Twinning

Talk to any twin long enough and you find shared experiences emerge — the same plot points and canon events that carry across people and shape who they are.

Walking beneath the artificial tundra of the MYER department store lights, my small six year old stature was dwarfed by the surrounding clothing aisles. I had been separated from my family and was desperately searching for any sign of my siblings among the sea of coat sleeves and flannel shirts. Turning a corner, I see my identical twin brother. Filled with glee, I rushed towards him with open arms, ready to embrace someone I thought I had lost for good. Instead, I slammed face first into what turned out to be a large full-bodied mirror, my head colliding with a thick panel of refracted glass, and with this came a violent awareness of my own self.

I was born on the 29th of May 2000, and my brother Edward was born 20 minutes later. From the moment we were thrust into the world, we were inextricably linked. Where he went I went, what I wore he wore. Obviously, being only children, we were physically bound by the limits of where our Mum took us or what she dressed us in. But what formed was a metaphysical bond, invisible yet strong like gossamer.

Talk to any twin long enough or venture into the dark corners of #twintok and you find shared experiences emerge — the same plot points and canon events that carry across people and shape who they are. The psychology of the twin is rarely discussed, however, and remains absent from a popular culture still recovering from the echoes of Mr Freud and Dr Jung. Consequently, ideas of the mirror self and the double abound, haunting the public imagination.

People assume that because we are twins we must think the same, talk the same, act the same. Recreating the “Come play with us, Danny” scene became a party trick — The Shining being one of the few cultural reference points for twins people could pull from. Creepy children, their synchronicity uncanny to those who have grown up without another soul moving in tandem through life.

Movies about twins often take this position, of people who have gone through life blissfully unaware there is a doppelganger out there. Films like The Parent Trap, Enemy, The Double and aptly Twins feature narratives of characters who, like the audience, grew up without a twin, and are suddenly given one, having twinness thrust upon them. The same goes with narratives about cloning, with the copy seen as an affront to nature. Or stories of mad scientists meddling with the natural order. They have gone through life with the benefit of building their own sense of individuality, agency and identity, they view themselves as a holistic, unified one.

For the twin, you are never alone, constantly compared to your other half, and painfully aware they are running around somewhere out there. For those with older siblings who attended the same school, you may have had teachers say something along the lines of “you’ve got a lot to live up to”. Instead, Edward and I sat the same tests at the same time, our results directly compared. “Why aren’t you doing as well as your brother?” was a question that we constantly faced, with people assuming we must be getting identical results regardless of our individual lots in life.

“Have you guys ever gone to each other’s jobs/classes/girlfriend’s houses and pretended to be the other?”

No/no/gross.

“Which one is the evil one?”

Neither.

“Can you read each other's mi-”

Nope.

“Why isn’t your brother more like you?”

Fuck off.

As twins, you grow up with a constant companion, another you. While at times it may be good, they can be your best friend, your confidant, other times it is suffocating. Most twins yearn for independence once they reach adulthood and are able to move freely about the world, relinquished from the institutional worlds of school and family that shove the two together and force them to compete.

While the average person embodies a monocular vision of the world, the twin occupies a binocular vision — split yet joined, always considering the other.

Sometimes I think about what would happen if my brother died and I get emotional knowing that a part of myself would be lost with him.

I remember my brother, speaking to a psychologist who brought my parents and I into a session one day, talking about the jealousy he felt towards me. Life was treating me more favourably and things became harder for him — the chasm between us grew ever greater, and he became more and more sick. Now we look back with a greater perspective and recognise that this was caused not by one another, but rather the world around us. But that does not mean it did not sting in the moment.

Few films come to mind that recreate the relationship of twins for general audiences. Three Identical Strangers comes close, recreating the existential dread twins feel at having their lives and identities tethered so strongly to another person’s, but is still largely meant to inspire terror in the average individual, warning there might be another you out there! Oooooooh spooky!

Adaptation captures the competitive nature of being a twin, but it still retains a central protagonist who you are meant to clearly root for, and the Kaufman brother’s lives are not so inextricably tied together. Charlie is able to move freely while Donald remains largely fixed to the side and is kept as comedic relief. Although the ending inspires hope, as it asserts that the twins must work with each other rather than against to resolve their bubbling trauma and become happier together — fittingly ending with ‘Happy Together’ by The Turtles.

Dead Ringers comes the closest. Twin gynaecologists have affairs with their patients, Eliot passing off the women he tires of to his meeker brother Beverly, both played by Jeremy Irons. The film places heavy emphasis on how closely tied the brothers are. They share the same job, home, sexual partners, and even fall down the same path of addiction in an attempt to “synchronise”, eventually leading to their simultaneous deaths. By the end, the brothers are unable to distinguish even between themselves. As the tagline says: “TWO BODIES. TWO MINDS. ONE SOUL.”

At the same time, there is a deep resentment and sense of competition baked into the interactions between the brothers, with Eliot talking down to the incredibly depressed Beverly, his sadness clearly forged by a life of living in the other’s shadow. It comes to a head in a sequence where the drug-addled Beverly interrupts a speech by Eliot in front of a crowd of people at a fancy event, expressing his sadness and anger at his brother receiving all the fame and adoration for their work.

While these examples are good, there is still room for the medium to grow and highlight the unique experience of growing up as a twin. We’ve had enough narratives about them to entrance or frighten general audiences. It’s time twinness and its specific traumas were treated with seriousness, discarding the monocular perspectives of films past to embrace an entirely new binocular mode of cinema.