Cronenberg’s unique drama draws him to unsteady and un-plotted territory. In this portrayal of Gynaecologist twin brothers (the Mantel Brothers) and their attempt at separation Cronenberg addresses the duality of human existence. As the 2 brothers fall into a love triangle with actress Claire Niveau the brothers separate. One falls in love with the junky actress and one gets drawn into work commitments.



As the brothers separate they get closer to their lives falling apart. A sliding slope into drug abuse and insanity sets in and the brother’s lives spiral out of control. Cronenberg tries to engage with the idea of what twin-ness is and what it is to be twinned.

Throughout film history the emblem of the twin have cropped up as a metaphor, but has never been tackled head on, in films such as the original Dead Ringer (1964), Twins, and The Parent Trap, their twin-ess has always been sidelined and never truly investigated as solid subject matter.

The twins in this film - Elliot and Beverly - sit as an analogy for the 2 sides of the brain; Elliot the male predator and lustful deviant and Beverly as the coy, reserved and hardworking alter-ego.

In the tagline “2 bodies, 2 minds, 1 soul” Cronenberg depicts the brothers as “Siamese Twins of the soul”, 2 separate physical people joined, not physically but linked with a powerful bond. The twins are depicted as a fantasy creature, something of myth and as they wander around their fish tank apartment and create crustacean like surgical instruments, linked with the opening lines from the Mantel Brothers as small boys (along with the fact Mantel is the name given to a crabs shell) the brothers become aquatic as an analogy to their otherness, a life and existence that we can only imagine. This Otherness is flipped (or mirrored) when Beverly creates his “Instruments for operating on mutant women”. As he slips into madness he makes everyone else the genetic anomaly.



In this “doubling” of the ego by Cronenberg it throws up a lot of problems to do with the idealness of self, Beverly has what is characteristically and I would argue characterised as the female persona of the twins. In the scene where Claire questions him about his “female” name he becomes defensive and argues that is spelt differently, he tries to emulate his brother’s sexually aggressive behaviour and thus shies away from his feminised persona, ashamed of his feminine qualities and seeing them as a hindrance rather than an attribute and creating in his mind the ideal male in his brother.

This portrayal, coupled with the research that came out of Minneapolis around the same time, showing that Twins that are separated before they are aware of their siblings (thus not knowing that they are a twin) will grow up smoking the same cigarettes, living on streets and marrying partners with the same name gives the film a feeling of Biological Determinism. The brothers had no choice but to try and separate and in doing so they had no choice but to self destruct…