Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site

As the world of 2022 continues to fall into tiny, shitty little pieces, we’re continuing on with our series of (at least four) documentaries – and the third was a mostly uplifting 2018 piece known as Three Identical Strangers, directed by Tim Wardle.

With a title like that, you’ve probably already figured out the basic plot – somehow we’re going to get from a set of (my goodness, hate to say it but really funny-looking) separately-raised babies as above, to a set of charming young gentlemen – Bobby, Eddy, and David – as below.

The only real question is: How?

Well, obviously they were all adopted out to separate families.  The meet-cute was one of only a few ways you can do it.  In this case, it was all Eddy’s fault.  See, Eddy, who spent one year following high school at a community college in upstate New York, decided to drop out and told all of the many friends he had made that year that he wasn’t coming back.  So when Bobby showed up to the self-same community college the next fall (it was about 1980, but I’m not sure exactly which year), everybody was hugging him and telling him how happy they were that he was actually back, and calling him Eddy and man, Bobby was getting freaked out.  Is this college?  Random strangers hug you and call you Eddy?  (Note: this is probably also the basic plot of several Star Trek franchise episodes.)  Of course it was Eddy’s closest friend, who knew for certain that he wasn’t coming back, figured it out first, and packed Bobby into the car for a midnight trip to Eddy’s house several hours away to reunite the brothers.

And, as you might imagine, reunited twins is at least a tiny media sensation, and as it happened, the brothers eventually ended up on the front page of some of the newspapers in New York City…where David was a bit freaked out to see not one but two copies of him staring back from under the fold.  “They’re coming out of the woodwork!” Bobby’s mother screamed over the phone when David called to say he thought (rightly) that he was brother #3.

In addition to becoming fast friends, the triplets also became quite a bit of a media sensation.  They were on Donahue and various other talk shows, touting their similarities – they all wrestled in high school, they all liked the same type of women, they had the same mannerisms, etc.  They were pretty much inseparable, and they were the talk of the town.  One day walking down the street, they got recognized by a film crew and convinced to stand in as some extras in a movie to ogle a girl walking by.  Yeah, it was Desperately Seeking Susan with a young Madonna.  They had no idea.  They even opened up a steakhouse together in the city known as Triplets.  You’d almost be forgiven for thinking this movie was going to be nothing but a fairy tale.

That is, unless you’re perceptive enough to notice that you’re only getting modern interview footage from two of the three brothers.

When I was a young child, maybe about 8 years old, I was at an afterschool painting lesson hosted at the house of one of the older ladies that attended my church with several other kids my age, including the pastor’s daughter.  And in the middle of the lesson, two police officers showed up to the door with our pastor in tow, and he was crying.  He walked up to his daughter, and presumably not knowing at all what to do, proceeded to explain to her in fine detail about her mother’s exhaust-pipe-and-garden-hose suicide.  All this while I sat right next to her.  I say this to make the point that I get the feeling that the description of Eddy’s suicide in this film is honest and intimate and harrowing, but I can’t really gauge it.  My taste buds for that sort of thing are quite burned.

So it turns out that the brothers shared at least one more trait that they kept pretty quiet about – they had all suffered from pretty severe mental illness as children.  Banging heads on walls until they passed out kind of mental illness.

Which leads us back to the second, darker act of the film.  I said earlier that there was only one real question. Well, there IS another question: Why?

It turns out there’s at least a partial answer to that.  The boys were adopted out by an outfit known as the Louise Wise Adoption Agency.  When the boys were reunited, the adoptive parents all got together and confronted the adoption agency, but didn’t really get anywhere, basically being told that it was easier to adopt out a single child than three together.

But slowly it came out that the agency actually separated many more sets of identical siblings at birth, including the two women pictured above.  While the details are still murky and largely sealed in inaccessible university archives, the picture that emerges is that the director of Louise Wise was involved in running an unannounced – and completely unethical – experiment where they would place identical siblings into households of very different income/demographics to ask the ultimate question of whether nature or nurture determines personality traits.  This of course, would explain the strange many-year psychological follow-throughs with the children, which the agency assured the parents was a new state-wide requirement for all adoptees. (Narrator: That was a lie.)  Unfortunately, though at the time the film was released, Bobby and David were still digging, they were unlikely to ever get to the bottom of everything.  The director of the agency had died many years before and no study was ever published.  The End.

It is interesting that Three Identical Strangers is so completely two different movies, at once (mostly in the early portion of the film) a joyful story of reunion and (mostly at the end) a sinister tale of unethical research and the ruination of lives.  The events of the film simply have to be viewed through both lenses.  Some sadness, some joy, the pursuit of questions with no answers…a documentary that is, in the end, just a microcosm of life.