In the Flesh: Dead Ringers Episode 5

Directed by Karyn Kusama of Jennifer’s Body and The Invitation fame and written by Susan Soon He Stanton, Dead Ringers’ fifth episode is its bluntest and most imagistic, adrip with symbolic and brutally straightforward examinations of the profession of gynecology, its specters and its secrets. It does so in the language of the Southern Gothic. The sprawling Alabama manor where Susan Parker’s family holds eerie, down-home court, the ghostly light of the kerosene lamp a sleepwalking Beverly carries through its darkened halls, the sight of Silas Jordan (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) sipping the scotch of Susan’s father Marion (Michael McKean), named for J. Marion Sims, the white surgeon whose years-long torture of the enslaved Anarcha Westcott from her 17th year to her 22nd formed the basis of modern gynecology, and the specter of Anarcha (Brittany Bradford) herself recounting a brutal, thudding summary of that torture in Beverly’s dream after Marion presented a sanitized version at dinner — it all feeds into an atmosphere of smothering oppression. The Mantles, as Silas points out, are blundering more or less thoughtlessly into a state where white people have terrorized pregnant Black people for centuries, and profited handsomely off of it.

Mwine, devastatingly handsome and with a voice like used-up sandpaper, is a gently provocative figure, forced onto the Mantle beat by Rebecca Parker, who cudgels the disgraced Pulitzer prize-winning novelist into writing a puff piece for the opening of their second birthing center. His Blackness goes unremarked upon by the white people surrounding him, and he himself comments on it only indirectly, but by his mere presence he agitates them, drives them to reveal their inner conflicts and motivations. There is a tremendous tension evident between what they’d like to say to him and what they choose to say to him, just as there is tension between Marion’s version of Anarcha’s story and the one Beverly glimpses in her dream. As Marion, McKean is a demonic delight, a spirit of pure evil wearing an avuncular human suit. His delivery of the line, “Have you done something very clever?” to Elliot as he guesses (correctly) that she performed a risky and highly illegal late-development embryonic implantation on an infertile patient is a thing of beauty, silky and dirty in equal measure. The intimations of a kind of incest much more readily pictured in the American imagination heighten the impression of the Gothic at work.

Visually, Kusama does some of her best work since The Invitation here. The cornish game hen and blackberries plated to resemble a woman giving birth is an unforgettable visual metaphor, swirling together carnivorism and the expendability of the female body, and her shot of Silas framed by the looming pictures of Marion’s patrician ancestors in the doctor’s study conveys in seconds the weight of history bearing down on the character’s shoulders. Elliot may be able to ignore it, may be able to participate in the complex and mutual lie that she and Beverly are headed for domestic bliss raising twins of their own, but the weight is there with or without acknowledgement. The manor pushes the twins up against their own reflection — the story about Marion’s stillborn twin, parasitized in the womb, the presence of twins and triplets out of which spill more and more and more, quadruplets sliding from a cut in the base of a woman’s stomach — and they come apart, their connection severed by a single scalpel cut.