Elliot and Beverly, far from being demystified, are viewed as exotic creatures by virtue of a cruel twist of biological fate. Carol Spier’s brilliant production design keeps us locked in a strange, alien mindset purposefully reminiscent of an aquarium. We are allowed only two glimpses of the exterior world, in the first and penultimate scenes. The movie is relentlessly interior in its depiction of personal chaos. Irons’ portrayal of both Mantle twins is not only an acting tour de force, but also a realization of the director’s most heartbreaking testament to the mind/body split. Cronenberg had already relinquished his early visceral/visual techniques of blood and gore for an emotionally affecting cinema centered on the disintegration of the mind as opposed to the flesh. Separation can be a terrifying thing, and Beverly’s descent into mental collapse and drug addiction inevitably delivers both twins to a fate befitting all rare creatures.ĭead Ringers’ stunning trump card and major special effect is Jeremy Irons. Beverly’s love of her-heart and soul-reveals that the latter cannot be annexed. Patient Claire Niveau, a woman possessed of a wondrous but quite useless three-chambered womb, becomes the circuit breaker. As both man and woman, they are a closed circuit, their stability precariously preserved by the virtue of their splendid isolation. Elliot’s sexual and professional conduct is as confident and ruthless as Beverly’s is modest and sensitive. Issues of good and bad become issues of maleness and femaleness, here destructively divided. In Cronenberg’s hands, Elliot and Beverly Mantle are one soul, split into two bodies and two mutually dependent minds at the point of conception. Initiated in 1981, the movie was to pass through several script writers, potential backers, and one serious false start before Cronenberg eventually assumed the role of main writer and producer in 1988.ĭead Ringers eschews the cliché of the good twin/bad twin. While magazine articles and a semifictionalized book- Twins-intrigued film executives, they were nervous about the subject matter. Discovered partially decayed and almost naked in their New York apartment in 1975, they had died from barbiturate withdrawal. And over the years, in the tradition of Europe’s greatest auteurs, he had imposed an entirely new, hermetically sealed sensibility on cinema: Felliniesque, Bergmanesque, and now Cronenbergesque.ĭead Ringers’ starting point was the stranger-than-fiction real life story of identical twin gynecologists Stewart and Cyril Marcus. But Cronenberg had long since matured as a filmmaker, even as his obsessions remained intact. ![]() ![]() His early excoriating excursions into science and the flesh were often dismissed as low-budget “schlock horror” by conservative critical establishments. Since 1976, audiences worldwide had been aware of Cronenberg as director of some of the most shocking, perverse, and original scenes of body horror ever conceived for the cinema. ![]() It dares the very taste buds of cinema with concerns so far beyond the polite, and so far beneath the easy shock, it could have been made by an alien: a being with a healthy disregard for the normal operations of commercial cinema, but with a unique sense of the human condition. “When was the last time a gynecologist was in a movie, even as a figure of fun? There’s something taboo there something strange and difficult.” True to Cronenberg’s assertion, Dead Ringers is both wholly original and uniquely disturbing.
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