Through a Speculum Darkly THE TRAGIC ANATOMY OF DEAD RINGERS
David Cronenberg isn’t an easy director to teach at a senior secondary level. His most admired films – Shivers (1975), The Brood (1979), Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986), among others – also tend to be gory ones, carrying R ratings for horror violence. A rare exception is Dead Ringers (1988), a film from the middle period of his career, when he was transforming from a cult B movie director into a respected establishment figure in cinema: it’s (relatively) inoffensive, but still Cronenbergian enough to give new audiences a taste of his style.
An atmosphere of respectability strikes you immediately as you watch Dead Ringers. It is Cronenberg’s first film to have a high-society setting: the world of twin gynaecologists Elliot and Beverly Mantle. Both characters are played by Jeremy Irons, whose plummy voice and refinement stand in contrast to the middle-class airs of earlier Cronenberg protagonists. Recalling her first viewing of Dead Ringers, film critic Eileen Jones told me: ‘The film was so lavishly production-designed, I was distracted by how posh it was.’1 Such newfound poshness went hand in hand with Cronenberg’s rising fortunes as a director. His previous film, The Fly, had won an Oscar for make-up, and he was working with production budgets ten times larger than those he had enjoyed a decade before.
was respectable in another sense: for Cronenberg, it heralded a move beyond genre entertainment and into the traditionally highbrow territory of biopics and character studies. Its plot was based on the real-life story of Stewart and Cyril Marcus, identical twins who practised gynaecology at New York Hospital and were found dead together in 1975, apparently from barbiturate withdrawal, in an apartment full of faeces and garbage. (More precisely, began as an adaptation of Bari Wood and Jack Geasland’s novel , which fictionalised the Marcus brothers case. Nevertheless, the final film has so little in common with the book that can barely be called a ‘source.’)with building his reputation as an actor. Receiving an Academy Award for (Barbet Schroeder, 1990) in 1991, he thanked Cronenberg in his acceptance speech even though the latter was not involved in that film’s production.
