"Dead Ringers" is probably Hollywood's most successful portrait of psychology stretched to aberrant extremes. The "identical" twins at the film's core form a composite organism, each the cerebral mirror of the other. One is socially cunning and icy-suave; the other is painfully shy, awkward, self-absorbed. Despite their glaring differences, each is utterly dependent on the other. Functioning in stealthy unison, they comprise an integrated (if chillingly synthetic) self.
Only when this duality is shaken by a love interest does their shared world begin to disintegrate. If each brother represents a respective brain hemisphere, any attempt at individual autonomy is like severing the knot of tissue that makes an anatomically bifurcated mind function as an undifferentiated whole. For the twins, escape from symbiosis equals suicide.
Reality fractures when the two hemispheres fall out of synch. In "Dead Ringers," Cronenberg illustrates this schism by assigning left- and right-brain attributes to each twin. Esteemed doctors, both live in the same swank apartment, ritualistically regrouping at the end of each day to synchronize. Their lives are carefully modulated so each can reap the other's experience -- an automatic process in an organic brain, but one that the twins must manage with incredible finesse lest their composite-self begin to fracture.
"Dead Ringers" may be disturbing, but the central concept is enacted within our minds on a near-constant basis. Cronenberg and Irons humanize a process most of us would prefer to consign to neurology textbooks, revealing how fragile that link between the hemispheres really is -- how something as trivial as a romantic obsession can cut deeper and more exactingly than the sharpest scalpel.
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