Dead Ringers

"Dead Ringers Poster". IMDb.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094964/mediaviewer/rm1424694016

Dead Ringers
1988,

Directed by David Cronenberg,

Written by David Cronenberg, Norman Snider

Stars: Jeremy Irons, Geneviève Bujold, Heidi von Palleske

Running time 116 min.

Trailer: Trailer "Dead Ringers" (1min 30sec)

Source: “Dead Ringers (1988)- IMDb”

Film Review

If you were expecting your average horror movie think again, this is one of Cronenberg’s finest movies and if you know anything about Cronenberg you won’t be disappointed. This film met the usual expectations of the viewers being a Cronenberg production, “I knew to expect body horror and, shall I say, an 'unusual' theme” (bob the moo, 2002). Cronenberg uses mind games to give his audience an extremely terrifying and psychologically torturous experience.  Cronenberg is always pushing and testing the limits of “the subject matter is very unsettling and controversial.”(Roland-Sinn, 2003) but he never goes down the road towards “the cheap and tasteless territories of gratuitousness and exploitation.” (Roland-Sinn, 2003)

Warning if you are easily scared or get terrified very easily I would suggest not watching this movie as it can cause psychological trauma.

H, Jason. “Tied Up.” The Entertainment Junkie, The Entertainment Junkie, www.easybib.com/mla8-format/digital-image-citation.

The Mantle brothers are identical twins, with an extremely well-known practice specializing in gynecology. The Mantle brothers look exactly alike and are very hard to tell the difference between them at first sight. Elliot and Beverly realize this phenomenon and use it to their advantage, with work but as well with their women without anyone ever really realizing.

Claire Niveau is an actress and is one of the many patients that they have. When Claire comes into play the brother's little charade follows apart and we get to see the brothers not as one but as two separate identities for the first time. When Elliot seduces Claire and decides to get friendlier with their patients than usual, he begs his shy brother Beverly to try her out, although Beverly resisted at first he then falls in love with Claire. When Beverly starts getting emotionally attached to Claire it starts to have an effect on the equilibrium of the Mantle brothers  relationship. Claire finally finds out about the charade and confronts both of them at a bar and throws her drink at Beverly, but within a few months, Claire decides to get back with Beverly.

After sometimes Claire’s addiction to pills, have an effect on Beverly and gets him hooked on them. When Claire has to leave for filming purposes, Beverly begs her not to leave, but she leaves anyways and says it won't be for long. While Claire was gone Beverly became extremely depressed and a higher use of drugs. The practice was affected by Beverly’s poor decisions, Elliot tries to get his brother clean after the accident on the operating table when Beverly jumps across the patient to put on the mask in desperation for an easy fix. Beverly was suspended from the hospital because of his actions. It doesn’t take long before it became too much for Elliot to handle and he starts saying that Beverly has desynchronized them. Elliot thought it was his job to get them back onto the same page by resynchronizing them by taking pills himself. Finally once Claire returns from her business trip she finds Beverly in withdrawal looking all over for pills and asks Claire for some but she doesn’t have any pills because she’s now clean.

Once Beverly gets cleaned up he starts to worry about his brother and finds Elliot in the shower at the practice intoxicated. The brothers have swapped roles but for the first time not on purpose but instead by complete accident. Beverly finds his brother and they celebrate their birthday. They swear that their gonna get clean, but it is obvious to us that this will never happen.              

The brothers shoot up for one last time and decide to separate the Siamese twins. Beverly uses the same tool on Eliot as he did on the patient when he got suspended. He disembowels Elliot and when Beverly awakens he sees his brother dead. Beverly leaves and calls Claire but when she answers the phone and says “who is this?”. Beverly is speechless and goes back to the clinic where his brother is lying there dead. Beverly lies down in Elliott's arms and dies there with him. The Mantle brothers weren’t only attached by physical characteristics but they shared the same identity, making them inseparable.  

Cronenberg, David. “Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers Directed
by David Cronenberg, 1988.” The Red List, The Red List, theredlist.com/media/database/films/cinema/1980/dead-ringers/009-dead-ringers-theredlist.jpg.

