Cronenberg Greenaway

Body & Society
http://bod.sagepub.com Cronenberg, Greenaway and the Ideologies of Twinship

ELANA GOMEL and STEPHEN WENINGER Body Society 2003; 9; 19 DOI: 10.1177/1357034X030093002 The online version of this article can be found at: http://bod.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/9/3/19
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Cronenberg, Greenaway and the Ideologies of Twinship

ELANA GOMEL AND STEPHEN WENINGER
For the sign to remain pure it must become its own double, thus putting an end to what is designated. (Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death)
Seeing Double Cinematic representation has always centered on the human body, thus becoming involved in what Linda Williams called the frenzy of the visible (1989): the desire to uncover, to reveal, to see it all. This desire is epistemological as much as sexual since it is assumed that total visibility equals total intelligibility. But in gender-obsessed culture epistemology doubles back upon sexuality. Sex is the means by which a body becomes visible at all, all which qualies a body for life within the domain of cultural intelligibility (Butler, 1993: 2). But what if sexual difference is supplanted by asexual sameness? What if the visible body aunts not its gender identity but its identication with other, similar, bodies? In plainer terms, what happens when the cinematic frenzy of the visible focuses on the visibility of twinship? The two lms we discuss in this article, David Cronenbergs Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, Canada/USA, 1988: hereafter DR) and Peter Greenaways
Body & Society 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 9(3): 1935 [1357034X(200309)9:3;1935;035704]
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Body and Society Vol. 9 No. 3
A Zed and Two Noughts (Peter Greenaway, Netherlands/UK, 1985; hereafter AZ&00), appeared before the spate of the current blockbusters inspired by the advent of human cloning, such as The 6th Day. By dealing with natural cloning, the birth of identical twins, these two lms avoid rehashing the Frankenstein syndrome. Instead they focus on the poetics and politics of the corporeal economy of the Same. Twins have always been regarded as monsters, not only in the discourse of pathology, in which the latter term denotes a biological abnormality, but also in the more general sense of monstra prodigies and portents, creatures at once marvelous and ominous, venerated and feared. Like all monsters, twins are something to be seen, a spectacle, whose meaning has been subject to numerous interpretations. Siamese twins, especially, were a staple in fairs and carnival sideshows. Still today, identical twins from the world over gather annually in Twinsburg, Ohio, to seek in other twins a reassurance that they are not human oddities, while others attend the fair to gawk at them for being just that. The unagging fascination with the incarnation of ones double re-emerging forcefully in the anxieties about cloning is manifest in numerous contemporary cultural productions and is echoed in postmodernisms obsession with simulacra, replications and virtual reality. But most modern treatments of twinship in lm and ction have followed the lead of the Romantics in employing the motif as a sign of self-division (e.g. the complementary pairs in Georges Batailles LAbb C or the Siamese protagonists in John Barths Petition). Problematic subjectivity is further limited to problematic sexuality, so twinship becomes a metaphor for homoeroticism, as in Patrick Whites The Solid Mandala or Michel Tourniers Gemini (Les Mtores). The specicity of the lms we are discussing is precisely their refusal to reduce the corporeality of twinship to a mere cipher of what Edgar Allan Poe called the bi-part soul or to a transparent symbol for homosexuality. And yet exclusive focus on gender prevents critics from appreciating the full complexity of the two lms, especially Cronenbergs that has been censured for its supposed misogyny. While there are misogynist overtones in DR (and in Cronenbergs oeuvre in general), they function within a broader framework of twinship, whose meanings are irreducible to a discourse of sex, despite the many critical attempts to interpret it as such. These attempts minimize the specicity of twinship by assimilating it to other forms of relationships. For example, Elaine Showalter, in her discussion of DR, writes that it deploys twinship as a metaphor for an ultimate homoeroticism and autoeroticism (1990: 140). Thus, the story of Beverly and Elliot Mantle, based on the real-life case of two physician brothers who committed suicide, is read in terms of a Romantic trope of incestuous soul-mates. Marcie
Cronenberg, Greenaway and Twinship
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Frank concurs: In a strange way, twinship itself becomes irrelevant [in DR]; or rather, it becomes a way of explaining (and, by doubling, of emphasizing) a bond between two characters, a bond that could exist between siblings, friends, or lovers (1991: 464). While Rosenbaum and Edmison who, in a 1976 article Dead Ringers described the actual case, reject the insinuations of fraternal incest, they still insist that the real love story . . . was between the two of them and fault Cronenberg for complicating this love story by introducing the character of Claire Niveau, the brothers patient and lover (in Rosenbaum, 1991: 263). On the other hand, for some feminist critics Claire becomes a symbol of the lms misogyny. Referring to the fact that the protagonists are gynecologists who perform bizarre operations on women, Mary Russo takes the lm to task for the elision of the vanishing point which is the maternal (1994: 126). But exploration of medical misogyny does not require twin gynecologists, while a bond between two characters who are completely identical (the fact visually emphasized in the lm) is not the same as the bond between two lovers who, regardless of their genders, are