Dead Ringers and the unique horror of identical twins
Even when he's at his most subtle, Cronenberg is still gross as hell
I started out writing an article about Ben Wheatley’s weird crime/horror debut, Kill List. I’d put down about a thousand words on the page, comparing him, by way of author J.G. Ballard, to David Cronenberg when it occurred to me that I was actually writing about how much I love Cronenberg and should probably just put Kill List on hold until I can get this one out of my system. Thinking about Cronenberg, mentioning a half dozen of his more unconventional movies in the article, it drew me to revisit a couple of them which I deliberately avoid for some fairly stupid reasons.
Cronenberg’s 80’s period is easily my favorite part of the run, so far. No big surprise there. Everyone loves those movies. He was adequately budgeted and able to bring his grotesque fantasies to life in stunning, sticky detail and hadn’t yet tired of being outwardly, explicitly gross with his ambitious special effects. Heading into the 90’s, however, Cronenberg shifted his attentions. The Fly was his final statement on gross-out horror movies as he shifted toward more cerebral affairs. Revisiting Cronenberg as I wrote about Wheatley inspired me to hit up that period of his career, the one that I probably spend the least amount of time exploring and celebrating and so I queued up Crash, the movie that went too far, a movie that both troubles and arouses in equal measure. I followed that one with Dead Ringers, which I came around to quite late and deliberately avoided for the longest time. Knowing what I did about it, I was in no hurry to check it out. If my favorite Cronenberg movies involve exploding heads, people jamming video tapes into giant vaginal torso-orifices, and a man transforming into a fly, then I was in no hurry to see the one about twin gynecologists, well-known for its almost total lack of squicky latex appliances. What a fucking moron I am!
Watching it again the other night, I was taken back to when I was a kid, hooked on cheap thrills found on the shelves at the local video stores, delighted beyond measure when the heretofore unknown title I’d just rented revealed its horrifying gross-out treasures of unspeakable violence and splashy special effects. I’m settling in for Dead Ringers, expecting the same thing, knowing only that TV movie critics are taking it pretty seriously and then finding nothing that I’m interested in. The movie is long. There’s no blood to speak of. Videodrome it is not!
Watching it with the eyes of an adult, however, Dead Ringers shoots right up into my top three Cronenberg pictures and I could be convinced to declare it his best movie, though not necessarily my favorite one. I do still love the loud, technicolor horror shows but Dead Ringers shows a subtler, more manipulative side of Cronenberg that I find absent in his other movies and I appreciate it all the more for how powerfully evil it is and how sincerely uncomfortable the experience of watching it is. Where most of his movies assume the role of mind fucker, they often do so in visually excessive ways. Videodrome blurs the lines between fiction and reality to such a point that no matter how awesome the movie’s third act is, that division of real and fake really doesn’t matter since whatever point Cronenberg is getting at becomes thickly opaque and contrasts harshly with the slippery conditions of gore. He speaks through the visual language of special effects to get the movie over the finish line. But Dead Ringers is the first time that the Cronenberg effect takes place without training wheels and it likely couldn’t have happened without a clear vision and a starring actor who had a firm grip on the material.
Jeremy Irons plays identical twin brothers but has to walk a tight rope. A lazier actor would have simply played them as fundamentally the same character but Irons does something that speaks to his talent as an actor. Brothers, Elliot and Beverly, merely look alike. Inside they are different people with radically different personalities and he portrays these qualities of them so well that once the mayhem and deception begins, you, as the viewer, will look for the subtlety of body language that Irons uses to differentiate the characters’ separate performances. In the movie’s most uncertain moments you find yourself examining Elliot or Beverly’s posture or manner of speaking in a paranoid bid to determine whether Cronenberg is pulling a fast one on you. Elliot is the gifted speaker that brings the brothers’ research to the public. Elliot is the bolder, more confident half of the pair. He carries himself as such. Beverly is the half which is primarily concerned with doing. He performs the practice and the research. He does the work that brings the Mantle brothers their fortune and reputation. But he’s mousy and timid. Together they’re a hermetic mixture of solve et coagula, which combine to form a powerful single entity. One half can’t work without the other, as the introduction of Genevieve Bujold proves. She’s the metaphorical wedge between them that causes the pair to unravel.
