Dead Ringers TV review: updates Cronenberg’s story to worse effect

What is a remake, if not a twin of sorts? Doubles have always fascinated us, so perhaps in more ways than one, Hollywood’s now burgeoning crop of reboots and remakes was inevitable. Built in. Not only do these provide us with the familiarity of nostalgia, but they also give us the opportunity to compare, spot the differences, and admire our cleverness. Twice is good, as they say.

However, remakes tend to be fraternal and not identical. where’s the fun in that? input: dead ringer, a new series for Prime Video based on the 1988 David Cronenberg film of the same name.Movie premise taken from the life and death of real-life twin gynecologists Stewart and Cyril Marcus, almost unchanged in the series. Beverly and Elliot Mantle seek to expand their successful obstetrics and gynecology practice while also working to detangle and detangle identities. But as the details of the series come to light, it’s the sameness that can be hard to tell. After all, there are many differences.

Most of the discrepancies between two versions of dead ringer It is rooted in one big shift: gender. In Cronenberg’s film, Mantle is male (both played by Jeremy Irons) and thrives in women’s businesses. Led by showrunner Alice Burch, the series sees Rachel Weisz take on a double role, playing a double doctor in a fun maniac. With modern eyes, it’s hard not to read this shift as political in nature. Given the intimate nature of gynecological practice and the sexual proclivities of mantle twins, Wise’s version of the physician must have a different relationship with the patient. A little more unclear. What does it mean for a mantle twin to become a woman?

Because 35 years after the Cronenberg movie and 48 years after the death of twin Marcus, male gynecologists have become a rare breed. In fact, many expectant mothers are specifically looking for a female gynecologist. It’s not necessarily a credential issue, but it could be. The male gynecologist can and should know the anatomy of the patient, the facts and realities of pregnancy and childbirth, but these realities are the cis female gynecologist of Beverly and Elliot 2.0 Literally making up the life of a doctor. So who is the right person to meet your gynecological needs?

Despite the ultimate fate of the mantle twins, the show seems to lead viewers to a definite answer. Same as… Women know women. However, the second version of the existing story, the series about twins, should know that similarity does not require sameness. Being a woman does not stand for empathy. The gap between being a woman and knowing a woman can be cavernous.

yet this way dead ringer It employs the mantle twin’s newfound femininity as a narrative tool rather than as a fact.femininity dead ringer It’s not beyond the hoarseness of a few creepy guys and the harsh tone of some girl power statements. [like strong women]?” Elliott asks. “Men. And most women,” Beverly replies. Instead, their femininity is used to develop the twins’ characters, especially to bestow goodness on their more quiet and pure-hearted twin, Beverly.

Beverly is someone who seeks a surrogate who has been neglected by aggressive rich women. I am a person. she gets it, Shaw seems to say.but what that, that’s right? pregnancy? femininity? What was the hardship of giving birth while you were poor? I don’t know, I don’t know the show. Aside from her lovers Genevieve and Elliot, Beverly’s connections with the women in her life are mostly gestures. They tell us basic facts about her. That she is kind and emotionally determined. But they don’t really say much.And nowhere is this clearer dead ringerThe use of that black woman.

Photo: Nico Tabernis/Prime Video

Like so many “modernized” remakes, dead ringer We take care to include people of color, but choose to leave them mostly in the background. However, although each role is different, they all appear with her one purpose. It’s about building and dismantling the twins of the mantle in front of the viewer’s eyes.

In the first episode, Beverly meets one of these women while walking through the hospital where she and her sister work. A woman in black recently gave birth, and she and her husband are patiently waiting for doctors to investigate the pain she complained of hours earlier. We know their predicament because she takes the time to ask, even though we are not responsible for it. Beverly begins to plan the diagnostic process, but then a female doctor (white) arrives and shows off Beverly, presumably trying to save face with the patient.

What follows seems inevitable, for all the wrong reasons. black woman dies “Your wife had a lot of internal bleeding,” the late doctor tells her now grieving husband. “A CT scan was ordered but was not performed.” beverly was able to save her, is the implication. Even if this incident was read generously as an example of Shaw’s understanding of the flaws in women’s health care — black woman They are three times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related causes. The end result remains the same. Black women are tools. She is a plot point designed to demonstrate Beverly’s ability to empathize and the urgent need for a revolutionary birthing center for twins.

Photo: Nico Tabernis/Prime Video

Not that there are a lot of plots to contribute. dead ringer Falling into yet another common pitfall of film-to-TV adaptations.The twins’ private space for collecting intimate materials is later revealed to be fodder for her art shows. I don’t know what it has to do with the identity crisis in . Probably more than a choir of creepy rich kids singing “The Scientist” by Coldplay. (I wish I had made this.)

This is all bad enough, but the show’s worst attack comes in the penultimate episode, directed by Karyn Kusama and written by Susan Soon He Stanton. We are launching and are about to open a second location in Montgomery, Alabama. Meanwhile, the two visit the family of business partner Rebecca Parker (Jennifer Ealy). Rebecca’s father-in-law (Michael McKean) is also an obstetrician-gynecologist, and one night he tells the twins about the birth of modern obstetrics and gynecology.

The story itself is heartbreaking enough, but according to the doctor, it’s one of cooperation. Her 17-year-old girl with rickets and a deformed pelvis gives birth to a stillborn baby, but in the face of tragedy bravely takes her body through a process of 30 different procedures to “repair” it. Doctor at. But later that night, Beverly (who is always Beverly) learns the true story in the form of a ghost: the girl was black and a slave, and she did not volunteer her body. Everything we know about the girl,” says Hallucination. She is probably herself.who had a deformed pelvis and suffered from severe rickets…we only know because of a white man specifically of A white man who tortured a 17-year-old girl and conducted experiments to claim himself as the gynecologist’s father… or The white man wrote down the only information we have about the 17-year-old girl. ”

Image: Prime Video

It’s a dramatically rendered story with a clear point — men are users and abusers — but curiously, when Beverly listens, the imaginary Anarcha takes her story a step further: ” You don’t know her,” she says. To know. She cannot have her trauma or imagined hopes. She’s not your device. ’ That’s a nostalgic way of writing that could work in the right hand. But it fails because the writers were unable to take their own advice, even though Anarcha was uttering the words. I made their tools so that the audience could better understand the Mantle Twins.

But for what?for all of the utilitarian black women that emerge over the course of dead ringer, contributes almost nothing to the story or characters. Beverly gains nothing from her encounter with the ghost of her gynecological past. She goes back to bed and wakes up in the morning to perform a C-section as if nothing had happened. Was the hallucination merely an audience lecture? Was Beverly unwittingly acknowledging the insidious roots of his chosen profession? Do things even matter? The charity Beverly may have felt for the tortured black women in the health care system dies with her.

He tried to differentiate himself from his predecessors by “modernizing” and to convince the audience that he knew the plight of all women, unlike the men who preceded him. dead ringer Mock and honor victims of medical racism. It exhibits issues of people of color only when it’s convenient for the (shallow and uneven) narrative, then discards them in favor of the white protagonist. During, dead ringer It symbolizes the lesson that new is not always better.