Dead Ringers TV review: updates Cronenberg’s story with worse impact

What is a remake if not a kind of twin? It’s a duplicate, same but different, often with a worrying sense of what came first. Doubles have always fascinated us, so Hollywood’s current rapidly growing roster of reboots and remakes was perhaps inevitable in more ways than one. Guaranteed equality, but with a built-in difference. Not only do these offer us the familiar comforts of nostalgia, but they also give us a chance to compare, spot the differences, and give ourselves a pat on the back for our cleverness. Twice is nice, as the saying goes.

However, remakes tend to be fraternal, not identical. Nothing in entertainment is exactly the same as what came before; Where’s the fun in that? Input: dead wrestlers, Prime Video’s new series based on the 1988 film of the same name directed by David Cronenberg. The premise of the film, taken from the life and death of real twin gynecologists Stewart and Cyril Marcus, remains largely unchanged on the series: Drs. Beverly and Elliot Mantle attempt to expand their successful gynecological practice while simultaneously struggling with the interweaving and disentangling of their identities. But when the details of the series are revealed, it’s the sameness that’s sometimes hard to see; Differences, it turns out, abound.

Most discrepancies between the two versions of dead wrestlers rooted in one major change: gender. In Cronenberg’s film, the Mantles are men (both played by Jeremy Irons) who thrive in business with women. In the series, directed by showrunner Alice Birch, Rachel Weisz takes on the dual role, playing the double doctor with delightful mania. From today’s perspective, it is difficult not to interpret the change as inherently political; Given the intimacy of the gynecological practice and the sexual proclivities of the Mantle twins, Weisz’s versions of the doctors inevitably have a different relationship with their patients. Beyond that, however, the practical application of this change is a bit more unclear. What does it really mean that the Mantle twins are now women?

The swap feels like a given at first, not least because male gynecologists have become a rarity in the 35 years since Cronenberg’s film and the 48 years since the Marcus twins died. In fact, many pregnant women specifically seek out gynecologists. It’s not necessarily a question of skill, but maybe it is; male gynecologists can and should know their patient’s anatomy, the facts and realities of pregnancy and childbirth, but these realities literally make up the life of cis-gynecologists, of Beverly and Elliot 2.0. So who better to cater to gynecological needs?

Despite the Mantle twins’ ultimate fate, the show seems to lead its audience to a clear answer, the same one many give when asked why female gynecologists are gaining ground: women know women. However, a series about twins that is itself a second version of an existing story should know: similarity does not require sameness. Femininity is not short for empathy; The gap between being a woman and meeting women can be huge.

And yet, that’s how it is dead wrestlers employs the Mantle twins’ newfound femininity: more as a narrative tool than fact. femininity one dead wrestlers is no state of being beyond the salacious stares of some creepy men and the snarling tones of some girl power statements – “Who doesn’t [like strong women]?” asks Elliot; “Men. And most women,” Beverly replies. Instead, her femininity is used to develop the twins’ characters, and especially to bring goodness to Beverly, the quieter, more pure-hearted twin.

Beverly is the one looking for a surrogate who is being neglected by an aggressive rich woman. She is the one who wants to open the twins’ private birthing center with the primary goal of helping people give birth safely. she gets it, the show seems to be saying. But what is It, Exactly? Pregnancy? Femininity? The struggles of birth into poverty? I have no idea, and neither does the show; Beverly’s connections to the women in her life — aside from her lover Genevieve and Elliot — are mostly gestural. They tell us the basic facts about them; that she is friendly and emotionally determined. But they don’t really say much. And nowhere is this more evident than in dead wrestlers‘ Use of his black women.

Photo: Niko Tavernise/Prime Video

As with so many “modernized” remakes, dead wrestlers makes sure to include people of color but keeps them in the background. They appear as nurses, pregnant women, reporters or even hallucinations. But despite their different roles, they all appear with a single goal: to build – and tear down – the Mantle twins in the eye of the beholder.

In the first episode, Beverly meets one of these women as she walks through the hospital where she and her sister work. The woman, who is black, has recently given birth and she and her husband are patiently waiting for their doctor to assess the pain she was complaining of hours earlier. We know her predicament because Beverly, a good doctor that she is, takes the time to ask even though she has no responsibility to the patient. She doesn’t hesitate to intervene, and through her we learn that her prolonged absence caused the doctor to ignore the significant pain the black woman is experiencing, which is quite different from that of her previous pregnancies. Beverly begins planning a diagnosis, but then the woman’s doctor (who is white) comes and shoos Beverly out, perhaps trying to save face with her patient.

