heart of darkness
by
Douglas Messerli
Tim
Wardle (writer, with the help of Lawrence Wright; and director) Three Identical Strangers / 2018
The
director of the 2018 documentary Three
Identical Strangers, Tim Wardle has encouraged critics not to reveal the
ending (or even the second-half) of his film about the triplets who suddenly
discovered, at age 19, the identities of one another. Yet, I’d argue that it
might be better to know the second half of the film without knowing the early,
rom-com, part. In a sense, it is like asking one to read The Heart of Darkness without knowing that things go bad for Kurz
and other Belgian occupiers in the Congo, which misses, perhaps, the very
reason one might wish to read that book, or, in this case, take a visit to your
local movie theater to see this remarkable piece of filmmaking.
If you don’t want to know anything
about this movie before seeing it, please feel free to skip this review. It has
never bothered me to know as much as I can about a film before seeing it so
that I might better comprehend and enjoy its images.
As the many critics writing on this
film have revealed is the wonderful accidental encounter by Robert Shafran, a
19-year old freshman at Sullivan County Community College in upstate New York,
of a series of people who greeted him with great enthusiasm, pats on the back,
and even kisses on his very first day on campus. That alone might have made
anyone suspicious something was amiss, but the fact that many also called him
Eddy might have made any of us feel we were in a slightly surreal experience. When
he finally met his dorm room mate—who, recognizing that Eddy (Galland) had
previously determined to not return to campus and was slightly different from
his new roommate—asked Robert whether he was a twin, the news might have set
off shocks of incredulity to the new freshman. We never discover in this film
why the evidently popular Eddy had decided not to return to the community
college or how Robert had determined to attend the very same institution, a
semester later, but it clearly did trip off clues that something was very
strange; and before he knew it, Robert was in a small phone booth with his new roommate
dialing up Eddy Galland and, soon after, speeding in his elderly car about two
hours away to meet, at the doorway of the house, his mirror image.
The euphoria of the discovery of two
other versions of yourself swept up the three boys into a new world of self-love,
propelling them almost immediately into, as an aunt describes it, a world in
which the 3 former wrestlers joined one another of the floor in a kind a roll-around
that she describes as a somewhat like “puppies.” The three, Eddy, Bob, and Dave
hit all the talk shows, dressing alike, talking alike, and interrupting each
other’s comments while commenting on their shared interests in the same kind of
women, Marlboro cigarettes, and taste in color. There had been numerous other
pieces on how rediscovered twins or even those knowledgeable of their kinship,
shared conversational habits, patterns of thought, and tastes, and these
triplets simply fueled that concept, as newspeople promoted their similarities
as opposed to questioning their differences. As they later assert, we wanted
and were encouraged to show how much we were like one another without anyone
asking anything else.
They had, however, big differences in
their upbringing. Eddy, raised by a strict and authoritarian school teacher,
did not have a close relationship with his father. Even in interviews, Eddy’s
father still seems to have no clue why he did not have a deep connection with
his son. Robert’s father, a physician, although deeply supportive of his son,
was often missing; Bob’s mother was herself a successful professional. It was
David’s more lower-class father and mother with whom the trio most bonded. If
you sense a series of class differences here, it is no accident, and might have
been one of the first things that the triplets questioned about themselves; the
Jewish adoption agency purposely put them into families of different financial and
parenting skills, having already also helped their adoptions of older sisters
for the three.
If it’s delight to see these smilingly
toothy, pudgy fingered, curly-haired boys in their early encounters, things
soon begin to fray. Each of them found women whom they married, not, as they
had previously argued, all similar in type. Eddy, who fought hard to keep the
families they created together, was devastated when his broth Robert left the
business, unable to work successfully with the other two. And, although David
remained close to Eddy, living across the street, he could not stop his brother’s
eventual suicide. Darker elements had existed in all our lives which involved a
sense of abandonment, and later, of having been forced to live a life over
which they had had no control.
When the Pulitzer Prize-winning author
Lawrence Wright (The Looming Tower, Going Clear) began to write about “twins”
in the late 1990s, he discovered a great deal of information that suggested
that the triplets and several twins had been intentionally separated from their
birth mothers by late child psychiatrist Peter Neubauer, an Austrian Jew who
had fled the Holocaust, using the Jewish Louise Wise Agency. The experiment,
which might have been interesting had all parties been alerted to its
existence, was an attempt to determine the difference between nature vs. nurture.
If Wardle’s film begins rather solidly on
the side of nature—these guys, after all, seemed at first to be so very alike
that only nature could have explained it—we gradually come to perceive that
perhaps their upbringing did make an enormous difference. Robert admits that
too had had suicidal thoughts, but that he couldn’t bring himself to carry them
out. David, although stunned by events, seems rather blessed by having the
beloved “Bubbalah,” as his father. Perhaps wealth and permission are not the
things that most sustain an individual this film suggests. Just a daily hug
might make all the difference.
Yet, the even darker story of a purpose
experiment on human beings, the findings of which will never be published and
whose files cannot even be opened in 2066, are the most sinister elements of
this tale. Why can’t the overseeing Jewish Federation open those Yale files, or
why won’t Yale themselves admit that they might be opened? One of Neubauer’s
unwitting confederates perhaps says it best. Those twins who don’t know about
each other may be better off, without being torn apart by the news that these
triplets had to endure. If the actions of those with they worked were indeed corrupt,
cynical, and even inexcusable, the pain these three brothers had to endure by
the discovery of the truth might not be worth it. Yet, at least the two
remaining brothers now know one another, and speak out strongly about the
truth; and that is the undeniable power of Wardle’s film.
Los Angeles, July
5, 2018
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