Return to Me: Fantasy and Docudrama in Chained for Life

Art & Trash, episode 42
Return to Me: Fantasy and Docudrama in Chained for Life
Stephen Broomer, October 4, 2024

The Hilton Twins were born conjoined, a rare condition, an anomaly that captures public attention not only as spectacle, but also for its symbolic power. Conjoined twins can represent, in extremity, the bond of siblings, or even more generally the notion of an abiding companionship. For the rarity of their condition, conjoined twins are mysterious, and their bodies invites the gawker to speculate on the physical and psychic bonds that may exist between them.

In this video essay, Stephen Broomer explores the story of the Hilton Twins as filtered through the 1952 exploitation film Chained for Life, starring and loosely based on their life.

SCRIPT:

The Hilton Twins were born conjoined, a rare condition, an anomaly that captures public attention not only as spectacle, but also for its symbolic power. Conjoined twins can represent, in extremity, the bond of siblings, or even more generally the notion of an abiding companionship. For the rarity of their condition, conjoined twins are mysterious, and their bodies invites the gawker to speculate on the physical and psychic bonds that may exist between them. Consider Chang and Eng Bunker, the most famous conjoined twins of the nineteenth century, whose image, in their time, became symbolic of the national and ideological divisions of the American Civil War, and whose deaths in 1874, within hours of one another, have been portrayed as one following the other out of shock and grief. Among sideshow performers, some, like Chang and Eng, were able to manage their own careers, gaining dignity and wealth in the process, but this, too, was uncommon. In the sideshow, such bodies, long relegated to positions of indignity and shame in rare cases of survival, were granted positions of dubious honour, branded freaks, subject to carnival celebrations and patronage. Their positions often remained undignified, prey to rampant abuse, mistreatment and swindling, though in fiction, and perhaps in life as well, there was sanctuary to be found in these communities of exceptional outsiders. This was how the sideshow was mythologized in Tod Browning’s Freaks, as a haven of outsider kinship. In Browning’s film, a pair of conventionally beautiful entertainers — a trapeze artist and a strong-man — deceive and betray a community of sideshow freaks, who avenge themselves by mutilating the villains. The sideshow was also a setting where factual distortions—in the form of imaginative showbiz backstories and stage illusionism—were commonplace. The imagined origins of these outsiders were a barker’s notes to gather the rubes and give them a thrill, but those stories could also distort the real difficulties that sideshow performers faced. Questions of dignity and exploitation are baked into this relationship between entertainment and the medical oddity, for sideshow culture was always consciously or subconsciously about the emotional and human cost of being different.

Violet and Daisy Hilton spent their early life on the oddity circuit, with abusive, adoptive relatives serving as their managers, who took advantage of them and from whom they were later emancipated. Even in their early act, they were entertainers, tap-dancing with Bob Hope. They were trained in music, with Violet playing the saxophone and Daisy the violin, a strange harmony that reinforces that, despite their appearance, they were individuals. As adults taking charge of their life, the Hiltons wanted to be Vaudevillian burlesque singers, an ambition that welded the presence of the elegant torch singer to their curious silhouette. In 1952, their life was fictionalized into the exploitation film Chained for Life, a forensic accounting of a crime of passion. The film bears a simple narrative conceit: told through the flashbacks of trial witnesses, its story is that of a publicity stunt marriage gone wrong, devolving into tragedy. The story closely resembles events in their own life, so thinly veiled that the sisters’ names have been changed from Violet and Daisy Hilton to the soundalike Vivian and Dorothy Hamilton. By the end of these testimonies, Vivian’s crime is revealed: she has, in a moment of rage and opportunity, murdered Dorothy’s lothario ex-husband, the trick-shot artist Parisseau. Her crime is portrayed as a just reprisal for a lifetime of otherness, disappointment and pain. The judge of this fictional trial pleads with the audience, both at the beginning and end of the film, to serve as a jury, to solve his problem: how can he find one sister guilty, and in doing so, condemn the innocent sister to death? It is a strange echo of the tale of the Judgment of Solomon, in which King Solomon demands that an infant be cut in two to placate feuding women who both claim to be its mother, a judgment that provokes the true mother to reveal herself out of love and fear for her child. The story is here modernized and tailored to the circumstance of conjoined twins. There is a limited but definite similarity between these stories. In the judgment of Solomon, the law reduces an infant to property in order to force an outcome. In Chained for Life, unusual bodies, long reduced to objecthood, are regarded by the law with compassion, but that same law is helpless to provide an outcome. In both, the lesson holds that such an case is not merely legal but moral, a test to judge and juror, a provocation for soul-searching. To see justice done would be a crime. Like many exploitation films that drew from the moral dilemmas of outlandish, tabloid subject matter, Chained for Life is conceived to stir debate in its audience, even if the film itself is ultimately unconcerned with the issues at hand. It performs sympathy, it patronizes, but it passes the burden of morality along, to an audience that was lured by the promise of a sideshow. This veneer of social consciousness is stretched over a deep, sidelong leer.

