Women, Women, Women, Women, Women, Women, Or, On Dead Ringers
There are quite a few spoilers for Dead Ringers below. If you haven’t watched the series, bookmark this and come back to it when you’re done.
A TV series set at a birthing center was bound to feature a lot of women. Screaming women, mostly, which is what television loves about labor and delivery. The wide mouths and sweaty brows, the way women can be depicted as both unbridled animals and gauzy maternal angels.
Dead Ringers, the new Rachel Weisz psychodrama in which she plays twins Drs. Beverly and Elliot Mantle, ambitious OB-GYNs in blood-red scrubs who scrap and plot their way into a kind of dystopian uterine dreamland, has grander plans for women than just tight shots of their vibrating tonsils and legs contorted in stirrups (though there is a hell of a lot of that, too).
Dead Ringers is based on a David Cronenberg film starring Jeremy Irons (and his porcelain accent), which itself used the Bari Wood novel Twins as its basis. In turn, Twins heavily fictionalized the lives of Manhattan gynecologists Drs. Cyril and Stewart Marcus, who died together in 1975 of barbiturate overdoses and were the subject of a New York Magazine investigation. All those former GYNs were M-E-N, but the show’s creator Alice Birch is “interested in writing about women when men aren’t around”; together with Weisz, she transformed the Mantles into two women who are just as ravenous and unmoored and dangerous as the men who formerly took on those roles. Other writers might want to prop up the duplicate Weiszes with a multitude of accompanying men, but Dead Ringers fills in its supporting cast differently. Women, women, everywhere, a convention of them, a smorgasbord.
To start, the main characters’ romantic partners are mostly women. In the first episode Beverly begins dating Genevieve (Britne Oldford), an ingénue actress with a role on a zombie show that is turning her into America’s favorite new damsel. Their not-so-angel investor Rebecca Parker (Jennifer Ehle), the mega-heiress of a Sackler-esque family, is married to Susan (Emily Meade), a Southern belle with a heart of gold and a gothic family Shirley Jackson couldn’t have invented. Rebecca and Susan are so dedicated to the twin causes of vaginal worship and Georgia O’Keefe-knockoff art that a giant painting of rosy pink labia hangs right behind Rebecca’s seat in their dining room, like a fleshy oblong halo.
Rebecca’s two closest advisors are both women: her lawyer Sasha and niece McKenzie. Beverly and Elliot’s capable, punky house manager, Greta (Poppy Liu), a woman. Everyone with verve and punch in this series, one of the verviest and punchiest of our era — women, all. The plentitude is so obvious that it’s eventually played as a visual gag. Deep in the series, when the Mantles visit Susan’s ancestral home in Alabama, they’re greeted by the sight of the multiple sets of female twins in her family; women are perched around the formal living room in disarming pairs, arrayed like a carnival exhibit. (The only man in the family is the patriarch, whom the writers couldn’t help but give the feminine name Marion.) One of those women is Susan’s cousin Florence, who is nine months pregnant and about to “launch” the opening of the Mantles’ second birthing center; she’s carrying an astonishing four more baby girls. Then there are the scores of female patients at the birthing center, laboring peacefully with partners or anxiously on their own, each birth and story wildly different from the others.
It isn’t that men are entirely absent from Dead Ringers, or that it follows some sort of speculative fiction premise where women rule the Earth. But the men are all puppets or playthings, often reduced to groveling at the feet of the brilliant, unhinged Mantles. Elliot screws a string of men, none of whom have any say in the sex itself or their relationship after the fact. Their manager/publicist Joseph is the closest thing the twins have to a male ally; he’s a man who yodels out “Embryology!” in an Oprah sing-song, a supplicant hanging on for the cash. When he finally quits, after one degradation too many (Beverly calls him “the human equivalent of fucking herpes” and asks when she can “douche him out”), he begins screaming a different distinctly female word — “You cunts!” — but the Mantles don’t pay him a flicker of attention. He slinks out of their apartment and isn’t seen from again. Even Elliot’s eventual deputy, Tom, the only thing close to an intellectual equal, is under her thumb: after a serious ethical breach at their former lab, she bribes him to keep quiet about her role in it, employing him at the Mantle Parker Center to keep him under lock and key.
Dead Ringers lacks any and all subtlety; it practically skips about in its guilelessness, perfuming the air with its intoxicating progesterone scent. In the second episode, when Rebecca and Susan host a dinner party for the Mantles at their country house, the table has its share of men, but they’re all obvious takes on the kinds of roles women have classically been shoved into. Rebecca’s right-hand man Ju Won is literally silenced: he doesn’t speak English, and can’t partake in the conversation in real-time. His translator isn’t even given a name, he’s just “the translator.” Later, in a show of dominance, Elliot demands Ju Won take his pants off and fuck her while the translator has to watch, silently. The other man at the party is Jeremy, husband to Rebecca’s ex-girlfriend Gwen. He’s a walking panty liner, a man so enthralled to the dogmas of feminism that he at first appears supportive, then satirical, and finally, like something from a horror movie that conservatives might air to explain the perils of emasculation. When Elliot declares the labia painting beautiful, he whispers to himself, “Show me one that isn’t beautiful,” then wonders, louder, “Is that misogynist? Scrap that, everything is misogynist.”
