Dead Ringers

Cronenberg's sad story of obsession, devotion, addiction, all the "ion"s.

From this site, fair use.

Dead Ringers (1988). Grade: B

I’ve got about three different leads in my head for this article/essay/review/whatever this site’s posts are, and I can’t pick one, so I’ll go with the one which seems both the most obvious and the most bizarre to me.¹ Obvious/bizarre kinda fits the world of David Cronenberg. His specialty is in wondering if things we accept, things which seem normal to us, could actually end up in a very dark place. (Not “Darkplace”; that’s Garth Merenghi’s specialty.)

Obvious/bizarre: having sex with identical twins. It was kind of presented as a standard hetero male fantasy, for a time. Witness this Coors beer ad, one of many along the same lines; it’s suggested that there’s nothing hotter than horny twins:

Need I tell you that Joseph Coors, the company’s owner at the time, was a major donor to far-right-wing religious extremist organizations like Focus On The Family? I mean, if you didn’t know that already, it’s not gonna surprise you.

Now, here’s one of my favorite “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell” segments. The premise of the bit is that there’s jokes the Late Night With Seth Myers writers come up with which might be deemed insensitive to Black people, gay people, or women, and so Myers can’t tell them; he reads the setup, and either Black comic Amber Ruffin or gay comic Jenny Hagel reads the punchline. This clip’s all funny, but I’ve fast-forwarded it to the part which suits Dead Ringers:

Yeah, having sex with two siblings would actually be hugely gross! “When you talk about the logic, you ruin it!”

Oh, and by the way, the new TV show Myers mentions, featuring Rachel Weisz in the dual role of identical twins? That’s an adaptation/expansion of Dead Ringers.

Jeremy Irons plays the identical Mantle twins, both gynecologists, both highly respected in their field, and both suave ladies’ men. Actually, it’s Bev Mantle who’s the highly respected one, the inventor of groundbreaking surgical devices; Elliot Mantle just coasts on Bev’s reputation.

And it’s Elliot who’s the master seducer; Bev just gets the women Elliot’s already slept with.

YUCK, right? Cronenberg doesn’t waste a second of our time pretending this is anything but completely fugging disgusting.

But then he subverts our expectations a little. At first, Bev, the shy one, seems to be starting to realize how twisted this whole setup is, and wanting to get out of it. He’s the one who has the audience’s sympathy. (Which isn’t a lot, you just like him more than Elliot. If you HAD to pick.)

Yet when Bev starts really sliding into madness, it’s Elliot who’s deeply hurt by it, who wants to help his brother in any way he can. ANY way. It is a Cronenberg movie, things are gonna get gooey!

Less gooey than you might expect, though. There’s a lot that’s suggested, and left to the imagination. The gooiest part comes in a dream sequence. The grisliest event of the whole movie is just shown by a rivulet of blood trailing down the side of a chair. There’s a nasty long shot of a corpse with its insides out, but it’s far enough in the background that it’s not going to make your popcorn come up.

This is loosely inspired by the 1975 story of two twin gynecologists who were found dead in a swank New York Manhattan apartment. You can read this 1975 New York magazine article about the brothers by Linda Wolfe, if you like. The brothers were considered top innovators, like the ones in this movie. (And at one point during an operation, one of them did try to huff a patient’s anesthesia gas; this happens in the movie.) It seems, however, that the real twins were frequently very cold and dismissive/insulting to their patients; the movie twins don’t start out that way. (There is one scene, when Bev has started losing his marbles, where he ignores a patient saying she's in pain; that’s something a lot of women have experienced from doctors in real life.)

The real twins’ story was turned into a “highly fictionalized” 1977 novel, Twins, by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland (I haven’t read it). Cronenberg had wanted this movie to be titled Twins, like the book. But director Ivan Reitman wanted that title for his movie, the one where Danny DeVito is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s twin and hi-larity ensues. So Reitman paid to get the title all to himself; that money went into this film’s budget.

The Criterion disc (it’s one of their older releases) has some raw footage you can watch of how they put Jeremy Irons in scenes with himself; it’s not very edifying. Much better is this interview from an odd, endearing website, ArtOfTheTitle, devoted entirely to opening-credit sequences. The writer, Will Perkins, interviews Randall Balsmeyer, who designed the opening credits along with Mimi Everett.

But, Balsmeyer and Everett also designed the special camera system which made it possible to put Irons in two places at once.

Now, in an older movie like The Parent Trap, when you saw Hayley Mills on screen with herself, it was done with simple split-screen effects; you block off half the image, shoot the person in one half, then you do it again from the other side. You then put the two halves together in a lab. Simple, cheap, very flat-looking and visually restrictive; the camera can’t move.

The way that effects shots are done with a moving camera is via something called “motion control.” You program a computer to move the camera. Say, it’s panning across the face of the Death Star; the computer can repeat that motion EXACTLY to add in spaceships or floating balloons or whatever you want to the shot, and you combine these elements in a film lab.

But, Cronenberg didn’t want the cameras to be computer-controlled, he wanted veteran camera operators to do it, to react to Irons’ movements.² So Balsmeyer and Everett invented a system where the camera operator moved the camera with levers; the computer recorded the motions the human camera operator made. So the crew could then have the computer match the motion EXACTLY as Irons filmed the other half of the scene. (The cinematographer here is the great Peter Suschitsky; he shot The Empire Strikes Back, which Cronenberg thought “was the only one of those movies that actually looked good”; he’s correct.)

