When I finally got around to watching the stunning 2022 documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (which, by the way, is now streaming on HBO Max), I spent a good week bruising my own ass, kicking myself from behind for not making time for it sooner. That film—which details photographer Nan Goldin’s successful activist crusade against the Sackler family, who are largely responsible for the opioid crisis—is an unforgettable piece of cinema. It will leave you on the floor, in the best (and worst) possible ways, both drained of emotion and charged up for a fight.
If you watch the film, you’ll likely also walk away thinking that there is no possible way that anyone could ever again sympathize with the uber-rich and morally bankrupt. Until, that is, you watch Jennifer Ehle stomp her way into Prime Video’s Dead Ringers limited series, with a hint of giddy cruelty in her eye, to convince us otherwise. But that’s exactly what good acting, and smart writing, can do: compromise us, if only briefly, under its power.
In Dead Ringers, Ehle plays Rebecca Parker, whose family is a not-so-inconspicuous fictional take on the Sacklers. In this world, the Parkers are the ones responsible for the ease of access to opioids, and Rebecca seems to take joy in watching countless people suffer under her family’s narcotic reign. Then, the Mantle twins, Elliott and Beverly (both played by Rachel Weisz), enter her orbit, looking for a world-changing investment for their visionary gynecological birthing center. Rebecca digs her nails into them, gaily watching them grovel for the kind of sizable investment only a soulless billionaire could provide.
Both twins are somewhat put off by Rebecca, but only Beverly is virtuous enough to stand up to her. After a cruel game goes wrong while the twins are vacationing at Rebecca’s upstate grounds in the second episode, Beverly confronts Rebecca and her group of equally callous cronies. “Fuck you all—you are awful people,” Beverly says, straight to their faces. “Categorically, the worst people. The humanity has literally been fucked out of you over the generations. You’ve retained a face, a cunt, and fingers, but you do not retain humankind in any sense of the word.”
It’s a dream moment for anyone who has ever wanted to say something similar to a deplorable tyrant. (So, all of us). But it’s one that seems to make Rebecca respect Beverly, at least a bit. Rebecca offers to invest in the Mantles’ birthing center, and Beverly reluctantly accepts, hoping that she can wash the blood off Rebecca’s money without wilting the paper.
Of course, that’s not so simple. Tying yourself to a billionaire never is; it demands sacrifice and moral compromise, no matter how stalwart of a person you are. Beverly sees this firsthand when the sisters open their birthing center, where she is almost immediately the recipient of a bucket of animal blood to her white doctor’s coat. This mimics Goldin’s real-life activist efforts to hold the Sacklers accountable, held in public galleries where Goldin’s art was displayed.
“I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s the same group and they do the same fucking thing wherever they happen to see my name,” Rebecca tells Beverly, locked away in a conference room. “I want to say it’s boring, but at the same time, I guess I admire their commitment.”
Beverly refuses to accept this, telling Rebecca that there’s nothing fantastic about seeing someone’s principles body slammed out of them by security, while Beverly is trying to provide care to women at the most precious and sensitive time of their lives. Then, Rebecca launches into a chilling monologue, one that serves as a rebuking of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, from the perspective of the affluent on the other side.
“You understand that she can afford her idealism?” Rebecca asks Beverly, referring to the activist that the building’s security tackled to the ground. “She lives with her mom and dad in a nice apartment in the city, and she took a class in school on capitalism, and one on socialism, and one on philanthropy. She has friends. She can afford food. But sometimes she makes a choice that maybe she shouldn’t, in order to have something nice in her life: watermelon out of season, or an Uber if it’s late, and she feels unsafe…despite the fact that she fundamentally disagrees with the company’s politics.”
Ehle’s matter-of-fact, stony delivery is so hypnotic that we viewers find ourselves mesmerized by her words. We momentarily forget that Rebecca is the human manifestation of pure, unfettered wickedness. Suddenly, it almost seems as if she’s making good points. Who among us hasn’t briefly compromised their own personal morals, taken an Uber despite the company’s proclivity for giving personal data to law enforcement, or eaten a delicious chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A despite the chain’s anti-queer politics? The show’s writers know that we’re starting to analyze our own behavior in our heads, taking this one step further with Rebecca’s sermon.
“We all do that,” she continues. “We all do cost-benefit all the fucking time, and we don't dissect every movie, because it’s exhausting, and punishing, and false. The fact that they come and do this—throw shit, and call me a murderer, and pretend they live in a different world, with different structures—means that they can occasionally make those bad choices and not dwell on them. And that’s fine. I don’t mind them. It’s the system, and I’m happy to play my part so the world continues to turn on its axis. None of them have any plan, any alternative. They would shit their pants if you asked them to come good on a plan. They’re quite happy mindlessly throwing organs and me and patting themselves on the back.”
Rebecca closes with one final question, leaving Beverly speechless. “When are you going to shut the fuck up and do your job, Beverly? Because, frankly, I’m fucking bored.”
For a moment, we’re caught up in Rebecca’s whirlwind. It’s sort of like that memed tweet from The Hill: “Nicki Minaj on Trump: ‘There are some points he has made.’” Dead Ringers would like us to be so spellbound by Rebecca’s lecture that we don’t come out of our stupor until a few minutes later. It’s only when we finally claw ourselves free from Rebecca’s degenerate black hole—and admire how fantastic Ehle is in this scene—that we recognize that she’s completely wrong.
Rebecca is not some no-bullshit, brilliant virtuoso. She’s a soul-sucking antichrist put on Earth to happily fund the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Dead Ringers trusts us to remember this, while being audacious enough to dare us to sympathize with her, if only for a moment. It’s a magnificent sequence, one that stands out among the rest of the series’ volatile writing, thanks to both Ehle and the writers’ willingness to settle into those dark mindsets, and explore what makes the rich tick until their ethics explode.