The framing of this fictional trial, with its pleading judge, gives the entire film an air of unreliability, an unreliability that is contradicted by its documental basis in reality. Its appeal to the audience’s authority—the authority of the crowd, the authority of the gawker—diminishes its sense of justice. Chained for Life reveals justice not as righteously blind but woefully inadequate. The film takes details from the real life of the Hilton twins and fictionalizes them into the lives of the Hamiltons: in reality, it was Violet who had faced accusations of bigamy when seeking a marriage license, and it was also Violet who had been subject to a stunt marriage. That stunt marriage was conceived in partnership with managers who knew that a marriage license for a conjoined twin would invite assertions of bigamy would invite the shocked attention of tabloids. Their lives were not as loveless and lonely as their on-screen counterparts: Daisy had given birth to a child, who was given up for adoption, and also experienced a short-lived ten-day marriage. The hypothetical deliberations of Chained for Life are lurid, sensational, and ultimately fictional, but their exaggerations are not pure fantasy. Between the frame of the trial, a dramatized medical tribunal, and the general cynicism of their vaudevillian showbiz community, the film is a docudrama, near enough to the actual truth that Vivian’s crime serves a greater truth.

Even so, Chained for Life is made for the gawker, and it proves this in the wedding scene, in which Dorothy and her fiancée Pariseau are married onstage in a theatrical ceremony that lingers on the quizzical and surprised expressions of theatre-goers, surely debating the same moral questions that the film implies to its audience: is this bigamy, and is this incest? What does a wedding night look like for conjoined twins? It tests the limits of propriety to imagine the body of conjoined sisters in a marriage bed. When Dorothy-Daisy has sex, what does Vivian-Violet feel? The public sphere of 1952 would hesitate to ask the question that’s posed behind their pursed or chortling lips, their rolling eyes, their gritted teeth: and that is, even with separate sex organs, how could their bodies not share in that intimacy? They could only experience sex as group sex, and inevitably, incestuous group sex. Such a private trial becomes a matter of public speculation under the big top, and while Chained for Life performs its compassion, declaring the twins as lonesome, longing women, these questions are titillating and the speculations of the crowd are inevitably perverse, judgmental, leering and heartless. Furrowed brows and whispers wonder, “is this real? They can’t be serious…”

The other characters in the film reflect a broad range of talents, with fellow vaudevillian performers offering strange feats of skill, like Whitey Roberts, whose plate-juggling is accompanied by comic stage-banter and performed fear and modesty, or the accordionist Tony Lovello whose speed-playing defies expectation; or Pariseau the trick-shot artist, later to be Vivian’s victim, whose grace and conceited elegance recalls Hercules, the strong-man villain of Freaks. The burlesque show is a showcase of physical ability: it is a setting where those with exceptional skills entertain a joyful audience. Against this, physicians, management and the law reflect a professional class, one of social normalcy, one that ranges in their ambitions from opportunism to compassion and which frequently acknowledges the sad situation of the twins, who desire but are prevented from having the common experiences of womanhood. Their songs are particularly painful in lingering on this point, with torch songs that portray love as a thing of individual longing and that describe experiences that an audience may imagine impossible for the Hamiltons, from courtship to marriage to childbirth. Both title and song offer the most tragic aspect of their situation, that their situation makes them ‘alone together,’ that they are already in a kind of prison of eternally present sisterhood, that among their shared feelings and experiences none haunts them more than their companionship. When they sing of love, pleading with a lover to ‘return to me’, the cliché lonesomeness of the torch song is being filtered ironically through two women tethered by flesh and bone, tethered from birth, neither of whom can experience real solitude. For Dorothy-Daisy and Vivian-Violet, their lives shall always be ‘she and her shadow,’ whom sweethearts out for fun pass one by one. The lyrics of their torch songs broadcast these painful ironies: “never say you’ll never fall in love.”

