Prime Video’s Dead Ringers tries to substitute bad feminism for good storytelling

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

However, remakes are often fraternal, not identical. Nothing in entertainment is quite the same as what came before it; where’s the fun in that? Enter: Dead RingersPrime Video’s new series based on David Cronenberg’s 1988 film of the same name. The premise of the film, drawn from the life and death 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 struggling to entwine and untangle their identities. But as the details of the series reveal themselves, it’s the sameness that’s sometimes hard to spot; differences, it turns out, are plentiful.

Most differences between the two versions of Dead Ringers are rooted in one big change: gender. In Cronenberg’s film, the Mantles are men (both played by Jeremy Irons), who thrive in women’s affairs. In the series, directed by showrunner Alice Birch, it’s Rachel Weisz who takes on the dual role, playing the dual doctors with a delightful mania. With a contemporary eye, it’s hard not to read the change as inherently political; given the intimate nature of the gynecological practice and the sexual proclivities of the mantle twins, Weisz’s versions of the doctors will no doubt have a different relationship with their patients. But beyond that, the practical application of this change is a bit more unclear. What does it actually mean that the twins of the mantle are now female?

The swap initially feels like a natural one, not least because male gynecologists have become a rare breed in the 35 years since Cronenberg’s film and the 48 years since the death of the Marcus twins. Many pregnant people even specifically seek out female gynaecologists. It’s not necessarily a matter of credentials, but then again, maybe it is; male gynecologists can and should know the anatomy of their patients, the facts and realities of pregnancy and childbirth, but this reality literally shapes the lives of female cis gynecologists, from Beverly and Elliot 2.0. Who better to meet gynecological needs?

Despite the ultimate fate of the Mantle twins, the show seems to be leading its audience towards a clear answer, the same answer many give when asked why female gynecologists are more common: women know women. However, a series about twins, itself a second version of an existing story, should know: similarity does not require equality. Femininity is not short for empathy; the gap between being a woman and knowing women can be cavernous.

And yet this is how Dead Ringers taps into the newfound femininity of the Mantle twins: as a narrative tool, rather than fact. Femininity within Dead Ringers is no state of being outside the lurking of some creepy men and raspy tones of a few Girl Power statements – “Who doesn’t [like strong women]asks Elliot; “Gentlemen. And most women,” Beverly replies. Instead, their femininity is used to develop the twins’ characters, and specifically to bestow kindness on Beverly, the quieter, purer twin.

Beverly is the one looking out for a surrogate neglected by an aggressive wealthy woman. She is the one who wants to open the twins’ private birthing center with the main goal of helping people give birth safely. She gets it, the show seems to be saying. But what is It, precisely? Pregnancy? Femininity? The struggle of giving birth while poor? 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 gestures. They tell us the basic facts about her; that she is kind, emotionally determined. But actually they don’t say much. And nowhere is this as clear as in Dead Ringersuse of his black women.

Photo: Niko Tavernise/Prime Video

As with so many “modernized” remakes, Dead Ringers makes sure to include people of color, but chooses to leave them mostly in the background. They appear as nurses, pregnant women, reporters or even hallucinations. But despite their different roles, they all appear with a single purpose: to build up – and tear down – the Mantle twins in the eyes of the viewer.

In the first episode, Beverly encounters one of these women while walking through the hospital where she and her sister work. The woman, who is black, recently gave birth and she and her husband are patiently waiting for their doctor to examine the pain she complained of hours earlier. We know their predicament because Beverly, a good doctor that she is, takes the time to ask, despite having no responsibility to the patient. She does not hesitate to intervene, and through her we learn that the doctor, through her prolonged absence, has ignored the considerable pain the black woman is in, noticeably different from that of her previous pregnancies. Beverly begins to map out a diagnosis trajectory, but then the woman’s doctor (who is white) arrives and leads Beverly away, perhaps in an attempt to save face for her patient.

