A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #21: David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers.

Dead Ringers is based on a true story about iden­ti­cal twin gyne­col­o­gist drug addicts; both played by Jeremy Irons. The film is a psy­cho­log­i­cal thriller deeply con­cerned with obses­sion, sex­u­al­ity and co-​dependence. Cro­nen­berg doesn’t overdo the shots that con­tain both Man­tle broth­ers, but the most effec­tive aspect of the film is also the sub­tlest, there are vir­tu­ally no exte­rior shots apart from the begin­ning and end. So the entire film occu­pies a claus­tro­pho­bic inter­nal space both phys­i­cally and psy­cho­log­i­cally, and these spaces tend to reflect each other as the plot devel­ops. The twins are Elliot and Bev­erly, both male, Elliot the old­est and extro­verted, the busi­ness­man and mar­keter of the two; Bev­erly younger and reserved, the med­ical genius. They share every­thing, includ­ing patients, includ­ing bang­ing patients. In par­tic­u­lar, an actress with a tri­fur­cated uterus named Claire Niveau. Jesus Christ, you’ve gotta love Cronenberg.

Bev­erly becomes attached to Claire and vice versa, until she learns that she banged Elliot ini­tially. They break up but get back together. Beverly’s love of Claire begins to sep­a­rate him from Elliot and their rela­tion­ship changes in small ways at first, but when Bev starts pill-​popping his per­son­al­ity begins to degrade rapidly. His nadir results in his attempts to oper­ate on a using “gynae­co­log­i­cal instru­ments for oper­at­ing on mutant women”. Elliot has his own psy­cho­log­i­cal eccen­tric­i­ties asso­ci­ated with his twin­ship [at one point he gets twin escorts and has one of them call him Elliot and the other Bev­erly]. He also attempts to score a three­some with his brother and his girl­friend. When detox­ing Bev­erly fails, Elliot decides that he needs to start tak­ing drugs as well to get back on the same wave­length, so they can get off the drugs together. They deserve a Dar­win Award for that idea.

There is no easy res­o­lu­tion to the myr­iad ques­tions about gen­der, abnor­mal phys­i­ol­ogy and psy­chol­ogy, sex­ual deviance and rela­tion­ships that are raised in this film. The res­o­lu­tion instead comes in the form of an abhorred pity for the Man­tle broth­ers and a feel­ing of relief that such trou­bled souls find their rest. Mean­while, the casual viewer is left with the need to exam­ine his or her own pre­dis­po­si­tions about the nature of human rela­tion­ship and cul­tural con­for­ma­tion. In this sense, this film owes a debt to Tod Browning’s Freaks. The ref­er­ences to the first set of con­joined twins is also rel­e­vant in this con­text, and the moral of the film, if there is one, is that deviance from the norm has dis­as­trous con­se­quences, even if the deviant par­ties are inno­cent in and of them­selves. Or per­haps, that the heavy pres­sure to con­form has dis­as­trous con­se­quences to offer another side of the same coin.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Chris Rodley
• 30 reviews at MQRE
• Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion review
• Psy­cho­log­i­cal Deter­min­ism in Dead Ringers by Dan Shaw
• Cro­nen­berg on Cronenberg
• Inter­view with Cro­nen­berg in 4 parts:
  1. Part 1
  2. Part 2
  3. Part 3
  4. Part 4
• Trailer