In terms of techniques, Cronenberg used foreshadowing to suggest the ending of the film even from the beginning of the film when the brothers were little boys and were inseparable from each other. As well when the brothers are in the practice Beverly says “if death is inevitable, it means that everything that comes before is irrelevant and trivial and meaningless. why should you be alive up to your death? You might as well die right now, or go to bed and eat ice cream." Pain is irrelevant and if you are dead, it will only hurt the people around you. Cronenberg was foreshadowing how he was going to end the film since  pain only happens when you are still alive Beverly would be the only one feeling the pain of his twins death, this would make him want to end his life as well. Another great use of the foreshadowing of the death of the Mantle twins is when Elliot asks Beverly about the first Siamese Twins and what happened to them. Beverly responds with “Chang died of a stroke in the middle of the night. He was always the sickly one. He was always the one who drank too much. When Eng woke up beside him to find that his brother was dead... he died of fright. Right there in the bed.”(IMBD). Cronenberg uses foreshadowing as a way of showing us how the brothers will die and it’s all over this film.

The movie tends to have more of a cooler colour pallet throughout the films with a blue-ish tint all the colours that we see. This isn’t the rule as there are some scenes like the one in the restaurant where Claire eats with both Beverly and Elliot and the lighting is warmer, but this is definitely an exception and not the standard. The blue colour temperature generally is used to give the audience a feeling of uncertainty compared to a warmer colour temperature like yellows and oranges that are open to the viewers. For example, if you wanted to portray a happy scene or tone to a film a DP (Director of Photography) in collaboration would use a higher colour temperature making white appear with more of an orange/yellow look so that the viewer experiences a warmer more “loving” embrace on the film. To the opposite end of the spectrum if a DP and director wanted to make an audience more uneasy and in general less safe about the film cooler colours from the opposite end of the colour temperature spectrum would be used to give this uneasy feeling. The blue colour is directly related to the style of characters that Elliot and Beverly portray. As twins that are always switching places in each others lives, it's difficult for them to open up to people as they could at some point get they stories wrong, therefore they are both closed off to everyone else and the cold colour scheme in the majority of the film enforces this idea that they are closed off from the rest of the world, for the most part. There are times that this predominant colour scheme varies, an example of such times is when Claire has dinner with both Elliot and Beverly and realizes that she has slept with them both. The warmer colour pallet in a scene like this in important as the brothers are being “discovered” and therefore we are learning about them and the are in a sense but not really opening up to the world and in this instance the warmer colours also portray this feeling that we are gaining more information about the two brothers.

The sets are built in a certain manor to play of the idea that the brothers are identical twins. The colours used in the set design almost make it hard to distinguish different surfaces and makes them all blend together. Definitely not done by accident the main colour of all the surfaces are shades of gray that all don’t reflect light too much, this allows all the surfaces to blend together which could symbolize the similarity of the brothers and how when together it is hard to distinguish one from the other. If you look at their home and their office we can see that the tones used on the walls are if not similar very close to being identical. The idea behind making these sets look similar is to make them harder to distinguish one from the other. If the brothers performed the same activity in one and then the other we could easily believe that they had never changed locations, or maybe just did it in a different room. The resemblances between these two important locations of the film are reflecting on the idea that the brothers are identical twins and are impossible to distinguish on from the other. As well the idea that if there was no other information provided to us as the views the changing of a set could not be caught by the viewer's attention which also reflects on the idea that brothers are always changing places in each others lives.

Now this general colour scheme for a film can be broken in a sense that different sets could have different temperatures in the lighting to represent a safer location in the characters lives, or in this case it is a different character's home. The cold colour scheme is changed to a warmer pallet in Claire Niveau’s apartment. Claire’s place has a significantly warmer colour pallet as her character is vastly different from that of the brothers, Beverly and Elliot. This change can be for a number of reasons. Throughout the film Claire is this more innocent character, especially at the start, that really just wants to have a child to fill this missing part of her life. This innocent that the director wanted to portray can be part of the reason that the DP wanted to make this distinction in the locations/sets but could also be because of many other reasons.