always and inevitably different individuals. Jeremy Irons, who plays both brothers in Cronenbergs lm, perceptively notices that their relationship is less homoerotic than platonic, an ideal relationship, in other words, that cancels out difference of all kinds. We shall argue that in both DR and AZ&00 twinship functions as a metaphor for a paradoxical self-denial of the body. This asceticism is predicated on the erasure of difference (including, but not reducible to, sexual difference) and of substituting for it the utopian economy of sameness which renders desire irrelevant. Twinship cannot be reduced to, or explained by, the means of homoerotic rhetoric. We can even say that such a rhetoric applied to Cronenbergs depiction of the deadly embrace of gemelarity is only an inadequate facsimile for twinship. If desire is, in Lacanian terms, a metonymy for subjectivity as lack, structured around an absence, then ideal twins cannot experience it. They are locked in their imagined state of plenitude, a condition which is, in the words of a ctional twin, without lack, eternal, unchanging, stainless, its brightness immune from spot or scratch (Tournier, 1981: 302). Or as Tournier puts it elsewhere, homosexual or even incestuous is just too feeble to describe the intensity of the relation between twins (Tournier, 1988: 210). Such a reading of twinship emphasizes its relation to a problematic of identity by blur[ring] the parameters of being (Shildrick, 1999: 90). However, if Shildrick sees conjoined twins as challenging the closed, normative, singular subject with their corporeal ambiguity and uidity (1999: 78), we would argue that the ideal relationship of perfectly identical (non-conjoined) twins forecloses ambiguity and uidity by embodying a cultural and political economy of the Same.
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This ideal relation is, at the same time, monstrous. Cronenberg himself describes the twins in DR as something monstrous. They are exotic as The Fly (in Rodley, 1992: 144). This monstrosity, in all its multiple aspects, constitutes the ideological matrix through which the issues of gender, sexuality and identity are elaborated in both lms: the sub rosa ideology of twinship. This ideology and the entanglements of corporeality and politics it entails, constitutes the subject of our article. Our focus is neither on the fashionable problematic of simulacra nor on the Romantic bifurcated consciousness. Rather, we discuss the notion of twinship within the historical context of biopolitics. This context involves the historical shadow of Nazism and eugenics, as well as the recent debates on cloning and heredity. The language of biology illuminates the bizarre and violent events of both lms, in which, in the words of a Peter Greenaway character in AZ&00, evil becomes merely a dreary ction (Greenaway, 1986: 144). Rather than using twinship as an ahistorical emblem of unity, we are concerned with the deadly consequences of its historical deployment. We look at what happens when the alluring metaphor of twin souls is literalized, when an aesthetic of mind and body is used as a template for the body politic, and when a biological accident of monozygotic reproduction is elevated to an overarching law of nature. Right-wing, Left-wing In both lms the link between twinship and biomedical research is made explicit: Cronenbergs Mantle brothers are gynecologists, Greenaways Oswald and Oliver Deuce are zoologists. To explore the implications of this link the broad outline of biopolitics must be sketched. Michel Tourniers keen distinction between left-wing and right-wing biology is very useful. The former, according to him, emphasizes dependence on the environment, while the latter tends towards the tyranny of heredity, with its faith in the past (Tournier, 1988: 205). The strange dialectics of twinship, with all its philosophical tensions mind and body, necessity and accident, anatomy and destiny became central to the study of human heredity in the mid-19th century and, under the guise of cloning, continues to shape current debates on the politics of reproduction. Twins played a central role in the fateful clash between left-wing and right-wing biology. As Sir Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics and the pioneer in twin research, discerned more than a century ago, twins offer a unique opportunity to evaluate the conicting claims of nature and nurture (Galton coined this famous phrase).1 The conict between heredity and environment is not merely nor even
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primarily the conict of two scientic concepts but the contest between two modalities of evolutionary narrative and two visions of human corporeality projected by these narratives. Left-wing biology, following Darwins own rejection of teleology and progress, sees in heterogeneity and mutation the driving force of evolution. In this view, if cloning, the perfect asexual reproduction, were to become the rule rather than the exception, it would spell an end to the changeable narrative of life. In the context of right-wing biology, on the other hand, gemelarity becomes not only a living proof of the power of heredity but a paean to symmetry which, taken to its extreme, ends by viewing difference as monstrosity. The right-wing imagined anatomy rejects all otherness in favor of a symbolic economy of sameness and a denial of the materiality of the body, including gender. It is an idealist metaphysics, which attempts to impose a pure pattern upon the chaotic contingency of life and to heal the mindbody rift by effacing the latter, and thus all corporeal origin and ultimately death. The geminate ideal, therefore, is a negation of time, history, and their narration (see Tournier, 1981: 196). As we shall demonstrate, the conundrum of such a state is resolved differently in the two lms under consideration. While the twin brothers in DR feel unable in the end to escape into difference, those in AZ&00 drive themselves