What follows seems inevitable, for all the wrong reasons; the black woman dies. “Your wife has had a heavy internal bleed,” the late doctor tells the now-grieving husband. “A CT scan was ordered, but it didn’t happen.” Beverly could have saved her, is the implication. Even if this incident is read generously as an example of the show’s understanding of the shortcomings in women’s health care – Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women – the end result remains the same: the black woman is a resource. She is a plot point, designed to demonstrate Beverly’s capacity for empathy and the dire need for the twins’ revolutionary birth center.

Photo: Niko Tavernise/Prime Video

Not that there’s much plot to contribute to; Dead Ringers falls into yet another of the common pitfalls of the movie-to-TV adaptation by stuffing the movie’s surgical (pun intended) storyline with conflicting extras, including a baffling thread that the caretaker Greta (Poppy Liu) of the Mantles follows as she explores the twins’ private spaces to collect intimate material, later revealed to be fodder for her art show. What this has to do with dual identity crises I couldn’t tell you. Probably more than the creepy rich kid’s choir singing Coldplay’s “The Scientist.” (I wish I was making this up.)

This is all bad enough, but the show’s worst assault comes in the penultimate episode, directed by Karyn Kusama and written by Susan Soon He Stanton. The Mantle twins have launched their birthing center and are on their way to opening a second location in Montgomery, Alabama. In the process, they visit the family of their business partner, Rebecca Parker (Jennifer Ehle). Rebecca’s father-in-law (Michael McKean) is also a gynaecologist and one night he tells the twins the story of the birth of modern gynaecology.

The story itself is poignant enough, but according to the doctor, it’s one of collaboration: a 17-year-old girl with rickets and a malformed pelvis gives birth to a stillborn baby, but in the face of tragedy, she bravely offers her body to a doctor over the course of 30 different procedures to “fix” it. However, later that night, Beverly (it’s always Beverly) learns the true story, in the form of a ghost: the girl was black and a slave, and she didn’t offer her body. “All we know about this girl named Anarcha,” says the hallucination, probably the girl herself, “who was 17 and enslaved, and forced to give birth to her stillborn baby, and who underwent 30 surgeries without anesthesia, and who had a deformed pelvis and suffered from a severe case of rickets… We only know what caused a white man, especially the white man who tortured 17-year-old girl and experimented on her to be called the father of gynecology… What That white man has written down is the only information we have on that 17-year-old girl.”

Image: Prime Video

It’s a dramatic story with a clear point – men are users and abusers – but curiously, as Beverly listens, the imagined Anarcha takes her story a step further: “You don’t know her,” she says, “And she’s not know about you. You can’t have her trauma, or her imagined hopes. She’s not your device. It’s the kind of on-the-nose writing that, in the right hands, could work. But it fails, because even while Anarcha utters the words, the writers have not taken their own advice, they have already used black women, capitalized on their imagined hopes, turned them into tools so that we, the public, can better understand the Mantle twins.

But for what purpose? Because for all the utilitarian black women who appear in the course of Dead Ringers, almost nothing is contributed to the story or the characters. Beverly gets nothing out of her encounter with the ghost from gynecology’s past; she goes back to bed and wakes up in the morning to perform a caesarean section as if nothing had happened. Was the hallucination just an audience-led lecture? Was it Beverly unconsciously acknowledging the treacherous roots of her chosen profession? What does that ultimately matter to Beverly and Elliot’s fate in the story? Any charity Beverly may have felt for the tortured black women of the health care system dies with her, because this is the one instance where the show understands that being equal doesn’t mean being the same.

By trying to differentiate itself from its predecessor through “modernization,” by trying to convince its audience that unlike the men who came before it, it knows the plight of all women, Dead Ringers mocks the victims of medical racism and congratulates himself on the achievement. It shows the issues of people of color only insofar as it facilitates the (shallow and uneven) narrative, then dismisses them in favor of its white protagonists. And as remake mania continues to take over Hollywood, the failures of Dead Ringers symbolize a lesson we still have to learn: newer is not always better.