Article written by Samuel Burnett.
The Parent Trap is one of my favourite movies of all time. Despite what would happen later in life, Lindsay Lohan delivered a flawless dual performance as Annie and Hallie and the visual effects team made it impossible not to believe that she had a real-life twin. The acting is superb, the dialogue witty and the premise is ingenious.
Just what would happen if you found a long-lost twin.
There’s just one teensy-weensy, but-ever so crucial, little, tiny detail.
THE PARENTS ARE BLOODY SOCIOPATHS!!!
I mean seriously! Who does that? What kind of depraved monsters would ever think that is acceptable behaviour?
They wanted a divorce? Sure, that’s fine, peachy and all that jazz. After all, studies have indicated that it is better for a child to be raised by divorced parents rather than two parents in an angry, loveless marriage. But who in their right mind thinks that children are commodities that can be equally divided up like the CD collection? And why, dear god, why, would they never tell their children that they had a twin sister? Were they ever going to share that little titbit of trivia?
I’m hardly the first person to point this out. I’m not even the hundredth. It’s become a lot of fun to lampshade the horrific implications of what the parents put their daughters through. Hell, Robot Chicken even made a skit out of it, having the judge handling their divorce blast them for their heartless actions.
So, we can all agree that splitting the children up and never telling them about the other was a horrible decision that should never be done in real life.
One small problem:
If Nick and Elizabeth never split up their children and kept quiet about their arrangement for all those years, there would not be a movie for us to watch. We would never see the wacky antics of the twins’ camp war, hilarious poker game included. We would never see Lindsay Lohan play what was essentially four separate roles; Hallie, Annie, Hallie pretending to be Annie, and Annie pretending to be Hallie. We would never see that amazing kiss between those miserable degenerates who thought it was okay to separate their daughters.
This is not an isolated incident in film either. Many, many high concept movies not only involve their lead actors doing horrible things as part of the plot, often the plot requires the horrible actions to take place in order to exist.
Home Alone, a high concept Christmas film revolves around the premise of a young, nine-year-old left home alone to fight of burglars on Christmas Eve. It’s a brilliant film that lets us into the mind of a future serial killer. Except, that this too can only exist in a world with extreme parental neglect that is borderline abuse. For Kevin to be left alone while the rest of the family leaves for their holiday, he a) has to be completely alienated by his family after, b) his older siblings and cheapskate uncle mercilessly bully him, c) his mother has to be an ungodly b**ch who blames him for being bullied and sends him to sleep in the attic after vindictively mocking him for the crime of being bullied, d) his father needs to be an absolute moron who “accidently” throws out his youngest son’s passport and plane ticket, e) his nosy neighbour needs to be rummaging through the family’s luggage which allows, f) his idiot sister to accidently include said nosy neighbour in the headcount while Kevin is not there, after which, g) his “loving” parents decide to not check each of their children as they got onto the plane, culminating in, h) the police doing the most half-assed job on the planet, imagining that if a small child does not answer a door, they have done all that can be done.
Oh yeah, i) These parents suck!
Once again, for this film to exist at all, we are required to ignore our supposedly likeable protagonists doing the most unforgiveable things to move the plot along. And there are so many other examples of this. The will-they-won’t-they relationship between Ross and Rachael hinges on Rachel being a manipulative sociopath who gets off on tormenting a (admittedly unlikeable prat) man every time he gets into another relationship.
The Batman movies require you to ignore the fact that the “heroic” Batman constantly allows the mass murdering psychopath, the Joker, to get away with killing thousands of people, even mourning him after his death.
The Prince of Egypt forces you to ignore all of the infanticide that the “noble” Moses is an accessory to.
When they say that you need to suspend your disbelief when watching a movie, they should also add that you need to suspend your conscience as well.
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