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The strange case of Dr Mantle and Dr Mantle: David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers

Confronting the reading of the film Dead Ringers (1988), the reader resists it by insisting that the nature of its psychological themes are open to all kinds of narrative interpretations with no prospect of reducing any one of them to a correct one. This is a way of stating what has always been tacitly known: that there is no single point of view but a tide of shifting ones, and, like waves breaking from one image or word to another, they bounce, covering and disclosing the ambiguities and complexities of human nature. The actual potential space of the analytic situation defeats the analyst’s attempt to achieve a single theoretical point of view because the emerging narrative has simultaneously been dictated by the other listener – the analysand. For the analyst is not the only recipient of communication in the psychoanalytic dialogue. This point is neatly implied by Schafer: ‘‘The end product of this interweaving of texts is a radically new, jointly authored work or way of working’’ (1983, p. 219). It is equally evident that the analyst even influences the communication of the patient’s material (Klauber, 1986). In short, the point I want to make is that film analysis is something similar to what happens in an analytic session, and which has much in common with Bion’s legendary invitation to attend the analysis without ‘‘memory or desire’’ (Bion, 1970, p. 41). Fortunately, however, this film offers to this reader a ‘front row view’ of a comprehensive range of emotions that allures one to reflect, and respond psychoanalytically to the interweaving of what, at first, seems complex and puzzling, helping to bring about a sense of an overall recognition and understanding. What follows, then, is doubtless a highly personalized response to a remarkably instructive film about the fascinating mystery of twin brothers and their fate. Dead Ringers represents Cronenberg’s final resolution to be a film director in a new, serious sense, marking both a decisive moment in his career and a