Deadlights: That Human Feeling

We all experience dysfunction. Abuse. Addiction. Mental illness. Exposure to a parent's aberrant behavior. None of us makes it through life without being touched by some or all of these things. For some of us, though, that dysfunction penetrates the barriers meant to partition our lives and personalities and envelops us completely. This isn't because we're weak or stupid or credulous but because we're social animals who long to make and keep connections, and sometimes those connections can spoil while still inside us. The desire to maintain and protect a rotting connection is both common and eminently understandable, a natural defense against the fear of change, and the fear of being alone.

Dead Ringers follows identical twin gynecologists Elliott and Beverley Mantle, both played by Jeremy Irons, as their dysfunctional connection melts down and implodes. The Mantle brothers share an apartment, a medical practice, and a love life, with Elliott passing his conquests on to Beverley, who impersonates his brother to maintain the ruse. When Beverley falls in love with one of these conquests and reveals the truth to her, cracks appear in the brothers' symbiotic partnership. Their relationship is unable to bear the strain of honest observation after having relied for so long on secrecy and the complete absence of internal boundaries. 

Director David Cronenberg communicates the brothers' intimacy and its collapse in several ways. At one point Beverley suffers a nightmare that he and his brother are conjoined or "Siamese" twins, a recurring idea throughout the film, and that his lover Claire is eating the tissue connecting them. In another Elliott hires a prostitute for a depressed Beverley and joins them as they dance, positioning the woman's hands on his brother's body. Later the brothers attempt to deal with their shared drug problem by "synchronizing" their systems, taking mirrored doses in an attempt to recreate a dying bond it seems they never truly understood. They become irreparably severed from each other not by the disturbance of Beverley's private love affair but by the exposure of their relationship.

Dead Ringers is a tragically sensual exploration of our will to love without understanding, to fumble at the things we know with unformed limbs and diseased mouths until they permit us entry. It's a tender treatment of an abusive and incestuous dynamic, an approach you wouldn't find in any other genre, and in that tenderness it finds an almost childlike horror, a primal kind of loss too hot and fetid to touch. It sketches our dysfunction in raw flesh.