into a fatal likeness. Mutant Men DR combines Cronenbergs interest in sexual difference (e.g. Crimes of the Future) and the body in all its instability and unpredictability (e.g. The Fly). The story of the Mantle brothers, the twin gynecologists who operate on mutant women and end up committing suicide together in a bizarre parody of mutual surgery, focuses the directors preoccupation with corporeality. The biological horror which pervades his lms is not merely an index of the male horror and envy of womens monstrous birthing capacities (Showalter, 1990: 141), but more crucially, a confrontation with the traumatic awareness that all bodies, male or female, fail to correspond to our intentions and desires. In his cinema, mutation and transformation reect a mind/body schism which results from the very incomprehensibility of bodily demise (Martyn Steinbeck in Rodley, 1992: xiv). While it might seem to some viewers that the disturbing scenes and Gothic medical implements of the twin gynecologists mark the lm as deeply misogynist, a close reading makes it clear that the lms narrative drive lies, as Showalter herself notes, in the brothers search within womens bodies [for] the secrets of their own birth and origins (1990: 140). For Cronenberg, gynecology is an epistemological trope. It is
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A beautiful metaphor for the mind/body split. Here it is: the mind of men or women trying to understand sexual organs. I make my twins as kids extremely cerebral and analytical. They want to understand femaleness in a clinical way by dissection and analysis, not by experience, emotion or intuition. Can we dissect out the essence of femaleness? Were afraid of the emotional intimacy of womanness, but were drawn to it. How can we come to terms with it? Lets dissect it. (in Rodley, 1992: 145)
Cronenberg even denes himself as a clinician or surgeon attempting to study sexuality and the body with his cinematic scalpels (in Rodley, 1992: 151; he also appeared as a gynecologist in The Fly). Both he and Greenaway can be said to argue for a satisfactorily unidealistic appreciation of the body and mortality (Greenaway, 1991: 8). In DR, as in many of his horror lms, he impedes our analytical gaze by foregrounding, in his words, the independence of the body relative to the mind, and the difculty of the mind accepting what this revolution might entail (in Rodley, 1992: 80). In their medical practice, Beverly and Elliot Mantle feel an urgent need to reform the naturally grotesque body, most especially the female physique, which is, in their words, so different from us, all wrong and deformed. To this end, they develop the Mantle Retractor, a gynecological instrument for opening, measuring and ultimately ameliorating mutant women. By being trifurcate (possessing three cervixes), Claire Niveau, their patient and lover, exemplies the cantankerous body, which unsettles the ideal symmetry the twins are striving for. Just as their aesthetic tastes lead them to choose home furnishings of a spare modernism, their minimalist metaphysics impels these physicians to force the female form to follow its proper function to breed. What has not been sufciently recognized, however, is that for the Doctors Mantle, it is not just womans body which is monstrous, but their own as well. Cloning or twinning is the opposite of sexual reproduction, as the latter entails mutability, gene mix and fertile unpredictability.2 The abnormality of twinning lies partly in its non-variation and partly in its sheer multiplicity. But the psychic consequences of symmetrical reproduction can be even more grave. In their article, Ron Rosenbaum and Susan Edmison discuss some apt remarks by Dr Gutmacher, chair of the Gynecology Department at New Yorks Mount Sinai Hospital, where the original twin physicians were doing their residency:
All separate identical twins may be regarded as monsters who have successfully escaped the various stages of monstrosity, Guttmacher wrote. Monsters lucky enough to escape physical conjoinment must constantly be on guard against slipping back into some sort of monsterhood through psychic conjoinment. Because of the constant peril of mutually confused identities, Guttmacher comes close to calling physically conjoined monsters healthier than most ordinarily identical twins. No Siamese twins have ever been known to succumb to dementia, he points out. Nor have any thought to end the lives they are doomed to live together. (Rosenbaum, 1991: 244)
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The vocation of the Mantle twins can be read as a response to the question as to whether their biology is indeed their destiny and whether their monstrosity can be eradicated by complete control of the body. In the directors own words: So there is a double game here; the mind/body split is still very much on my mind (and possibly body too), but here the body is separated into two parts (in Rodley, 1992: 144). The twins are only too aware of themselves as freaks. Women serve as displacements of their own monstrosity. Their gynecological research is a tool with which to master not only the maternal body (Russo, 1994: 119), but their own exotic physicality as well. This mastery involves an attempt to dematerialize themselves into the static le-mme-au-mme symmetry of ideal twinship. As perfectly reduplicated signs, the Mantle brothers may avoid both messy difference and all questions of origins and ends (see Baudrillard, 1993: 75). They want to see themselves as dioscuri or boys of Zeus, transcendental signiers, needing only pure (self-)repetition. In the rst part of the lm, Bev and Elliot seem to be impervious to sexual desire. As children they probe an anatomical doll and, foreshadowing their adult terror of the sexed body, ponder the possibility of sex without touching. Their subsequent sharing of women seems merely to satisfy a physical need. And there is no need to have sex with each other, since such physicality would get in the way