Benjamin Pineros. "Jeremy Irons, Genevieve Bujold and … Jeremy Irons". Breaking Down David Cronenberg: Dead Ringers (1988). Nerdspan. http://www.nerdspan.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/nerdspan-movies-david-cronenberg-dead-ringers.jpg

Being an older film camera movement is kept to a minimum more because that was the style of shooting at the time and even films with very large budgets weren’t using these beautiful cinematic and dynamic shots that involve camera cranes dollies and other technical gear to produce the cinematic shots that we associate with today. The film is, for the most part, static shots based off of a tripod that was the norm in the 1980s and early 1990s. This style makes for a lot of static shots that can provide the audience with an uncertainty, as it isn’t what we experience in our everyday lives. If you were to compare two shots of people walking, one being static and you just see the character walk across the scene and the other being a tracking shot using a steady cam that follows the characters as the move along the scene the second shot would be more comforting to the audience as they are with the action and like, in reality, the scene would be moving along. But when you place a static camera to capture this kind of movement the camera get limited to pan and tilt motion, which creates a very circular movement since the camera is the center point of the motion. This movement, therefore, makes an audience feel a little uneasy, as it does not replicate how we would perceive that action in real life. This camera technique therefore already gives our audience a subconscious feeling of uncertainty throughout the film which then reinforces the feeling that the director and director of photography wanted the viewers to experience.

Jeremy Irons played both roles perfectly and seamlessly merging two complete opposite roles into one giving an amazing effect to the movie. The strong and passionate lady charmer to the shy and timid brother. Elliot Mantle knows his way around women and wants to share is sexual relationships with Beverly, the brothers don’t keep secrets from each other even the most personal experiences. Elliot was the stronger brother always trying to help but then becomes too much for him to deal with. Beverly was always getting the seconds since he was shy with the ladies but yet was always up in their junk. When Elliot falls in love with Claire we see how using Jeremy Irons as both characters become an advantage to the film making. Geneviève Bujold played Claire Niveau extremely well as an actress who was in love with the Beverly or should i say both of them. She fit the part perfectly looking like a million bucks, it was obvious that she would be the reason why the brothers would lose their closely knit family affair with each other.

A question raised by this film is the ethical matters when looking at the brothers’ jobs. As gynecologists, they have hundreds of patients, but they don’t view them as patience, rather objects. To some, this may be disturbing and unethical, but to them is normal. They seek sexual relations from their patience and get even more pleasure from those who have more problems regarding reproduction. The brothers believe that if Elliot does something, it isn’t real or true until Beverly does it also which is very disturbing when thinking about sexual partners. A perfect example is Claire Niveau. Miss Niveau was approached by Elliot after discovering she is not like everyone else, meaning Elliot was very attracted to this aspect of her.  The movie Dead Ringers is a perfect example of both ego and socio-centric selves. Elliot represents the ego-centric self as he is independent, he finds the women to have sex and examine them, he plays the role of a parent as he guides his brother Beverly and Beverly plays the socio-centric self. He is extremely interdependent and relies on Elliot for mostly everything, everything including sex partners to his confidence in life.

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This movie made me feel sick to my stomach, it would not have been a movie that I would have watched by myself at home but as a class project it was closely related to our class topics. I can not tell you how disturbed I was after watching this movie although you may think a bloody gory movie would have done more damage to my psyche, you are mistaken this movie brings out so many troubling topics and makes you think about everything that we may have taken for granted. Overall, this movie was extremely well played by the actor Jeremy Irons, playing the roles of both Elliot and Beverly to a tee. The director is able to shoot the movie in a dark-light type of setting to portray the lives of the brothers and how they’re work is seen as crazy and sickening with their way of life both with their profession and personal lives. As a horror movie, the director takes a different approach, meaning no pop-ups, or scary looking characters rather he makes it a horror movie by having these brothers who manipulate and control females and do unheard of things to them and turning their lives around when things start to go downhill. This is a brilliant way of making a movie and to conclude, this movie was extremely well directed and acted. This movie was a very well written masterpiece leaving us the viewers thinking about every second of the movie and how twisted you have to be to write a movie like this one.

