Dead Ringers is much more subtle, deliberately paced film by David Cronenberg coming right after The Fly, which was a very direct, accessible film in comparison. It contains a unique visual manifestation of the dual nature of the personality of the two main characters, Beverly and Elliot.
Cronenberg’s existentialist philosophies are very strong in this film. It is a film permeated with images of desperation, despair, separation and pain. Initially, Beverly is portrayed as the more withdrawn, thoughtful and introspective of the two twins, while Elliot’s behavior can be described as arrogant, thoughtless, and even cruel. This is best represented through the scene in which the woman they have both been seeing, Claire Niveau, meets them in a restaurant, and Elliot embarrasses Beverly, who has fallen in love with Claire. Intriguingly, it is Elliot who appears most afraid of “losing” his twin brother to Claire, although it is clearly a primary fear for both twins. In fact, one of the film’s key visual sequences is a very blatant image of the woman biting through the flesh that connects the brothers like Siamese twins. This hugely symbolic image is presented in a dream sequence in a similar fashion as the horrific childbirth involving the giant larva in The Fly. What is noticeably different about these images in Dead Ringers, however, is the implicit horror lying beneath the surface-in the character’s psychological attachment, desires, and sense of dependence on one another-as opposed to the directly grotesque and horrific images that were pervasively depicted throughout The Fly. With the exception of Videodrome, I consider Dead Ringers Cronenberg’s most sophisticated presentation of his themes and ideas up to this point.
There are strong sexual themes throughout Dead Ringers. In “Double Trouble” by Karen Jaehne, the authors points out the twins’ occupation as gynecologists. In the same article, Cronenberg is quoted as saying “It is gynecology that provides the adult environment for these twins; they form as children a kind of complete unit…that excludes everybody else”. In the brilliantly funny and revealing opening scene, Cronenberg shows us the twins as two very unusual young boys, and their clinical approach to a young girl about letting them have sex with her as part of their “research”. With this opening scene, Cronenberg shatters all expectations about what these types of scenes that begin with the protagonists as children usually reveal to the audience. In this case, his jet black sense of humor combines with his sexual elements to create a perfect idea of the types of adults these twins will grow into.
In the “Double Trouble” piece, Cronenberg explains that “I had to take this picture to quite a few studios to get it off the ground, and I was asked more times than you can imagine why the twins couldn’t be, say, lawyers”. This is an interesting production aspect to keep in mind watching the film, because the sexual imagery is so prevalent, and presented in such detail, that it is easy to see where the people financing the film could perceive an awkward response to the subject matter. Beverly’s transformation into a more disturbed and twisted character is made painfully visual in the series of gynecological tools that he has made, which push the limits of pain that his patients can bear.
In addition to the physical pain, Dead Ringers contains some very moving scenes of emotional pain. When Beverly calls Claire while she is away on location, and mistakes her secretary’s voice for that of a man whom he assumes she is having an affair with, his pain is very believable and touching, due in no small part to Jeremy Irons’ performance. It is interesting, purely from a technical level, to watch the performances Cronenberg brings out of the highly skilled actors in his films beginning with Videodrome. What is equally impressive is his eye for casting, especially in putting actors who fit the “type” completely. Jeff Goldblum in The Fly may be the best example of this, able to pull off several different stages of his character’s personality changes and make them both believable and poignant at the same time. The casting of Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers is a particularly great performance in a dual role. He imbues each twin with a distinct set of character traits that makes it possible to follow the performances clearly and believe that they are in fact two separate people rather than an optical effect. Another technical aspect worth mentioning in regard to this film is the cinematography by Peter Suschitzky, which is very intricately lit and conveys so much of the mood and tone of each scene just through the lighting.
Another aspect of the emotional pain that Cronenberg and Irons bring to the surface is the sense of imprisonment that Beverly feels in relation to Elliot. This is quite visually expressed toward the end of the film when Elliot has Beverly locked in a cell for rehabilitation. Even more visually, the dream sequence presents them connected like Siamese twins, making their attachment both frightening and grotesque. Elliot also tells Beverly of the case of the Siamese twin performers Chang and Eng, in which one awoke to find the twin dead next to him in bed, and died of fright upon seeing this. Elliot essentially tells Beverly that if he dies as a result of his drug use, then Elliot too will die. Cronenberg explains that “Part of our whole understanding of freedom is our assumption that we are individuals and that we have personalities that can evolve and change at a metaphysical level. But a lot of what we are is physically determined…We know all about family resemblances, but we really don’t want to think we are like anybody else in the world.” This is essentially the theme of the film.