Among the movie’s many layers are the central notions of separation (solve), integration (coagula), and blurred lines of being. They’re two individual men with individual personalities but they do everything together and have since they were children. They continue to live together as adults, metaphorically joined at the hip in a way that reads as toxic by even the most generous of interpretations. They struggle against one another, pulling in opposite directions, desperately trying to be individuals while simultaneously realizing and being quite comfortable with the notion that to be apart is suicidal. When the wedge inevitably comes between them, she lights a fire that can’t be put out. Doom was always their destiny. Theirs is a pair which simply cannot exist. Their lifestyle, though lavish, is also fundamentally poisonous and unsustainable. The model for the movie is based on the real life twin-brother gynecologist team, Stewart and Cyril Marcus, whose mysterious deaths in the 1970’s are chalked up to the very unsustainable model that Cronenberg latches on to in Dead Ringers.
In his past films Cronenberg has treated the natural world’s collision with technology as nothing short of catastrophic and corrupting. The unnatural is always the enemy and the way that it transforms humanity’s relationship to the rest of the world is always terrible in the most satisfying of horror movie tropes. But this is the first time that mankind’s own natural systems of reproduction are treated as potential vectors of corruption. The very suggestion at work in Dead Ringers is that twins and greater numbers of multiples are uncanny corruptions of the otherwise beautiful reproductive process. This is obviously unfair and a little troubling but what’s a horror movie if it’s not a wild exaggeration of experience? They’re treated as a single entity experiencing the world as a pair of individuals and then twisted to make you feel a little weird. They are clearly living a pair of profoundly unhealthy lives of desperate co-dependence while incessantly pulling away toward liberty. There is no option to the inevitable disaster. It blurs the lines between them, at first subjecting the viewer to the idea that they may deliberately mislead you into thinking you’re dealing with one when you’re actually dealing with the other. Anecdotally, this seems to be an innocent and very common game played by twins as children but extending this behavior into adulthood tweaks the behavior in a bitter and unpleasant way. It suggests that for all their brilliance, they’re both inescapably trapped in adolescence. It’s a deeply paranoid prospect for the viewer. Early Cronenberg begged the viewer to consider the horror of losing control of your own body but from behind the safety of the movie screen and grotesque special effects. How do you feel if you can’t even trust your own body to do what you need it to do? Here, the safety net is pulled away when you can’t trust yourself to know which twin is which even as the two of them lose track of themselves in the weird shell game that they’ve carried on for as long as they have. The stakes only last for as long as the movie runs but Cronenberg’s genius shift away from outward expressions of gory horror and into a more cerebral space of horror storytelling is an especially inviting experience that makes it all possible. You’re left with the impression that it was such a daring idea for film investors to buy into that the conjoined-twin nightmare scene was added simply to calm nervous money people who thought that David may have been trying to escape the very thing that made him a box office guarantee in the first place.
Dead Ringers doesn’t need to be a squishy gauntlet of Grand Guignol to get under your skin. It sets out to fuck with your head and sticks the landing so effectively that repeat viewings feel decadent when you’re already presented with so much food for thought but it wouldn’t be Cronenberg without some awful visual tricks to make you squirm. In place of pulsing latex effects appliances and bursts of blooming tumors, Cronenberg presents a set of tools that are somehow vastly more terrible than anything found in Videodrome. As Beverly loses his mind, slipping away deeper and deeper into drug-induced madness and paranoia, he commissions the creation of a series of surgical tools for “mutant women”, made by an artist (played by Stephen Lack of Scanners fame). The produced results are revealed, lying in a state of terrible potential on a nearby surgical table, eyed by nervous surgical technicians. Seen at first in drawings and then in the surgical theater, no threat could be more awful since each one has the alien appearance of something found in a Cronenberg movie crossed with the sorts of tools found in manuals of medieval medicine and museums of oddities and horror. Each one appears to serve a very specific purpose but what that is is left entirely up to your own awful imagination when paired with the knowledge that each one is intended to be used on a woman’s reproductive organs. Especially terrible is the only instrument we see actually used, an articulated piece of surgical steel with the appearance of finger bones, topped with a horrible curved spike.
Dead Ringers is, without a doubt, Cronenberg’s most confident movie. Heading into the 90’s with pictures which play against type, like Naked Lunch and Crash, you get the feeling that he left it all on the dance floor with this one, as stepping out of his comfort zone at the end of century produced fine but otherwise technically wobbly movies. He wouldn’t regain his swagger until A History of Violence.