of perfect communion. After the intimacy of twinship, a character of Tournier remarks, no other intimacy can be felt as anything but a disgusting promiscuity (Tournier, 1981: 80). In the words of a Mantle twin, heterosexual intercourse is sleeping with mutant women. It is only when Bev falls in love with Claire that desire manifests itself as the desire for difference rather than a need for likeness, and a reluctant acknowledgement of lack emerges. By wanting this particular woman, rather than a woman, offered by Elliot, Bev shatters their self-sufcient, pre-oedipal wholeness. For the twins, women represent birth and death, the drive of difference, change and evolution. Claires difference is seen not only in terms of gender but also of mutation, accident, irreducible uniqueness. It is a difference of individuality and non-gemelarity. Thus, she represents the greatest threat and temptation to the twins, for she offers a gure of desire as an image of asymmetry. The recognition of their own freakishness is a precondition for the twins experience of desire, for only through such a self-confession can the libidinal economy of the Same be supplanted by the economy of the Other. Their (aborted) process of psychological (re)birth begins with the sexual encounter with a mutant woman and develops through drug abuse, Bevs descent into nervous collapse, sickness and botched surgeries. As their immaculate apartment
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becomes littered with garbage, the twins bodies are progressively marked with pain and suffering, the signs of individuation. They experience liberation and individuality as engendered by what Artaud calls the rst sexual division and the carnage of essences (Artaud, 1958: 31). For Cronenberg, individuality, indeed humanity, consists in coming to terms with the unique and unnished body, which forever escapes our images of purity and (self-)identity. Its mortal trajectory inscribes the path of desire. The characters in Cronenbergs later lm Crash, who obsessively re-enact car crashes in order to assign to them erotic signicance, follow the same road as the Mantle twins, who also attempt to accept the biomorphic horror of our bodies with their soft geometries (Ballard, 1990: 61, 57).3 The scandalous scene of a man making love to the wound in a womans thigh in the former lm recalls the vaginal slit on a male abdomen in Videodrome and parallels the scandal of the twins self-mutilation in DR, an attempt to break through the protective carapace (retracting the mantle). In Cronenbergs artistic vocabulary, however, both are acts of existential courage, implying a symbolic recognition of the impurity of the esh. Moreover, in both lms this recognition involves a feminization of the protagonists: in Crash, the psychoanalytical wound of femininity becomes translated into real scars, which impartially adorn the bodies of both male and female characters, while in DR the sons of Zeus splay themselves in the gynecological chair which, in their economy of the Same, represents difference, contingency and corporeality. The monstrosity of Claire and other women in DR should be read, contra Showalter, not as an expression of misogyny but its very subversion. Monstrosity is life; purity and perfection are sterility and death. Accidental Animals The anxiety and fascination with contingency and random mutations are at the core of Peter Greenaways AZ&00, in which zoologist twin brothers Oswald and Oliver Deuce become obsessed with mortality after both of their wives are killed when their car collides with a swan. The lm is replete with various myths and taxonomies used, outmoded, wholly invented, unlikely, irrelevant, or impossible (Greenaway, 1986: 14) by which humans try to come to terms with mortality and accident. They study living organisms from an apple (A) to a zebra (Z), imposing an articial teleology upon natures random selection. In one scene, the brothers cut and glue pictures of animals into matched pairs, the activity that the script describes as twinning . . . to make a logical two-animal creature (1986: 82). As detached in their taxonomical pursuits as the Mantle twins in their gynecological research, the Deuce brothers seek answers to lifes ultimate questions
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through their rational collocation of natural processes and articial structures. Symmetry is all (1986: 85). In AZ&00, just as in DR, twins are prodigies, a rare species in the human zoo (1986: 89). Women, on the other hand, represent vital mutations, the repressed site of unstable corporeality and promiscuity. Venus Milo is a storyteller, who, as her transparent name suggests, specializes in erotic tales of the Obscene Animal Enclosures (1986: 389). Alba, the driver of the fatal car and now an amputee, reminds us that accidents always occur, acts of God t only to amaze the survivor and the Insurance Company (1986: 47), even as the twins insist that it cannot be mere chance that their wives were driven in a car by a woman in a feathered costume and attacked by a swan on Swanns way. While the Deuce brothers fantasize about being stitched back into their original Siamese condition (in line with Platos philosophy of twin souls in Symposium), Alba expresses the futility of all such cultural symmetries superimposed upon the randomness and accident of corporeal being. She is only too aware of her own status as merely an excuse for medical theory or art history (1986: 7). Van Megeen, quack surgeon and self-proclaimed artist, amputates her remaining leg, and the twins, upon learning of her imminent death, ask Alba for her corpse in order to accomplish her scientic goals. She will, says Oliver, because of her leglessness, now t better into the frame. Alba replies: A ne epitaph: here lies a body cut down to t the picture (1986: 107). Finding no plan or purpose in the bodys senescence and unable to escape the torment of the asymmetrical, the twins seek to recapture an original wholeness in the