Mainstream Hollywood always tries to smooth over divorce – whether it be by way of ignoring it completely or mending it up and tying it with a safe, neat little bow. And America eats it up. We love to see our problems fixed and our lives represented as more simple than they actually are. 

A prime example of this is the 1998 remake of the 1961 film The Parent Trap, which chronicles the lives of Hallie Parker and Annie James, a pair of long-lost identical twins who live on opposite sides of the globe, meet at a summer camp, and hatch an identity-swapping plan to get their divorced parents back together. 

From an objective standpoint, the film is enjoyable to watch. It plays on classic tropes of mistaken identities and chance encounters, and it has a certain childlike innocence. But the movie’s picture book, fairytale ending, in which Annie and Hallie’s divorced parents suddenly realize that they are still in love with one another, is extremely problematic. It perpetuates the false notion that divorce is simply a mistake in the arrangements of ordinary life, and plays into the broader Hollywood myth that there is just one person who completes each of us, when in reality, each person is, by definition, complete by themselves.  

It is a powerful thing to have your story represented in art. Hiding children from the reality of divorce gives the illusion that so-called normal families are all together, while having divorced parents is something to be ashamed of. Just as unrealistic depictions of “idealistic” thinner bodies on screen and in print promote eating disorders and body dysmorphia, representation or lack thereof of real-life families in media can have profound effects on real life.

There are two ways to approach The Parent Trap – literally, in a way which condemns its false notions of Hollywood happy endings and perfect lives, or more loosely – taking in its themes of the power of family and the sheer ability of children’s love to drive at least the appearance of parental reconciliation and cooperation. 

The innocent wishes of Hallie and Annie stem from a very real place for many children who have experienced divorce or family tumult: they find comfort in each other’s company, and they wish that their lives would be the way they used to be.

As an eleven year old girl with divorced parents sitting in front of the television watching The Parent Trap, was I looking for a different life? Or was I finding joy in the things I already had?

The Parent Trap made me feel happy – but it may have just been fleeting, a product of living vicariously. I always dreamed of going to Hogwarts. I wanted to be a member of the Weasley family, with its traditional family and gender roles just as I hoped in some small way to have my life resolved in the way Hallie and Annie’s lives are “fixed” in The Parent Trap. 

But sometimes, life in movies isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Just look at Lindsay Lohan, the now-34 year old who played Hallie and Annie in The Parent Trap. Hallie and Annie aren’t real, and Lindsay Lohan, sadly, is a notorious product of the toxic hollywood child star machine, unreliable and addicted. 

Although films such as The Parent Trap can be fun to watch, they reveal deeper societal narratives about what constitutes a good, successful, or complete life. Modern families are not like The Parent Trap. They cannot be fixed by reverting back to old ways, no matter how much we may wish for it.

In real life, there are no happy endings. That doesn’t make our life definitively sad or tragic, but it goes on, – there is no way of preserving bliss or sadness forever.