Jeremy Irons in David Cronenberg's The Ringing Dead Credit & Copyright: Alami
David Cronenberg first read about the Marcus twins in a newspaper . He remembered a tabloid headline that had caught his attention: «Two Doctor Twins Found Dead in Luxury Home.»
The story was unique. In July 1975, gynecological twins Stuart and Cyril Marcus were found dead at the age of 45. They were OB/GYN superstars—infertility specialists for the great and good men of New York—but their lives were steeped in barbiturate addiction. The bodies were found amidst stomach-churning squalor—garbage, excrement, and dozens of pill bottles.
Stuart died first, face down on the bed; his features have already decayed. After Stuart's death, Kirill left the apartment, but for unknown reasons returned to his brother's body. It was later determined that Stewart had died from an overdose of Nembutal, a barbiturate the twins were taking in huge amounts. But the cause of Cyril's death was never determined.
There were reports of malpractice caused by drug use and strange behavior.
Cronenberg read a 1976 article about twins in Esquire. In an interview years later, Cronenberg recalled thinking, «Someone should make a movie about this!» Indeed, the Marcus twins were the inspiration for his psychological drama The Death Ringers, starring Jeremy Irons as Elliot and Beverly Mantle, now reimagined for the Amazon Prime series of the same name, starring Rachel Weisz as the twins.
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The original Cronenberg film has been in the making since 1980. Producer Mark Boyman recalls that he was turned down by all the studios. Even for David Cronenberg, whose films then included the flesh-melting charms of Videodrome and The Fly, this was a bit out of the ordinary. “Let me put it this way,” Boyman says. «David and I came up to you and said: «We want to make a film about identical twins, perverted gynecologists. Do you agree?»
Eventually, a film was released in September 1988 that tells a fictionalized version of the story of Stewart and Cyril Marcus. It was also partly based on the novel The Twins by Bary Wood and Jack Guiseland, which itself is partly based on Marcuse. The twin doctors in the book have an incestuous relationship that takes the story to places that Cronenberg was not interested in. Instead, he wrote his own version of the story.
«Beverly and Elliot are not the Marcus twins,» Cronenberg told Newsday in 1988. “I came up with my characters.” However, the resemblance is troubling.
Stuart and Cyril Marcus were born in Binghamton, New York on June 2, 1930. Stuart appeared first, followed a few minutes later by Cyril. They were bright children—student rather than athletic—and Stewart, more charming and affable to the twins, was central to society and to their many academic accomplishments. This dynamic has continued: Stewart is a confident frontman, Cyril is a background player.
Stewart and Cyril Marcus, the inspiration behind the Dead Ringers
They grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, although they later pretended to wealthy patients that they had grown up in a prettier town. The Marcus' path through college and medical school was, appropriately, identical. According to an Esquire article, also referred to by Ron Rosenbaum and Susan Edmiston as «The Death Ringers», the Marcuses had the same corpse in anatomy class. But they struggled to play well with others. The head gynecologist of their residency at Mount Sinai Hospital called them «arrogant, resentful of criticism and disobedient to orders.»
“They were schizoids,” said psychiatrist Linda Wolfe, who also wrote about the twins for New York Magazine. “When they talked to you — and most of the time they didn’t talk to anyone, only to each other — you got the distinct impression that their answers were artificial, that they didn’t really have the same emotions that other people did it, but imitated other people's emotions, trying to emulate them.”
During their stay at Mount Sinai Hospital, a senior physician, Dr. Alan Guttmacher, also a gynecologist, twin and twin expert, separated the Markus family. Guttmacher was of the opinion that twins were «monsters» (a term once used in the medical world for Siamese twins).
Genevieve Bujold and Jeremy Irons in «Death Calls» By: Alami
This is exactly how the Dead Ringers looked at their twins. “For this story, we assumed that identical twins are, in fact, Siamese twins […] who ended up separated,” Boyman says. The idea is brought to life at the most Cronenberg moment of the film: a nightmarish scene in which the twins are connected by a connecting tunnel of flesh — a manifestation of extreme separation anxiety.
Boyman recalls visiting the University of Minnesota to meet with twins and an expert on identical twins. “They told me to watch them eat,” he says. “It was very interesting how they all arranged knives and forks in the same way. I also learned that identical twins almost always develop their own language that only the two of them know.» Boyman adds: «If people didn't have identical twins, you might think this is science fiction.»
There is a question about whether the Marcus twins were identical or fraternal twins. Cyril once stated that they are not identical, a statement repeated by Linda Wolfe. But they were so similar that even their mother couldn't tell. If either of the twins caused trouble as children, she spanked them both, just to be sure.
