Horror Madness: Dead Ringers vs. Altered States

We come back once again to Horror Madness, and in this match up in the Mad Science category we meet two of the very weirdest, maddest (hottest) scientists the genre has yet produced.

On one side we have David Cronenberg’s 1988 masterpiece (and it’s not the only one of his masterpieces in this category!) Dead Ringers.

And on the other side there’s Ken Russel’s 1980 dreamscape Altered States.

See the introduction and full slate here http://oftenveryvile.ghost.io/introducing-horror-movie-madness/.

If you take the time to look at the link above and refresh your memory, you’ll see quickly that David Cronenberg is the king of the Mad Science category. If I could go back I’d maybe make separate categories for body horror and scientific/cosmic horror, but I can’t go back, and it’s just as well - this project is unwieldy enough as it is. I’ll be lucky to get through it before I’m 80. In any case - David Cronenberg is the director who, just based on numbers, is likely to take this category and maybe this whole thing. There are others who show up a few times: James Whale, of course, and John Carpenter. The underappreciated Tobe Hooper is in a few different categories. What can I say, I like what I like, and most of the people who could make a great horror movie made more than one.

Ken Russel is here only twice; he was a hell of a horror director, but he didn’t return to the genre often. That’s something I wonder about - he was obviously interested, as interested as Cronenberg was, in the horrific and the shocking. He wasn’t concerned, like Cronenberg, with exploring the limits of the human body, but in exploring the limits of human ability. He made a great many films about artists and about how they can lose their humanity and relationships in their single-minded pursuit of beauty. Altered States should best be thought of as one of them.

This provides a way into a comparison between these two films. They’re both about single-mindedness, regardless of the fact that one of them is about twins (the twins in Dead Ringers might as well be one person). They’re both about work, more so than other mad scientist films, which are often about discovery and invention, and are often about the sacrifice of humanity for the sake of that discovery, but are rarely concerned with the day-to-day, continual fascination a dedicated person feels for their work.

There isn’t one big “it’s alive” discovery scene, or even arguably a big discovery. There is, instead, a slow and methodical process of perfectionism, of perfecting a process or a tool. For the Mantle twins and Edward Jessup, what we’re seeing is a life’s work, and it’s one that doesn’t really have a beginning or necessarily an end. The goal isn’t to find one thing, it’s to keep doing the work and nothing else, forever.

Both of these films, too, are about what happens when other priorities conflict with the work, and both of those other priorities take the form of women. I’ve written about Altered States in this space before; here’s an excerpt:

“We learn that Emily gave up a professorship at Harvard for Edward’s sake. He makes no comparable sacrifice for her, until the end, when his dormant love for her causes him to save her life. Her sacrifice is not revisited. Instead, Emily becomes a symbol of love and obligation, one that tethers Edward to the real world when he almost fully retreats into his work and his fantasies…But all the way through I kept thinking about Emily. Why was she doing what she was doing? Why did she sacrifice everything for this admittedly handsome but cold and usually mean man? Why do women in stories like this always do that? Where are the stories about women whose work carries them away, who destroy relationships for the sake of discovery, and where are the men who patiently wait for them?”

In Dead Ringers relationships - however coldly and weirdly portrayed, as they tend to be in Cronenberg’s films - are central, and this might be why I like it better. It’s less beautiful than Altered States, and on a surface level it’s more emotionally remote in its tone. Jeremy Irons plays the Mantle twins as people who barely have any idea how to successfully navigate the world, and Genevieve Bujold acts like someone who has been inside the bubble of artistry and celebrity for so long that she has little knowledge of what appropriate behavior looks like. But they still feel more alive and more human than the characters in Altered States, who are instead beautiful sleepwalkers. Cronenberg is cold and remote, the camera is cold and remote, but the characters aren’t. It’s like watching a movie about humans made by an alien.

Dead Ringers, too, is plain scarier. I know some people who don’t even classify it as horror or science fiction at all; I think they’re wrong, but I can see why they don’t. The horror comes not just from the frightening images and actions, but from the realization of what the human mind can become under pressure. Jeremy Irons’s performances - and he gives two performances so seamlessly that you start thinking of him as two actors as you watch - are among the greatest ever committed to film; not just for horror film, but in anything. He’s fully engaged and committed to these characters and finds the humanity in them even (especially) as they turn into monsters. William Hurt was capable of good work, but he wasn’t this good, and if you’re scared of him while watching Altered States it’s because of how inflexible he seems throughout.

This is another pretty easy decision, ultimately. Altered States has moments of astonishing beauty, but Dead Ringers is horror at its best: it digs into the strange parts of human life better than any other genre can. Ken Russel will be back; don’t worry about him.

It’s not Uncle David’s first appearance in this bracket, nor his last, but it’s his first win. We’re giving it to Dead Ringers.