Imaginary friend

I have watched it again now and believe you are correct.

Nice catch about the emergency kit.

I have read all the great comments on this board. Someone noted this and someone noted that. One person caught the song "You'd Be So Easy To Love" that begins and ends the film has the line "...see your future with me...", as indeed Biggs CAN see his future by listening to Dobel(the song title also may be ironic in reference to the impossible-to-love Ricci character).

I think Dobel also represents Biggs' paranoia and his Id. Biggs admires it when Dobel stands up against the bullies, but also realizes Dobel has gone too far with the troopers.

Perhaps D. has Biggs go off to Cal. at least partly because of the trooper situation, to evade trouble that Biggs is in fact in himself.

One of the words Dobel uses is veridical, which can mean:

Coinciding with future events or apparently unknowable present realities: a viridical hallucination.

The fact that D. "predicts" correctly a number of events is too much to ignore, including Ricci's infidelity, the manager's survival, and D.'s early-on description of "a conversation he had with a taxi driver" that we see depicted with Biggs at the conclusion.

Yes, other characters see Dobel, this isn't "The Sixth Sense". But his dropping of the vase is probably enough indication that he is something less than 100% there corporally or temporally(now I sound like Dobel,lol).

Note how Biggs always refers to his friend by his last name, emphasizing it. Clearly, "Dobel" is in some way Biggs' "Double".

The uniqueness in this film, is that Woody usually has a guy playing the "Woody" role in his films that Woody doesn't appear in. Here he has himself and Biggs, both playing the character.The Biggs character has all the typical mannerisms and speech patterns. So you get two similar characters, with a 40 year age difference.

What kind of movies do you watch segredes? I'm not trying to knock you, but a lot of great filmmakers want you to dig into their work for hidden messages. Sure, movies can be great escapism, and that's all good, but why not also use a movie to ponder life and think, and not just amuse your self. (I use the word amuse because the root -muse means "to think" and the prefix a- means "not, no" so amuse technically means "no thinking.")

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn't exist.-Verbal Kint