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Dead Ringers
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This is a rare case of remake-adaptation-expansion where knowing the original – David Cronenberg’s superb 1988 film of the same name – and/or having it uppermost in your mind as the immediate point of comparison, is going to hinder rather than help your critical appreciation/evaluation of what British-born showrunner Alice Burch (Normal People, Succession) and her team of collaborators have attempted. Because, in fact, very little of the film – and almost nothing of Cronenberg’s intricate stylistic games with the initial, real-life material – ports over to the series. So don’t eagerly await the unveiling of grotesque surgical instruments sculpted by an uncomprehending artist. Don’t expect a queasily erotic threesome involving the lead twins (Jeremy Irons in the movie) and their shared amour, set to “In the Still of the Night”. Don’t anticipate those deliciously unsettling moments when Cronenberg deliberately and artfully made it hard for us to tell which twin is which. Don’t look forward to any especially perverse dwelling on unusual anatomies of particular women. And don’t demand the crushing yet voluptuous melancholia of Cronenberg’s vision. This new Dead Ringers starts from a gender-flip: Rachel Weisz has a ball playing both Beverly and Elliot, and she’s definitely the best thing in it. The prologue – which gets an alarming pay-off much later in the series – sets a very different tone and intention than was established in the movie: solicited, in a dive bar, by a sleazy bystander who hopes for a fantasy-threesome, the ladies sarcastically make mincemeat of the guy’s presumptions and desires. It’s always easy to tell these two anti-heroines apart: the sassy, ready-to-experiment one with a history of mental disturbance (Elliot) has her hair down, while the more constrained, brooding one (Beverly) has her hair up. That – along with an array of seamless digital effects – simplifies our ongoing cognition of events; no longer, alas, the spectatorial frisson of spotting a line knitting two halves of an image, or the back of a stand-in’s head, as we once did with The Dark Mirror (Robert Siodmak, 1946) and many others of its twin-set ilk! Then, after the prologue, off we go: into a much grander plot premise than was suggested by the initial source material (the sad and murky tale of New York gynecologists Stewart and Cyril Marcus, who, it seems, took themselves out in a double suicide). The new-look Beverly and Elliot swiftly launch themselves into a high-rolling, fabulously well-resourced endeavour – specialist, revolutionary care for women during the birth process – and that requires a vast level of private-investment funding. So, into this seething cauldron of new life – and the chilling possibility of artificial, test-tube life – come a host of rich players, led by amoral entrepreneur Rebecca (Jennifer Ehle). Why stop at a single, especially designed hospital when an entire franchise can be projected across the globe? The first episode is the most striking of the whole series. Taking its cues from the cinema of extremity – not Cronenberg (who is, finally, pretty discreet on most subjects once Dead Ringers inaugurated the post-gore, ‘psychological’, chamber-drama phase of his career), more like Noé or von Trier – it is a half-gruesome/half-comical onslaught of gynecological spectacle, with special attention paid to numerous caesarian sections. Cronenberg gave us set and costume designs infused with disquieting, vibrating redness; Burch & associates opt for a river of prosthetic blood. Cinematic metaphor becomes televisual literalness: such is the way of our 2020s world. Beverly also falls in love with a patient, Genevieve (Britne Oldford). Intriguing element from our diverse-and-inclusive age: both Genevieve and (entering in episode 5) the investigative journalist Silas (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) are black, and both provide an overwhelmingly ‘normal’, moral perspective on the twins’ saga (never mind the tiny flutters of self-doubt, hip indifference or booze-weakness stuck as alibi-appendages onto these characters). One of the few more-or-less queer ingredients that Burch adapts from Cronenberg is that the sisters, ultimately, share an intense and all-consuming sort of love. Double-suicide is not the path taken here; I won’t spell out the mechanics of the plot in its later stages, but simply signal that the intrigue is powered by a simple and effective thread (even if, logically, its on-the-ground believability is hard to maintain): each twin keeps a big secret from the other. The more that Burch’s Dead Ringers – variously directed by Karena Evans, Karyn Kusama (Girlfight, 2000), Lauren Wolkstein and Sean Durkin, and with an all-female writing team – proceeds into the grotesque world of the rich and amoral, the more it strays into Ruben Östland/Triangle of Sadness (2022) territory (and I predict there will be plenty more film/TV encroachments onto that terrain very soon). This tendency comes to a head in the scenes featuring Michael McKean as the very Southern Marion, surrounded by a gaggle of gathered twins. Here and there, a vague ‘critique of capitalism’ – post Mark Fisher, post Red Scare podcast denunciation of ‘Big Pharma’ conspiracy – is uneasily brandished and, in the same breath, juggled as a running gag. Finally, for my taste, there are just too many diverse tendencies toyed with in this version of Dead Ringers; its strengths tend to drain away by the end, like that blood from the gynecological table. The series follows the shaky path also adopted by (among others) Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (2022) and the dire American Gigolo (2022) spin-off: each episode tends to get its own tone, its own thrust, even its own corner of plot intrigue. No doubt this is in abreaction to the often deadening, rigid and repetitive ‘template style’ that has ruled even the best TV series of the past 25 years – where the showrunner’s auteur-like decisions in every department get clamped on in scene 1 and stay put all the way to the finale, years later. These more recent efforts, however, show the strain induced by a rather fake, often superficial and merely trendy imposition of nominal heterogeneity: we get a (predominantly) black episode, a woman’s episode, a queer episode, a ‘visceral horror’ episode, and so on … with directors who came to the fore in 1990s cinema (including Gregg Araki, Jennifer Lynch and Carl Franklin) duly typecast for the ‘specialty’ of their vision or sensibility. It’s a funny old industry … © Adrian Martin 10 May 2023 |
