The backdrop of the film charts the rise of the television in the domestic setting and with it, the ensuing commodification of fear during the cold war.

Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges' short story 25th August, 1983,[2] Double Take's narrative plot is based on a fictional encounter Alfred Hitchcock has with an older version of himself.

[3] The ensuing conversation between the two is characterized by personal paranoia and distrust where the younger Hitchcock is in deep fear of his older alter ego.

Intermittently returning to the room in which the menacing conversation between the two Hitchcocks proceeds,[4] the narrative takes a deathward path.

[7] In 2005, prior to making Double Take – which started as a casting,[10] Grimonprez shot the ten-minute video installation Looking For Alfred.

[10] The project explored the legacy of Hitchcock's persona as well as it made references to his films through restaging his cameo appearances.

In 2007, Film and Video Umbrella published a book version of Looking For Alfred with inclusions by authors: Patricia Allmer, Jorge Luis Borges, Chris Darke, Thomas Elsaesser, Tom McCarthy, Jeff Noon and Slavoj Zizek.

[12] The themes of Double Take are paranoia, falsehoods, contradictions and the rise of the culture of fear played out through the beginning of the television era.

"[14] And as such the film's exploration into paranoia is also a double take on the Cold War, a mirror of the fear mongering played over the TV tube.

[5] Besides that Double Take is also about how two man always do the talking:[16] in the 'Kitchen Sink Debate' of 1959, the first televised summit live, Nikita Khrushchev outsmarted Richard Nixon, "whose best retort to the Soviet leader's critiques of U.S. capitalism is to point to the latest in TV sets".

[17] Double Take implies that the predominant purposes of the space race as well as the television were propaganda, "both individually and, to greatest effect, when acting together".

[7] As Thomas Elsaesser notes that we now have a Hitchcock defined as Nietzschean and as Wittgeinsteinian, as Deleuzian and as Derridean, as Schopenhauerian and as many more contradictory things.

[21] Jose Luis Borges' initial short story August 25, 1983 is based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Double.

[22] Authors like Adelbert von Chamisso, Hans Christian Andersen, Edgar Allan Poe and many more were inspired by the idea of the double as well.

Grimonprez claims that "Hitchcock wants the woman to embody his own desire, but his dreamwoman never redeems his anxiety precisely because she refuses to fit into that mould.

According to Freud, "meeting one's double is an encounter with the uncanny, occurring at the boundaries between mind and matter and generating a feeling of unbearable terror.

"If Hitchcock didnt have a belly button he might be a clone and there might actually be many doubles of the master, of which Ron Burrage was one", wrote Grimonprez.

[33] Double Take is part of the permanent collections of the Tate Modern (Artist Rooms) and Centre Pompidou, amongst others.