Recently, on a family Zoom call with my brother and father, the topic turned to a discussion of what image of ourselves we were seeing on our screen. I can’t remember how this conversation started, although it’s likely related to the fact that my family are obsessed with measuring ourselves to find out who’s the tallest, who has the biggest head, the highest forehead, the biggest calves, the largest ears, the finest hair, and so on.1
By experimenting with screenshots of us raising our left hands, we soon realised that the Zoom camera is set up by default to mirror our image back to us, although other people see the ‘real’ thing. I’d never consciously noticed this before, but it got me thinking about mirror images.
This is a topic that has long interested me, partly because my first attempts at writing, immortalised in relatives’ guestbooks, took the form of mirror writing—i.e., writing that’s only legible in a mirror. Although mirror writing is common amongst children as part of the process of learning to distinguish between letters like ‘b’ and ‘d’, the neuropsychologist Geoffrey Schott suggests that left-handers have a natural facility for it. This is because, Leonardo Da Vinci aside, it’s more of a motor skill than a cognitive one.2
But what’s interesting about mirrors is that we typically only realise we are seeing an inverted version of the world when we view text through them. The inversion doesn’t consciously register when we view ourselves, despite the fact that right-handers suddenly become lefties, and vice versa, because our brain automatically converts the image.
In fact, having since experimented with removing the mirror image setting on Zoom, I found it quite disconcerting to view the ‘real’ me—especially when I moved my hands or turned my head, because they didn’t go in the direction I expected. Trying to put lipstick on proved near impossible, and made me feel distinctly motion sick, worsened by the fact that my eyes seemed weirdly lopsided. Looking slightly demented and feeling vaguely sick,3 I was more than happy to return to the mirror image setting.
Still, while our brain seems to convert images of ourselves readily enough, when we see other people in the mirror, we are often tricked by the inversion. For instance, I have occasionally embarrassed myself by commenting on the left-handedness of hairdressers cutting my hair.4 This typically results in the sort of incredulous look one reserves for morons, and a polite reminder that I’m viewing the hairdresser through a mirror.
Interestingly, some people have suggested that the distortion produced by mirrors is psychologically harmful. One proponent of this view is John Walters, the developer of the TrueMirror, who argues that viewing ourselves in a regular reverse mirror has an emotionally flattening effect because it doesn’t reflect back our ‘true’ self and ‘authentic’ expressions. In his words, ‘I think that the best way to describe the person in the reverse mirror is your doppelganger, it’s like almost by definition, it looks like you, but it’s not you, doesn’t act like you, doesn’t feel like you, doesn’t express like you’.
Of course, this is not a new idea. The notion of the sinister mirror self is a horror movie staple, from Jordan Peele’s Us, to the memorably creepy 2009 film The Broken. Indeed, the word ‘doppelgänger’ itself comes from German folklore, and the idea of a ‘ghostly double’ as a bad omen—a concept depicted in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s nineteenth-century painting ‘How They Met Themselves’.
Nor are these ideas about mirror images distinctively western. For example, in Korea, bronze mirrors were used prior to the introduction of glass mirrors and have long been associated with supernatural powers; they are still widely used in shamanic rituals for this reason.
In The Mirror: A History, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet recounts a Korean tale about a poor pottery merchant who comes into possession of a bronze mirror. When he presents it to his wife, she is stunned by the unknown face that appears. Thinking that her husband has taken up with another woman, she cries, ‘Who is that tramp?’ Her husband grabs the mirror to see what she is referring to and spots a man he takes to be his wife’s lover; insults and arguments ensue. When the couple take their dispute to the local prefect for resolution, he too becomes embroiled in the mayhem. Presented with the mirror, he sees a civil servant that he assumes has been sent to replace him.
Although the protagonists in the Korean folktale don’t recognise themselves in the bronze mirror, mirrors have power precisely because the person in the mirror is both us, but also separate from us. Or, rather, it gives us a totally different perspective on ourselves from the one we have as the person inside the body we are now viewing externally in the mirror.
This quality is captured in the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s observations on the ‘mirror stage’: the label the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan gave to the period between six to eighteen months when the child starts to identify with its own image in the mirror. In Merleau-Ponty’s words,
‘At the same time that the image makes possible the knowledge of oneself, it makes possible a sort of alienation. I am no longer what I felt myself, immediately, to be; I am that image of myself that is offered by the mirror… I am “captured, caught up” by my spatial image’.
Notably, humans and other great apes are the only species that consistently recognise ourselves when we peer into a mirror.5 According to the primatologists Jordan Anderson and Gordon Gallup Jr, the latter quickly learn to use their reflection to ‘pick their teeth, explore their ears, or investigate their genitals’, thus proving once and for all their close connection with humans.6 In contrast, other animals react as if seeing another creature.
This suggests the immense significance of mirrors for humans—a topic that is sadly understudied in anthropology, probably because we are so fond of talking about metaphoric mirrors7 that we tend to forget about literal ones. Still, available ethnographic accounts of cross-cultural encounters with mirrors suggest that their introduction has profound effects.
