Unlike a Proud Boy rally, the look-alike contests provided a non-threatening way for white men to celebrate the fact that they all look alike.
It seems that to be exceptionally neutral, remarkably normal, especially un-special is the ethos of our current moment. Pantone’s color of the year is a beige glow-up: Mocha Mousse is “Simple and Comforting: A Soft, Warming Brown.” Stanley cups, army green thermoses that were once standard Dad-core, have radically widened their target audience, now endlessly customizable while remaining iconically generic. And the look-alike contest fad that kicked off in October celebrates contestants’ unique ability to look like someone else. The buzz surrounding the latter—and there is a lot of it—more or less reads: “Shockingly Normal Guy Looks Like Famous Person.” In fact, most of the celebrity picks are notable for how much they, themselves, resemble average guys. Fans of the Gladiator series were disappointed in Paul Mescal, who lacks the “muscular charisma” to play Lucius. The star of Normal People, it appears, is too normal to head up an action film. Jeremy Allen White exudes no-frills Chicago authenticity. Jack Schlossberg looks like every other guy to come out of the Yale to Harvard pipeline. And many have noted that a majority of the contests chose as their template the “rodent boyfriend” archetype. From Timothée Chalamet to Josh O’Connor, these “rat boys” are hot but “attainable” in their unconventional attractiveness. The look-alike contest recognizes normal guys for looking remarkably like celebrities who themselves look remarkably normal.
If we believe the numerous think pieces that have theorized the popularity of the look-alike contest, these silly, playful and utterly harmless events have emerged from a desire for apolitical public sociality. Why are these contests especially popular among men? Well, because being a woman is inherently political and, honestly, aren’t we all a little tired of it: women have been pressured to look like celebrities for ages and discourse around conforming to feminine beauty standards is especially, yet predictably, fraught. In fact, the organizer of the Zendaya look-alike contest, Cassi Simms, said that the goal was not to look like Zendaya: “You don’t exactly have to look like her in the mirror. It’s about also how you represent and how you carry yourself.” While the Dev Patel look-alike contest was organized with explicit intention to diversify the field and a Drake contest was promoted by the rapper himself, the overwhelming majority of these events were white—a feature that assured that these gatherings would remain depoliticized (which is to say, relatively, unpoliced). Unlike a Proud Boy rally, the look-alike contests provided a non-threatening way for white men to celebrate the fact that they all look alike. And while many have noted the “grassroots” organization of these events, their organic emergence from below was not enough to push these contests over the line into the space of politics proper. Look-alike contests are, importantly, “not a protest. They’re not an election rally,” Erin Meyers claims. Unlike the ongoing U.S.-funded genocide of Palestinians and an election between a disappointing candidate and a terrifying one, look-alike contests are “not things that have been […] contentious lately.” Instead, the contest provides a warm and fuzzy sociality with people who are the same as you. While the doppelgängers of old were uncanny, threatening, unwelcome, we are now in an era of the “new double” according to Alia Soliman, where we seek out the “cosy playfulness” of knowing that “there’s someone just like us out there doing life differently.”
Of course, to call something apolitical names its politics. And while these events may have imagined themselves as existing outside controversy, police arrested four people at the Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest (including one of the contestants) for participating in an “unscheduled demonstration” without a permit. The runner up in the Zayn Malik contest, Selin Ceren, was harassed online for advocating for “lesbian representation in these contests” and the woman who won the Drake contest was mocked as “DEI Drake.” Calls for look-alikes of JFK and Bernie Sanders made oblique allusion to politics, even if only to let old guys in on the fun. We thus might instead say that a specific political formation is assembled by the look-alike contest—and the insistence that this formation be characterized as apolitical is, of course, not incidental to it.
