The biggest difference between the 1961 Disney film The Parent Trap and both the book it was based on and the 1998 remake is the age of the twin protagonists. In 1949, the world famous German children’s writer Erich Kästner published Das doppelte Lottchen, a story about two nine year old girls who discover they are twins separated by their divorced parents. This book spawned numerous film adaptations, the most well-known being Disney’s 1961 film and its 1998 remake. In the remake, the twins, played by the preternaturally adorable Lindsay Lohan, are 11 years old, still preadolescent like the girls in Kästner’s book. In the 1961 film, however, an older Hayley Mills plays the twins as 13 year olds. This choice by the writer and director David Swift takes Kästner’s dark fairytale of divorce and connects it with the experience of adolescence.
That Kästner’s improbable story is best understood as modern fairytale is clear. In Kästner’s book the fairytale references are sometimes explicit, as when one of the twins watches her father, an orchestra conductor and composer, conducting the opera Hänsel und Gretel. But the story itself is fairytale. A husband and wife separate and decide to take one twin each and never speak of the existence of the other. When the girls meet they are able to work in tandem to overcome obstacles and repair the rift between their parents. These are mythological motifs, with divine twins. The summer camp at which the girls discover each other is an updated version of what would be a forest in a story by the Brothers Grimm. In the 1961 film there is even a return to the forest, a camping trip during which the girls, assisted by Mother Nature herself (in the form of twin bear cubs), drive away the would-be step-parent who seeks to replace their mother. The movie even ends with the parents’ remarriage presented as a dream.
As with fairytale, The Parent Trap possesses such force—it is a bizarre and marvelous film—in part because it gives narrative form to primal trauma, the splitting of the self experienced by a child of divorce, and its possible overcoming. As Sharon says to her twin, when they reconstruct the story of their parents’ divorce and their own resulting separation: “You know what probably happened? They must have quarreled, and parted, and just sort of bisected us, each taking one of us.” The line indicates the surgical nature of this internal amputation. The 1998 remake finds an objective correlative in a torn photograph of the parents, one half in possession of each girl.
As fairytales play out all kinds of childhood horror in the form of wicked stepmothers or kings abandoning their children to die, this myth centers on the way that the disunion of the divorced couple lives on as fissure in the child—externalized and literalized as a split into two selves—and who can no longer find in her parents an image of union on which to base her own self. This story is like the famous judgement of Solomon, except that the baby in question is in fact cut in half—“bisected”—and a piece given to each parent, fifty-fifty. In Kästner’s book one of the twins even dreams that her father attempts to separate her from her sister with a saw.
The key difference in the 1961 film is that the awareness of this split and the need to overcome it are triggered by adolescence. The self that Sharon-Susan must find is the prelude to an adult self, romantically and sexually aware. The all-girls summer camp she attends is boy-crazy, as we see at the start when a dance is organized with a nearby boys camp and the girls shriek with excitement. When each twin comes back from summer camp, they are met with people who sense that something has changed about them. Of course this is because they have switched places, but this also reinforces the sense of something “different” that is connected with adolescence.
The commencement of Sharon-Susan’s own romantic life requires a reckoning with their parents as erotic people, a confrontation with an image of the parents—literally a photograph—that does not belong exclusively to the child but is shared, or hidden. The twins interrogate each parent about why and how they fell in love with the other parent. They justify this as a way of discovering how to reunite their parents, but it is simultaneously an attempt to acquire a new, adult understanding of the parent as erotic-romantic individual, and therefore a new understanding of oneself as both a product of that eros and an individual capable of forming her own romantic attachments.
This is the opposite of the college-age son’s response in Noah Baumbach’s 1995 film Kicking and Screaming, when his newly separated father starts to speak about his sex life: “Dad, I’m not really ready to accept you as a human being yet. The idea of you and mom is disgusting enough.”