1) This movie can easily be connected to Freud’s theories and one of them was mommy/daddy issues. From the looks of it, both Elliot and Beverly had mommy issues since they went from girl to girl looking for what their mother never gave them when they were young. Their mom isn’t ever talked about in the movie but it is very easy to see that she might not have been much present in their past. Having a female figure with them is what they look for the most. For them, going from women to women and sharing them is a way for both of them to experience what women have to offer. It’s easy for them to do so since they are twins and can pass as the other one.

2) Freud also talked about infantile sexuality in one of his studies and it seems that the twins are totally linked to this. From very young age, the twins seemed to be very interested in anything sexual. The first scene of the movie is them at the age of 7-8 years old and they ask a girl their age something very sexual. This shows that they were involved in childhood sexual experiences and that affected their personality to one that always wants sex. It is never explained in the movie if they did have sexual experiences when they were young but for them to ask a girl about that at such a young age can very much hint at that.  

3) Another connection can be made between the movie and the class content and that is how the two Mantle brothers have the excessive need to be in a woman’s womb. Maybe when they weren’t even born yet they love being in their mother’s womb. They liked it so much that they decided to make a career out of it (gynecologist). This job lets them be in a woman’s often enough. This might just give great pleasure since it unconsciously reminds them of how it was in their mom’s womb. Them having sex a lot can also explain how they very much like the interior of a woman. Also, these brothers are always together just like when they were in the womb and that can hint at how them being always together can constantly remind them of that womb they liked so much.

"Bev laying on Elly" The top 22 haunting endings to modern movies. Deen On Geek.
http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/haunting-endings/29308/the-top-22-haunting-endings-to-modern-movies/page/0/1

1) Love is very present in this whole movie and people might ask how could Claire (a troubled actress) still continue to be with Beverley even though she had sex with his twin brother, Elliott, before. How can love be perceived by the main characters in this movie?

2) Have you ever experienced obsessive love where you feel you would die without that person? What was that like and is it real love?

3) Can a connection so strong between two individuals create a very unusual and odd behavior around others?     

"Bev laying on Elly" The top 22 haunting endings to modern movies. Deen On Geek.

http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/haunting-endings/29308/the-top-22-haunting-endings-to-modern-movies/page/0/1

http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/24476/looking-back-at-david-cronenbergs-dead-ringers

The Den of the Geek website is a great source that relates to Dead Ringers and the actual events that the ideas that the film used for inspiration. The review goes in-depth into film techniques and other aspects of analysis. As well the review talks about important psychoanalysis of the characters and their behaviors.

By placing aside overt horror, Cronenberg forged a human drama of genuine depth - a film painful to watch, yet entirely mesmerizing. It is, as the director himself once put it.

“Looking Back at David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers.” Den of Geek, www.denofgeek.com/movies/24476/looking-back-at-david-cronenbergs-dead-ringers.

www.davidcronenberg.de/psychoringers.html

The article written by Dan Shaw from Lock Haven University dives deep into the psychological aspects that are used to develop the characters in the film. Dan Shaw dives into standard psychology to explain the characters as uses them as perfect examples of people that haven’t completed Freud’s theory of psychological development as a child. The article written by Dan is a great piece to broaden your knowledge about the psychological issues portrayed by Beverly and Elliot in the David Cronenberg film Dead Ringers.

Shaw, Dan. “Dan Shaw: PSYCHOLOGICAL DETERMINISM IN DEAD RINGERS.” Dan Shaw: PSYCHOLOGICAL DETERMINISM IN DEAD RINGERS, Lock Haven University,

www.davidcronenberg.de/psychoringers.html.

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References:

Cronenberg, David, and Norman Snider. "Dead Ringers." Dead Ringers (1988) - Rotten Tomatoes. Rotten Tomatoes, 2005. Web. 30 Oct. 2016.

<https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/dead_ringers/>

"Dead Ringers." IMDb. IMDb.com, n.d. Web. 30 Oct. 2016. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094964/>.

"Dead Ringers (film)." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 30 Sept. 2016. Web. 30 Oct. 2016.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Ringers_(film)>

Pineros, Benjamin. "Breaking Down David Cronenberg: Dead Ringers (1988)." Nerdspan. Nerdspan, 14 Mar. 2013. Web. 30 Oct. 2016.

<http://www.nerdspan.com/breaking-down-david-cronenberg-dead-ringers-1988/>