What follows seems inevitable for all the wrong reasons; The black woman dies. “Your wife suffered severe internal bleeding,” says the defaulting doctor to the now grieving husband. “A CT scan was ordered but never performed.” Beverly could have saved her, is the implication. While this incident is liberally read as an example of the show’s understanding of the deficiencies in women’s health care – Black women are three times more likely to die of pregnancy-related causes than white women—the bottom line remains the same: the black woman is a tool. It is a plot point constructed to demonstrate Beverly’s capacity for empathy and the urgent need for the twins’ revolutionary birthplace.

Not that there’s much of a plot to contribute to; dead wrestlers falls into another of the film-to-TV adaptation’s usual pitfalls by padding the film’s surgical (pun intended) plot with inconsistent extras, including a startling thread that follows the Mantles’ caretaker, Greta (Poppy Liu). , as she invades the twins’ private quarters to collect intimate materials that later turned out to be fodder for their art exhibition. I can’t tell you what this has to do with twin identity crises. Probably more so than the creepily wealthy children’s choir singing Coldplay’s “The Scientist.” (I wish I had made that up.)

All of this is bad enough, but the show’s worst offense comes in its penultimate episode, which is directed by Karyn Kusama and written by Susan Soon He Stanton. The Mantle twins have opened their birthing center and are on track to open a second location in Montgomery, Alabama. In the midst of this process, they visit the family of their business partner Rebecca Parker (Jennifer Ehle). Rebecca’s father-in-law (Michael McKean) is also a gynecologist and one night he tells the twins the birth story of modern gynecology.

The story itself is harrowing enough, but according to the doctor, it’s a collaboration: a 17-year-old girl with rickets and a deformed pelvis gives birth to a stillborn baby, but bravely volunteered her body in the face of tragedy Doctor through 30 different procedures to “fix” it. Later that night, Beverly (it’s always Beverly) learns the true story in haunted form: the girl was black and a slave, and she didn’t volunteer her body. “All we know about this girl called Anarcha,” says the hallucination, probably the girl herself, “who was 17 years old and enslaved and forced to give birth to her stillborn baby and who underwent 30 surgeries without anesthetic , and who had a disfigured pelvis and suffered from a severe form of rickets… We only know why a white male, specifically The White man who tortured and experimented on 17-year-old girl to be made father of gynecology… What The written by a white man is the only information we have on this 17-year-old girl.”

It’s a dramatically rendered story with one clear point—men are users and abusers—but oddly as Beverly listens, the imaginary anarcha takes it a step further: “You don’t know her,” she says, “and she’s not yours to know.” They can’t have their trauma or their imagined hope. It’s not your device.” It’s the kind of writing on the nose that might work in the right hands. But it backfires, because even as Anarcha utters the words, the writers have failed to heed their own advice. They have already used black women, capitalizing on their imaginary hopes, turning them into tools so that we, the audience, can better understand the Mantle twins.

But what for? Because for all the utilitarian Black women that are popping up over time dead wrestlers, almost nothing is contributed to the narrative or the characters. Beverly takes nothing away from her encounter with the ghost of gynecology’s past; She goes back to bed and wakes up in the morning to have a cesarean like nothing happened. Was the hallucination simply an audience-directed lecture? Has Beverly subconsciously acknowledged the insidious roots of her chosen profession? In the end, what does this mean for Beverly and Elliot’s fate in the story? Any charity Beverly may have felt towards the tortured black women of the health care system dies with her, as this is the only instance where the show understands that being similar doesn’t mean being the same.

Attempting to differentiate himself from his predecessor through “modernization,” attempting to convince his audience that unlike the men who came before him, he knows the plight of all women, dead wrestlers mocks the victims of medical racism and congratulates himself on the achievement. It only flaunts the problems of people of color to the extent that it serves the (superficial and uneven) story, and then discards them in favor of its white protagonists. And as the remake mania continues to grip Hollywood, the failures of dead wrestlers are emblematic of a lesson we still have to learn: newer isn’t always better.