In The Parent Trap, the daughter’s ability to understand and contend with her father’s imminent marriage to another, much younger woman tracks with her own growing awareness of adult eros, while the father’s rapprochement with the mother tracks with his recognition that his daughter is on the way to womanhood. When the father broaches the subject of his new fiancee, he starts to explain: “You probably think of me as being just your father, and to you I probably seem ancient and old.” Sharon explodes at him yelling: “You can’t marry her! She’s just a child!”
In fact, the problem with the father’s new relationship is that, as his daughter understands very well, it confuses his desire for lost youth and erotic rejuvenation with a properly developed adult sexuality. As Sharon says to the fiancee: “I know what wonderful, delicate mystery daddy sees in you. And I can’t say I blame him there, either. You’re very nicely put together.” She sees moreover that the fiancee’s motivation isn’t love but gold-digging.
The father’s regression forecloses both the possibility of him reuniting with his ex-wife, and accepting his teenaged daughter as a young woman. This is brought out when the mother shows up at his house, causing him to take pratfalls as he sees his ex-wife and his daughter peeking out from behind a tree, and even more explicitly when he find’s his ex-wife’s ample brassiere hanging in the bathroom and then looks into his daughter’s room to see if it can possibly belong to her.
His confusion over the mismatch in development underscores his need to make a place for both his ex-wife’s place as adult woman and his daughter’s place as woman-to-be. When he finally realizes that Susan is actually Sharon, the daughter he has not seen since she was a baby, he talks about burping her and changing her diapers, then says “Look at you now. Look at her” and embraces her. As he is still wet from his fall into the lake, his hug wets her shirt, accentuating her developing body. She then affirms she is: “Quite grown up.”
From this point on, the last third of the movie switches focus from the twins to the parents. Although the twins arrange a sweet and corny recreation of their parents’ first date, it doesn’t have the power to bring the two together or to remove the fiancee from the picture. This will take a rekindling of the powerful erotic dynamic between father and mother, a process that begins much earlier with the mother, played by Maureen O’Hara, who in her separate home in London looked and dressed dowdy and restrained, but shows up at the father’s home in California as a voluptuous redhead in form-flattering green dresses. She invades her ex-husband’s home with her sexuality and its unpredictable, even violent power. “Why do you have to get so physical?” he complains when she socks him. “I can’t even talk to you about anything. You always wind up belting me.”
The father, played by Brian Keith, takes a while to catch O’Hara’s fire. He is a passive obstacle, responding to O’Hara’s allure and energy with mere apology and deference. O’Hara’s attractiveness registers more with the comic figure of the reverend who is to perform the wedding ceremony between the father and his fiancee. Even as Keith tries to reassure his fiancee and prospective mother-in-law that his ex-wife is “really the… the motherly type,” O’Hara bounces into the room to the delight of the reverend’s discerning eye.
The father is stuck between an ex-wife and a daughter, neither of whom he wants to recognize as sexual beings, and a fiancee onto whom he has projected this missing recognition of womanliness. But he cannot get unstuck on his own, and requires the camping trip sequence from which the mother absents herself at the last minute. The mother can stay at home knowing that Nature herself, with her two twins reverting to impish helpers, will do the work of chasing off her rival who is superficially feminine but not primally so.
Back from the camping trip, the father finally recognizes this primal feminine energy in his ex-wife when, in the kitchen, after a deep focus shot for the viewer, he turns around from washing his hands to see Maureen O’Hara from behind, barefoot and on a stepladder, getting dishes down from a high shelf.
Suddenly able to perceive both mother and goddess in one, restored to his hearth, he rushes upstairs to continue his own preparation: shaving, dressing, fixing his hair. When he returns she has him untie her apron, further revealing the interpenetration of the domestic and the erotic. He can finally deliver his speech about what he misses in her: “I miss those wet stockings you used to have hanging around the bathroom. . . .And I miss my razor being dull because you used it to shave your legs with. And I miss the hairpins mixed up with the fish hooks in my tackle box. . . . I guess I just miss you.” She raises her hand to her mouth, allowing us to see the wedding ring on her finger, and he concludes: “We’re going to grow up into a couple of old, lonely people if we don’t do something about it.”
