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"Perhaps what is so fascinating in the history of the twins gathered is the implied suggestion that it could happen to anyone," Lawrence Wright, Pulitzer Prize winner, in his book from 1997, Twins: And What They Tell Us Who We Are? . "It feeds the common fantasy that any of us could have a clone, a doppelgänger; someone who is not only a human mirror but also an ideal companion; someone who understands me perfectly, almost perfectly, because it is me, almost me.It is not only the sense of identity that excites us but the difference; the fantasy of a twin Identical is a projection of ourselves living another life, finding other opportunities, choosing other careers, sleeping with other husbands.An identical twin could experience the world and come back to account. choices that we could have made. "
The reunited twins, in particular identical, are convincing for scientists for the same reasons: They offer a unique opportunity to understand the age-old question of nature in relation to culture, genes in relation to the environment, and with our growing understanding of the importance of epigenetics, the question of how these two factors interact with each other. If identical people are raised in different environments by different parents, what can this tell us about the degree to which our behaviors, personalities, health and intelligence are innate or acquired? Among the findings of one of the most well-known studies on separated twins, the Minnesota Study Study of Twins Rear Apart: The identical siblings raised independently are about as similar as those raised together. Nature, in other words, makes a pretty strong case for himself.
In the canon of the famous twins together, there are some emblematic examples, touchstone: the Jim twins, the brothers are separating like baby lives; Oskar and Jack, separated at six months, became members of Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany, the second being a Trinidadian Jew. More recently, we learned that the Colombian brothers had accidentally traded to the hospital nursery, so that two pairs of identical twins were raised as two seemingly fraternal, unrelated duos.
Then there are the Shafran / Galland / Kellman triplets. own right, and now the subject of an excellent new documentary, Sundance awarded by Tim Wardle Three Identical Strangers . In 1980, Bobby Shafran, a new student from Sullivan County Community College in Sheldrake, New York, arrived on campus for an exceptionally friendly reception. It was as if the strangers who crowded around his dormitory already knew him. In fact, they had confused him with an old classmate: Eddy Galland, who shared with Shafran more than a passing resemblance. They had the same face, the same body, the same manners, the same birthday; were both adopted; and had both been placed with their families through the same adoption agency: Louise Wise Services in New York, now closed, and then a prominent institution for Jewish families seeking Jewish babies. They were twins, boys quickly guessed, reunited after 19 years apart. Their story has been splashed across the newspapers.
So in Queens, David Kellman, another 19-year-old with curly hair and beard, also born on July 12, soon found himself looking at his image. (s) in the New York Post . What at first seemed to be a story of twins united suddenly became even bigger: separate triplets at birth, raised within a hundred miles of each other, completely unaware of the fact that they were born. existence of the other.
Kellman's aunt remembers the boy's first encounter. "It was the most amazing thing they belonged to each other." The first part of Three Identical Strangers zooms in with the same childish energy and pugnacious. The triplets were the toast of the human interest information media. They appeared on talk shows, extolling their strange similarities: All three Marlboros smoked; all three were high school wrestlers; all three liked older women. They scored cameos on Cheers and Desperately Seeking Susan (it's them, peeping a very young Madonna in the streets of Soho). They partyed in the glittering 1980s nightclubs in New York, became roommates in a sordid little Manhattan, and eventually business partners, opening up a y-scene, kitschy restaurant called Roumanian Triplets Steak House just a few blocks away. 39, onramp at the Holland Tunnel. ("His dining room is the kind of contemporary blond-wood space with brick walls where raspberry vinegar farm chicken pieces are expected," greeted The Washington Post in 1988, "but the menu is the genre")
About halfway through Wardle's documentary, the manic energy of the first act of the triplet takes a plunge. "From the moment we we met. . . until later. . . there was nothing that could keep us out of the way, "he recalls ominously from a Sharian today, middle-aged. By the mid-90s, the easy intimacy that the triplets had assumed began to curdle. In 1995, Lawrence Wright, working on a history of New Yorker that he later adapted in the aforementioned book Twins contacted the brothers. He had found an article referring to a secret study conducted by a psychologist named Dr. Peter Neubauer in collaboration with Louise Wise Services. The agency had a policy of separating twins and other multiples for adoption (based on a recommendation from a different psychologist). Neubauer, Wright discovered, had seized the opportunity to launch the final investigation on nature against education: to study separated twins not, like other scientists, only after that. They rediscovered themselves, usually in adulthood, but during their development as ostensibly singleton children. The adoption agency was going to give him subjects, but all the operation depended on a cone of silence: the parents could not know that their new offspring had identical siblings, nor the nature of the social experience in which their children were involuntarily, as the documentary later suggests, they may have also been subjects of study). They were forced to keep their new babies enlisted in what they said was a standard study on the development of adopted children, allowing them to be observed regularly by a team of guest researchers operating under false pretenses. .