In the article “Cronenberg’s Creative Cancers” by Alan Stanbrook, Cronenberg addresses the theme of the “separating out the environment from the genetic factors”. One of the most horrific elements of the film is the concept of the lack of free will as part of being a twin. He sought to show that “as in a classical Greek tragedy, their lives are predetermined.” By presenting the characters as twins, Cronenberg explores the potentials for finding the horrific in a not-too-uncommon biological phenomenon. In the “Cronenberg on Cronenberg” interview, he says that “The fact that Elliot and Beverly are identical twins is their evolution into something monstrous”. This relates to the theme of emergent evolution, and in “Cronenberg’s Creative Cancers”, points out that “Darwin’s theory of evolution by mutation had a serious flaw, because he never considered the possibility of evolution by disease.” The “disease” in this case is much less grotesque and overly horrific than that in The Fly. As Cronenberg points out, “For some people the movie is a lot harder to take than The Fly, which has a shield of fantasy in front of it. Dead Ringers is too close to home.” The idea that biology, not environment, could be responsible for shaping the life of an individual or set of individuals is indeed frightening. This theme is the core of the relationship between Elliot and Beverly. As much as Beverly wants to be free from Elliot, and as much as Elliot tries to make Beverly dependent on him at any cost, the two are inextricably intertwined at the deepest level. The recurring theme of flesh is made visually quite literal in this presentation of twins bound by deep-seated emotional and biological needs.
The theme of technology and machinery also plays a major role in Dead Ringers. In this film, the gynecological tools devised by Beverly become symbols of pain. In the “Cronenberg on Cronenberg” piece, he compares the idea of pornography to any idea that “pushes against what are considered very safe standards of behavior and imagery”. He draws a comparison to Powell’s Peeping Tom, about a man who creates his own “version of pornography”. The protagonist in Peeping Tom and Beverly in Dead Ringers do share many similarities in their work by making it into a uniquely pornographic manifestation of their deepest fears and psychology. Beverly condemns the women in the film for not having bodies that fit to the rigid specifications of his hand-tailored tools. This perfectly sums up the relationship of both twins’ relationships with the women in the film. Beverly is very emotionally insecure, and despite having a perfect understanding of the mechanics of the female body from a medical standpoint, is completely incapable of responding to them in an emotionally healthy way. This is another similarity to the protagonist of Peeping Tom, who is unable to express his feelings of sexual attraction to Anna Massey in that film because he knows he will be compelled to murder her in order to film the moment of horror as she confronts her own death. In Dead Ringers, Beverly’s fears of women are manifested in his paranoid and irrational reaction to hearing Claire’s male secretary answer the phone while she is away on location. When he has his emotions shattered, he devolves into drug use and a state of complete emotional instability. Elliot, on the other hand, attempts to keep Beverly dependent on him. For both, neither truly have free will, as they are completely unable to function without eachother.
The tools become symbols of the protagonist’s undoing much in the same way technology “infected” the character of Seth Brundle in The Fly after he created his own “tools”-the teleportation devices that ultimately prove to be his undoing. It also recalls the effects of the video on Max Renn in Videodrome. The tools in Dead Ringers are excellent representations of the characters’ cold, clinical view of sex (which is also humorously depicted in the opening scene), and these tools also prove to be the undoing of both characters, as Beverly uses them to murder his brother before taking his own life. This suggests that there is no free will even in death, as Beverly cannot bear to continue living after he has murdered Elliot. The final image of the two twin bodies piled on top of one another is the perfect representational image of this.