perfect equipoise that is death. Hoping to arrest the inexorable progress of decay, they attempt to immortalize themselves by rigging cameras to document their own nal putrefaction after their joint suicide. But the cameras short. Like the twins death, their project has no discernible signicance. Greenaway succinctly summarizes the lms problematic: Are animals like car-crashes Act of God or mere Accidents bizarre, tragic, farcical, plotted nowadays into a scenario by ingenious storyteller, Mr. C. Darwin? (1986: 15). For an answer to this central question posed by the phenomenon of twinship, the twins of AZ&00 study organic decay, while the Mantle brothers, as haruspex gynecologists, open bodies, rst womens and nally their own. However, all they nd is what Stephen Jay Gould calls the unerasable signature of history, the traces of natures irreducible contingency inscribed in the mutability of the esh, whose details, as Darwin himself put it in his exchange with Asa Gray, whether good or bad, [are] left to the working out of what we call chance (Gould, 1989: 283, 290). Thus animals (and humans) are indeed mere accidents, and this is what allows such storytellers as Darwin to emplot them into a variety
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of strange, tragic and obscene stories. The twins in each of the lms under discussion dream of imposing order on this horrifying, chaotic fecundity of bodies and narratives, only to nd themselves, each pair in their own way, victims of their own unacknowledged vital monstrosity. The Republic of the Same While devoid of any explicit political allusions, both Cronenbergs and Greenaways lms participate in the discourse of twinship, which stretches all the way from 19th-century eugenics, through the nightmare of Nazism, to Dolly the cloned sheep and the debates over the cloning of humans. In their representation of the seductive but deadly symbolic economy of the Same, the lms reveal the dangers of right-wing biology and undermine its visions of a hereditary utopia. In this and the following sections we return to the cultural history of gemelarity, in order to situate the connection between twinship and death, epitomized by the Mantle and Deuce brothers, in its proper context, that of biopolitics. The current renaissance of hereditarianism, bolstered by the completion of the Human Genome Project and successes of genetic engineering, follows a long eclipse occasioned by the shock of Nazi eugenics. Far more sophisticated technologically, this second golden age of sociobiology (the rst was around 1900) is underwritten by the same master metaphor as the rst one: the body as a readable, unambiguous, self-consistent script. Since the mid-19th century, twin research has played an important role in this construction of the body. Identical twins have been seen as providing a dramatic illustration of the primacy of heredity. In Galtons words, twinship furnishes:
. . . instances of an apparently thorough similarity of nature, in which such difference of external circumstances as may be consistent with the ordinary condition of the same rank and country do not create dissimilarity. . . . [Thus] Nature is far stronger than Nurture within the limited range that I have been careful to assign to the latter. (quoted in Farmer, 1996: 52)
The familiar dichotomy of Nature/Nurture is here perceived in terms of similarity/dissimilarity. The twinned body provides the reassurance of self-identity. The appeal of hereditarianism lies in its ability to tame what might be called corporeal diffrance. Both on the scale of individual and of species, right-wing biology imposes a predictable pattern on the open-ended narrative of life. The way in which twinship participates in the ght against randomness and accident is reected, for example, in Kate Wilhelms science ction novel Huysmans Pets, which combines twin research with chaos theory to posit the existence of a hidden order in chaos and accident. Like the Deuce brothers, the novel refuses to accept that accidents just happen, and so the putative existence of
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correspondences in the lives of separated twins serves to neutralize the horror of indeterminacy. The mutant women of DR epitomize the nightmare of right-wing biology: the pliant, changeable, endlessly mutating body. They are monsters of difference. But the monsters of sameness have their own iconography, which is reected in the uncompromisingly pure milieu of the Mantle brothers, with their modernist furniture and severely functionalist work-tools. The connection between cloning and the aesthetics of mass production is rst made explicit in Aldous Huxleys Brave New World. In this novel twins are produced en masse. Human beings are standardized in the name of stability, and the principle of mass production is applied to biology as ninety-six identical twins [are] working ninety-six identical machines! (Huxley, 1960: 4). In the words of Walter Benjamin, the essence of mass culture lies in the substitution of a plurality of copies for a unique existence (Benjamin, 1985: 221). Benjamin, who dened fascism as an introduction of aesthetics into political life, saw the link between a plurality of copies and the fascist fascination with what Klaus Theweleit calls totality-machines, marching armies composed of fungible, eugenically perfect human components (Theweleit, 1989, vol. 2: 154). The fascist utopia is based on the visibility of the ideal body, manifested in uniform parades, mass rallies and massive male nudes in public spaces. What makes this body ideal is precisely its self-identity: racially normative, it is endlessly multiplied and yet always remains the same. Attempting to contain the messiness of sexual reproduction, Nazi eugenics disciplines the chaos of differentiated bodies. But the obverse side of this discipline is the uniformity of death by violence. Rows of faceless corpses mirror the ranks of totality-machines, stripped of their individuality. Both