JUST THE TWO OF US
DEAD RINGERS Rachel Weisz and Alice Birch team up to transform Cronenberg’s cult classic into a twisted feminine fable.
There are some lies that film fans can convince themselves of. That you can see a knife entering Janet Leigh’s torso in Psycho, that The Shining contains clues about how the Moon landing was faked and that when Jeremy Irons won his Oscar in 1991 for Reversal of Fortune it was really for David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers. Even Irons acknowledged it during his Oscar speech saying, ‘Thank you also, and some of you may understand why, thank you David Cronenberg.’
The original saw Irons play both Elliot and Beverley, twin gynaecologists who wish to push the boundaries of their field with elaborate custom instruments that resemble avant-garde torture implements and ‘beauty contests for the insides of bodies’. Elliot is the more confident and morally bankrupt of the two, while Beverly is meeker and agonises over the dubious path they take, but the line between their identities is blurry. Their co-dependent
dynamic is strained when an actress comes to them for fertility treatment, and Beverly falls in love with her, sending both on a dark and dreamy fable of body horror, lust and addiction.
Those central beats are present in Prime Video’s TV adaptation, which sees Rachel Weisz play Elliot and Beverly. Executive producer and head writer Alice Birch, best known for her awardwinning plays and writing Succession, Normal People and The Wonder, takes no credit for the show’s inception as, ‘This was all Rachel’s idea, she always loved the film and was looking for something that had a central female relationship.’
Once production company Annapurna was on board, Birch was approached, admitting to Teasers that ‘I watched it for the first time and I’d never seen anything like it. You want to switch your serious work brain on but I couldn’t because it’s so wild and I loved it.’ In her adaptation, she takes us on
‘That was hard to write and very hard to film. There’s a real emotional cost’ ALICE BIRCH
the same madcap ride, but brings us to the cusp of a contemporary medical dystopia and wisely makes much of the queer subtext actual text. This also means that Weisz may break the record for most sex scenes performed by an actor in a single project, and Birch says Weisz was more than up for performing them in service of the darkly erotic tale. ‘When you’re building characters, that’s an early question. How do they make their money and what’s their sex life like? It’s a good way to access people.’
But while the expectation might be that femininity will soften Elliot and Beverly, the adaptation has lost none of its edge. The series shows just how biting it is willing to be in its opening scene (‘the first scene I wrote’) where Elliot and Beverley are propositioned in a diner and respond by coolly asking, ‘Is your imagination so fucked that you need to see everything twice before your dick can get hard?’ That touches on how the world is quick to sexualise identical twins, but Birch’s writers’ room saw the twins as having ‘great dramatic potential in a bond that’s just too much. Elliot is happy with the way things are but it’s suffocating Beverly.’ While none of the writers were twins, they were all women, including Weisz who attended every day. The ‘female lens’ extended to the majority of the show’s directors, department heads and actors. But when pressed on what that brings to the show, Birch is hesitant to define it beyond that ‘there’s a lot about the female body experience and we wanted to look at childbirth and female relationships in a way that hasn’t been depicted on screen before.’
FLESH AND BLOOD
In the spirit of Cronenberg, the show depicts frequent and intense body horror that is at times near unbearable. Birch seems pleased when Teasers admits that at several moments the pause button and a short restorative walk around the living room had to be employed. ‘That was hard to write and very hard to film. There was a real emotional cost for everybody, but with those birth scenes they become quite technical so it vacillates between difficult and joyfully pragmatic.’
While the six episodes afford ample opportunity to make viewers feel faint, aroused or nauseated, the show drew on many of the unsettling experiences the writers had with childbirth and medicine. For the women in the creative team ‘it’s really hard not, through your own experience, to get angry at how underfunded and under-researched it is. It’s really shocking. I feel like I was processing those things through the show too.’ But the show speaks to other uncomfortable truths like the opioid crisis and ‘we have a Black woman who isn’t listened to by the white doctor with dire consequences and the research shows that happens consistently. We wanted it to start in a really grounded honest place.’ By bringing Dead Ringers up to date, the show is able to tackle so many of the contemporary fears of modern womanhood but also keep one foot in the grotesque imagery and eerie character study of Cronenberg’s original. Much like Elliot and Beverly, the two come together for an intoxicating and truly horrifying combination.