At the beginning of David Cronenberg’s 1988 film dead ringers, twin boys, blond and bespectacled, come out the front door. “I have discovered,” one says to the other, “why there is sex.” This is due to the fact that people do not live under water. If we did, we’d be like fish, he decided; we laid eggs and fertilized them. While walking down the street, the boys see a girl their own age sitting on their porch. “Raffaella, do you want to have sex with us in our bath?” one shouts. “It’s for the experiment.” Raffaella chooses not to give her body to science, or at least to these scientists. Their pride is hurt, the twins are looking for a gender explanation. “They are so different from us,” laments one of the boys, “and all because we do not live under water.”
“What difference will the sexual difference make?” was one of the questions i had before watching dead ringers, a new Amazon series based on the film starring Rachel Weisz. In the 1988 version, Jeremy Irons plays Beverly and Elliot Mantle, in-demand fertility doctors whose successful practice is threatened when Beverly begins a relationship with Claire (Geneviève Bujold), a charming patient who turns him into a drug addict. The film is a psychosexual thriller filled with homoeroticism and textbook perversions. At one point, Beverly dreams that he and Elliot are Siamese twins, and imagines Claire in a fit of passion, sensually biting the abdominal flesh that connects them. Elsewhere, Elliot hires twin escorts and orders one of them to call him Beverly and the other Elliot. Thus, we are constantly encouraged to imagine two men together in bed, if not physically, then by suggestion.
The remake scathingly condemns any such dreams of its twin doctors. First scene from dead ringers takes place in a greasy diner after dark. Beverly and Elliot, played by Weiss, have just finished their shift and are hungry; Elliot inhales his burger under the gloomy overhead lighting. They are depleted after a day spent with patients through a medical system that treats them like a conveyor belt of paid services. A few stalls away, a scruffy white man looks at the sisters, almost choking with desire. Do you guys ever know? he can’t help but ask. “You two plus the guy?” The sisters, not accustomed to sharp tools, bumped into him. – What exactly attracts you? asks the normally reserved Beverly. “Do you have such a crazy imagination that you need to see everything twice before your dick starts to harden?”
Loud, relentless attacks on misogyny are what audiences expect from showrunner Alice Burch. Before moving on to television and film, Burch developed a reputation as a talented and courageous feminist playwright, unafraid to address points of view that divided the movement. She wrote a play inspired “SCUM Manifesto” by Valerie Solanas. In 2015 she developed We want you to watch, a play about two women who try to shut down the porn industry (with a plan that involves kidnapping the queen). WITH dead ringers, it would appear that Birch has chosen an issue on which there is more consensus among feminists. In a letter to the media, she said that one of her goals is “to acquaint with the horror of the medical system in which many women and women in childbirth find themselves.” high the maternal mortality rate among people of color despite the high cost of care.
However, health insurance companies and lawmakers blocking health care reform are not the villains in this show. Instead, like many recent satires about eating the rich, dead ringers focuses his anger on the super-wealthy, in this case wealthy women, seeking to use the new private enterprise and Mantle lab for “custom” services, including: circumventing legal regulations regarding surrogacy and accelerated experimental hormone therapy to delay the onset of menopause. As in Burch’s earlier work, dead ringers has manifest quality to it. The show contrasts poor women trying to give birth safely and inexpensively with their wealthy counterparts, presented here as women who want to bypass natural biological processes for their own convenience and vanity. However, this sometimes seems like a false binary that overlooks the experience of women who have, say, twin worries.
A day in the life of the Mantle twins at Westcott Memorial Hospital is the horror of childbirth. Blood is everywhere. The screams are deafening. For those who don’t know what actually happens during section C, this is dead ringers it will be instructive if you don’t pass out by then.
And those are just the scenes with happy endings. We are also shown a black mother bleeding because her white doctor was unable to provide her with a CT scan (despite Beverly’s insistence). In a lengthy scene, we see Beverly and Elliot caring for a pregnant surrogate mother whose baby is in a presentation. Standing next to her is Lara, her biological mother, a domineering woman dressed in expensive designer clothes. While Beverly tries to turn the baby over, Lara constantly interrupts, asking how soon she and her husband can use a surrogate mother again: “I really like small gaps.” When Beverly tells her to tone it down and let her focus on the patient, Lara says, “I’m a fucking patient.”
The dream of the Mantles is to open their own enterprise, although there is a contradiction in how each of them presents this. Beverly wants the maternity hospital to be open to everyone. In the same heated scene, she tells Lara, “We wouldn’t set it up so that women like you can buy women in bulk and do whatever you want with them.” Elliot tolerates the idea of a maternity hospital out of sisterly affection; what she really longs for is a research lab that will work in tandem with her. Elliot believes in serving the rich because they, and they alone, fund science (at least in the largely governmentless universe this TV show seems to occupy). Lara is exactly the kind of client – I mean “patient” – that she likes: a client with deep pockets who will fund her experiments.
