SOURCE: “Lost and Gone Forever: Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers,” in Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities, Vol. 15, No. 2, Winter/Spring, 1996, pp. 11–28.

In the following essay Beard examines several themes found in Dead Ringers, such as sexual otherness, the struggle for a male identity, emotional paralysis, rationality versus nature, and science and sexuality.

I’ve had a response to the movie that I’ve never gotten from any of the other films. I went to one of the first public screenings in Toronto and one guy, a doctor, said, “Can you tell me why I feel so fucking sad having seen this film?” I said, “It’s a sad movie.” Then I head from someone else that a friend of his saw it and cried for three hours afterwards. So I thought, “That’s what it is. That’s what I wanted to get at.” I can...