murder (negative eugenics), and cloning or twinning (positive eugenics in Nazi parlance), constitute attempts to supplant racial, sexual and individual difference by the economy of the Same. Even though neither Cronenberg nor Greenaway deals explicitly with fascism, both link twinship and violence in a covert reference to the cultural history of eugenics. Twin research was at the very heart of the racial hygiene and anthropology of the Third Reich. Eugen Fischer, a prominent Nazi eugenicist, called twin studies the single most important research tool in the eld of racial hygiene, while Otmar von Verschuer, Mengeles scientic patron to whom the latter submitted all the research material from Auschwitz, claimed it was the sovereign method for genetic research in human. All multiple births in the Reich were registered for the explicit purpose of isolat[ing] the effects of nature and nurture in the formation of the human racial consciousness (Proctor, 1988: 423). Far more than a scientic tool, twin research participated in the ideological narrative that
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stressed not abundance but regulation, not fertility but reproduction of exact type. This is the narrative that, in Hitlers own words, aimed to see to it that the blood is preserved pure and, by preserving the best humanity, to create the possibility of a nobler development of these beings (Hitler, 1971: 402; emphasis in the original). The twins are not only a supposedly irrefutable argument in favor of heredity over environment but an incarnation of the blood preserved pure. The Gemini are the tutelary deities of the Thousand-Year Reich. Mengeles infamous experiments on twins in Auschwitz are an acme of rightwing biology as a symbolic act. Insofar as his medical torture had any rationale, it was cast as a search for perfect and identical reproduction. Mengeles professed goal was the increase of Aryan fertility, grotesquely evidenced by his jubilation when, as a fugitive in Argentina after the war, Mengele learned that his son Rolf was about to marry a twin of good racial stock (Matalon and Dekel, 1991: 227). Searching for the secret of the mass production of identical Aryan supermen, Mengele, in the words of a prison doctor, wanted to be a God to create a new race (quoted in Lifton, 1986: 359). Cronenbergs Mantle brothers are also fertility specialists in fact, the Marcus brothers, their real-life prototypes, were so successful in their fertility treatments that one former patient claimed they were like gods (in Rosenbaum, 1991: 241). But while the sadistic structure of the concentration camp separated the divine physician from his subhuman, monstrous subjects, Cronenbergs lm reveals the intrinsic entanglement of their positions, rooted in the intransigent commonality of the esh. The twin gynecologists are simultaneously lords of life and death, loftily exercising the absolute power they have as physicians over the mutant bodies of their patients, and monsters or mutants themselves. In a sense, they are at once avatars of both Mengele and his victims. Popular culture has seized on Mengeles twins as perhaps the best-known symbol of Nazi biology. Ira Levins The Boys from Brazil (1976), later made into a lm, provides a link between eugenics and the contemporary cloning scare. When on 22 February 1997 a team of Scottish scientists introduced the rst cloned mammal, a sheep named Dolly, one of them, Dr Keith Campbell, admitted in a subsequent interview that he had enjoyed the cloning fantasy The Boys from Brazil.4 His enjoyment was, of course, quickly reinterpreted as an expression of scientic hubris. But in the subsequent vociferous debates over the clash of nature and culture, the historicity of both concepts has been conveniently effaced. The danger of cloning/twinning lies not in any supposed violation of natural law but in its entanglement with the deadly corporeal ideologies of purity and sameness. The Boys from Brazil reects a current aporia of nature and nurture,
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epitomized in its treatment of twins. In the book and the lm, the exiled Dr Mengele (still alive when Levins novel was published) manufactures cloned copies of Hitler and then dispatches agents to murder the little Adolfs adoptive fathers, thus reduplicating the psychological history of the original. Levins Mengele seems to want it both ways, to rely on heredity and yet reinforce it with environment. In the climactic scene, one Adolf assists in the killing of Mengele (primacy of nurture) but the novel ends with another clone imagining himself as a crowd-commanding demagogue (primacy of nature). Like the Mantle brothers, striving for separation yet locked in their fatal likeness, The Boys from Brazil is positioned on the fault-line between right- and left-wing biology that cleaves postmodern culture. But the books explicit focus on Nazism also reects the way in which twinship becomes a metaphor for the problematic of history. The ambiguity of twinship, its duality in [the] mode of self-contradiction (Lash, 1993: 6), functions as a gure for the contemporary ambiguity toward Nazism itself. On the one hand, the Nazi emphasis on heredity is unmasked as a monstrous fallacy, Hitlers twins being but innocent children. Thus, Nazism is implicitly represented as a mistake, a bout of historical madness, paralleled by what appears to be Mengeles incipient insanity. On the other hand, if even one of Hitlers clones becomes a simulacrum of the Fuhrer, Nazi eugenics is proven right, an even more monstrous idea. Just as the scientic study of twins provides whatever answer the researcher is looking for, the cloned Hitlers display the conundrum of Nazism: is its evil a historical accident, a chance concatenation of unique cultural forces, or is it somehow deeply rooted in human nature (not to mention the lingering debates over the German national character)? The politics of the monstrous body makes visible (monstrare) the metaphors we live by and die for. Soft Watches, Hard Facts As Gould points out in his Wonderful Life, the clash between the right- and left-wing paradigms in biology, the ladder of progress and the tree of life, constitutes the single most important point of contention in evolutionary theory over the last hundred years. But its implications, as we have argued, go far beyond science and impinge on our understanding of the nature of history itself. Is history a tale of contingency, a picaresque novel of bizarre, tragic, farcical . . . acts of God fit only to amaze the survivors, as Alba puts it in AZ&00, or is it an unfolding of design, a sort of Bildungsroman? Discussing his two kinds of biology, Tournier points out that for the purposes of myth, tragic
