Double Don't Know

This trope is under discussion in the Trope Repair Shop.

Interviewer: How do you think your fans will react [now that you're returning to playing golf after being treated for sex addiction]?
Tiger Woods: I don't know. I don't know.

— Interview, March 22, 2010

A ubiquitous utterance in film, television, and the legitimate theatre, signifying that the protagonist is (dramatically) out of ideas. For real, this time.

Whereas in Real Life, most of us are content to say "I don't know" once, if at all, fictional characters are likely to repeat the phrase for dramatic effect. It's a common act break, being almost magnetically attracted to music stings and commercial breaks.

Although there are several variations of the Double Don't Know, there are a few particularly common breeds. Samples, with context:

After-School Specials

Concerned Parent: But what about the Mid-Winter Sophomore Diversity Dance Social?
Troubled Teen: I don't know anymore... I just don't know!
[runs away, slamming any doors in her path]

Sci-Fi

Guy At Console: The ship's glowy core thing is bright red and leaking smoke for some reason! And stuff is shaking — that means this is serious, captain. What should we do!
Captain: I don't know, Console Guy. I don't know.
[close-up of pulsating space-gas blob on the view screen]

The Double Don't Know is closely related to One-Liner, Name... One-Liner — which is made of simple, repetitive phrases used to provide closure to a scene or plot, including but not limited to: "I do, Billy. I really do," or, "It sure is, Billy. It sure is." etc. This variation is mostly a Dead Horse Trope, though the namesake phrase lingers on.

This is a stock phrase trope. It has nothing to do with "what now?" cliffhangers that don't feature repetitive statements akin to those described above. It's also unrelated to Donald Rumsfeld's famous Unknown Unknowns — "the things we don't know we don't know".

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Examples...or maybe not. We don't know. We just don't know!

Film — Live-Action

Literature

Real Life

• In the court case of Perry v. Hollingsworth, which attempts to strike down California's Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriages, the court's decision had the following:
  At oral argument on proponents' motion for summary judgment, the court posed to proponents' counsel the assumption that "the state's interest in marriage is procreative" and inquired how permitting same-sex marriage impairs or adversely affects that interest. Counsel replied that the inquiry was "not the legally relevant question," but when pressed for an answer, counsel replied: "Your honor, my answer is: I don't know. I don't know."
• John McCain spoke on November 5, 2008 at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel, Phoenix, Arizona, when he conceded the Presidential election to Barack Obama:
  "I don't know. [interrupted by applause] I don't know what more we could have done to try to win this election."
• Canadian Professor Jordan Peterson was asked whether he believes in the Christian concept that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. He said, "The literal resurrection? I don't know. I don't know."
• In an interview at New York's 92Y, Gene Wilder tells how Mel Brooks called him after finding out that Gene had written a treatment for what would become the movie Young Frankenstein. "What did you get me involved in?" "Nothing you don't want to be." "I don't know, I don't know, I don't know."
• In an MSN reprint of an article in the December 7, 2019 Washington Post titled "Texans on southern border vow to fight Trump's efforts to take their homes for border wall", about attempts by the Trump Administration's Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security to secure access to (and, in some cases, ownership of) land along the southern border for a border wall, Rocio Trevino, a Texas homeowner whose property the government wanted to survey, was interviewed for the article:
  Trevino voted for Trump and agrees that the nation needs to secure the border — the family has hurricane shutters over every window and door for security — but she is exasperated by the uncertainty and unresponsiveness of the process involving her property.
  "What bothered me most is every time I asked a question, the government responded with, 'We don't know. We don't know,'" she said.
• In episode 516 of the Freakonomics podcast "Roland Fryer Refuses to Lie to Black America", Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer (who is black) released a controversial study on police use of force, using federally collected data and data from 10 cities, showing that while police do tend to use force on blacks more than on whites, as far as police shootings are concerned, "What we found there was no racial differences whatsoever in lethal uses of force." He tried to convince federal officials to change some practices both to get better reporting, and to incentivize ways to make local law enforcement use of force less likely. He did not have much success:
  Fryer: And to start doing these things where we can potentially look at tying federal resources to police collecting the right data, etc. And just none of it happened. I just failed.
  Freakonomics interviewer Stephen Dubner: Because why? Because that's just how it works in government — is that the easiest answer?
  Fryer: I don't know. Maybe it's, "I suck." I don’t know. I really don't know. But it was extraordinarily frustrating to me because this is something that matters so much. And it felt like there was a wedge to really make progress.
• We have a double Double Don't Know starting at about 1:15 in a YouTube video found here, Steve Lehto, a lawyer in Michigan, read a report of a false document allgedly submitted to the United States Supreme Court:
  Interestingly, after reading [ADF Legal's] statement...they still admit that what was presented to the court may have been fake, they don't know, they don't know. They're just saying they didn't do it, and are upset that people have insinuated that they did do it. However, we don't know who did it, but somebody submitted something that got into the court record, and the person it is attributed to, says "I never did that." And as the ADF Legal points out, "it could be that guy did submit it. and won't admit it. We don't know, we don't know."

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Statler: Can you think of anything that would make that last show something other than completely worthless?
Waldorf: I don't know, Statler, I just don't know!
Both: Do-ho-ho-ho-hoh!

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