Watching Dead Ringers—Alice Birch’s 2023 mini-series adaptation of David Cronenberg’s 1988 film of the same name—was triggering for my anxious brain, inducing intense nightmares. In Cronenberg’s film version, Beverly and Elliot Mantle are twin gynecologists (portrayed by Jeremy Irons) who run a successful clinic in New York City; in Birch’s version, Rachel Weisz portrays the Mantle twins as gynecologists who aspire to open their own birth center and research lab in the city.1 Feminized ambition and desire are the amorphous and abstract boogeymen of Dead Ringers. To what lengths will the Mantles go to achieve their goals? What lines will they cross, and who will be hurt in the process?
The show, and my response to it, prompted me to think about how violence and pain are transmitted within and across the screen. Whose pain was I swallowing when triggered into a nightmare? Whose feelings was I absorbing? I found these questions challenging to parse through, in large part because Dead Ringers’s depiction of its protagonists and their sense of injury and justice is riddled with ambivalence. Through its gender reversals, Birch’s show appears to offer a critique of liberal feminism insofar as it places the Mantles’ aspirations to individual success and ambition under scrutiny. Beverly and Elliot repeatedly toe ethical lines in order to accomplish their personal and professional goals, while Rebecca Parker (portrayed by Jennifer Ehle), a cutthroat lesbian venture capitalist who invests in the Mantles’ clinic, is unapologetic about the wealth her pharmaceutical family has accrued through the opioid crisis. The show thus suggests that the drive for career advancement, wealth, and recognition may influence privileged (white) women’s propensity to abandon feminist solidarity while enacting harm and violence on others—specifically, Black women, past and present.
Despite this running critique, our central points of identification in Dead Ringers are indeed the Mantles, and as viewers, we are de facto implicated in their nefarious activities. This identification compelled from us is perhaps what also drives the horror underlying the series, which is the horror of sameness. The horror of the same is structurally built-in to the show through the deployment of the classic trope of the creepy twins. The twins are also the series’ protagonists, the ones with whom we uneasily identify and the ones for whom we root even as we regard them with disdain. Accentuated by the show’s dim lighting and subdued tones, their mirroring of one another, coupled with the sameness and echo of their voices, mimics the feeling of being in a fun house where reality is twisted, distorted, and suffocating.
As feminist film critics Carol Clover, Linda Williams, and Barbara Creed have argued, feeling and affect are core structuring features of “sensational” genres like horror, melodrama, and pornography.2 In the Cronenbergian tradition, Dead Ringers is permeated by a sense of unease and malaise and includes visceral and creepy depictions of blood, body organs, and psychic torture and trauma. My nightmares generated by these depictions indicate that there was a transit of pain, from the on-screen world of the show to my own off-screen world. Although my reaction to the series might be a subjective one, the show’s writers and directors apparently expected—or, at least, hoped—that viewers would experience some version of what I did. Our senses of pain, horror, and violence do not emerge in a vacuum. Per Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde, and others, our subjective sensibilities are deeply entangled with the histories that have formed the world, which is to say: slavery, capitalism, colonialism.3
These entanglements come to the fore in one of Dead Ringers’s major plotlines, about Beverly’s desire for her own pregnancy. She becomes enamored by Genevieve, a Black actress who is initially Beverly’s patient. On the surface, Beverly and Genevieve are a happy couple, realizing their reproductive goals together, with their same-sex interracial union symbolizing the difference and multiplicity associated with liberal progressive futures. If, within classic psychoanalytic theory, homosexuality figures as “inverted” desire—as desire and identification inappropriately directed at one self—then Dead Ringers amplifies this perspective by contrasting Beverly and Genevieve’s normative lesbianism with Beverly and Elliot’s perverse and emotionally incestuous entanglement in one another’s lives.4 The use of a single actor to portray both roles underlines this citation of inversion. Even as they are separate people with distinct lives, experiences, and desires, the twins often operate as a machine, with Elliot often bringing Beverly’s professional and romantic goals to fruition. For example, it is Elliot who seduces Genevieve for Beverly, and the show’s depiction suggests that this is a tried-and-true charade for the Mantle sisters.
Contrasting the fear embodied by the creepy twins trope is another affect: guilt. The series most explicitly explores race and reproduction vis-à-vis gynecology’s disturbing histories in episode five (“Five,” directed by Karyn Kusama) which takes places in an Alabama mansion, the family home of Rebecca Parker’s wife, Susan.5 The residing patriarch, Dr. Marion James, is named after J. Marion Sims, the 19th century American surgeon whose contributions to gynecological medicine were only possible through the torture of enslaved Black women, on whom he conducted experiments without anesthesia. Continuing that tradition, Dr. James experiments on his own family, which contains multiple sets of twin daughters, and soon-to-be quadruplet grandchildren. But guilt has its limits. Even as Dead Ringers invites a critical view of its protagonists and acknowledges gynecology’s horrific history, the twins remain at the center of the series as the audience’s primary source of identification. Aren’t we still rooting for these people even if, or precisely because, we find them horrifying?
