Twins: The Poetry of "The Twins"
Thursday, June 14, 2012 at 2:23PM Are you enjoying the twins series? I can't tell but if not, what do you have against Geminis?
Pre-Cogs
A few days ago my mind flashed violently back to Minority Report (2002). I blame the recent screening of Prometheus (2012) since both films belong to the school of Gah!mazingly Art Directed Sci-Fi Movies that are nonetheless problematic given their collisions of greatness and "really?" moments. The other thing tying them together is one Not Entirely Human performance (Samantha Morton as "Agatha" / Michael Fassbender as "David") that is so damn enjoyable and smart that you can forgive a lot just for the pleasure of watching the actor do his or her best genre thing.
Fact: Samantha Morton and Michael Fassbender are inhumanly great actors.
Twins have always fascinated non-twins and not just from the visual double takes. Their assumed psychic connections suggest all sorts of telepathic supernatural and psycosomatic implications once you let your mind wander. [The poetry of twins after the jump...]
All of which makes twins a perfect fit for sci-fi horror and fantasy, which thrive on the Unknowable whether they take place in distorted versions of our real world or galaxies far far away. But I digress. One of the interesting non-intuitive things about Minority Report's narrative is that "the twins" are not seen as the psychologically gifted member(s) in their liquid triangle. The one with the most precognitive power is their mouthpiece Agatha. Which brings us to today's twins Matthew Dickman and Michael Dickman who played "The Twins" Dashiell and Arthur in Spielberg's movie. It was their first and last big screen appearance together.
The brothers are actually poets and in a lengthy fascinating piece in the New Yorker a few years back their poetry --which is said to be much different and they don't like it to be grouped together as a circus act with their poetry -- spoke about their time on the Spielberg movie. After an appearance in an indie called Anoosh of the Airwaves (no presence on IMDb) they signed with a talent agency hoping for commercials:
Some years later, they received a call from a casting director in Hollywood, Denise Chamian, who was looking for twin brothers to appear in Steven Spielberg's movie "Minority Report." Michael and Matthew were cast as the "pre-cogs" - identical twin brothers who are able to foresee crimes before they happen. "I was searching for twins all over the country, and we needed a very specific look, and the were perfect, look-wise," Chamian told me. "They were very pale and kind of unearthly looking - people who looked like they had not been out in the sun much in their life." The roles were not particularly demanding artistically, though they were physically: The Dickmans were required to have their heads and eyebrows shaved and to lie, muttering, in a vat of warm water with their skulls wired up. "It was the best job for poetry ever," Michael says. "Whenever we weren't actually shooting, we would be in our trailers, reading Ted Hughes, and then we would leave and take cabs to bookstores and spend our per diem on poetry. On our days off, we would make coffee in one of our hotel rooms and write poetry all day."
Even with such unusual opportunities, it became clear to both brothers that acting would have to become secondary to writing. "To be an actor takes up a lot of the same stuff as if you were going to try to make writing, and I couldn't figure out how to do both," Michael says. "Poetry just occupied my thoughts more."
Despite their efforts to be viewed as separate entities within the poetry world, they often reference each other in poems. In Matthew's most popular poem "Slow Dance" he writes of the siblings:
Two men in the middle of the room.
When I dance with him,
one of my great leaves, he is absolutely
human,
and when he turns to dip me
or I step on his foot because we are both
leading,
I know that one of us will die first and
the other will suffer.
Michael's poems are much less sentimental though equally mysterious about the inexplicable twin bond.
The body unfolds and unfolds and makes
a human being
Everything I am not
is walking across the room towards me
and looks just like me.
Reader Comments (2)
So true about Fassbender in Prometheus. Who knew that playing a robot could have so much nuance to it?
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