This rush sees itself on the street and feels afraid

According to many folk traditions, to see one's double, or doppelgänger is to see one's death. The unease felt by encountering a doppelgänger is captured especially poignantly in F. W. Murnau's "The Last Man."   Encountering one's uncanny double is lent a capitalist context, in the scene where the film's protagonist sees an unknown man wearing his same uniform -- the doorman's uniform -- in the revolving door at the entrance of the hotel.

Though the two men are drastically different, physically (the protagonist is old, fat, and bent, the new man is young, lean, and virile), the audience immediately understand the doubling owing to the simple fact that both characters are wearing the same hat and coat.  And indeed, encountering this double does portend a symbolic death for our protagonist. This man takes over his job, and thus his station in life.

The revolving door is important, also. Murnau's innovative camera techniques allows this moment to slow down; we are inside the door itself, and each pace is felt as we see the protagonist seeing himself. This exaggerated slowness of movement emphasizes what is otherwise (and elsewhere in the film) an everyday and rather quick action -- the passage of people inside a revolving door. And of course, capitalism depends on just such everyday revolutions: the old worker is replaced by the young, and the business survives unchanged. To the individual, however, this changing of the guard can mean death. Were it not for the author's unrealistic intervention at the end of the film, our protagonist would die a broken man.

In addition to the uncanny doubling, the film offers us a more optimistic form of recognizing oneself in others as well. At the end of the film, when the protagonist lucks in to inordinate wealth, he hands it out freely to the night watchmen, as well as tipping other porters outside the hotel. In the very last scene, he invites a previously unseen tramp to ride in his carriage with him, even though the doorman attempts to shove the tramp away. In this scene, the doorman represents the disdain the wealthy have for the poor. However, rather than internalize this disdain himself, the protagonist recognizes the tramp as another human being. In contrast to the moment of recognition inside the revolving door, this moment is a call for empathy. The prior, cold and separated by glass, the former, warm and whimsical.