Beyond the Lead Characters Being Identical, David Cronenberg's 1988 Masterpiece Dead Ringers is NOTHING Like The Parent Trap
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When I was growing up and coming of age cinematically during the 1980s David Cronenberg was a singular Canadian weirdo with a wholly unique aesthetic and sensibility but also a mainstream commercial filmmaker.
Cronenberg didn’t just flirt with the mainstream during the Reagan decade: he entered it with uncharacteristically commercial projects like the mind-blowing 1981 surprise hit Scanners, the 1983 Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone and, most notably, the surprise smash 1986 remake The Fly.
The 1988 psychological horror film Dead Ringers isn’t as accessible as the filmmaker’s other films from the decade, with the exception of 1983’s Videodrome, but I vividly remember it being rightly hailed as a major triumph from from a true auteur, a dark, uncompromising masterpiece from a filmmaker for whom there is no such thing as too intense or too disturbing.
I’m a big Cronenberg fan. Yet it took Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 to get me to finally see a rather important component of the filmmaker’s essential canon. Why? I suppose because even by Cronenberg standards Dead Ringers seemed unrelentingly, unbearably grim. Sometimes you’re in the mood to confront the hideousness of existence in all of its horror. Alternately, sometimes On Deadly Ground seems like an appealing option instead, not because it’s better than Dead Ringers but rather because it’s much, much worse, and consequently won’t tax your frazzled mind too heavily.
I was right. If anything Dead Ringers proved even more gut-wrenchingly sad than I had anticipated. It’s a great movie that put me into one hell of a terrible mood. That’s Cronenberg for you: real feel-bad entertainment for one solitary, suffering soul encased in a meat prison of bone and flesh and muscle.
That’s our Davey!
I feel outraged on Jeremy Irons’ behalf for one of Oscar’s most egregious snubs. You expect your fair share of snubs and flubs when it comes to Oscar nominations but some oversights are just unforgivable. It is surreal to me that the Einsteins over at the Academy, in their infinite wisdom, felt that there were five actors who delivered better performances than Jermy Irons’ heartbreaking, virtuoso, tour de force performance as identical twin surgeons on a steep downward slide.
Irons didn’t just give the performance of a lifetime: he gives two performances of a lifetime that are utterly unique and distinct yet so complementary that they sometimes feel like two halves of one whole, a set of Siamese twins whose connective tissue is all psychological and metaphorical rather than literal.
When Irons won the Academy Award for Best Actor for Reversal of Fortune a little later it felt like the Academy was atoning for not even nominating him here.
The future Alfred Pennyworth is riveting as Beverly and Elliot Mantle. They’re identical twin surgeons who share an apartment, a profession, a face and women who are not always aware that they are having sex with two different men who look exactly alike.
Elliott is the brash extrovert of the duo. He’s the public face of their business, a confident yuppie who seduces beautiful women whom he then passes off to his brother without the unfortunate lover knowing.
Genevieve Bujold’s Claire Niveau is a neurotic actress whose trifurcated cervix fascinates Beverly as a medical marvel and fascinating mutation. When Claire learns about the brother’s deception she becomes disillusioned with Beverly, who has begun abusing prescription medication in an attempt to ward off traumatic nightmares.
Elliott is a sociopath who cares only about himself and his brother but Elliott is weak. He lacks his brother’s steely confidence. He cannot handle Claire or the the substances that he’s putting into his body at an alarming and deadly rate.
The world of surgeons and surgery is custom made for Cronenberg’s body horror. Dead Ringers is fixated on cruel-looking surgical tools that are ostensibly created to save lives but seem equally, if not more suited to ripping apart bodies from the inside as well as the outside.
Drug addiction similarly perfectly suits Cronenberg’s aesthetic. What are dangerous drugs if not horrors that we put inside our bodies in order to experience pleasure, joy and ecstasy but that almost inevitably lead to dependency, sickness, addiction and ultimately death?
Cronenberg’s camera icily observes the action as Beverly’s crumbling mind state and spiraling addiction destroys his professional life and then his personal life along with his sanity and health.
This is, perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the most effective anti-drug movies I’ve ever seen because it’s not an anti-drug movie at all but rather a movie that deals with the worst kind of addiction with clear-eyed, brutal, uncompromising candor.
Elliot puts his own life on hold to help his brother but as they descend further and further into madness and speed blearily past the point of no return the differences between the two disappear and they become one sick, sad, doomed organism hurtling towards an ugly, early doom.
Dead Ringers is the perfect union of actor and director and director and subject matter. It’s haunting, sad, brilliantly acted and unforgettable psychological thriller about the horrors of the human mind. I look forward to never seeing it ever again. Life is just too short to subject myself to something that soul-crushing again, no matter how extraordinarily artful or powerful.
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