The Cronenberg Crawl: The Trifurcated Cervix Edition

This looks legit. Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers.

In Dead Ringers. Jeremy Irons plays a pair of twin gynecologists who share a clinic and, unbeknownst to the women they seduce, most of their lovers. When the meeker twin falls in love with an actress who comes to them for fertility treatments, the relationship between them begins to sour.

Dead Ringers is a movie about twins and vaginas. If this leads you to conclude that it’s a titillating sex romp, you’re going to have a bad time.

Unfortunately for porn enthusiasts, the leading twins in Dead Ringers don’t have vaginas. They fix them. And because this is a David Cronenberg movie, fixing a vagina in this movie means stuffing it full of custom-made spiny instruments while dressed like a delegate at the Council of Nicea, at least in the second half of the movie.  This is because Elliot and Bev (played by Jeremy Irons and, when both Elliot and Bev are on screen, Jeremy Irons and the back of somebody else’s head) share the responsibilities of running a cutting-edge fertility clinic. They also share a crippling drug addiction, paranoid fantasies about mutant women, and a debilitating co-dependency on the other twin. They live in the house, sleep in the same bed, and pass unsuspecting patients and lovers back and forth between them without informing these women when this switcheroo occurs. 

If this doesn’t sound toxic enough already, the situation goes even further to hell when shy, subordinate twin Bev falls madly in love with their patient Claire, a famous actress who is infertile because her cervix has three holes in it. The good news is that a quick Google search reveals that a “trifurcated cervix” is a medical condition that exists only in Cronenberg’s head; at any rate, both brothers acquaint themselves thoroughly with said cervix both with and without a speculum, until Claire finally realizes she’s being tricked and has slept with both Bev and Elliot when she only intended to sleep with Bev. Clare’s furious rejection of the brothers devastates the twin who loved her. As a result, Bev begins to abuse prescription medications, hallucinates that his female patients are “mutants” with severe reproductive deformities, and, worst of all, begins operating on these women with a series of custom-ordered instruments that look like rejected props from the Hostel movies combined with titanium beetles. 

You can pretty much divide Jeremy Irons’ entire filmography into films where he either chose to act or not to act, and this is fortunately the former. There’s undeniable power in his performance. Irons manages the nigh-impossible feat of rendering the brothers’ relationship as multi-dimensional and not relentlessly creepy; it’s by turns tender and terribly sick. Irons also manages to make the brothers distinguishable from one another without relying on obvious character foils or stock tropes. For this reason, then, Dead Ringers works because the dynamic between Irons and Irons works. He has excellent chemistry with himself. We believe that Bev and Elliot love each other powerfully and could share a beneficial partnership in their personal and professional lives if they weren’t so toxically consumed with one another. We also believe that their natural bond has mutated beyond healthy limits into a dangerous absorption with the other, coupled with a shocking disregard for all external parties. We believe Bev and Elliot’s ability to both love and resent each other for the power they have over the other, and we believe that they simultaneously long for freedom and crave the sustained safety of their own exclusive relationship. On this level, then, Dead Ringers works. It is a solid film about an unbreakable, consumptive, and tragic bond between two people who share everything, including genes and a womb.

So does Dead Ringers work? Sure, but not as well as it could. The problem is that Cronenberg doesn’t want his movie to be about a destructive relationship between twin brothers. He wants it to be (as near as I can tell, given the tone and third-act horror tropes) a genuinely unsettling psychological thriller with body horror elements. And this is where the movie doesn’t deliver. The average horror movie relies not only on tone but on a premise that that the audience will immediately relate to as genuinely dangerous and frightening. 28 Days Later is scary not only because of the movie’s quick pace and ominous visuals but because of the relatable dread of being left without one’s friends and family, coupled with the terror facing a national tragedy. Nothing bad happens to Cillian Murphy during his opening walk through London, but if you don’t have goosebumps while watching that sequence, you’re not paying attention. The same can be said of older horror movies like The Exorcist and The Shining. Both feature strong scripts, great performances, and marvelous practical effects, but both movies are inherently scary because the horrors that the characters experience are so familiar to us. Isolation is terrifying. Harm coming to one’s child or family members is terrifying. A change in a loved one’s demeanor, a doctor’s inability to treat sickness, and profound religious uncertainty are all terrifying. We find these movies scary because we’ve experienced the small-scale versions of what these characters are going through.

Seriously, did no one object when Bev ordered red scrubs?

That said, for Dead Ringers to work, it really needs you to look square in the face at the world of clinical gynecology and squirm.  A lot of the power of this movie depends on the audience being unsettled by the inherent ickiness of vulvas and codependent twins, and unfortunately for this film, I have one of each. Louise and I are the daughters of doctors, and if I’m going to be scared by body horror, I need to see the horror and not just the body. When Irons says that his patient has a “trifurcated cervix” (go ahead and say that out loud, it’s a riot), I get out my laptop to see if this really happens. When I see a couple of twins cuddling in bed together, I think less about incest and more about the last five vacations I’ve taken. To me this is not a thriller; it’s a family drama about two sad, broken, and brilliant brothers. It doesn’t leave me running for the exits; it has me running to the phone so I can call Bev and Elliot and tell them they can beat this thing.

The creep factor really doesn’t even get ratcheted up when we see Bev’s madness made manifest in his treatment plan for “mutant women.” The surgery scenes just strain our credulity too much. Rest assured, ye squeamish: Bev never actually gets around to cutting on anyone, but when we get an eyeful of his special-order tools we immediately wonder why no one on his sizable surgery team has had Bev’s hospital privileges suspended. His equipment looks like Steve Martin’s dental tools in Little Shop of Horrors. The stupidity of the surgery sequence isn’t helped by the fact that the hospital staff dresses like Death Star employees. They don’t wear scrubs; they wear red Klan uniforms.  And when a fellow doctor exclaims “Jesus, Bev!” when Bev passes out on a patient, we wonder why the patient, scrub nurses, anesthesiologists, and janitor weren’t also yelling “Jesus, Bev!” when they saw the batshit cardinal uniforms they all had to wear to work that morning.

All in all, then, Dead Ringers tells a good sibling story but not a good horror yarn. Maybe I’m not the target audience, maybe I’m not squeamish enough, or maybe after watching so many David Cronenberg movies I’m just too far gone, but it just didn’t come together for me. If you want Jeremy Irons to be party to your depression today, this is a good pick alongside M. Butterfly. But if you want Cronenberg to gross you out today, watch The Fly instead.

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