Headscratchers / The Parent Trap (1998)

• How did Annie get all the furniture on the roof of the cabin?
  • Her friends probably helped her. Four or five girls carrying a small camp bed between them would probably be able to manage it. If the whole cabin was in on the prank, there were probably multiple girls helping out. Strange that no one saw them doing it - can't have been done quickly - but the camp seems to be very poorly staffed.
• While it's clear that Elizabeth and Nick get back together in the end, how did they make it work? Did Elizabeth move to California to be with Nick, or vice-versa? Or did they simply choose to have a long-distance marriage?
  • This was going to be a final gag in the original script, where the twins bicker about who will move where.
  • I'd lean more towards Elizabeth moving. She could probably move her business to California with very little problems - especially as Annie mentions that she's becoming quite well known. She seems to have something of a following in America - if her dresses are featured in Vogue. While Nick has other people helping him on the vineyard, it might be trickier for him to move and still be involved in the business.
  • Given that wine-making is a seasonal business, they could live in both places. During growing and "crush" season Nick would probably need to be on hand and Elizabeth could work out of a new boutique in San Francisco. The rest of the year, they could reside in London and Nick could remotely manage the sales and marketing of his label.
  • It's worth noting that the parents discuss the idea that they could keep the girls for half the year each - and Chessy says "they can't go to two different schools each year, that's nuts." so even if they could manage to live in both places it might be a bit too much for the girls. Or the girls could go to a boarding school.
  • There's no way in heck they'd go to boarding school, given that not only did Meredith effectively threaten to do the same thing, but their parents just got back together and they would want to spend as much time with them as possible. Elizabeth moved her business to San Francisco, Nick probably started a seasonal tuxedo design business during the winter months, and the girls went to public school and had an amazing rest of their childhoods. Everyone got the best in the end.
  • It's also worth bearing in mind that online shopping began as early as the late '70s, and the Internet's already been around for about fifteen years at this point. Elizabeth probably won't have too much trouble selling dresses all over the world, even from California.
• The original arrangement. Why did the parents torture the kids like this? First they tear them apart, then they refuse to acknowledge the other parent or allow any meeting, they even keep it a secret that the girls are twins without any sign of wanting to end the charade. What good does it serve, what could have possessed them to do something this cruel? The girls weren't at fault...
  • As the Fridge page points out, probably they panicked and it just snowballed.
• So Elizabeth moved to London 11 years ago hoping that Nick would come after her. But he never did. Nick said that he didn't know she wanted him to. But when he didn't come after her, why didn't she just come back? Or at least contact him? It seems that sense that incident, the two of them have broken off any connection with the other.
  • What she actually says is "we were both young, we had stupid tempers and so I packed". According to a Freeze-Frame Bonus, she would have been 23 and highly stressed out from being mother to twin girls for the first time. So emotions were running very high and leaving was an unhealthy tactic done in the heat of the moment. Nick assumed she wanted to leave and stayed away, while Elizabeth assuming Nick not coming after her meant that he didn't want to stay together. They were young, stubborn and hurt. Neither wanted to make the first move out of pride at first, but then it became so long since they'd had contact it seemed pointless.
• When Chessy notices that "Hallie's" behavior is off, she says that "it's almost as if [she] were..." and then cuts herself off. Hallie (actually Annie) guesses that Chessy was going to say "Annie", and Chessy's reaction seems to imply that she was indeed. But Chessy had not seen or heard from Annie or Elizabeth since Annie was a baby, so she couldn't know what Annie was like.
  • It could be that more in the sense that she was going to say that she’s like a completely different person and she stopped herself because she knew that there was only one person in the world who could look just like Hallie but act very different.
  • And is it so strange that Chessy entertained the possibility? She has helped raise Hallie for eleven years and knows the girl better than anyone. Twin switches are harder to pull off in real life than one would think (because real identical twins often aren't 100% identical in appearance) - and this is a woman that knows Hallie well enough to pick up on unusual behavior that just doesn't add up. For as much coaching as the girls gave each other, there are some things they can't expect to hide from someone who knows them. Chessy puts it all together that the dog acts as though she's a different person, her appetite has changed completely, she's speaking differently and is suspiciously calling someone in the middle of the night in a different time zone. She knows Hallie has an identical twin sister on a different continent - so maybe the idea floated into her mind and she said it sarcastically. She just got lucky that was actually the case.

