Here's Looking at You Kid

I just Netflixed Dead Ringers (1988). Awesome.

The film tells the story of twin gynecologists (Jeremy Irons plays both) who specialize in fertility in women. The twins share a bed (unbenownst to her) with a French actress who desperately wants to have children. Unfortunately, she has a rather unusual uterus insofar as she has three cervical openings. The twins find her "fantastic" and fetishize and locate their desire around her "mutant" uterus. Ultimately, one of the twins falls in love with her (and the feeling is mutual) and later becomes convinced that she is having an affair with her incredibly fey assistant (why the guy's clearly signified sexuality eludes the twin is beyond me). His pain over her perceived infidelity is turned into a morphine/heroin addiction that later spirals into his artistic vision of gynecological tools for mutated female genitalia. While he is loaded he performs an exam on a woman, much to her intense discomfort. Convinced that she, too, is a mutant, he is both erotically charged and deeply disgusted. I love how the film emphasises the deep desire that is often embedded in disgust.... As the woman writhes in pain, the scene ends and shifts to the twins talking about her pain. The druggy twin says, "there's nothing wrong with the instrument! It was the body. The body was all wrong!" The twins' work is so tied to fetishizing (not women) but their uterus', and even more specifically, their abnormal, abjected (i.e., "mutant") interiors. Kristeva would (of course) note the ways in which the abject is both gendered and highly sexualized in the film, which is what makes Cronenberg's filmic philosophy so effective. Not to mention, the HOT sex scene where one of the twins fucks the actress as she's tied to her bed's footboard with surgical tubing clamped with forceps. After they finish, he gently unclamps the tubing and you can see where it has dug into her skin. It reminds me of corset unlacing and proves to be equally erotic and sensual (yes, I am weird about these things).

The actress is not a hapless victim but fetishizes the doctor/patient relationship. She will only refer to whatever twin she's with as "doctor" and notes that the PDR is her bedside reading. She is keenly aware of the specific type of desirability she holds for him/them and works this to her own erotic advantage. This fits in nicely with Terry Kapsalis' argument (and some historicists) that the gynecological exam serves as a space for erotic performance codified (and therefore sanctified) as medical study.

If you have my weird sense of erotic aesthetic and interest in mutant things, you should check out this really incredible but whacky film.

***P.S. I looked over my post and realize I use a lot of the same words over and over again. Sorry about this, but I am so hung over right now I can't seem to think beyond "erotic" and "fetish." They'll have to do ! :)