32
narrative and drama, contingency is not as compelling as essence (Tournier, 1988: 208), which is to say that aesthetic preferences lead us to adopt what may be a politically dangerous view of life. Like the twins in AZ&00, we desire to impose a symmetrical grid of significance onto historys prolific and contradictory stories, to ease our confrontation with contingency and the closure of death. The metaphorical connection between the symmetry of twinship and the predictability of a teleological life narrative is trenchantly summed up in Galtons reading of the apparent similarity of twins lives:
We are too apt to look upon illness and death as capricious events, and there are some who ascribe them to the direct effect of supernatural interference, whereas the fact of the maladies of two twins being continually alike shows that illness and death are necessary incidents in a regular sequence of constitutional changes beginning at birth and upon which external circumstances have, on the whole, a very small effect. In cases where the maladies of the twins are continually alike, the clocks of their two lives move regularly and at the same rate, governed by their internal mechanism. When the hands approach the hour, there are sudden clicks, followed by whirring of wheels; the moment that they touch it, the stroke falls. Necessarians may derive new arguments from the life-histories of twins. (quoted in Farmer, 1996: 55, emphases added)
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this passage is the metaphor of the clock. The connection between timepieces and teleology goes back to William Paleys well-known treatise Natural Theology (1802), which purports to deduce Gods benevolent blueprint from the study of Nature. In its opening passages, Paley describes coming across a watch lying on the beach and realizing that the sophistication of its design presupposes the existence of a designer, however out of reach. Similarly, the argument goes, living beings, who are at least as intricate as timepieces, bear the marks of a divine craftsman. For Paley, as for Galton later, nature is a massive clock whose symmetry and regularity excludes the capriciousness of accident. The metaphor of the timepiece reaches its logical and unsettling conclusion in a eugenicist treatise of 1900 by W. Duncan McKim, which advocates a gentle and painless death (by carbonic gas, no less) of the genetically inferior who obstruct the stately march of progress. This is no cruelty but the necessary maintenance of the clockwork of natural selection, since External nature is, as it were, a great chronometer, the action of which is absolutely perfect (McKim, 1900: 211). From teleology and design, through the regularities of twinship and cloning, to the extermination of the unt, the chronometer of right-wing biology chimes the hours of its own catastrophe. Unlike Dalis famous soft watches, which exemplify the dissolution of ideal geometries into organic ux, the clocks of twinship crystallize life into a succession of regular displays. Paul, the twin in Gemini who desires to maintain the geminate cell of pure stasis, is obsessed with barometers and measuring devices
33
(Tournier, 1981: 128, 451). The Mantle brothers inject narcotics in order (in Elliots words) to get synchronized, and round out their lives by dying on their birthday. In a nal attempt to deny the contingency of life, the Deuce brothers frame their deaths in a series of time-lapse photographs. Twinship in the lms of Greenaway and Cronenberg cannot be understood outside the historical context of biopolitics. Neither mythological interpretations of twins as eternal archetypes nor postmodern readings in terms of the culture of the copy are sufcient to account for the cultural resonance of gemelarity reverberating through the debate over cloning. What ultimately drives the twins of DR and AZ&00, the eugenicists of the 19th century and the mad biocrats of the 20th and 21st, is a utopian desire to foreclose the risks of individual and social history in a reproduction of the Same. Such utopian thinking, observed Isaiah Berlin, has always presumed that human society grows:
. . . in a governable direction, governed by laws; that the borderline which divided science and utopia . . . was discoverable by reason and observation and could be plotted less or more precisely; that, in short, there was a clock, its movement followed discoverable rules and it could not be put back. (Berlin, 1997: 9)
The historical consequences of such a monist faith that the laws of the individual body and the body politic can be measured and directed are known only too well. The symmetries of art and the ctions of pure duplication are necessary consolations but all attempts to literalize these utopian illusions invariably result in apocalyptic monstrosities. Notes