• It is established that Sammy the dog is far more friendly to Hallie than he is to Annie. So when the parents couldn't tell them apart, why didn't they just bring the dog in and see which girl he ran to?
  • Well, maybe to fix that, Hallie would get Sammie friendly with Annie so he liked her when they get back?
  • From my limited experience with children, I've learned that when they're being difficult and you're on a deadline, you aren't the most rational person. I'm sure the dog was the last thing Hallie and Annie's parents were thinking about when they had the stress of trying to get one home, the other planning a wedding and them both having to deal with each other for the first time in years.
  • I don't think Nick had noticed that the dog didn't like Annie (when she was disguised as Hallie) because Sammy is mostly looked after by Chessy, not Nick, so only Chessy had picked up on Sammy's behavior — and by that point in the film, Chessy wasn't going to suggest it as she's on board with the girls' plan.
  • Also, originally, the only reason that Sammy disliked Annie was because she was a stranger. By the time they all ended up at the resort, Annie had probably spent enough time with him to make him warm up to her. Supported by the fact that 'Hal' begged her dad to bring Sammy.
  • Also, toward the end of the film, Sammy is seen with both twins and seems to be comfortable with them, so he must have warmed up to Annie by that point.
• Why would an English child go to an American summer camp?
  • That's not terribly uncommon—the northeastern US is notorious for having a ton of summer camps. A lot of them also recruit counselors in England and other European countries, so it's not unreasonable to assume that kids would come over, too.
    • Another film from the same period - another Disney film, no less - serves as an attestation to this; 1995's Heavyweights features a British boy who not only attends summer camp in North Carolina, but schools the other boys in American history.
• What kind of camp has an isolation cabin as a punishment? So, kids who misbehave end up having their parents' money wasted for an entire summer without the parents' knowledge? Wouldn't the camp just kick them out and send them home rather than wasting resources on kids who won't be using them?
  • It's some old BS about forcing them to come to an understanding so they'll start being nice to each other. It's more Fridge Horror when you think about what would happen if they tried this in an obvious one-sided case of bullying.
    • Who says they would? Also, campers probably only have to stay in the cabin until "the problem is resolved". The twins could have pretended they were still fighting, having themselves restricted for longer and longer, because they needed to spend most of their time together in order to prepare for the switch.
  • Forget the interpersonal dynamics: Who in their right mind would "isolate" two pre-teen children alone in a cabin away from all the others with no supervision at all? Most camp cabins have a counselor assigned to each one to handle problems and oversee behavior. One bad accident and it would be lawsuit city.
  • For all we know, there could have been supervision in the form of daily check-ups to make sure the girls were keeping the cabin tidy — we just don't see it. And perhaps they did participate in the other camp activities too. We just focus on the girls learning the details about each other because the other stuff isn't important to the plot.
  • A much simpler answer: Marva and Marva Jr. don't exactly seem to be the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree. Something like pushing two prepubescent girls who look like one another and have been playing increasingly ridiculous pranks on each other didn't set off in their minds that it could potentially make the situation worse...so this troper wouldn't trust their judgment, or lack thereof.
• How did Annie not know who Leonardo DiCaprio was? I mean, Titanic just premiered a year prior and was one of the biggest movies at the time. It had a London premier and one of the leads was also British.
  • She would have been ten when it came out and therefore not in the demographic. Maybe she was just uninterested in celebrity culture. She doesn't seem like the type who would keep up religiously with that sort of thing, and Leonardo may not have been a big deal in England at that point.
• Isn’t peanut butter uncommon in grocery stores in Europe? Unless Elizabeth grocery shops at an international market wouldn’t peanut butter be an unlikely part of their diet?
  • It's always been sold in Europe. According to a poll, it's consumed by 40% of households in the UK. It's fairly standard to see one or two options in even the tiniest corner shop.

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