Straighten out their mess with togetherness! Togetherness! The Parent Trap!

The Parent Trap 1961 (rewatch): Since I'm 4k into the fic I'm writing instead of a Parent Trap AU, I figured I'd rewatch to see if the movie is exactly how I remembered it being.

Answer: Yes.

The one thing that is more clear (and that I don't think I paid attention to the first time around due to not caring and it's not like I care much more these days about shoehorned-in het romance) is just how quickly Mitch and Maggie's second marriage is gonna end, based only on the characterization-as-shown in their interactions, as opposed to everything else about it, which also indicate this second marriage is not gonna last.

My question for the rewatch was: do these characters make me believe they are the ones who would Do This, and the answer is definitely, these are exactly the kind of people who would decide to split up twins for the sake of an easier custody agreement and then never tell them that they're twins. The film earns that. But because it earns it so well, or, well, on the way to earning it so well, it explains why this is not a rekindled relationship that's gonna last. And, really, the twins seem to want them to get back together solely because they dislike the custody agreement. If the parents can find a way to have the twins be together and also see both parents regularly, I imagine their objections would vanish, because that's the root of them. Sharon takes an immediate dislike to Vicki that I doubt Susan would have had before Susan knew she was a twin. (Susan would for sure have eventually disliked Vicki. But Sharon's immediate NOPE reaction is because she wants a parental reconciliation.)

The hurdle to get over in the "superquick getting back together after divorce" genre is that, in order to do it in a short period of narrative time, the reasons for divorce need to be things that either aren't relevant anymore (see: the hard part with doing a Persuasion plot, it needs to earn that the breakup was fully justified due to barriers that have now completely vanished, I say this as someone with an abandoned Check Please persuasion AU) or are so superficial they're easily gotten over (which always rings kinda hollow, this is probably a lot harder to earn than the first one), and movies have a harder road than books because of constraints of the medium; books have more space to explore the inner lives of characters and they can sure show attraction a lot better than movies with their "he was a boy, she was a girl, can I make it any more obvious" shorthanding. And all this is compounded in The Parent Trap with the divorce being so acrimonious that they split up twins, never told the twin about the other one, and lied to the kid about the other parent. They cannot sell this as "well, we broke up because we wanted different things in our careers, but now that it's a decade and a half later, we're more settled now, let's give it another shot". What these parents did is so far beyond any of that.

This movie did not give us the first explanation. It didn't really try to sell us on the second explanation. Instead, Mitch and Maggie's first interactions made it very clear why they divorced. They get immediately into an argument. Maggie is being extremely inappropriate and then punches Mitch in the eye, giving him a black eye he has through the rest of the film. I'm supposed to think these two belong together? I do not. This is clearly trying to be punch-punch-kiss, but for that to work, there has to be some understanding of what appeals to them about the other one. That is not given here. The appeal seems to be "huh, that person's hot". That was not enough to sustain them in their first marriage. It's not gonna be enough for their second.

The one (1) good thing I can say about these two is that they didn't decide to stay together "for the sake of the children". The fact that they each love the twin they arbitrarily ended up with is still kinda damning considering the, y'know, custody agreement they originally came to and happily lived with for 13 years.

Those two got along so badly, they decided they never wanted to see each other again. And then when Maggie found out she had Susan instead of Sharon, she takes the pretty clear hint the granddad gives her about looking frumpy and gets herself a makeover so she can try to get back together with her ex-husband. This decision comes out of nowhere. "I have the wrong twin" + "I'm gonna see my ex-husband again" + "must look good so he'll be attracted to me". She's not trying to win the divorce and flaunt it. She immediately tries to get back together with him. Why? Why does she want to reunite with him? It's never explained.

This is the man she didn't want to see again so much that she agreed she'd never see one of her daughters again either, if that was what it took.

And then Mitch only decides to try again with Maggie after Vicki's walked off after the camping trip; suddenly he's single again and a switch is flipped and he's like "hey sure might as well get back together with my ex, even though in all our previous scenes, we've been arguing and have nothing we agree on except the children." That pretty much makes the characters for me. This is who they are, this is what they do, this is not a second marriage that is gonna last. Which is good, because I'm very pro-divorce and I believe strongly that people who don't want to be married shouldn't be married. And I'll bet the twins won't let the new custody agreement suck so much. And the twins are nearly 14, so it's not like they've got too many years left to need a custody agreement signed by their parents. It's just the rest of their lives of figuring out what they're gonna do once they can make the decisions, which, yeah, they're the ones making the decisions throughout the entire movie, so, fair.

(A note on the timing: per prop canon, the movie takes place in the summer of 1960. The twins are born November 12, 1946. The parents met in New York, presumably sometime in 1945. I wouldn't mind hearing *that* story. Maggie lives in Boston, so getting to New York for shopping is something that appears to be so common, she does it randomly on a whim in this film. What was California Mitch doing in NYC? Where did they live when they were married? How long were they together? All I know is they were not living in Mitch's California house, because Maggie didn't recognize the address on the telegram)

I mean, most of the movie is twin shenanigans, the rekindled romance is basically pastede on yay in the last 20 minutes of the movie. It is not a main concern of the film to make sure the reconciliation is earned. I have a vague recollection that the remake did the parental romance better than this one, but it has been so very long since I watched that and my memories of that one always mingled in with the Olsen Twins's It Takes Two. So the remake is probably due for a rewatch just to see what improvements are made.

In other news, I was legitimately shocked that Vicki's actress was 26. She looks older than Maggie does. It's definitely the hair and makeup styling, which is fully in line with the characterization. But I honestly was like "eh, the age difference between Vicki and the Dad isn't that bad" and then I looked at the ages.



This entry was originally posted at https://lannamichaels.dreamwidth.org/1098628.html.