1. More recently Stephen Jay Gould remarked in The Mismeasure of Man that the study of twins seems to be the only adequate natural experiment for separating genetic from environmental effects in humans (1996: 236), with the crucial addendum, however, that such natural experiments are guaranteed to provide whatever results the researcher seeks. Gould chronicles the IQ theories of Sir Cyril Burt as a cautionary tale of the inherent duplicity of twinship. 2. Rene Zazzo quotes an identical twin on his feelings for his brother: Yes, I love women, thats not the issue. To make love ne; but to tie yourself to a woman for life, thats crazy. You wouldnt understand youre not a twin. A man like you must be looking in love for another self. But we twins, weve had this alter ego, this double, right from day one. When youve experienced the intimacy of twinship, all other kinds seem like pale imitations altogether illusionary. Sexual union with a woman is great, of course. But she remains an unknown how can you pair for life with an unknown? (Le Paradoxe des Jumeaux, quoted in Farmer, 1996: 146) 3. In ordinary horror lms the monstrous body marks the boundary of humanity (see Tudor, 1995). In both DR and Crash, however, the descent of the body into monstrosity and mutilation signies its humanization, as both the Mantle brothers and the characters in Crash learn to accept the contingency and vulnerability of the esh.
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4. See the column by Michael Specter and Gina Colata, After Decades of Missteps, How Cloning Succeeded (New York Times, 3 March 1997).
References
Artaud, Antonin (1958) The Theatre and Its Double. New York: Grove. Ballard, J.G. (1990) The Atrocity Exhibition. San Francisco: Re/Search. Barth, J. (1968) Petition, in Lost in the Funhouse. New York: Doubleday. Bataille, George (2001) LAbb C, trans. Philip A. Facey. London: Marion Boyars. Baudrillard, Jean (1993) Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. London: Sage. Benjamin, Walter (1985) Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken. Berlin, Isaiah (1997) The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History, edited by Henry Hardy. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Butler, Judith (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Routledge. Farmer, Penelope (1996) Two, or the Book of Twins and Doubles: An Autobiographical Anthology. London: Virago. Frank, Marcie (1991) The Camera and the Speculum: David Cronenbergs Dead Ringers, Publications of the Modern Language Association 106: 45970. Gould, Stephen Jay (1989) Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. New York: W.W. Norton. Gould, Stephen Jay (1996) Mismeasure of Man. London: W.W. Norton. Greenaway, Peter (1986) A Zed and Two Noughts. London: Faber. Greenaway, Peter (1991) The Physical Self. Rotterdam: Catalogue for an Exhibition at the Boymansvan Beumingen Museum. Hitler, Adolf (1971) Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifin. Huxley, Aldous (1960) Brave New World. London: Bantam. Lash, John (1993) Twins and the Double. London: Thames and Hudson. Levin, Ira (1976) The Boys from Brazil. New York: Dell Publishing. Lifton, Robert Jay (1986) Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books. Matalon, Lucette L. and Sheila C. Dekel (1991) Children of the Flames: Dr Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz. New York: Morrow. McKim, W. Duncan (1900) Heredity and the Human Progress. New York: Knickerbrocker. Paley, William (1807) Natural Theology, or Evidences and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature, 11th edn. London: R. Faulder and Sons. Proctor, Robert N. (1988) Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rodley, Chris (ed.) (1992) Cronenberg on Cronenberg. London: Faber. Rosenbaum, Ron (ed.) (1991) Travels with Dr Death and Other Unusual Investigations. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rosenbaum, Ron and Susan Edmison (1991) Dead Ringers, in Ron Rosenbaum (ed.) Travels with Dr Death and Other Unusual Investigations. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Russo, Mary (1994) Twins and Mutant Women: David Cronenbergs Dead Ringers, pp. 10727 in The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity. New York: Routledge. Shildrick, Margrit (1999) This Body which Is Not One: Dealing with Difference, Body & Society 5(23): 7792. Showalter, Elaine (1990) Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Sicle. New York: Viking. Theweleit, Klaus (1989) Male Fantasies, 2 vols. Oxford: Polity Press.
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Tournier, Michel (1981) Gemini, trans. Anne Carter. London: Collins. Tournier, Michel (1988) The Windspirit: An Autobiography, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Boston, MA: Beacon. Tudor, Andrew (1995) Unruly Bodies, Unquiet Minds, Body & Society 1(1): 2541. Williams, Linda (1989) Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible. Berkeley: University of California Press. Elana Gomel teaches at the Department of English of Tel-Aviv University, Israel. Her elds of interest include literature and biology, science ction, narrative theory and utopia. Her articles have appeared in Textual Practice, Poetics Today, Science Fiction Studies and other journals. Her book Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject is forthcoming from Ohio State University Press. Stephen Weninger currently teaches at Hong Kong Baptist University. His elds of interest include aestheticism, urban studies, and the 19th-century novel. His work has appeared in The Journal of PreRaphaelite Studies, Victorians Institute Journal and Utopian Studies.

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Body & Society

http://bod.sagepub.com Cronenberg, Greenaway and the Ideologies of Twinship

Cronenberg, Greenaway and the Ideologies of Twinship

Body and Society Vol. 9 No. 3

Cronenberg, Greenaway and Twinship

Body and Society Vol. 9 No. 3

Cronenberg, Greenaway and Twinship

Body and Society Vol. 9 No. 3

Cronenberg, Greenaway and Twinship

Body and Society Vol. 9 No. 3

Cronenberg, Greenaway and Twinship

Body and Society Vol. 9 No. 3

Cronenberg, Greenaway and Twinship

Body and Society Vol. 9 No. 3

Cronenberg, Greenaway and Twinship

Body and Society Vol. 9 No. 3

Cronenberg, Greenaway and Twinship

Body and Society Vol. 9 No. 3

Cronenberg, Greenaway and Twinship

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