The Parent Trap (1988) is one of my all time favorite comfort movies with so many iconic scenes and twin antics. Returning to it with a critical eye gave me an entirely new perspective on the legendary twin movie. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still great fun, but Annie and Hallie (or should I say Lindsay Lohan?) as twins are… a bit problematic.
The first chunk of the movie is the twins at camp – arriving separately, discovering each other, waging a prank war, and inevitably piecing together their twinship and their plan to swap places. This is probably the most iconic part of the movie. The twins are introduced as individuals, but even then their differences in personality are molecular – and the most glaring difference in general being their English dialects. Annie winning the fencing match results in a rivalry between them, establishing their trickster natures and competitiveness even before they combine forces as twins. On the one hand, this suggests that this love of prank pulling isn’t tied to twinness, but on the other it consumes their relationship once they find out they’re twins – their main bonding scene being the montage where they learn about the other’s life in order to pull off this swap. A particular part of this montage is when Annie has to cut her hair and pierce her ears in order to resemble Hallie. In the context of the movie plot, I find this forgivable, but there’s still this inherent idea in it that identical twins have to be completely physically identical.
It’s increasingly obvious that Annie and Hallie being twins is no more than a plot device as the movie progresses. Upon meeting each other and figuring out their estrangement, they have very little interest in each other and rather want to know about their missing parent. The scene where Annie and Hallie figure out they’re twins is completely centered around their single-parents with the two halves of the photograph being the proof. Their twinness is a tool to get them to this other missing part of their life which gets to what the movie is really about – repairing a fractured family. The closest either twin gets to asking their parents why they were separated or expressing any animosity about it is when Nick tells Meredith that Hallie is a twin and Hallie says, “Don’t feel bad, Mer, he never mentioned it to me, either.” This line completely shrugs the whole thing off, excusing the parents from any responsibility for their highly questionable solution to the shared custody of their daughters.
When the swap happens, their individuality and distinction shrinks from molecular to nonexistent. There are some asides from characters about “off” behavior and they eventually are found out, but once this happens, the differences disappear. There is a scene where Elizabeth and Nick are ready to switch the twins back and Annie and Hallie refuse, using their identicality to keep them from being able to tell which twin is “theirs.” From this point on in the movie, I didn’t even try to tell them apart and frankly, there was little need as the adults take up most of the screen time after this. Annie and Hallie return when camping with Meredith in order to pull so many pranks on her that she threatens Nick to choose between them and her (obviously Nick picks “T-H-E-M. Them.”). Nick and Elizabeth are the focus of the remainder of the movie. The final confession even takes place with Annie and Hallie in the room, but they’re hardly shown for more than a few seconds. By the end of the movie, the twins have been completely forgotten as main characters.
It is no secret that there is a trickster archetype in movies, but I think it’s particularly sad when paired with twins, especially in a story like this where recovering from estrangement is a main idea. Annie and Hallie are reduced to tricksters – first deceiving each other then their parents then Meredith – and during this process, their little individuality deteriorates as they embody their full twinness. The Parent Trap makes being a twin look playful and lighthearted, ignoring the realities of a family situation like this in favor of the happily ever after. It achieves that comedy and fun but at the price of having the trickster twins archetype. Even if the movie is arguably not truly about them as twins, Annie and Hallie are still used as the face of it and who people remember most which feeds into this harmful stereotype that twins are inherently tricksters.
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