In the first episode, Beverly meets one of these women as she walks through the hospital where she and her sister work. ![]() But in spite of their differing roles, they all appear with a single purpose: to build up - and tear down - the Mantle twins in the eye of the viewer. They appear as nurses, pregnant women, reporters, or even hallucinations. Photo: Niko Tavernise/Prime VideoĪs with so many “modernized” remakes, Dead Ringers takes care to include people of color, but chooses to leave them primarily in the background. And nowhere is this more clear than in Dead Ringers’ use of its Black women. They tell us the basic facts about her that she’s kind, emotionally determined. But what is it, exactly? Pregnancy? Womanhood? The struggles of giving birth while poor? I have no idea, and neither does the show Beverly’s connections with the women in her life - aside from her lover, Genevieve, and Elliot - are mostly gestural. She’s the one who wants to open the twins’ private birthing center with the primary aim of helping people give birth safely. Instead, their womanhood is used to develop the twins’ characters, and specifically to confer goodness upon Beverly, the quieter, more pure-hearted twin.īeverly is the one who looks out for a surrogate neglected by an aggressive rich woman. Womanhood in Dead Ringers is not a state of being beyond the leers of a few creepy men and grating tones of a few Girl Power statements - “Who doesn’t ?” Elliot asks “Men. Womanhood is not shorthand for empathy the gap between being a woman and knowing women can be cavernous.Īnd yet, this is how Dead Ringers employs the Mantle twins’ newfound womanhood: as a narrative tool, rather than as a fact. A series about twins, however, which is itself a second version of an existing story, should know: similarity does not necessitate sameness. What does it really mean that the Mantle twins are now women?īody is reality: tracing David Cronenberg’s history with body horrorĭespite the ultimate fate of the Mantle twins, the show seems to be leading its audience toward a clear answer, the same one many give to the question of why women gynecologists have become more prevalent: women know women. But beyond this, the practical application of this change is a little more unclear. With a contemporary eye, it’s difficult not to read the change as an inherently political one given the intimate nature of gynecological practice and the sexual proclivities of the Mantle twins, Weisz’s versions of the doctors are bound to have a different relationship to their patients. In the series, helmed by showrunner Alice Birch, it’s Rachel Weisz who takes on the dual role, playing the double doctors with delightful mania. In Cronenberg’s film, the Mantles are men (both played by Jeremy Irons), thriving in the business of women. Most of the discrepancies between the two versions of Dead Ringers are rooted in a single major change: gender. ![]() But as the minutiae of the series reveal themselves, it’s the sameness that can sometimes be difficult to spot differences, as it turns out, abound. Beverly and Elliot Mantle try to expand their successful gynecology practice while also wrestling with the twining and untwining of their identities. The premise of the film, taken from the lives and deaths of real-life twin gynecologists Stewart and Cyril Marcus, remains largely unchanged in the series: Drs. Nothing in entertainment is exactly the same as what came before it where’s the fun in that? Enter: Dead Ringers, Prime Video’s new series based on the 1988 David Cronenberg film of the same name. Remakes, however, tend to be fraternal, not identical. Not only do these provide us with the familiar comfort of nostalgia, but they also give us the opportunity to compare, to spot the differences and pat ourselves on the back for our cleverness. ![]() Guaranteed sameness, but with difference built in. ![]() Doubles have always fascinated us, so perhaps, in more ways than one, Hollywood’s current rapidly expanding crop of reboots and remakes was inevitable. What is a remake, if not a sort of twin? It’s a duplicate, the same but different, often with a preoccupying awareness of which came first.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |