different lives: lying to your other self
by
Douglas Messerli
Ed
Perkins (director) with Alex and Marcus Lewis Tell Me Who I Am / 2019
Ed
Perkins’ award-winning documentary from 2019, Tell Me Who I Am, cinematically speaking, is a rather awkward work, relying on only a few images,
mostly photographs, haunting pictures of a family’s large sprawling mansion,
and, mostly, two taking heads—the identical twin brothers, Alex and Marcus
Lewis whose lives this film recounts.
Without knowing much about it, I watched
this film on Halloween morning, which could not have been more appropriate for
this true ghoulish tale.
If you haven’t yet seen this film,
perhaps you might wish to wait before reading my tell-all review. For some
people plots or stories matter immensely; I tend to be more interested in
reveling in the entire experience of films and books. I’ve seen Hitchcock’s Vertigo,
dozens of times, and yet it still puzzles and enchants me every moment. Having
now seen this film, and having been moved by the conversations of these two
unfortunate brothers—and now realizing that Perkins didn’t need to be a clever
cinematographer given the poignancy of the story he was telling—I might surely
see this film several times over, even if it is almost too painful to watch.
Returning “home,” a world without meaning
in this case, he discovers a terrified woman of some 6 feet tall, with apparently
a quite vivacious personality, and a sour and often violent father who hardly
has the time to talk to his children, without the ability to even comprehend
the situation. The boys, from the age of 14, have been basically forced out of
the mansion into what is called the “shed,” where they share a room without
even a key to enter the house itself. Mysteriously, certainly to the now
completely unknowing Alex, they are refused entry to many areas of the parent’s
living quarters, including the stairs. Like servants they live downstairs only,
sharing meals with the highly eccentric mother and father with little other
contact.
But mostly Alex is forced to rely on a few
photographs of him and his brother on a beach, swimming in the sea, etc. He
himself begins to take photographs, fearful that if he were to lose memory once
more, he would be swallowed up into an impossible vortex of forgetfulness. For
Alex, the photographs are connections with a lost world which he links up
through his imagination rather that any rational thought. Gentle, and reassured
by his brother, he appears never to question the “rules of the house,” the
distance of his father, and the strange, always partying mother, who keeps him,
despite her overwhelming personality, at a far distance.
When the now 20-some-year-old’s are called
into their father’s study, where he reports he is dying of cancer, he asks them
to forgive him for his temper and distance. Alex immediately does so, but
Marcus refuses, much to the confusion of his twin.
Except for some very quirky behavior of
the duo’s parents, this might simply be a story of two privileged children, one
of them having suffered amnesia.
When they once sneak up into the attic,
discovering dozens of presents sent to them as children as birthday and Christmas
gifts, still wrapped and never delivered to them, Alex doesn’t seem able to
question why their mother and father might deprive them of those offerings. And
Marcus explains it away as simply an eccentricity in their otherwise blessèd
life. It is a bit like a horror film sans the horror. Yet even most the
naïve viewer must recognize something is not quite right with this tale.
When their mother also dies, of brain
cancer, the twins having inherited the big house, go to work cleaning it from
the massive amounts of possessions accumulated by their parents. In their
mother’s room they discover a large cabinet filled with sex toys, within which
lies a smaller cabinet. Finding the key, they open it—the closest to a true
Pandora’s box that one might even imagine—in which lies a photograph of the two
boys entirely naked, but with their heads clipped off.
That photo suddenly reveals to Alex that apparently
he has been lied to, not only by his mother and father, but by his twin
brother. The world Marcus has recreated for him is not the real world at all.
The only person upon which he could rely for any truth has betrayed him as much
as the past must have.
There have been numerous occasions in
which we realize that children’s or even older adult’s memories have been
altered through dreams, misguided therapists, and parents so that they imagine
terrible events that may never have truly happened. We had a dear friend, a restaurant
host, who we truly loved, who suddenly begin to have terrible feelings that he
was abused as a child. When I asked him what was his memory of the abuse, he
described his father as basically washing him in a shower. Whether or not there
was actual abuse, I don’t know. And he clearly did not like his father; but I
suggested that perhaps he was imagining of even manufacturing the abuse, and
that his nightly tears might be better directed towards something more
positive. I am not, clearly, a psychiatrist, I may not know of other events he
may have experienced. Nor do I have the expertise to suggest what that “event”
may have meant to his life. But I do know that in times of crisis we might
imagine all sorts of things that may never have been what we later perceive
them to be.
In the Lewis’ case, it is the reverse.
Alex claims to truly have loved his mother, the mother he cannot now remember.
Perkins’ story is divided into 3 parts,
the first about Alex and his desperation. The second about Marcus and his
explanation of the lies. Marcus knows that many people might judge him
negatively about the tall tales he told his brother, but both Alex and we know,
ultimately, that he was simply attempting to give his brother another view of
history, to provide him with a life that any child might have wished, instead
of one he still remembers with terror and even horror. Alex, after his
accident went through a great deal of therapy, yet Marcus has held everything
within, refusing at times to even admit what he and his brother experienced as
children, joining in on the myths he was lovingly telling his twin in an
attempt, perhaps, to erase what he actually knew to be the truth.
In the third part of Perkins’ film, Marcus
finally admits what really occurred, but will only face Alex, in this instance,
through a computer transmission of what he describes.
Their mother abused them numerous times,
taking them into her bed and masturbating them. But, even worse, she would
individually drive them to the homes of local pedophiles, who would rape them
and keep them overnight. There were no trips to France or other beaches, there
was no possible joy in the lives of these brothers who often awoke to find the
other gone. Despite the family’s great wealth, the boys were banned from the
house, forced to live in the garden “shed.”
Alex says everything when he attempts to
describe “normality”: “I was never questioning anything, because what is normal
really? Normal is what you know, and normal is what your family is.” It is only
at age 32 that he realizes that his life was not the “normal” life his brother
attempted to recreate for him.
Yet these brothers did “come through”
despite their numerous betrayals, and both today are married and run a
successful hotel.
As Variety critic Peter Debruge
perceptively comments about the film:
The result could be viewed as a
meditation on memory, an Oliver
Sacks-like case study or a deeply
unethical experiment in which
two identical twins are allowed to
cope with abuse in completely
different ways. Before Perkins met
them, the brothers co-wrote
a book about their experience,
which bears the same name. In the
documentary, the director appears
to be interviewing the twins
separately, but he’s really just
filming them as they recite their own
story. They’ve chosen their words
carefully; they cry on cue; and they
share just enough, while holding
back an enormous amount of
information.
That’s their right, of course,
but by the end, there are large segments
that still don’t add up. More
peculiar still, once the twins have had their
cathartic moment, neither one seems
the slightest bit interested in holding
the culprits of their childhood suffering
accountable. It wasn’t just their
parents, both dead now, who abused
them. If “Serial” could influence the
fate of Adnan Sayed, surely the
Lewises’ book, followed by this
documentary, has the power to
expose the monsters who preyed on
them as children. In a scripted
thriller, one can bet that unlocking the
source of Alex’s trauma would bring
all of his memories flooding back.
Here, the process merely points the
way to an even deeper mystery.
We have always to wonder whether Alex’s
accident wasn’t a kind of fortuitous event, that his need to forget was behind
his amnesia, which his twin recognized and used to help his own way out of the
horrific past they both had suffered?
Los
Angeles, November 1, 2019
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (November 2019).
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