Prime Video’s Dead Ringers tries to substitute bad feminism for good storytelling
What is a remake, if not a sort of twin? It’s a duplicate, the same but different, often with a preoccupying awareness of which came first. Doubles have always fascinated us, so perhaps, in more ways than one, Hollywood’s current rapidly expanding crop of reboots and remakes was inevitable. Guaranteed sameness, but with difference built in. Not only do these provide us with the familiar comfort of nostalgia, but they also give us the opportunity to compare, to spot the differences and pat ourselves on the back for our cleverness. Twice is nice, as they say.
Remakes, however, tend to be fraternal, not identical. Nothing in entertainment is exactly the same as what came before it; where’s the fun in that? Enter: Dead Ringers, Prime Video’s new series based on the 1988 David Cronenberg film of the same name. The premise of the film, taken from the lives and deaths of real-life twin gynecologists Stewart and Cyril Marcus, remains largely unchanged in the series: Drs. Beverly and Elliot Mantle try to expand their successful gynecology practice while also wrestling with the twining and untwining of their identities. But as the minutiae of the series reveal themselves, it’s the sameness that can sometimes be difficult to spot; differences, as it turns out, abound.
Most of the discrepancies betweenthe two versions of Dead Ringers are rooted in a single major change: gender. In Cronenberg’s film, the Mantles are men (both played by Jeremy Irons), thriving in the business of women. In the series, helmed by showrunner Alice Birch, it’s Rachel Weisz who takes on the dual role, playing the double doctors with delightful mania. With a contemporary eye, it’s difficult not to read the change as an inherently political one; given the
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