I pretended to be a huge fan,” she explained to me recently. “I went home and Googled her and was like, Oh. Huh. I don’t see it. At the time, I was in a sketch show at the iO Theatre, in Chicago, and I pitched to the director that I do an impression of Laura Dern in ‘Jurassic Park’ as a sketch. When I performed it, people went nuts.”

She has since fully embraced the comparison. “I think there is something organically funny about a grown woman consistently dressing up as another grown woman and taking pictures alone in her tiny and very messy bedroom in Brooklyn,” she offered.

I suppose that because we tend to regard our own faces as wholly distinct, bearing the particular mark of our souls—anything else would be an affront to our deep-rooted human exceptionalism—the thought of a lookalike invites fascination. A recent and popular meme, seeded on the Web site Bored Panda, features snapshots of people posing next to museum portraits: “10+ Times People Accidentally Found Their Doppelgängers In Museums And Couldn’t Believe Their Eyes,” the headline reads. There is a long, rambling Reddit thread devoted to celebrity doubles. People even ran a list of celebrities who resemble other celebrities. The idea of a thing that looks like a different thing—it’s toast, but it’s the Virgin Mary—can be psychically unsettling, reiterating a suspicion that the world is full of tricks, illusions, and prevarications. (Trust no one!) But it can also be funny: a playful bait and switch is, after all, the kernel of more than one madcap comedy.

The word doppelgänger—“double-goer,” in German—was first cobbled together in 1796, by the writer Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, in his novel “Blumen- Frucht- und Dornenstücke, oder Ehestand, Tod, und Hochzeit des Armenadvokaten Siebenkäs” (or “Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces; or, the Married Life, Death, and Wedding of Siebenkäs, Poor Man’s Lawyer”). From the start, the term had onerous and supernatural connotations. In Richter’s book, the titular Siebenkäs is distressed by the condition of his marriage. Struggling for a way out, he consults a man named Leibgeber, who lures him toward pseudocide; faking his own death allows, theoretically, for an ecstatic and consequence-free reinvention. The twist is that Leibgeber is actually Siebenkäs—the uncanny manifestation of some dark desire.

As a literary device, the doppelgänger eventually became rampant, effectively deployed by Edgar Allen Poe in “William Wilson,” by Vladimir Nabokov in “Despair,” by Charles Dickens in “A Tale of Two Cities,” by Joseph Conrad in “The Secret Sharer,” and by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in “The Double,” among many others. The concept itself predates Richter. Spectral doubles—an evil twin, a shadow walker—are present in ancient Egyptian and Norse mythologies. The news they bring is almost always bad.

In recent years, the culture has perhaps come to regard the idea more playfully—mostly as fodder for gags. On an episode of “Seinfeld,” in 1996, Elaine encounters “Bizarro” versions of her cronies at a diner strikingly similar to the coffee shop she and her friends frequent. The two crews share looks and mannerisms, but they are essentially opposites (in the same episode, she visits a museum of miniature things, and Kramer pretends to be an executive). “Kevin and his friends are nice people! They do good things, they read,” Elaine explains to Jerry, after he asks why they don’t see her anymore. “The whole system is breaking down!” he exclaims.

Maybe there’s even some comfort in not having to bear the full brunt of your own visage, alone—to instead share the burden and the glory of your features, the particular way that they’re read and beheld by the rest of the world. It can certainly be revelatory—like accidentally catching a glimpse of yourself, unposed and unself-conscious, in some reflective surface, and thinking, Oh! I asked Wojciechowski if she had any advice for a fellow doppel-Dern. “To all my fellow Laura Dern doppelgängers out there, you can be @ilooklikelauradern2, but I will always be @ilooklikelauradern1,” she joked. Then, an earnest evocation of solidarity, the gift of oneness: “Laura Dern seems amazing. How lucky are we to look like someone so cool?”