Director Agnieszka Smoczynska’s movie The Silent Twins is the latest pop culture meditation on the lives of June and Jennifer Gibbons, Black identical twins who were incarcerated in England’s notorious Broadmoor psychiatric hospital from 1982 until 1993 after a brief rash of petty crimes and arson. Even before that, they confounded their parents, siblings, teachers, and assorted experts in Wales, where they grew up, by refusing to speak and moving in eerie synchronicity.
What almost no one knew at the time was that June-Alison (as she prefers to be known today) and Jennifer were also prolific writers, producing poems, short stories, and novels and keeping meticulous journals. June-Alison was able to get one of her books, The Pepsi-Cola Addict, published via a small vanity press; any remaining copies are collectors’ items.*
Investigative journalist Marjorie Wallace first wrote about the twins in The Sunday Times in 1982, and national interest followed. With the support of June and Jennifer’s parents, who provided access to the twins’ massive archive, and experts like Tim Thomas, an educational psychiatrist who taught them at Eastgate Centre for Special Education
in Pembroke and who remains in touch with June-Alison today, as well as her own ongoing relationship with the twins, Wallace expanded her article into the 1986 book The Silent Twins. Now out of print but available as an e-book, it offers an overwhelming insight into the twins’ explosive creativity, humor, and pain.
The fascination around the twins only grew after Jennifer mysteriously and suddenly died the day they were transferred from Broadmoor to a clinic in Wales, which would allow them more personal freedom. June and Jennifer Gibbons have remained an object of fascination among anyone interested in the cross-section of outsider art, twinship, mental illness, and systemic racism in the ’70s and ’80s in the United Kingdom. Even now, the twins’ life story is fodder for low-budget true crime shows and podcasts, along with various short and longform documentaries, and even a French rock opera.
Everyone has their own reason for their interest in the Gibbons sisters’ story.
As Hilton Als wrote about them in the New Yorker, « All of us have a fiercely proprietary relationship to the twins as material… The twins’ uniqueness was astonishing. So was their universality. Their lives were the tale of a whole that divides and cannot be made one again. »
Smoczynska first became attached to the film adaptation when screenwriter Andrea Seigel saw her breakout film The Lure, a glittery, bloody rock musical about man-eating mermaid siblings whose love for each other is tested when one falls in love with a human man. Seigel got in touch and sent her the script she’d been working on for some time, which is based on Wallace’s work and informed by the available media by and about the twins.
« I was deeply, deeply moved by the way how Andrea told the story, » Smoczynska told Mashable via Zoom. « And also, by the story, and by June and Jennifer Gibbons, how they were extraordinary, sensitive, funny, intelligent, smart, strong… How Jennifer and June, they loved each other, and at the same time, how they hated each other. »
Their story is tragic, to be sure. They were failed by almost everyone around them, from the vicious bullying they endured at the hands of white students to the racism they encountered in the educational, medical, and carceral systems they were swept away in. Even their most sympathetic allies weren’t above suspecting that the twins were just being irascible or making fun of them.
Jennifer and June were also in constant competition with each other, borne of a childhood game that grew into a sort of obsessive-compulsive ritual entailing who would move first, who would eat what, who would first lose their virginity or become a published author or have a baby, and, perhaps most importantly, who would die first.
That bond was familiar to Smoczynska, who grew up among her mother’s seven sisters and their families. « They grew up together without their mom, » she said of her aunts. « They were lonely. And I remember how I felt as a child between them, among them. And I remember also how the sisters’ love can be deep, complex, beautiful, but also toxic, in terms of how much you can hate your sister at the same time, and in a second, you can love her so much. And then how much you can sacrifice yourself [for] your sister. »
Once involved in the project, Smoczynska was thrilled to learn how much of the Gibbons’ writing was available. « I wanted to tell this story from also their point of view, and to dive into their heads and into their souls, » she said, adding, « I invite[d] to the project my collaborators, my DOP, my production designer, and composers, and we decided to read every, every moment of the diary and everything that we could find. And then I decided to add stop-motion animation [to] incorporate Jennifer’s writings. »
Smoczynska brought the twins’ private world to vivid life through music and animation.
Smoczynska tapped Polish artist Barbara Rupik for the scenes using stop-motion animation, which include a parable about talking parrots and Jennifer’s harrowing short story The Pugilist, about a doctor who replaces his newborn son’s heart with that of his dog. Zuzanna Wronska, who wrote several original songs for The Lure, incorporated Jennifer and June-Alison’s writing into three new songs for The Silent Twins.
In addition to stop-motion animation, there are also dazzling fantasy scenes with choreographed dancers and swimmers; the twins dressed smartly and signing piles of books for fans; the two DJing a hit radio show; and a love scene in a garage, where Jennifer imagines flowers blooming all around her. Then the perspective shifts, pulling away to reveal June-Alison’s point of view from where she’s hunched, hiding in the corner.
« My starting point was to research much more about June and Jennifer, and what they read, what they were reading during this time, what they were listening [to] during this time, what the movies [were that] they were watching during this time, which books they were reading during this time, » she said, explaining that the love scene was « written [that way] because Jennifer was very romantic… What I loved is it’s clear that it was juxtaposed with the point of view of June, but also then it was juxtaposed with [what] Jennifer wrote in the diary. »
To authentically represent their story, talking to people who met the twins in real life, as opposed to simply repeating how they have been portrayed in the media, was crucial.
« I met Marjorie twice, maybe three times, » Smoczynska said of the investigative journalist, adding that Wallace also met the actors who portrayed the twins as adults, Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance. « [Marjorie] showed us much more materials [from the twins], which were not incorporated into the book… She told us a little more about June and Jennifer, what is not in [any] book, and she wanted also to meet Letitia and Tamara, and just to feel the chemistry, the energy. » Smoczynska, Wright, and Lawrance also had a Zoom book club of sorts with Wallace’s book, which they pored over chapter by chapter. And Smoczynska met with Tim Thomas, whom she praised as “an amazing person, beautiful human being.”
Most of all, Smoczynska wanted to show the twins as three-dimensional people, beyond how they’d been portrayed in the media. « They’re not victims or not only victims, » she reflected, « They were very powerful, sensitive. And they were artists. »
The Silent Twins aims to give them credit where it’s due.
*(While June-Alison currently lives a private life, her novel The Pepsi Cola Addict is being rereleased with a new introduction and art by the author, courtesy of multihyphenate cult artist/musician David Tibet and his partner Ania Goszczyńska, with a trade paperback coming in 2023. All proceeds are going to June-Alison. Her Instagram account, which is handled by Tibet and Goszczyńska, also teases Jennifer’s thought-to-be-lost Discomania and a poetry collection by June-Alison. For those interested in the twins’ writing or so-called « outsider art » in general, this could not be more tremendous news.)
