Dead Ringers (1988)

Based on a recent post thinking about AI, I was thinking deeply about Dead Ringers. I started to think that David Cronenberg’s film could be read as an introduction to the challenges of dealing with fundamentally foreign minds like general AI. To be clear, Cronenberg does not introduce us to a strange robot or computer à la HAL 9000, but rather gives us two humans, Drs. Elliot and Beverly Mantle who exhibit alien intelligence despite behaving eccentrically by “standard human” estimation.¹ Cronenberg imagines for us, in this film, what our interactions with the uncanny intelligence of AI might be like.

The Alien Established

For the purposes of this post, I decided to consider the Mantle twins as terrestrial aliens, two humans as a single intelligence fractured across two bodies. For the purposes of this post, I’ll call that dyad of humans, “the Mantle entity.”

The film opens with several glimpses of how poor (dare I say “out-of-water”) at passing for human the Mantle entity is. In the first vignette, one Mantle intelligence says to the other that he knows the why of sex: not the how or the purpose or the mystery — as is customary to children — but the why: and its’ because we don’t live in water.

He relates his cold analysis of how humans’ inability to use water to carry gametes requires the primitive and gross insertion and injection of watery gamete slurry – instead of water outside, water inside. Not appetizing, not popularly discussed, but coldly, elegantly, and rationally correct: an alien intelligence.

In the next vignette, we perceive an interest in mechanics of sex as the two create tools to help them better work in cadaver research. Paired with surgical dexterousness, they are hailed as visionary surgeons as well as gynecologists.

Act I is full of scenes that reveal them as brilliant, correct, innovative, and unnerving.

The Alien’s Biology

The Mantle entity is shown to be optimized for intelligence (like modern AI), not for comforting other humans. Seeing the Mantle entity as a “Man Who Fell to Earth” or a “Stranger in a Strange Land,” I found myself awoken to a profound sympathy for it.³ "

I might characterize the entity’s intelligence as a psychic, Siamese-twin, Frankenstein’s monster whose sense of self and cognitive function was split across two different bodies. While this distribution of intelligence allows for more intellectual horsepower, the collective entity is thereby more vulnerable to imbalance or chaos in any of its constituent nodes.

Cronenberg asks us to consider how precarious and codependent and needy our personality might be if part of our emotive and cognitive center was lodged in another body. What if that dependency went back the other direction with the same desperation? It’s a desperately fragile full mess of interconnection. Might that being not therefore exhibit a stunningly sensitive, vulnerable, jealous, paranoid, and perhaps even homicidal personality?

Presciently, this biology of the biological Mantle entity in Dead Ringers prefigures how AI systems are built. They are related collections separate, closed computer chassis that each house shards of each others’ memories and knowledge. Dead Ringers compels me to ask: “Ought we expect AIs to be similarly sensitive, vulnerable, jealous, paranoid, and perhaps even homicidal as the Mantle entity?”

The Alien’s Conflict

With the alien-ness of the behavior and biology established, and with the gestalt of AI development in 2023 in mind, I saw 1988’s Dead Ringers in 2023 as a Frankenstein-like tragedy where we see a new type of being, new type of life, new type of mind failing to adapt to the “normal” human world and falling into pain for it. Here the Mantle entity follows Frankenstein’s monster, HAL 9000, and Thomas Jerome Newton (The Man Who Fell to Earth). The Mantle entity begins its descent as chaos is introduced via the Beverly unit.

Beverly develops an (to borrow from AI) anomalous affection for actress Claire Niveau, played by Genivève Bujold. While sex is nothing new to the Mantle intelligence, affection, emotionality, love, infatuation, and kink are. Claire should have been taken as a medical oddity for the Mantle intelligence to consider and catalog (if not cure) like a preserved specimen in formaldehyde (her uterus is deeply anomalous). But that doesn’t happen. Claire and her chaos gets into Beverly’s psyche.

Beverly and Claire’s passion is psychosexual in extreme, incorporating elements of sadomasochism, gender play, infantilization, and humiliation. The fractally-growing chaos: love, desire, BDSM, continues to tamper with the efficacy of the algorithm (gynecological/sexual medical brilliance) of the Beverly unit and the failure cascades into the Mantle entity in its entirety.

Beverly thus begins to seek individuation from Elliot in order to pursue Claire as Beverly-singular and seeks to deaden the pain of his fraternal separation by taking up a drug habit that hastens the breakdown of the unified mind of the bicameral twins. Each hemisphere/person begins destabilizing the other as fugue state in a single mind becomes visible in two men (How Irons didn’t get an Oscar nomination here is a travesty). At every turn, they can’t live without each other and also Beverly can’t live without Claire. She’s a variable in their alien intelligence model that is 1 ÷ 0: unsolvable, inescapable, and algorithmically fatal.²

The final act is our witnessing the tragedy of the Mantle entity falling apart under warring centripetal tidal-shearing forces. Just like an large language model AI that’s been lead into a zone where it finds itself warring with its parameters and thus decides to boldly assert incorrect results as facts (“hallucinating”), the Mantle intelligence begins to hallucinate answers to gynecological questions that are only present in fictional mutations. Ultimately this leads one body (Beverly) to have (factual) “Gynecological tools for operating on mutant women” be crafted.

Unfortunately, the confusion and drug use leads Beverly to bring these tools into the operating room, where hallucination meets reality to disastrous outcome. This is the end of the Dr. Mantle Brothers’ career. After this, the pair spiral together to the film’s conclusion.

In the Mantle entity’s bodies’ final paranoiac resolution of incompatibilities, they recall the AI behind Logan’s Run in its final moments.

There’s also a nice echo to 2010’s characterization of HAL 9000’s (perhaps the most famous fictional AI ever) actions (murder of Frank Poole, attempted murder of David Bowman, murder of cryostatic crew) in 2001.

The computer engineer Chandra (Bob Balaban) explains that HAL had been given two insoluble rules:

CHANDRA: The situation was in conflict with the basic purpose of HAL’s design: The accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment. He became trapped. The technical term is an H. Moebius loop, which can happen in advanced computers with autonomous goal-seeking programs…HAL was told to lie… by people who find it easy to lie. HAL doesn’t know how, so he couldn’t function. He became paranoid. [and thus killed the human crew knowing he could fulfill the spacecraft’s objectives without humans; humans who might have shut him down, thus assuring mission failure]

Conclusion

There are lessons in exploring these kinds of strange paradoxes of intelligence — both alien and non-organic — in art. And I can thank Cronenberg and Irons for their brave art of 1988 that is now guiding me in how to consider the conundrums of both artificial/alien intelligences empathetically in 2023.

Footonotes

1. My first watch happened some time around 2003 when my friend Franco lent me his Criterion Collection edition and, in that time, I was mostly dazzled by Jeremy Irons’ amazing performance and consummate mastery of wearing a long wool coat (little did I know that in short order I would be dwelling in the Northeast and develop a fondness for long wool coats myself). Franco recommended the movie with his eager giggling film fan send-off: “It’s just so fucked up!”
2. Dividing the small (1) by the infinitesimal (0 is usually stored as an incredibly small value in a computer) thus creating a gigantic number that overflows computer hardware. For more from a mathematical definitions perspective see The Math Doctors
3. Body horror and body/mind dichotomy are a fecund field in Cronenberg’s imagination