Dead Ringers

After moving us with his heart-rending “The Fly” (1986), David Cronenberg continues along his personal path of examining themes near and dear to his heart – the sex/death duality, anxieties regarding the physical body and its mutations, the close mind-body connection – and he does it by taking inspiration from the plot of the book “Twins” (1971) by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland.

Once again we find ourselves facing a tale of impossible love. However, if in the prior work the stumbling block was embodied by an aberrant psychophysical transformation – a clear metaphor for degenerative illness – in this case, the problem lies further upstream. In fact, the Mantle twins – identical in appearance, but night and day when it comes to personality – basically depict a single, split personality, which not only serves to explain their inseparability (“The truth is nobody can tell us apart. We are perceived as one person. If Bev goes down the tubes, I go with him“), but also allows Claire’s explosive potential as a divisive element to be fully unleashed.

Above all, “Dead Ringers” marks a definitive point of no return in the director’s career as far as the figurative plane is concerned, given that his obsession for carnality reaches levels that exceed his splatter esthetic: vivisections and dismemberments, routine components of past films, will never be capable of reaching the depths he now craves, which is why Cronenberg turns to the power of language. Through words and concepts, the Mantles study bodies, perusing their contents, examining their systems, organs, and tissues, right down to the individual cells (“I’ve often thought there should be beauty contests for the insides of bodies. You know, best spleen, most perfectly developed kidneys. Why don’t we have standards of beauty for the entire human body?“). Again through language, the two brothers reify past events and experiences (“You haven’t f****d Claire Niveau until you tell me about it“). To turn a well-known line from “Videodrome” (1983) on its head, we could conclude that in this film it’s the flesh that makes the word.

Mainly shot in interiors, “Dead Ringers” is a frigid, claustrophobic work that favors the cold colors embodied in the pallor of a sublime Jeremy Irons, cast in a double role. (The excellent work of body double John Bayliss in combination with techniques such as motion control and split screen produce extraordinary effects).

And so, between a Freudian nightmare and a disturbingly intense finale (the silken embrace of death is reminiscent of Michelangelo’s “Pietà”), the golden decade of one of the greatest “auteurs” of world cinema draws to a close.