The study apparently violated any rule requiring informed consent for human experimentation, " Newsday reported in 1997, shortly after the project was exposed "No rule governing behavioral studies was in place at that time, and no law prohibited the separation of twins." Looking at Three Identical Strangers I remembered Errol Morris' recent series of Netflix docudramas .] Wormwood Another slow-burning thriller about conspiracy and cover-up: The refrain of this film, Hamlet – "Some thing is rotten in the state of Denmark "- works here as well, though much of Wardle's documentary power lies in our inability to identify the precise source of our
More than half -th century after the birth of the triplets, the Neubauer's hodes raise serious ethical questions, especially about the integrity of young researchers who make monthly home visits to each family, with full knowledge of the existence and closeness of their subjects' siblings. . (Wardle interviews such a research assistant, whose lack of contrition is disconcerting.) The dark history of studies on twins – favored by Nazi eugenicists and in the United States by those with racist political programs – does not Not help, especially since all the children involved were Jewish (just like Neubauer, who fled his native Austria during World War II). Neubauer also did not refuse to define its specific objectives and, to date, has never published its findings. He died in 2008, leaving instructions to keep his study notes under lock and key in an archive at Yale until 2065. Precisely what he was looking for, why and what he has discovered remains a mystery, even after the advertising generated by the documentary resulted in the release of parts of his records. They contain no formal conclusions and leave large strips of text written, probably to protect the privacy of other subjects in the study, some of whom are probably still in the dark as they were born twins. after the meeting of the triplets in 1980, by an anecdote reported by People magazine: Shortly after their story was made public, the brothers – by the documentary then totally unaware of Neubauer or his project – were contacted by Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr., the chief scientist behind the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart mentioned above. Bouchard hoped to recruit them as participants in his own study (we do not know he knew about Neubauer's activities). Their response, communicated by their newly recruited agent: "What is there for them?"
The year the brothers discovered the machinations of Neubauer, Galland, as a result of # 39, a series of manic episodes, was tragically killed. himself. Several years later, Triplets, the restaurant, closed. The film implies that the relationship between the two surviving brothers has also cooled. Towards the end of the documentary, we finally see Shafran and Kellman together on camera; they are less like brothers and sisters, more like somewhat worried acquaintances, old war comrades with too much trauma to ignore them.
Wardle slowly reveals the details, keeping an eye on the suspense. Most of the unfortunate stories of triplets have already been reported, but the director unearths some salient clues of Neubauer's intent. I will walk slightly not to spoil these revelations. Suffice it to say that little in the life of the triplets or in the choice to study them seem insignificant: not the fact that many of the biological mothers of the children in the study had a complex psychiatric history, nor The composition and class status of Galland's fatal battle with mental illness is a function of his childhood experience as the son of a disciplinary father who was not sure what to do with his emotional, son visionary? Was it a consequence of the trauma of discovering that his childhood was essentially designed for science? Or was it due to a deeper trauma suffered when he was separated from his brothers at such a young age?
And what made Shafran and Kellman more resistant than their genetically identical siblings? Could the discoveries of Neubauer have shed light on these questions? We may never know it, or at least not for nearly 50 years. But in the great debate between nature and culture (something of a false dichotomy according to current scientific norms), Wardle 's film, or at least the people who find it, seem to favor the' '' ''. education. The differences between the triplets were ultimately greater than their similarities. "We found the ways to look like ourselves and we put them in value," insists Shafran. The three boys were wrestlers, but again they all had the same stocky physique, muscular, thick neck and well suited to the sport. They all smoked Marlboros, but at that time, Marlboro was the most-purchased cigarette brand in the United States. They preferred all older women, but studies have shown that partners are one of the few areas where identical twins tend to differ. No matter how much we look like each other, no one crosses the line between being like and being the same, "wrote Wright in 1997. What can we really learn from someone else's experience? – even a genetic clone? There are no definitive answers. We leave David Kellman and Bobby Shafran in the Bardo: somewhere between ignorance and understanding, between strangers and brothers.
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