Dr. Guttmacher managed to separate them. He sent Stewart to a hospital in California; Kirill stayed in New York. During the separation, Cyril married and eventually gave birth to two children. Stuart remained a bachelor all his life. As Wolfe detailed, Stewart was engaged, but his fiancée broke him off. He was «terribly impersonal and aloof» and showed no sexual interest in her.
Rachel Weisz in the new version of Dead Ringers by Amazon
A few years later, Stewart reunited with Cyril in New York. They ran a fertility clinic at a New York hospital and ran a private practice. They published a leading book on obstetrics and gynecology and attracted well-mannered, wealthy women. They used a variety of drugs, methods, and procedures to help women have children—women who had unsuccessfully visited other gynecologists. «Many of the women in this office were Charlie's last chance,» one patient told Rosenbaum and Edmiston for Esquire. Patients also described them as «like gods» and «miracle workers».
«Death Calls» accurately captures the dynamics of the job: Stuart was the hound for fame and Cyril did the work (in «Death Ringers» Elliot accepts awards and Beverly sweats hard over their research). Other reports describe Stuart as a pendant and Cyril as a perfectionist, but both are prone to outbursts of anger, especially when questioned. Before writing about them for New York Magazine, Linda Wolfe was a patient but left when Stewart got mad at her. The nurse also claimed that Cyril threw sterilized instruments at her.
When Stewart became an assistant professor, Cyril had to deal with the day-to-day gynecological routine of their practice. It is not known when Cyril started taking drugs, but it has been reported that he took amphetamines to get through the long hours and nightly emergency calls. Kirill's wife divorced him, starting a downward spiral.
In the summer of 1972, Kirill lost consciousness — a suspicion of an overdose or a possible stroke. A handyman from the building raised the alarm. He called Stuart, explaining that he thought something was wrong in Cyril's apartment. At some odd moment, Stuart fell silent. After a moment, he said: «You're right, something is wrong.» When they found Cyril, Stuart hesitated. He instructed the handyman to give Kirill mouth-to-mouth, and not to do it himself, until the arrival of another doctor.
From that moment on, Stewart took great care of his brother. He moved closer to Cyril—reports vary, sometimes in the same building, sometimes several blocks away—and they dined together, traveled together, and both got jobs as surgeons in an abortion clinic.
But the Marcus twins had something in common: a rapid, increasingly introverted, drug-related decline. When they drank a huge amount of barbiturates, strange reports went out: the brothers claimed that they were impersonating each other and slurring; canceling meetings as their practice has fallen into disrepair; unpaid bills and a strange aversion to filling out paperwork — which led to an investigation.
In April 1974, Kirill fell out of the operating room before the operation. Hospital staff were ordered to keep a close eye on them. Another gynecologist told the New York Times that they were «really out of their minds» at the time. The Marcuses denied that they had a drug problem, but were eventually fired from their hospital posts.
The technician was the first to notice the smell coming from Cyril's apartment. When the repairman and the cops stormed through the door, the apartment was, in the words of one officer, a «pigsty»: half-eaten sandwiches, rubbish, dirty plates, unwashed linen, chicken bones, and the remnants of an unbridled addiction to pills. The brothers used the chair as a toilet rather horribly.
It appears that between July 10 and 14, Stewart overdosed on Nembutal and died. Cyril left the apartment, but returned. How exactly Cyril died has never been fully explained. There were no barbiturates in his system, so there was no overdose; there were no signs of convulsions associated with death from barbiturate withdrawal. The only explanation was malnutrition — he allowed himself to rot next to his brother.
For David Cronenberg, the intrigue was not so much the events associated with their death as the twins themselves. «I don't think it was a murder mystery,» says Mark Boyman. “It was a personal characteristic mystery.”
Cronenberg is so often labeled as a demeaning body horror. «Calls of Death» is more naturalistic, but still unorthodox: Elliot and Beverly live in a yuppie dream world; in surgery, they wear red robes, like something out of a satanic ritual. There are visceral Cronenberg strokes. When actress Claire Nivot (Genevieve Bujold) arrives for an appointment, they are fascinated by her «triangular cervix»; Beverly later creates gynecological instruments for the abnormal genitalia of «mutant women» — the instruments may be one of Jeff Goldblum's insectoid limbs in The Fly.
