When I was a kid, one of my favorite movies was The Parent Trap, the 1961 Walt Disney film starring Hayley Mills. I was fascinated by the parallel lives of identical twin teens Susan Evers and Sharon McKendrick, who were separated at birth by their divorced parents, each of whom took one child.
The girls led equally affluent lives on opposite coasts; Sharon in Boston, sophisticated and posh; Susan in California, laid back and casual. Not knowing they were twins, they meet by chance at summer camp, hurl insults at each other and soon discover the truth. A sisterhood blooms as a plan is hatched to switch places and trick their parents.
As a kid, it did seem odd that each parent would split the twins at birth. But I didn't give it much thought, I was willing to accept the crazy premise just to see the shenanigans in action. I loved the whole switcheroo thing and could not believe that one actress (Hayley Mills) played dual roles. Thanks to split screen technology, I watched in awe as Hayley Mills stood next to ... Hayley Mills. I remember I had the Parent Trap chapter book, bought through Scholastic at school and I used to read and re-read that book, alternately imaging myself as each girl.
I loved the whole thing. Hayley Mills, her parents, the summer camp, the sophisticated apartment in Boston, the ranch style home in California, the practical jokes, the old-fashion speech cadences (if Anthropologie could bottle vintage speech patterns in an antique milk bottles, they would bottle this one) - the whole thing drew me in.
Now that I'm grown and have twins of my own, I'm shocked that anyone would ever knowingly split up twins. In the Parent Trap, the parents never make an attempt to keep the girls together, or to stay in touch at all. Now that blows my mind. Here, you take baby A, and I'll take baby B - have a good life!
How could any mother be satisfied with raising only one of her twins, without any sort of relationship with the other? How could you knowingly raise twins apart without telling them? Personally, I would forever be curious about the twin I would not raise, I would forever have that deep maternal longing. And I would be sad that my twins would grow up without each other.
When the Parent Trap twins switch places, hilarity ensues. Neither parent initially suspects a thing. I laughed hard at this movie as a kid and I still laugh along with it now. But today, as a parent of twins, I start to question the premise, even as I'm laughing.
How can a parent of twins not know which twin is which (with the exception of the infancy stage where even partents of twins have trouble telling them apart), especially a twin one has raised exclusively? Wouldn't the twin you raised be easy to recognize, if not initially, then eventually? Identical twins have their own personalities, have mannerisms which are unique to each one and have slight to moderate differences in physical appearance. Perhaps Sharon and Susan were mirror image identicals, which would mean that Sharon would be right-handed and Susan left-handed! I just don't see how the parents could have been so easily tricked.
So while the Parent Trap remains one of my all time favorite family films, I do see it through two different perspectives these days, now that I'm the mother of twins. Actually, the Parent Trap is the only film about twins that I have even seen. I skipped the 1988 Danny DeVito - Arnold Schwarznegger film, Twins. I didn't manage to catch Adam Sandler's latest film, Jack and Jill. But that gives me an idea. I think I'll line up a few of these films about twins in my Netflix queue and have my own little home film fest about twins!
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