This political formation comes into view with the proliferation of Luigi Mangione look-alike contests in New York City, Philadelphia, and the University of Florida. The first of these contests in New York took place before Mangione was apprehended and only identified by his smiling eyes, masked face, and green hoodie. Mangione look-alikes started cropping up everywhere, not just as contestants. TikTok stars dressed as Mangione; Macy’s sold out of olive green hoodies within 48 hours; UnitedHealth reportedly tried to invoke copyright law to stop the reproduction of Mangione’s image. The look-alike it seems, slides too easily into the copycat. Whereas the celeb look-alike contests were good, innocent fun, the Mangione contests were painted as “tasteless event(s)” where a “dark fandom” paraded in a “seeming celebration of a murder.” In many ways, Mangione is already the uncanny double of the celebrities whose own doppelgängers assembled in major metropoles. If the celebs of the look-alike contest are famous for their ability to make us feel like they are just like us, Mangione is famous for actually feeling just like us: enraged at the injustice of the healthcare system. The promise of the look-alike contest is that, if entered into the right lottery, anyone can become a celebrity; the Mangione look-alike trend promised that the masked assassin could be almost anyone. Of course, explicitly excluded from this framing is the Black man in a hoodie who is always already entered into a look-alike contest not of his choosing. Every hooded Black man resembles a phantom criminal, a specter in the paranoid imagination of the police who see its reproduction everywhere. If racial profiling inverts the dynamics of the look-alike contest, the Mangione contest is too close an approximation. Once unmasked, the beautiful, white, and privileged Mangione further eroded the line between who we should and shouldn’t aspire to look like.
Perhaps the threatening, uncanny doppelgänger of old has not actually faded away, but remains the disavowed “evil twin” of the friendly look-alike. The celeb look-alike contest invites a happy congregation of Dr. Jekylls. The Mangione contests assemble a coterie of conspiring Mr. Hydes. We have two kinds of look-alike contests, themselves mirror images of each other: there is cozy sameness and there is threatening sameness. If the celebrity look-alike contest strives to champion uniformity within an exceptionalist frame—to dole out special attention for being generic—the Mangione contests throw into relief its double: the collective (albeit a homogenous one.) The contest upholds the category of the exceptional individual as the very marker under which a group of people will be organized. The collective, by contrast, subsumes those within it and thus exceeds the power of its individual participants. Mangione (and his look-alikes) are one among the many; the celebrity is the one the many want to look like. It is significant that, even after his face was revealed, the Mangione contestants dressed up in hoodies and masks: any white guy can look like him and, to the terror of the ruling class, any white guy (or girl) can become him. The threat that the Mangione look-alike contest poses is that the white working-class contestants might mistake themselves for a collective and thus accidentally recognize that they are in solidarity with others across class rather than racial lines. The anonymity among the look-alike contestants threatens to become the Black Bloc: when everyone looks the same, you cannot tell anyone apart. As one X user noted, we missed an opportunity for “a real Spartacus moment.” We have two political formations: one that claims itself apolitical, and the other, explicitly political. And yet, they look remarkably the same.
The Timothée Chalamet contest, the first of its kind, exposes the twin impulses at the heart of the contest. Police were at first unsure if this was a “demonstration” without the necessary permits—in other words, a gathering that could lead to the formation of a collective—or, ultimately, a themed tailgate party. They eventually categorized the look-alike fad as the latter and thus allowed it to go on otherwise undisturbed. The police, and the media following, decide if an event is politicized or not. And yet, being together in public is definitionally political. Put differently, the definition of politics is the organization of public life. The look-alike contest thus throws into relief the political formation that is the American public. For Kaitlyn Tiffany, the look-alike contest offers “the closest approximation of America’s utopian experiment, where people of all different origins and experiences live together in relative peace and harmony and, importantly, good fun.” The idea that a look-alike contest is as close as we get to a utopian celebration of “people of all different origins and experiences” strikes me as insane. On second thought, however, this is perhaps exactly what the look-alike contest reveals. The “American utopian experiment” is one where peaceful and harmonious sociality is touted as the product of beautiful diversity but is actually a mandated performance of sameness. So long as we look alike, we can get along, and getting along is a competition: even though we are all the same, someone is still the best at being the same. The look-alike contest makes visible that the American public remains the uncanny double of a people in actual, real solidarity with one another, of a collective.
Marissa Fenley is a Harper Schmidt Fellow in Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. She is also a dramaturg, sometimes-puppeteer, and avid Real Housewives fan.