Rachel Weisz as Elliot/Beverly. Image Credit & Copyright: Nico Tavernis/Prime Video
But the real connective tissue that connects The Dead Bell Ringers to other Cronenberg films is the boundaries and sense of the body and self, often extended by the mechanisms in his films. In Dead Ringers, twins are one body split in two. “It raises questions of personal identity,” Boyman says. “That's what's worrying. For our society to work, you have a personal identity—a name, a driver's license, a perimeter of the self. In the case of these identical twins—and all identical twins—the troubling question arises: where does the “I” stop? What is the perimeter? Obviously, in extreme cases of identical twins, the line can be blurred.”
Cronenberg didn't need total body horror to make studio executives squeamish. Gynecology was quite uncomfortable. “I must have set up 40 different venues in Hollywood,” Boyman says. «We were often asked, 'Can't you make them twin lawyers?' Cronenberg noted that «of course they were all men.» (Executives who were squeamish about Cronenberg's proposal would likely have fainted during the caesarean section and birth montage in the Rachel Weisz series' first episode.)
The stars have also been set aside. “I remember some actors telling me that they would literally go crazy to play these roles,” Boyman says. “I will not name names, but many Hollywood celebrities turned us down. Then Jeremy showed up.”
It's an eerie performance by Irons. Few doubt that Elliot and Beverly are two men. Not only does Irons convince you that these are different characters, he often plays one while pretending to be the other.
Here he played shades of a different character and shot scenes out of order, says Boyman. “And he will have to go back to being another twin in the morning. He first asked me if he could have two dressing rooms.”
Therein lies the film's biggest invention: the love triangle between Elliot, Beverly, and their actress patient Claire. Elliot seduces her and then hands her over to the more withdrawn, clumsy Beverly, a recurring pattern of abuse. Unbeknownst to Claire, she is sleeping with both twins. But Beverly falls in love with her; his love is the first thing that cannot be shared between Elliot and Beverly.
As Elliot warns Beverly, he didn't actually have sex with Claire until Beverly told him everything. It's not real until it becomes a shared experience. It is alarming that the doctor who worked with the Marcus twins and became pregnant described something similar. Both twins insisted on having her enlargement checked. According to her, it was «completely unnecessary.» “But they did it anyway. As if a man couldn't do something without sharing what he's doing with his brother.»
The idea of impersonating each other, while taken to extremes in the film, also rings true. Stuart Marcus boasted that they had fooled the patients by switching places, presumably during the vaginal exam as well. Stewart could also take Cyril's place — in person and by phone — after his collapse.
Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers Credit & Copyright : Alami
When Kirill appeared before the medical board, he was suspiciously charming. Could it really be Stuart? Elliot does the same to Beverly in «Dead Bell Ringers» when in front of a medical board after Beverly — in a barely coherent state during surgery — stabs a woman with one of his monstrous instruments and rips off her anesthesia mask. The instruments are Cronenberg's invention, but the scene is based on a real incident where one of the Marcus twins actually tripped during surgery and ripped off the patient's anesthetic mask.
As disturbing as it may sound, the drug abuse seen in Deathbinders is only a small part of the real story. The New York Hospital later stated that the Marcuses did not pose a risk to patients, but others argued otherwise. Cyril at one point attempted to circumcise a newborn with a scalpel without a blade (a mistake that Stewart later repeated). In another story, the hand of one of the twins was shaking so badly during the operation that another doctor had to be called. Shortly before their death — on the last day of the Markus' stay in the hospital — one of the Markus' patients was hospitalized, apparently with a miscarriage. . Cyril confessed that he then disappeared; when Stuart arrived three hours later, he was promiscuous and did not notice that she was bleeding. He tried to send her home before the other doctors took over.
The origin of Elliot and Beverly Jeremy Irons is close to the reality of the Marcus twins. They have to share everything: even drug addiction. The movie twins end up in the same squalor as the Marcuses (they even eat birthday cake, which was true — reports noted that the Marcuses seemed to be childishly overeating junk food of fizz and ice cream in their last days). Elliot's death is much more gruesome in Dead Ringers: Beverly gutted Elliot using his tools in a drug-fueled episode. Although, like Cyril Marcus, he leaves briefly before returning to die at the hands of his brother.
In the film, their descent begins with Beverly falling in love with Claire. “When one gets involved with a woman, it gets hard for the other,” Boyman says. «There was a question of personality.» He adds: «It's a slow downward spiral caused by their identical twins and the inability to separate, eventually.»
It's dramatized, but gets to the dark core of the death of Marcus' real twins. As Linda Woolf wrote of Stuart and Cyril, “They saw their bond as supportive and nourishing. But in reality, it was the disease that eventually killed them.”
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