For example, in the 1970s, the visual and media anthropologist Edmund Carpenter wrote about the reactions of the Biami—an isolated Papua New Guinean community on the Papuan plateau—to mirrors. Recording the reaction of adults confronted for the first time with a large mirror reflection of themselves, Carpenter reported:
‘They were paralyzed: after their first startled response—covering their mouths and ducking their heads—they stood transfixed, staring at their images, only their stomach muscles betraying great tension. Like Narcissus, they were left numb, totally fascinated by their own reflections’.
Carpenter argued that all societies subscribe to the notion that in addition to our physical self, we also possess a symbolic self. The power of mirrors is not just that they corroborate this belief, but that they reveal the symbolic self outside the physical one. He suggests that this revelation is, initially at least, ‘probably always traumatic’. However, he notes that the Biami quickly became used to mirrors, soon employing them for grooming purposes.
Because of how readily we become habituated to (and reliant) on mirrors, it’s easy to forget that prior to their widespread manufacture in the late eighteenth century, we knew ourselves primarily through the gaze of others. Conversely, Melchior-Bonnet observes, ‘We are now so accustomed to encountering our image at every turn in mirrors, photographs, and on videotape that it is difficult to measure the extraordinary impact on human sensibilities brought about by the possibility of seeing oneself from head to toe in a mirror’.
Of course, things have changed radically in the 30 years since Melchior-Bonnet published The Mirror, because in addition to mirrors, photographs and videotape, we now have smart phones and Zoom meetings. Basically, we are confronted with our own image at every turn—and not just the relatively static likeness in a photograph or a mirror, but animated real-time images of ourselves speaking in meetings and talking to family members and friends.
That this has further impacted human sensibilities should not surprise us. Nor are these impacts restricted to the well-publicised increase in people seeking cosmetic procedures in the ‘Zoom Boom’ era produced by the Covid pandemic. Although this is mostly attributed to the ways in which Zoom has amplified existing insecurities about our appearance, I suspect something far more anthropologically interesting is going on.
If mirrors made possible a sort of alienation from our selves, allowing us to be ‘captured’ by our image, many have now developed a full-blown case of Stockholm Syndrome. Arguably, Instagram face (the full lips, high cheekbones and sharp jawline achieved through cosmetic procedures) is not about looking better in real life; it’s about looking better on Instagram. And what’s on display on Instagram is not your physical self but your symbolic self, which, for some—like the eerie Kim Kardashian lookalikes I sometimes see on the tube—has become more real.8
So maybe German folklore and all those horror movies are right after all: the doppelgänger is indeed a bad omen. This is not just because it hunts us down and subsumes us, but because we embrace our ghostly double and hand it the reins. But you know what? The mirror image setting might be set up by default on Zoom, but there’s another even more powerful setting, although you have to actively search for it: ‘hide self view’.
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Basically, at any family get together, you can guarantee that at some point people are going to be forced to stand back-to-back and a tape measure will be pulled out. If you are an in-law or guest, you will be required to join in. This is how I know that I have the largest forehead in my family,*my father the largest ears, and my brother-in-law the largest cranium.
*My forehead is so high that when I was growing up, my brother used to call me ‘Ferengi-head’—an insult whose magnitude can only be fully appreciated by Trekkies.
This fits with my own experience—I can still mirror write fast and accurately as long as I don’t think about it. All of my correspondence with my grandfather was in the form of mirror written letters. These days, it’s basically a party trick I pull out to impress people, although I’ve learned the hard way that it’s only impressive if you happen to be carrying around a pocket mirror, because it basically looks like scribble, and no one can be arsed going to the toilet to confirm that it’s legible.
I did take a screenshot for this post, but decided that it would be unwise to circulate the image publicly. Harley Quinn can pull off the smeared lipstick and demented eyes look; I can’t.
As David Wolman observes in A Left Hand Turn Around the World, left-handers always notice fellow lefties, because we feel a public sense of kinship with our fellow cack-handers, and a private sense of superiority to everyone else.
With the possible exception of captive dolphins, suggesting that Douglas Adams was right all along—dolphins are just as smart as humans. Smarter, really. As Adams said in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, ‘Humans think they are smarter than dolphins because we build cars and buildings and start wars etc., and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish and play around. Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons’.
If great apes could put pen to paper, I can only assume that much like their human cousins, their output would consist primarily of pictures of dicks and balls.
The American anthropologist Clyde Kluckholn started the trend with his influential 1949 book Mirror for Man: the Relation of Anthropology to Modern Life and it has been used in endless publications since then, including the undergraduate anthropology textbook Mirror for Humanity—now in about its thousandth edition.
This is basically what Jean Baudrillard means by ‘the desert of the real’, although I’m loathe to point this out because I’m personally of the view that quoting Baudrillard makes you sound like a bit of a wanker. (I feel the same way about Nietzsche.)