What Amazon's 'Dead Ringers' gets right about birthing that so many TV shows get wrong
A woman is screaming. Her legs are in stirrups, there is blood and people wearing scrubs and masks. She's giving birth on television.
But this time, it's a little different. The TV show behind the images, which on the obstetrics spectrum range from ordinary to downright disturbing, has something to say.
In Amazon's superlative remake of David Cronenberg's 1988 horror film "Dead Ringers" (now streaming), birth trauma is ever present, but it also has a point other than shock and awe. And that's unlike many TV shows that portray the sometimes scary way every human has come into the world, most recently and prominently in HBO's "House of the Dragon." Creator Alice Birch ("Lady Macbeth") and star/producer Rachel Weisz have crafted a harrowing story about the way society treats women's bodies. We can't look away, and maybe that's a good thing.
"Ringers" is the rare Hollywood remake that expounds and expands on its source material, by flipping the gender of its protagonists. In the original movie, Jeremy Irons plays twin gynecologists with a disturbing interest in each other and the women whose care they are entrusted with. Now it's Weisz as Doctors Elliot and Beverly Mantle, one wild and the other reserved. They aren't just doctors, but women with their own uteruses in the game (in the first moments of the series, Beverly has a graphic miscarriage, for starters). The Mantles want to leave their hospital and open a bespoke birthing clinic for very different reasons: Elliot, to take the birth process out of the dehumanizing health care system, and Beverly, to experiment with and research fertility and gynecology without pesky government or ethical oversight.
More: How 'House of the Dragon' traded the sexual violence of 'Game of Thrones' for birth trauma
In "Ringers," the dozens of birthing people that Beverly and Elliot see over the course of the six-episode series could be background noise, props used to raise the body-horror stakes and background sound of grunts and screams. And in some cases, they do fade into the background of the twins' bloody, messy lives. But in those moments the show is making a distinctive point: Pregnant people's traumas, and their very lives, become meaningless noise and statistics in the health care system (AMC's "This Is Going to Hurt" found similar material here). And in the exceptional fifth episode, the show traces the horrific roots of modern gynecology.
"Ringers" is a horror show, and the core maliciousness of Cronenberg's film remains. Elliot and Beverly may talk a good game in some settings about fixing that health care system, but they are both selfish, feral beings who bend to the whims of their billionaire investor and their own sadistic and sexual desires. And when the red scrubs come out (fans will remember them acutely from the original film), everything is just as terrifying as you would expect.
"Ringers" is a fantastic, singular and singularly disturbing series. Weisz is phenomenal, and it's worth tuning in to see Elliot eat a hamburger or Beverly attempt to survive a dinner party with the uber-wealthy that's more horrifying than anything that happens in the operating room. Pregnant women are only dehumanized in this fictional world when "Ringers" wants to remind you how dehumanized they are in the real one.
Too often on TV, birth is either portrayed as comedic or blithely fatal. In "Ringers," it is horrific (and sometimes deadly), but it is also transparent. It is out in the open where we can talk about it, understand it and confront it.
Birth, really, is everything.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Dead Ringers' gets birth trauma right when so many shows get it wrong
