“It was too perfect,” said David Cronenberg of the real-life unfoldings that inspired Dead Ringers (1988). Two twins, whom Cronenberg in the film names Beverly and Elliot Mantle, grow up at such a lockstep as to become accomplished partner gynecologists, building on their kinship to probe that female orifice of human origins, making it so that women can bear children. Staying in sync with one another as middle-aged professionals requires a diligent balancing: Bev labors more at the clinic while Ellie rises to a professorship, and Ellie makes gifts out to Bev in the form of women. Later, as Bev descends into a ruinous addiction to self-prescribed pills, Ellie determines to match the lows of his counterpart.
The real-life twin gynecologists, Cyril and Stewart Marcus, were found dead in Cyril’s Upper East Side apartment in 1975. This was at a time when the esteem of psychoanalysis in the United States had begun to wane; instead, diagnostic psychiatry and pharmaceutical treatments were on the come up, buffered by outcome-oriented insurance billing. But, in an abstracted, explicatory manner, analysts still held some ground in mainstream culture. A 1976 Esquire article by Ron Rosenbaum and Susan Edmiston, which Cronenberg has cited as an inspiration for Dead Ringers, refers to the opinions of government investigators and hospital physicians alongside psychoanalysts. The article suggests that the Marcus brothers actualized their long-standing desires to kill one another—death wishes that arose from a confusion about the very fact of being a twin. Indeed, what feels notable about the case of the Marcuses for us after-the-fact observers is how simultaneously gruesome and canny it seems, how with all their intelligence and medical expertise they seemed to have abstracted themselves into a paradigm of tragedy.
In the film, which places the twins in Toronto rather than New York, we witness what appears to be a textbook case of projection as Bev becomes increasingly convinced that his clients are more and more made up of “mutants,” women whose bodies are “all wrong.” He commissions an artist to fabricate a set of clawed, dinosaurian instruments for operating on these mutant women, tools he later labels more aptly as what he endeavors to use for the separation of conjoined twins. This sci-fi plot point was added by Cronenberg in the course of adaptation. But the one marked deformity of the film is only felt and not seen: toward the start, Bev and Ellie each touch love-interest Claire Niveau’s “trifurcated cervix” to verify her infertility, and this barren womb remains protected in Claire, who will survive the mess. The twins are both played by a handsome, exacting Jeremy Irons, and while the face of Stewart Marcus was found in a state of partial decomposition inside that apartment in 1975, this movie protects the visages of its two brothers, preserving them in their adoration for one another.
Dead Ringers screens tonight, June 25, at Film at Lincoln Center on 35mm as part of the series “The Other America: A Cosmology of Jordan Peele’s Us.”
