Three Identical Strangers REVIEW
Every family has secrets. There is something that one partner knows that the other does not. There is something the parents know that the kids do not. There is something that the kids know that the parents do not, or that only one parent knows. There is something that each sibling knows that the other siblings do not know. I suspect only the pets are omniscient. The question is: “Is this a problem?”
Are these secrets the only thing keeping some family’s together?
I was listening to a student today who had just found out something that two people in her family of eleven had known but she had not. Blew a hole in that family like a hellfire missile into a row boat.
Three Identical Strangers is a documentary about one family and the way it is trying to navigate its way through a secret well-kept; a secret kept for nineteen years before coincidence or Providence threw the veil open and put their secret on the front page of the news (and now a major motion picture). Imagine for a moment that you have a twin brother and your parents never told you because they never knew. Now imagine that that twin brother has a twin brother and it is not you. Imagine being nineteen years old and waking up one morning to discover that you are a triplet. Imagine setting out to uncover how that could have happened and running smack dab into sealed files in a Yale library that cannot be opened until 105 years after the day you were born. Imagine that the implications are that you have to live to be 106 if you are ever going to read the boxes of files that tell the story of why your siblings were kept a secret from you.
Some stories are stranger than the fictions we could ever imagine.
“You cannot go poking skeletons in the closet without making maggots wriggle," Salena Godden writes in Springfield Road.
Question for Comment: The question for Comment tonight is a weighty one: “How do you know if you want to know a family secret if you do not know it? I suppose these things are like meanings in dreams. We all know that there is a secret but we can either pursue knowledge of it or decide not to. It is our call.
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