As a result, Dead Ringers hurtles over the Bechdel Test, with its now-paltry requirement that two women have at least one conversation that is not about a man. Instead, you have to watch carefully to find any instance in which a conversation between two women is about a man. Men might as well be attired in the same print as the wallpaper behind them. They’re there, but only barely.
And yet the casting doesn’t merely flip gender roles. It undoes the notion of masculine and feminine qualities entirely by bedazzling the women with such an array of personalities and behaviors that they sail past that absurd binary. Instead, they function like the patriarchy exists in another dimension, as if they've left the impossibility of equity in the dust behind them and are liberated to simply behave in the manner that best suits their needs. These women aren't being held up for evaluation using a system of measurement we even recognize.
If all this sounds basic, like a low bar that television should have crossed long ago, then yes, absolutely, I agree. But it hasn’t. Personally, I’m tired of having to be delighted that women are graciously permitted to play villains or devour burgers or haul an ugly dude into a bathroom stall for a quick romp. Contemporary television about and for women is often built on the notion that we ought to gawp at women doing remarkable things, that women are slowly being allowed into a world of men, and that their characters are determined by what kind of women that particular narrative calls for. Dead Ringers gives me what I want, a world where women aren’t stuffed into secondary spots, or slotted in for “gender balance,” or made to play antiheroines at whom we’re supposed to gasp. It’s men who barely squeak into the frame, whose presence isn’t antagonistic so much as unimportant.
The most potent example of this at work are Beverly and Elliot’s obstetric ambitions, their raison d’être. Beverly wants to make childbirth as intuitive and emotionally connective as possible for women: she develops free-range fetal heart rate monitors, coaches women through independent births without any medical intervention (or touch), and designed sensory-controllable rooms that can mimic forest immersion. The point is to make possible any expression or desire women might have, to accommodate any woman’s needs or wants.
Elliot wants something entirely different — freedom for women’s bodies to remove themselves from the processes of pregnancy and childbirth entirely, to use their physical forms in whatever manner they please. Her lab work is unconcerned with ethics (and perhaps disconnected from the realities of physiology) — she tells Rebecca that, among other feats, she can and will stop menopause entirely by transplanting uterine tissue. And she obsesses over artificial wombs and fetuses raised in sacs and jars. When Elliot begins plotting to grow a baby to term outside a human body, she does note that she’ll need sperm (and her sister’s stolen eggs); she hasn’t entirely bypassed the necessity of male genetic material. But the rest is brought about by a woman on her own — a woman who is both mother and not-mother. By the show’s end there are two mature fetuses, floating in amniotic fluid in a manner reminiscent of the captured aliens in Independence Day, waiting to be, well, “born.” Dead Ringers turns itself into a rejiggering of that almighty myth, the creation story, with an Eve who barely needs an Adam to kick off the human race. And if women can recreate the first story, it seems to say, the one that formed them from a man’s goddamn rib, then they can also chart an entirely new course for the rest of the narrative.
Dead Ringers eventually goes wobbly after a Pulitzer-winning writer (a man, ahem) is called in to write a “puff piece” about the twins and is given full access to their panoply of deranged behaviors, including an intentionally botched C-section. The series isn’t patient enough with itself, and wants so badly to send the Mantles careening against one another like bumper cars that it loses track of its best asset — the two of them, together. It forgets that it’s a show about atmosphere and character and leans hard into a rickety plot. Which is to say that I found myself watching the back half of the series purely to discover how else it might give zero fucks about the male experience.
Because the beauty of Dead Ringers’ focus on the twins’ entwined identities is how it butts up against the notion that one woman is just woman. Sure, Beverly and Elliot are two identical bodies (“we have the same tongues, the same cunts,” Elliot yips when they transgress sexual boundaries) who have shared the same bloody ambition for most of their lives. But they are also multitudes, multiples, an infinity mirror of divergent, colliding women.
Endpapers:
Last month I wrote a profile of the novelist Catherine Lacey for The Atlantic that wonders whether you can ever really profile someone whose preoccupying theme is the fractured self.
A bunch of other female critics have written great pieces about Dead Ringers: Sophie Gilbert at The Atlantic, Angelica Jade Bastién at New York Magazine, Alexandra Kleeman at The New York Times Magazine. Read’em all.
Andrea Long Chu has won a Pulitzer for her scalpel-sharp book criticism. My favorite essay of hers is the one about Ottessa Moshfegh.
I can confirm that this jumpsuit perfectly fits a paperback in its front pocket. (I may have it in three colors.)
If you’re in a room and you’re reading, that’s a reading room.