Three Identical Strangers is the most thought provoking documentary I have watched in while.
To fully appreciate this story, you ought to start here, with a 1995 New Yorker Article that first features its progenitor, Dr. Peter B. Neubauer. It was the sixties, a set of identical-twin girls came to the attention of the prominent psychiatrist who saw in them an exceptional opportunity to study human nature through twins separated by design, and perhaps to lay rest that most primordial quarrel of nature versus nurture. Thus began his multi-decade research: the lives of at least five pairs of twins and one triplets were traced in secret from the moment of their adoption, until the study’s whimper-ish end.
Just what exactly is hereditary? In the Neubauer Twin study, “Amy” and “Beth” grew in lockstep and into remarkably similar adults: both neurotic, both hypochondriacs, both confused over their sexuality and identity. Their resemblance is all the more eerie considering that their adoptive environments were polar opposites: Beth enjoyed the nurture of a compassionate, present mother and steadfast, affectionate father, Amy lived her antithesis.
Or consider the Jim Twins – Jim Lewis and Jim Springer, separated at birth and reunited 39 years later, observed by Professor Thomas J. Bouchard and his team at the University of Minnesota. The two Jims shared similar mannerisms, vocalization, and even morphology in their bodies. Yet the two have entirely separate lives. Bouchard had studied more than a hundred other separated twins, and every single one of them shared inexplicable commonalities: similar life events, like falling down the stairs at 15, or meeting their future spouses at a local dance-hall, might be a matter of happenstance, but quirks like storing rubber bands on wrists and sexual preferences, or pathology like location of acne, the wrinkles and grey hair, or the poignant phenomenon of twin guilt, are much harder to explain by coincidence.
Then there’s the controversial Sandra Scarr, who found that black and interracial American children adopted early into white families were similar to their adopted families in childhood but lost that resemblance by adolescence. Instead they begin to approximate their birth siblings in personality and IQ tests, despite having lived an entirely insulated life.
Three Identical Strangers began with a wildly outlandish reunion of the Neubauer triplets. One day in 1980, 19-year-old Robert Shafran arrived at Sullivan Community College for his first day, only to find that everyone had already met “him”. And when that story was featured in the news, it was picked up by their third twin.
It soon came to light that their separation was engineered. The brothers were placed with disparate families representing working class, middle class, and upper middle class, and with just as divergent parenting styles.
Three Identical Strangers is the story of their unnerving parallel.
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The documentary flirts, dances, and brushes with that cardinal question. It doesn’t quite draw conclusions. Neubauer himself had locked up his research at Yale until 2065, fearing both backlash against his study and perhaps against the conclusions he drew.
Discussions around this sort of topic invariably lead to the matter of ‘free will’, and at times a fatalist spiral.
If two genetically identical individuals separated at birth will grow up to be the same adult with only stylistic difference, with the same hopes and quirks and sawdust dreams that make us Men, what are we at all? Shelves to be decorated by “the ornaments and curiosities” of experience?
And if human nature is inheritable, and if this nature may be caustic at heart, what does it say about our quest for transformation?
My mother used to say, when I told her of my intention to have no children: “Good. Your father’s family line deserves to expire. Nothing good comes out of it”.
I hated that.
Consciousness is the rebellion against biology.
I rebel.
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