Three Identical Strangers is a documentary in three parts that examines the personal story of how three men who were separated at birth and adopted by different families met and how their lives unfolded; investigates the reason for that separation; pulls back and shows the unresolved scope and effect of this phenomenon. A human interest story develops into a psychological thriller with no resolution.
It is not the filmmakers’ fault that there is no resolution. I am not a scientist, and while I am an attorney, consent to medical and psychological examination is not my expertise, but something can be legal and wrong. The idea of substantial, meaningful scientific consent and who has a right to use another person’s life for research is still an area that either the law is behind on or willfully complicit in favoring institutions, fictional people, over individuals, actual people. By substantial, meaningful scientific consent, I mean that the burden should be on the expert, the examiner, to insure that the intent of the research is clearly disclosed, and there should be a duty to keep the person being examined, i.e. the subject, informed of any ongoing developments that emerged, which were not available at the initial disclosure. If an examiner can prove that there was full, initial and ongoing, disclosure of the intent, purpose and discoveries of the research, then there can be a claim to proprietary claims. Anything less is, as one of the brothers puts it, “Nazi shit.”
Three Identical Strangers seems to suggest that the parents consented to at least, a monitoring of the boys’ welfare and adjustment to their new home or at most, an adoption study, but they were never told that they had identical siblings, and they still do not know the purpose or findings of the study, which spanned from 1960 through 1980, but the findings, which are housed at Yale’s Archives, are restricted until 2066. It appears to be the examiners’ intent to release the information once everyone is dead. Is this an attempt to avoid liability because there is no living person with standing to sue or a sensitivity, disclosure issue in order to not release intimate details of people’s lives while they are alive? I highly doubt that it is the latter since the gatekeepers of the study have been remarkably stingy with releasing the findings to the subjects of the study in the absence of pressure from bad press.
People need a memento mori. When people make decisions, they think of time as an infinite resource so they don’t consider how valuable and irreplaceable time actually is. We don’t know our expiration date, but we have one so we only have a certain amount of time to live fully and well. When we don’t live fully and well because we make the decision to see that as something that can be postponed to the future, we are deluding ourselves, but when we prevent others from even having the option to live fully and well, it is like murder. When people make decisions for others without thinking of the daily, real world impact of those decisions, it is a stunning lack of empathy, an inability to put yourself in your subject’s shoes or a godlike delusion which results in glee at playing with others’ lives. Three Identical Strangers interviewed two people who were researchers albeit not integral to it, and while they conceptually understood in retrospect that they were wrong, Dr. Lawrence Perfman, who was a research assistant for under a year, giggled at the idea of having more knowledge than the subjects about the subjects’ lives, and a sweet looking elderly woman was shockingly cold and intellectually unfazed at the premise that there were still people who were clueless about having an identical sibling. It never occurs to them to wonder how they would feel if they did not know about an identical sibling, but someone else did and purposely kept that information from them even though it was readily available.
One of the brothers’ adopted aunt, Hedy Page, explained, “When you play with humans, you do something wrong.” There is no way to compensate people for time that they were intentionally kept apart for any reason other than the best interests of the child. If separating mothers from children is one end of the spectrum, during a voluntary adoption setting, separating siblings, particularly those who have been together since the time of conception, is a part of that spectrum. While Three Identical Strangers explores possibilities why the three brothers’ lives turned out similarly and differently—they share a mother who was mentally ill, but their differing environments, i.e. different families, ameliorated or exacerbated the effects of that mental illness on their daily life, the documentary only briefly alludes to the fact as babies that they hit their heads against the wall as a result of separation anxiety without further delving into the possibility that an external trauma was the real cause of their psychological distress. Isn’t it possible that even with a biological inheritance of mental illness, without the study, they may not have experienced trauma and would not have shown the effects of mental illness. Mental illness can be caused by biology and/or trauma as those with no history of mental illness, but later suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder after experiencing a traumatic event can attest to.
Three Identical Strangers ultimately does not go far enough into exploring whether or not the study itself can be construed as child abuse. As a result of the US government’s immoral treatment of undocumented immigrant families, the public is becoming more aware of the damaging consequences of isolating children from their family and putting them in an unfamiliar environment. It is a form of genocide inflicted by government officials who may or may not be ignorant of the psychological consequences. While these brothers were placed in a beneficial environment, a group of trained psychological professionals cannot plead similar ignorance of the psychological effect of separating identical siblings for a beneficial reason from a mother, but also from each other with no provision of periodically socializing together out of intellectual curiosity.
Three Identical Strangers is additionally horrifying because it is set against the backdrop of post World War II, and people on both sides of the study are intimately familiar with the horrors of the Holocaust. If they cannot be inoculated against casual institutional cruelty and will inflict Mengele light experiments on the land that they sought refuge from terror, then there is no hope for the rest of us.
While Three Identical Strangers starts as a light and enjoyable chronicle into three young men’s lives, it becomes a necessarily emotionally draining experience which shows us that the lessons learned from the exploitation of Henrietta Lacks still have yet to carry over. Apparently men of conscious and science can be sadly mutually exclusive. There was a movie about this same subject, The Twinning Reaction, which was released earlier, and I am very interested in seeing it.