A potential patron appears in the form of Rebecca Parker (Jennifer Ehle), the ice queen, who tells Elliot, “I like science. I like medicine.” (She says this as if distancing herself from her wife Susan, who says, “I love kids. I love women.”) Elliot and Beverly drive to her home in upstate New York to impress her and her reign. , or, as Elliot jokes, to spend the weekend “begging on the Davos dam.” The guest list is a parade of evil money. There is a niece, Rebecca McKenzie (Allison Kloster), whose father was the creator of the drug that sparked the opioid crisis. (“We made a good product that people want more,” she explains.) There’s also Joo Won (Soji Arai), a gaming entrepreneur who wants to apply “AR and VR” to patient care, and one of Rebecca’s former executives. , the woman running a wellness empire. “We were the first to use raw water, bloodletting,” she boasts. If you missed that it should be Gwyneth Paltrow, don’t worry – her kids are treating everyone to an a cappella rendition of Coldplay’s The Scientist.
At first, the board of directors disagrees with the Mantles’ proposal. To be honest, I would too. How exactly do you scale a maternity hospital where the main draw is the chance to get treated by one of the Mantle twins? No, the excitement really escalates when Elliot starts talking about the lab and its aggressive, unethical approach to doing experiments. When it starts to look more like a medical start-up than a maternity hospital, the faces of the board members fill with excitement. The prospect of freezing a 24-year-old girl’s ovarian tissue and then reintroducing it at the onset of menopause makes Rebecca’s people smile like a Cheshire cat. You call it rejuvenation, they call it a “special longevity health package.” By now the money has begun to flow in, and with it the doors of the elegant Mantle Maternity Hospital are opening.
It seems nothing can stop the Mantle Twins now. They are beautiful, smart and in bed with the kind of people who can make their problems disappear. These issues include the twins’ personal lives: Elliot’s addiction to drugs and Beverly sleeping with a patient, but after the series, it feels like Elliot’s research is a major scandal.
These threads come together when Rebecca chooses a disgraced journalist named Silas Jordan (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) to write an auspicious portrait of the sisters. “Remember, it’s a piece of fluff,” Susan warns him. Silas, however, clearly has no intention of playing ball. He is going to tell the truth, but perhaps simply because the truth is better for his career. He hides a #MeToo skeleton in a closet, and saving women from an evil gynecologist could make him “undoed.” “What the hell are you up to, Frankenstein?” Silas asks, pressing Elliot about her lab.
Without going into the details of Elliot’s experiments, it’s safe to say that there are several areas that she would consider unacceptable. As she sums up her Beverly philosophy in the first episode:
Do you want to have a baby on Wednesday? Do you want him to have blue eyes? Do you wish he could never catch a cold? You want to have twins, triplets, quadruplets. You want to stop menopause. You want men to breastfeed. You need female sperm. You want me to raise your child out of nothing. Do you want me to squeeze your vagina while I pull the baby out of your navel? Okay, come on. Let’s do some research, let’s make something fucking happen.
If this sounds like an irresponsibly mixed list of scientific uses – eugenics has been linked to postponing menopause – the rest of the show will do little to alleviate your anxiety.
What puzzled me the most was how the show portrayed the desire to compensate for menopause: if someone considers vaginal dryness, for example, an unpleasant symptom that interferes with quality of life, and wants to get around it with very common medical procedures, such as HRT – hormone replacement therapy . , which uses a non-human version of the hormones that Elliot will extract from the ovarian tissue of a 24-year-old patient – should we perceive their desires as Goop-dictated aspirations that are contrary to the reproductive health of minority women? Can’t these worries live in the same body?
Silas follows the twins to Alabama, where they are about to open a second clinic. While there in the eerie south, Elliot has a vision in which a black woman tells her story Anarcha Westcott (1828–unknown). Westcott was an enslaved woman who was operated on without anesthesia by the American physician J. Marion Sims. called “father of gynecology”. Shaw draws a parallel between Sims’ experiments and Elliot’s research. “She’s not your device,” the vision tells Elliot. Back in the land of the lucid, Silas, who is also Black, shares these feelings. He tells the twins, “People matter. It’s not just a subject for Elliot’s experiments.” These scenes were dizzying for me. As the show itself shows early on, it is the lack of care, lack of attention, and lack of application of basic scientific advances (such as CT scans) that lead to poor outcomes for minority births. The problem of recent times has been that there is too little science, not too much.
I mainly focused on the role of medicine in the series and paid less attention to the dynamic between the two sisters. I did it because of this dead ringers, like everything else a perfect Cronenberg film, never figured out how to reconcile a sibling drama with a story about medical ethics. Simply put, it’s a toxic, co-dependent relationship that Elliot, according to the show’s theme, comes out as the worst of the two. The doctors’ research and what it means is more interesting than the novelty of double vision. After all, I’m not the creepy guy at the diner; I am a person who hopes that science, whenever I need it, will be there not only to relieve my pain, but to increase my pleasure.