The criticism that David Cronenberg’s films represent a “fear” of women can be understood somewhat in his portrayal of gynecological exams as source of pain and grotesque imagery in this film. “When was the last time a gynecologist was in a movie, even as a figure of fun?” Cronenberg asks. “There’s something taboo there, something strange and difficult”. He points out that the gynecological exams early in the film are presented straightforward, but that they do become more weird and painful as Beverly’s tools are introduced later in the film. Cronenberg’s presentation of these procedures as something to be feared, or something painful, could be seen as a source of the criticism leveled against his work at expressing that disgust and fear. Of course, the scenes also relate to his presentation of the “Dr. Benway”-type character in much of his work. When Beverly is performing a procedure under influence of drugs, he is unable to perform with his usual skill and is thrown from the operating room in an attempt to save the patient from further pain and mistreatment. Cronenberg’s presentation of the operating room as a source of horror was prominently displayed in the fantasy birth sequence in The Fly. The scenes in Dead Ringers are less overtly fantastic but are even more horrific in that they take place within the film’s reality, and also reflect the larger reality that the film seeks to impose on its story. As with the concept of the biological phenomenon of identical twins as compared with the fantastic genetic mutations of The Fly, the medical aspects of Dead Ringers also reflects this more “realistic” approach, which only adds to the horror of the situations.
Interestingly, Beverly and Elliot are presented as remarkably similar. They live together and share the same career and medical practice, and even share the same women. Elliot, presented as the “dominant” twin in the beginning, finds his status challenged by Beverly when Beverly is able to connect with Claire on an emotional rather than only physical level, threatening the dependence between Beverly and Elliot. The dependence between the two twins is reflected in the scenes in which Elliot describes to Beverly how if one of them dies, the other is likely to follow. Beverly is presented as the “female part of the yin/yang whole”, according to Cronenberg. This is the source of his frustration, and his desire to be taken seriously by Claire. It is made worse for him when he is humiliated in front of Claire by Elliot at the restaurant. Also, intriguingly, he reacts with great hostility when Claire jokes that “Beverly” is more a woman’s name.
Cronenberg’s use of technical imagery is very successfully achieved in this film with the use of the “twinning” photographic process. What is intriguing is Jeremy Irons’ skill at portraying both roles just differently enough that it doesn’t come across as a cheap technical trick. Even though the identical twins share many personality similarities, it the skill in presenting them as two separate characters that makes the film work. Without it, the convincing portrayal of the twins and the horror implicit in their lack of free will would be lost.
For me, Dead Ringers was a successful return to the ideas and symbolism that were explored in Videodrome. I prefer this approach as opposed to the straightforward visuals and sci-fi presentation of The Fly which, for me at least, left little room for interpretation of the symbolism and imagery. Videodrome was perhaps the most heavily symbolic work by Cronenberg we have viewed thus far, but Dead Ringers adds complex new themes involving biology and predetermination that make it a rich repository of Cronenberg’s favorite themes going back at least as far as Shivers. Without the direct, visual elements of sci-fi, it allows for a greater concentration on the underlying themes. That said, there were a number of visual sequences that stood out to me, most notably the operating room sequences, which contain a genuine nightmare quality, especially in their creative use of color, such as the red operating gowns. The use of color in this film was extremely sophisticated, especially in comparison with Cronenberg’s earlier work. Too often an overlooked aspect of the design of a film, the color here works well with the mood and tone of each scene, always suggesting so much through its’ hues. The apartment scenes have an appropriately subdued, bluish color design. Intriguingly, Cronenberg also includes comparatively few exterior shots in this film, which is in keeping with the more internal themes of the story. In contrast, the exterior shots of the “outside world” present the inherent strangeness that the twins’ feel in their interaction with this environment. There is one scene in particular that stands out to me, which is when Beverly returns to the sculptor’s display window and takes back the models of his tools that have been made and are on display. Beverly’s inability to interact with the “outside” world in a normal manner are made quite clear here.
Dead Ringers is a very successful film in conveying its ideas and connecting both emotionally and intellectually with the viewer. As a film, it marks a technical brilliance that brings out the visual subtleties underlying Cronenberg’s work. Taking a more subtle approach visually, Cronenberg is able to focus on the psychological differences and similarities between the two twins, and the struggle for a sense of individualism despite their physical similarities.
Labels: cronenberg, movie reviews