It sounds very technical, and for the first few minutes or so, it feels very technical. But before too long you’re not watching the trick photography anymore, you’re watching Jeremy Irons’s two performances. Each quite excellent in its own way.

Only after the movie was shot did Balsmeyer and Everett approach Cronenberg about designing the titles, too. Which I’ll include here. They’re quite good. Some spooky drawings but nothing too gross. The titles were inspired by a museum in Florence which had medieval torture instruments, and both Balsmeyer and Everett AND Cronenberg had recently visited the things. Balsmeyer said the exhibit made him sick and he had to leave; Cronenberg, of course, had a catalog of the museum’s holdings on his desk.

Incidentally, Balsmeyer said Cronenberg wasn’t creepy at all in real life: “it’s almost like he gets his demons out in his movies and that leaves him free to be a very warm and funny and personable human being.”

I’ll admit, I don’t share most of David Cronenberg’s obsessions. He tends to be into really kinky sex stuff, and I’m not; he tends to be into what’s called “body horror” (things that can go disgustingly wrong with human flesh), and I’m not.

But what I do like about Cronenberg is how honest and straightforward he is about his odd obsessions; he’s not telling the audience, “admit it, you’re just like me.” He’s more about saying, “I admit it, I’m an offbeat duck.”

And, hey? What’s wrong with offbeat ducks? Nothing, as far as I’m concerned. Be your bizarro self, more power to ya. Just don’t whip out the medical tubing the next time you have sex with me (which is a thing that we see in the movie, alas).

Back to the film. There’s basically only three characters; there’s the Irons twins, and Geneviève Bujold as a movie/TV star who the brothers both sleep with (without her knowledge). Bujold has the film’s best moment, when she calls out the twins for how twisted their behavior was. It’s actually almost funny; they’re squirming not to admit it, and she’s got them nailed dead to rights. Bujold’s a very fine actor; it’s too bad she didn’t work out for Star Trek: Voyager. (Not that Kate Mulgrew was bad at all; but the scripts weren’t the best.) Bujold quit after two days because the pace of shooting a TV series drove her nuts.

Irons is masterful at delineating the brothers; we don’t need any special articles of clothing or anything to remind us which one’s which. Until the very end, when both of them are in a severe state of delusion, and it becomes tricky to tell them apart; I’m sure that’s what Cronenberg intended. (He co-wrote this with Canadian screenwriter Norman Snider.) There’s something maybe a little too clinical about Irons’s performance most of the time here… but, then again, he IS playing a guy who treats people pretty heartlessly. By the end, when the brothers are both falling apart, Irons’s performance gets pretty emotional; it’s affecting. Despite the nasty things these guys have done, you still feel bad for them. (Howard Shore’s exceptionally good musical score helps a lot in that regard.)

This and eXistenZ are my favorite Cronenberg movies from this period; I need to go back and see some of his earlier work I’m not familiar with (the grosser movies). I’ll admit, he kinda lost me with those “serious” films featuring Viggo Mortensen; I like Mortensen a lot, it’s just that those stories weren’t the kind of thing I’m interested in. I haven’t seen much of Conenberg’s later films; I did get all the way through the one with Robert Pattinson in it (don’t make the same mistake). I couldn’t even finish half of Maps to the Stars.

But once upon a time, Cronenberg was quite the critical favorite; this 2008 article lists all the Cronenberg-devoted websites there were. It’s difficult to find any, now.³ (Fan-run sites overall have tended to disappear; they’ve been “replaced,” much for the worse, on Reddit threads and antisocial media.) I would guess, now, that critics’ favorite Canadian filmmaker is Denis Villeneuve; let me know when he delivers anything even as interesting as that Cronenberg Pattinson-in-a-limo movie. I won’t hold my breath.⁴

Back in the day, Cronenberg’s films didn’t all work, but they were always worth a watch. There’d always be some ideas worth chewing on, even if you didn’t like what the movie was about or you didn’t care for the script. Cronenberg could get a little too psuedo-intellectual at times, but I’d prefer that over modern directors who don’t think at all (and are inevitably praised by critics as “thought provoking.” Right.)

If you’re not familiar with his work and you’d like to try some of it, this is a very fine one to go on. Even if you find the main characters loathsome (which they are), it’s a helluva psychological thriller/drama. During the ending sequence, I found I had my hands balled up into fists from the intensity of what was happening — and I knew what was gonna happen! I remembered it pretty plainly from almost 30 years ago! I tell yah, there are movies I don’t remember 30 days later, much less 30 years. 30 years for a movie to stick with you? That’s pretty impressive.

1. Besides, I know from experience that nobody reads posts about good stuff from the 80s, only the crap 80s stuff, so the lead doesn’t matter. Why people are more nostalgic over New Kids on the Block than they are The Pogues, I dunno, you tell me.

2. Cronenberg also didn’t like storyboarding either, planning out the shots in advance; he liked to work them out with the cinematographer and the actors on the day of the shooting.

3. Here’s two very good Cronenberg posts; one from Ashley Allinson at Sense of Cinema and a career overview by The Canadian Encyclopedia. The Allinson one is top-notch.

4. I know lots of people liked Arrival. Well, Mrs. twinsbrewer made me turn it off after 40 minutes and I was quite happy to do so. (And we both hugely admire Amy Adams.) If there’s anything I’m sick of, it’s filmmakers who use Mom With Dead Kid as a plot device. What must that feel like if you’re somebody who’s actually suffered that tragedy? Do movies like that help? I can pretty much guess they do NOT!