I stumbled on the book Twins by accident. During our ride up to the Integratron, to celebrate the SFBC’s two-year anniversary, David Hollander off handedly mentioned that the classic film Dead Ringers was actually based on a book written in the seventies. Who knew? I didn’t think much of it, but whenever that movie is brought up, it takes me back to 1988 when I some how saw it with my friend Mark Weisman at Century City’s ABC shopping center. The movie totally scarred me for life, but in a Cronenberg healthy way, I guess. What a fucked up movie. Anyway, after returning from our desert trip to the Integratron and Desert Hot Springs, I went to Cliff books to find some serious SF to read, I was bored with the SFBC’s selection The Snow Queen. I thought I was in the "Ws" of the SF paperback section, but as it turns out I was in the horror section. My eye caught the spine of a book called Twins; I love anything with twins in it, especially The Other, an amazing film that I saw on KTTV as a child that totally gave me lasting horrifying memories. The Other was also a book originally and it was the guiding inspiration for my thesis show at Art Center called “Learning Telepathy”.Anyway, as it obviously turns out, the book Twins was the paperback that Dead Ringers was based on. I started reading it that night and couldn’t put it down. What a page-turner.

The book tells the story of two Jewish twins, David and Michael, growing up in Manhattan. They are identical and inseparable. They are warned by their grandfather that they must be separated or else they will eventualy kill each other because, in the Jewish tradition (according to the book), twins are neither one person or two, they are somewhere in between. I love that idea. Anyway, they both become gynecologists somehow. One twins wants his independence and the other one can’t bare it. I found it hard to tell which twin was which due to fact that there names are so bland, I found myself scanning the book to remind me who was who.

The book takes place in the sixties and seventies. It reads like a trashy romance novel, except the romance is between identical twins. The story devolves into a world filled with alcohol abuse, prescription drug addiction, and turned on, first-rate, psychologically perverted sex scenarios between the doctors and their cancer patients. HOT!

The book is totally interesting because it is so psychologically charged in a seventies, Brood/Heavenly Creatures kind of way. The twins are clearly fucked up when together in the early part of their lives. They become more and more independent as they become more and more separated, but they clearly can’t live without each other. As they finally give up and start merging back into “one and a half person” they become a drug addicted, psychically unified, pulsating organic fuck machine. At one point one of the twins is so messed up on downers, he can't get off the living room couch. He has to take a dump so his brother encourages him to shit right there on the living room couch. Needless to say the twins apartment starts resembling the contentes of their heads. It's a shame the writers couldn't access a language or style to mimic the OBGYN's psychological demise into a pyschic soup.

It makes a lot of sense why Cronenberg picked this book and turned it into a masterful psychological "drama". Only the seventies could have produced it. This is great book to read if you are interested in the translation of literature into film. I highly recommend this treasure.