Though the horror of Sims’s gynecological experimentation is a horror borne by Black women, in “Five,” that horror is displaced onto Beverly. And our own sense of horror, produced by identifying with Beverly, allows us to make that history of horror feel like our own. The very pleasure of body horror lies in its propensity to titillate viewers with recourse to the visceral, gross, and gory, and this is generally a consensual process: audiences who consume body horror know what they’re getting into, and they often do so intentionally. As Dr. James extols the virtues of scientific experimentation and innovation as necessary evils—praising Elliot’s willingness to engage in the illegal and risky for science’s sake—during a dinner scene, Beverly is visibly distressed. Her visceral reaction is aesthetically reproduced for viewers through the mounting intensity of shots alternating between Dr. James, Elliot, Beverly, and Beverly’s surgical incisions into her plate of food, and through the grating sound of a knife cutting into a fleshy piece of meat. As Dr. James and Elliot delight in the possibilities of experimentation, Beverly’s realization that Elliot has been engaging in illegal experiments at their clinic—experiments which also implicate Beverly—sets her into panic. Starkly contrasting Elliot’s voracious and gluttonous appetite for sex, drugs, food, and science (which is showcased across episodes), Beverly reluctantly slices the piece of pie on her plate. Her tolerance peaks, and she vomits.
That night, Beverly dreams about a traumatic event from childhood, in which she is swimming in a lake, searching for Elliot. She wakes up and encounters the ghost of Anarcha Westcott, who haunts the grounds, with Beverly’s baseline childhood trauma becoming a connective tissue linking her and Westcott. Westcott was one of Sims’s subjects, and she recounts the experience of his experiments from her perspective. Beverly is suddenly covered in blood that is emblematic of Westcott’s pain. She hears Elliot’s voice, and realizes she has been sleepwalking. Although we hear Westcott’s story, the visceral reaction belongs to Beverly; as viewers, Dead Ringers invites us to feel Beverly’s pain, which is in fact Westcott’s pain. Black feminized pain is thus imagined as transmittable across the screen—the pain of all women—while Black women haunt the screen’s edges.
This aesthetic displacement of Black women’s pain corresponds to popular tropes alternately portraying Black women as victims bolstering a white savior—such as Monster’s Ball (2003) or The Help (2011)—or as angry, super, or magical, immune to pain—such as Whoopi Goldberg’s character in Ghost (1990). The question that lingers is: what does it mean to incorporate the pain of others, particularly when we are speaking of racialized and gendered violence? To what extent does this “parallel pain” create space for empathy?
The feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed names the potential for solidarity pain created from different painful experiences as a “shared affinity of hammers.”6 But the danger of a trigger response is that it unfaithfully conveys social and historical context. I don’t remember the particulars of the nightmare I had after watching “Southern Hospitality,” but I do know that whatever terror I experienced was mine, absorbed into my own body. It was neither empathetic nor sympathetic. In Dead Ringers, Beverly’s feelings become the viewer’s feelings. In the final scenes of the show, Elliot collaborates with Beverly to plot her own symbolic demise. Navigating ethically dubious territory again, the twins remain loyal to each other to finally achieve their goals. In the world of the series, the pain of Black women is just one stop on the Mantles’ journey of self-actualization. Off-screen, Black women’s pain is one tool among many for generating thrills (even in the form of a nightmare) for viewers.
If Dead Ringers plays on the horror of the same, from the generic convention of the creepy twins to our own twinning of bodily response in the face of gore, it also confronts us with how this twinning can ultimately obscure the historical horrors that structure our present. We are left to mourn our own innocence, rather than reflect on our complicity in the harms wrought on Black women by white supremacist medicine. What would it look like for horror to invoke, rather than empathy, something like accountability instead? How might a body genre leave us mired not just in sensation but ready for action? Watching Dead Ringers, the horrors of history reverberate in our feelings of malaise and distress, remaining lodged in our bodies for a time—and then we return to the rhythms of our everyday lives, continuing along with the same.
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I am grateful to editor Michael Dango for providing feedback that helped to strengthen this essay.
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Endnotes
- Both the film and TV series are partially based on the biography of twin gynecologists Stewart and Cyril Marcus, and Bari Woods and Jack Geasland’s novel Twins, a fictionalized account of the Marcus’ lives and deaths.
- Carol Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” Representations 20 (1987): 187-228; Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1993); Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 2-13.
- Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008); Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984), 124-33.
- Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
- Kusama is director of the feminist horror film Jennifer’s Body (2009) and TV series Yellowjackets (2021-).
- Sara Ahmed, “An Affinity of Hammers,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 3, no.1-2 (2016): 22-34.
Beenash Jafri