FILM / Twin flics: the naked truth: Hollywood has a quiet obsession with twins. John Lyttle considers the similarities

PERHAPS twins fascinate us so because they blithely shatter our belief in our own uniqueness. How matchless, how irreplaceable can one be if it's possible to be duplicated, right down to the cutest little chin cleft? No wonder superstition (and supernatural meaning) has clung to the phenomenon since Castor and Pollux, Romulus and Remus: consider the still current notion that twins are somehow spiritually joined, able to experience the intensity of each other's best and worst moments. Or are capable of marrying at the same hour on the same day, though unaware of each other's existence.

It's hardly surprising, then, that the inherent drama of twinhood has been exploited through the centuries, from Plautus (The Menaechmi, Amphitryon) to Shakespeare (Twelfth Night, The Comedy of Errors) to Dumas (The Man in the Iron Mask) to Patrick White (The Solid Mandala) to Bruce Chatwin (On the Black Hill). Written for the page or stage, each examines duality with reverence, using twinship's natural contradiction - two who seem as one - to spin parables about the human condition. It's a cultural banality that covers everything from early religious teaching to Freudian dogma: twins are representatives of the divided self, Heaven and Hell, Law and Disorder, the Conscious and the Unconscious . . . fill in the blank spaces.

Hollywood provides the most naked - and traditional - expression of these tropes. Twins, like doppelgangers (see The Prisoner of Zenda, Sommersby, The Prince and the Pauper and the forthcoming Presidential satire Dave), are multi-purpose metaphors, able to be put to any use, comic, tragic, instructive, horrific. The latest addition to the form, Alan Rudolph's Equinox (see review, facing page), for all its surface sophistication is actually a handy compendium of genre commonplaces. Why, the sweet twin and criminal twin are even separated at birth (see below). As the director truthfully says, 'It's a pretty simple story.'

(Photograph omitted)