As a docudrama, Chained for Life emphasizes the facts of its case and attempts to root them in a recognizable reality, in the familiar exchange of business dealings, medical consultations, trial testimonies. In a baroque departure from docudrama, the film illustrates Dorothy’s yearning for normalcy in the form of a dream sequence. She dreams of sitting up in bed, detached from her sister. Through the avatar of a body-double, Dorothy stands on her own and walks out into a garden. The body-double dances, joined by Parisseau, and the real Daisy is seen in close-up, posed behind a tree. The blocking conceals the presence of Violet, and this clumsy exchange of the body-double in a long shot and the authentic Daisy in a close-up is so transparently imaginary as to be both farcical and heartbreaking. Her dream—a tragic, impossible dream—is one that only the illusion of cinema can realize. The film performs the most complex and impossible of incisions—it separates the sisters—with the most blunt and clumsy of instruments, splicer and tape aiding our pliable perception. By the simple exchange of long shot and close-up, by the simple deception of continuity editing, the filmmakers achieve something that the Hilton Twins may have longed for—separation, individual personhood, normalcy—but it is, like so many torch songs, a pleading demand unmet, an impossible, unrequited longing.

The Hilton Twins, as they are portrayed in Chained for Life, are creative women whose strength and self-determination is only undermined by their desire to be like everyone else. They were not figures of charity and pity: like Chang and Eng before them, they broke away from the sideshow attraction to define themselves as entertainers. By developing an act as singers, they departed from the carnival, and became more than mere objects of fascination and ridicule. After Chained for Life was released, they began to make personal appearances at double-bill screenings of the film, which was paired with Browning’s Freaks, in which they had memorably appeared two decades earlier. It was an ironic pairing: while both films are compassionate—bordering on patronizing—Browning’s was an open subversion of the leering nature of the circus sideshow, culminating in a furious retaliation, while Chained for Life reproduces and conceals the leer of the sideshow beneath the relative dignity of burlesque and vaudeville. The freak is pitied for being different, while the entertainer is admired for their talent; it is logic like this that led Violet and Daisy Hilton to break off from the sideshow and pursue the burlesque. And yet, in Chained for Life, there is still no shortage of pity, and exploitation of the pitiable.

In 1961, the twins had their final public appearance, at a drive-in in Charlotte, North Carolina, by coincidence, not far from the estate where Chang and Eng had lived and died almost a century earlier. After the show, the sisters were abandoned by their tour manager, with nowhere to stay and no money. They applied to work as cashiers at a local grocery, bartering that they were willing to work for a single salary. The owner insisted on giving them two salaries, and conceived of a discreet check-out where their condition could be concealed, so as not to invite leering from customers. With help from the owner’s church, the twins were able to rent a home, where they lived in relative quiet and seclusion for seven years. In January 1969, they were found dead in their home. Like Chang and Eng before them, they had died separately, with Daisy passing away between two and four days before Violet. Violet hadn’t called for help, instead waiting with her sister’s body for her own inevitable death. While the law and a whispering society had meddled in their experiences of love and sex, the Hilton sisters in death can remind us of an almost unimaginable side of their agony, the inevitable end, that one sister would have to endure the death of the other. For conjoined twins, by their physical constitution alone, such a loss is magnified. It is a loss of self. From the birth of Violet and Daisy Hilton in 1908 until their death in 1969, that grief was inevitable. In her last days, Violet Hilton must have come to finally know what it meant to be alone, a loneliness that was not peace and freedom or a promise of new beginnings, but despair and bereavement.

In the case of the Hilton twins, their pleasures and desires and longings were subject to hypocritical policing and lurid exploitation. Their search for happiness was met with the social and legal obstacles. The on-screen judge in this fictional trial cannot decide what is more meaningful, the law’s need for retribution, or the compassion that the twins invite by the nature of their exceptional circumstance. In the end, the judge offers no resolution: the case for the sisters is made, but instead of passionate, decisive action, the debate—an endless, meaningless, indecisive debate—is passed along, surrendered, to the viewer.