In truth, there is something a little lacking in his strangely morbid response to O’Hara’s apotheosis as domestic sex goddess. Brian Keith is empathetic and likeable throughout the film but he does not bring the larger-than-life presence that would match O’Hara.
I sense he is functioning as a placeholder for John Wayne. This is partly because Wayne and O’Hara were so interlinked at this time, having generated onscreen heat in films such as Rio Grande and The Quiet Man. But it is partly because John Wayne might have delivered the final lines in a way almost no other actor could, as the veritable incarnation of masculinity itself. Wayne saying “I know I don’t say things like you want to hear ‘em” is not apology but assertion.
In a very astute essay for First Things magazine about the differences between the Disney movies and Kästner’s ur-text, Dana Mack points out the 1961 film’s emphasis on erotic tension between the parents, a tension that can at times be unpredictable and even violent, yet is a necessary ingredient in the cement of a good marriage. One of the lessons of that film, writes Mack, is “not that family violence is funny, but that love is a volatile proposition, wedded love not for the faint of heart.” The parents in the film “failed to accept the protracted skirmish that is erotic pair-bonding,” and require their children to bring them together in order to take up loving arms once again.
By contrast, writes Mack, the 1998 remake offers a de-eroticized, too placid image of marriage. The twins have been restored to the pre-adolescence of Kästner’s source text. Yet so have the parents, played by Dennis Quaid and Natasha Richardson. There is no sexual chemistry between them, and their relationship seems to accord with the idealized projections of their eleven-year-old daughters.
Richardson never blooms like O’Hara does. She is, ironically, a bridal fashion designer, but does not appear to have a libido herself. She does not seem to preside supernaturally over the camping scene, since one cannot imagine her connected with capital-N Nature. In contrast to the messy lessons of the 1961 film, the 1998 remake is resolutely safe, and whatever adult sexuality exists in this world is offloaded to the comic servants. There is much enjoyment in this film, but not much insight into the nature of love and sex.
David Swift, who wrote and directed the first film, divorced his first wife, remarried in 1957, and had two daughters with his second wife. The remake was co-written and produced by husband and wife Charles Sheyer and Nancy Meyers, who also have two daughters, Annie and Hallie, whose names are used as the names of the twins in the 1998 film.
Meyers, who directed the film, has been a highly successful director and writer of popular fare since the 1980s, films that often consider the uncertainties of upper-middle-class women, from Private Benjamin to The Intern, and that take inspiration from 1930s screwball comedy. The year after their remake of The Parent Trap appeared, she and Sheyer divorced. Sheyer later remarried and had twins, and again divorced, his third or fourth time depending on the accuracy of Wikipedia.
In 2020, Meyers wrote a piece in the New York Times about her mellowing relationship with her ex-husband. As Meyers writes of her career since they divorced:
I have spent the last two decades not only being single but writing a couple of movies about divorced women my age —purposely defying the clichés that being older and single meant you were destined to be undesirable, lonely and isolated. I wrote about women in my films who blossomed post-divorce, much as I had done in some ways. I was driven by a desire not to be put in a box by my age or divorce, and I wanted to project a positive spin for women like me. And in my movies, I wanted to try to be funny about it all. Why not laugh at some of what life throws at us?
Recently sharing a ride with her ex-husband to the wedding of a friend was, she writes, the stuff of potential romantic comedy. But in this case it precipitated a new stage in their relationship, “that can best be described as ‘old friends.’” Other shared rides followed, easy-going, occasionally fraught or awkward with the weight of past intimacy, but comfortable overall if not exactly uncomplicated. As Meyers writes of her screenplays: “I really do enjoy writing the ex-husband character, a relationship rich with humor and filled with pain.”