3 min read · Jul 28, 2023
--
The Parent Trap, the 1998 comedy that launched Lindsay Lohan to stardom, celebrates its 25th anniversary this month. A remake of the 1961 classic, doppelgangers Hallie and the British Annie, both played by Lohan, encounter one another at summer camp where they eventually realize they’re actually twins, separated at birth by their bitterly divorced parents, vigneron Nick (Dennis Quaid) and fashion designer Elizabeth (Natasha Richardson). The hijinks the twins get up to in order to get their parents back together and fix their family keeps The Parent Trap on nostalgic lists and in frequent rotation for family movie nights. But nostalgia is notoriously rose-colored, and watching The Parent Trap through a modern lens highlights how deeply disturbed it is.
“The movie really glosses over the aspect of anger and resentment towards parents,” Dr. Sulman Aziz Mirza, MD, a triple board certified physician in adult psychiatry, child and adolescent psychiatry and addiction medicine, tells me. “There was some initial shock in the movie, but then it was like, now we have to get you guys together so that we can live the rest of our lives happily ever after to make up for it.”
The extent of the movie addressing this psychologically-damaging turn of the events is Hallie guffawing that her father withheld the fact that she was a twin for the first eleven years and nine months of her life. While Hallie and Annie could be forgiven for taking a beat to process this reality-shattering news, the adults surrounding the drama similarly shrug it off. The most incredulous character is Nick’s young fiance (the incomparable Elaine Hendrix), mostly because now she has to deal with two pre-pubescent girls instead of one. Dr. Mirza believes, though, that the twins would be reeling from “the loss of a sibling bond. To reconnect at that age [amplifies] the loss, especially in the developmental years. We rely so much on our siblings.”
That goes doubly (heh) when said siblings are twins. Much is made of the twin connection, and although Dr. Mirza points towards Annie and Hallie’s individuality, such as Hallie’s proficiency in fencing and Annie’s strawberry allergy, ultimately “it makes the loss of the twin bond worse because it’s like, you are this part of me that should have been there my entire life. The loss is the hardest part because they’ve lost however many years of time together, growing up, developing together, supporting each other.”
Instead of focussing on how this affected each child — and, indeed, each parent effectively having suffered a form of infant loss when they split up and sever all ties with one of their children shortly after birth — The Parent Trap uses this as a flimsy plot point to get this boring white couple back together, which can be damaging to viewers with similar experiences, too.
“When people watch these movies hoping to see a great representation of what they went through, [it] comes across as really damaging and a really negative presentation of what happened,” Dr. Mirza says, such as queer representation or Sia’s Music, which Dr. Mirza offers as an example.
You better believe that if The Parent Trap was remade today, much more credence would be given to the psychological ramifications of the twins. And if it got the diverse reboot treatment that so many of our favorite childhood IP has undergone (for better or worse), The Parent Trap would be ripe for all sorts of examinations of family separation, incarceration, missing children and immigration, issues that disproportionately affect families of color.
Dr. Mirza is sure to note that what the trapped parents did isn’t child abuse per se, but it is “sh*tty parenting,” and according to the CDC, parental separation is one of the ten adverse child experiences that can have impacts in adulthood.
How might that affect an adult Hallie and Annie if they choose to have kids of their own, like their portrayer Lohan?
“If we’re going by their characters’ [situation], they’re going to overcompensate,” Dr. Mirza says, by staying in bad relationships or forcing overly close bonds. “They overcompensated in the movie by forcing their parents back together, disregarding why they split up in the first place… which was a very dismally PG-rated [reason in the film].”
