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The twins Elliot and Beverly Mantle represent, in essence, the ultimate expression of duality: completely identical from a physical standpoint (portrayed by a Jeremy Irons with the gift of ubiquity, perhaps never as great), both esteemed and appreciated gynecologists, almost the perfect adherence of two existences in one being.
Yet this total overlap hides profound character and psychological differences that simply wearing the same clothes (as seen in the very first scenes) cannot erase. At least in the first part of the film, the twins are presented to us as profoundly different from each other. On one hand, there is Elliot: cynical and unprincipled, yet brilliant and extroverted, certainly the "strong" half of the Mantle entity. On the other hand, Beverly (the one with a woman's name, but which "is spelled differently"), awkward and clumsy, but much more gifted in the field of medical research. Initially, however, there seems to be a perfect and totally autarkic "ecosystem" between the two, closed off to external subjects, based on a sort of tacit (but not too tacit) agreement whereby each has a part of and in the life of the other ("You haven’t experienced anything I haven’t experienced. You haven’t slept with Claire unless you tell me!").
The idyll of this "dual unity" will be broken by a woman: Claire, a charming actress afflicted with a rare uterine malformation (a trifurcation), who will engage in a relationship with both brothers under the mistaken belief that they are one person. She herself is the first mutation, the "element of confusion in the Mantle brothers' saga. Probably a destructive element". It will be she who breaks ("by biting," in the only scene featuring the "Cronenbergian flesh" in its typical representation), that invisible and misshapen flesh bridge that holds the two brothers together.
Then Beverly, the humble and compliant part, begins his own personal and progressive mutation (the second): no longer willing to share everything with his brother, wanting to keep something that is exclusively his own, unable to bear even sharing the love he feels for a woman. The path that was initially a single straight line, given by the perfect merging and combining of the brothers' lives, begins to bifurcate, progressively transforming into a kind of ellipse. Beverly is soon dragged by his lover into a vortex of drugs and paranoid feelings that prevent him from seeing reality objectively. The third mutation begins, the most profound and dramatic, one that, despite starting as a purely psychic phenomenon in the protagonist's mind, spills over into the surrounding reality: to Beverly all his patients start to appear as monsters, as if each of them harbors a part of Claire's malformation ("The patients are getting stranger. On the outside, they are normal... but inside... they are deformed"), the same technology (understood as the ultimate expression and physical manifestation of the human mind), the innovative gynecological instruments through which the Mantle brothers have gained fame and success, become little more than twisted medieval torture tools (a bit like those seen in the opening titles), abortions of a disturbed and mutated mind.
At this point, Cronenberg could have, predictably, unleashed his typical gory and visionary register, that "horrid" quality that over time has become somewhat his trademark. However, one of the most interesting aspects of "Dead Ringers" lies precisely in the near total renunciation of gory and/or disgusting scenes. The impossibility of discerning the real world from the one produced by Beverly's progressively deviant mind remains something completely inscrutable to the viewer: how can we be certain that Beverly's patients do not truly suffer from some physical deformity? What are the concrete mutations that so torment the protagonist? Nothing is told, and nothing is shown.
It is as if, for this once, reality does not need to be deformed to appear in all its monstrosity. As if, for this once, it suffices to represent the extent to which morbidity and that mix of love-conflict that binds the two brothers/doubles can reach. Indeed, in the final sequences, Elliot decides not to leave his brother alone in his self-destruction, voluntarily succumbing to the same mutation: the ellipse closes, that perfect overlap of the two existences from the very first scenes is reconstituted (so much so that the two begin dressing and moving almost in unison again). And it all takes place without visual effects, without hallucinations or cinematic tricks, but simply by showing the two brothers as victims of the same physical and psychological decay.
Perhaps because the worst mutation is the one that leaves the body intact but disrupts the mind, to the point that not even death can erase its effects.
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