"We Don't Do Babies": Reproduction in David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers

Abstract

In Dead Ringers , the question of gestation is central. In this paper, through the frame of the medical and filmic gazes, I examine how visual scientific knowledge and the maternal body explore and contain the inherently dangerous and threatening nature of pregnancy. The use of male subjects in this film acts as a primary defense against the implications of gestation. I examine the use of visual technologies as they structure the bodies and subjectivities involved in these processes of reproduction. I argue that the collision of maternity and visuality in these male bodies attempts to contain the visual import and physiological and material reality of the pregnant female body. The fluid nature of its materiality and, by implication, its subjectivity, disturbs the boundaries of all these frames and allows us to see that visual technologies itself cannot confine or determine the edges of the gestating body.