A psychoanalytic reading of Netflix’s Triptych
The following contains spoilers for the Netflix show Triptych (original Spanish name Tríada).
Triptych is a show about a forensics expert, Becca, who is called to investigate a murder case where the victim looks identical to her, shares the same birthday, and upon some investigating, shares the same DNA. Becca has always felt like there was some connection missing in her life, some loneliness that has been with her since childhood, and now she realizes that this could have been caused by a missing identical twin. She immediately confronts her mother about it, but the mother responds angrily and offers no answers, instead asking Becca if she’s been drinking again.
Then Becca discovers a third identical twin sister, and the show follows them as they slowly discover the truth of where they came from. In the season finale, it is finally revealed that their real mother is an evil psychiatrist who wanted to create a sociological experiment by birthing triplets and placing them in three different adoptive homes (one lower class, one middle class, one upper class), just to see how different they would turn out to become, basically trying to settle the old nature / nurture debate. When one of the girls’ fathers died in an accident, the psychiatrist had the other two fathers killed as well, just to “keep the variables the same”.
When we are confronted with questions of who am I, where do I come from, the most basic and simple answer is: the mother. After all, it’s where we quite literally came from. In the show, these questions are triggered by a disturbance of the self image: Becca seeing a different version of herself, dead. The problem is that the mother doesn’t have the answer: even though we came from her, she cannot fully determine what we are, because in some mysterious way, we become a free subject separate from the mother, making our own decisions and mistakes etc.
But the source of our freedom also becomes the source of our anguish, since subjectivity requires that we assume a certain lack in our being. If I can be fully determined, meaning if the question of “what am I” can be fully answered, I would be an object, not a subject. So there always needs to be something missing, some part of ourselves needs to remain a mystery to ourselves. To put it in another way, subjectivity resides in the fact that I cannot fully explain why I make some decision (why did I marry Javier, and not José? Why did I become a carpenter, and not a bricklayer?), I can only offer rationalizations, but in the end the “real” reason remains obscure to me.
We suffer this lack because it is also the thing that separates us from ourselves, guarantees that we will never be complete, fulfilled. For Becca then, the dead identical twin comes to embody this lack, creating a deadly lure. Becca’s mother becomes a figure who caused this lack by taking away the twin sister, but also holds the secret to who Becca really is.
To achieve this, the show splits up one mother into two: the adoptive mother who is sweet and caring, and the evil psychiatrist as the real mother. The occupation of psychiatrist is well chosen here because we often view (and fear) the psychologist as someone who can see through us, into the unconscious truth of our being. The terms of the experiment also fits perfectly with the stereotype of the overbearing mother: the mother who leaves us no freedom to make our own decisions, who wants total control, demands constant observation.
This splitting of the mother explains a curious inconsistency in the show: Becca’s relationship with her mother is only troubled in the first episode. Once the psychiatrist comes into the picture, all tension disappears between Becca and her now adoptive mother. This fits nicely with Todd McGowan’s claim that the central operation of ideology is turning an inherent contradiction into an opposition of two distinct poles.
In summary, a question of identity can be answered by the creation of the figure of the overbearing mother who strives to completely determine us. Needless to say, such a fantasy becomes persecutory as such a complete determination threatens to simply destroy our subjectivity. Does that mean that there is no such thing as an overbearing mother, that this is all just a fantasy of the child? Of course not, many mothers do have a desire to make their child a part of themselves, as many parents have the fantasy of “living on” through their children. But it is the child’s job to separate from the mother and carve out a space for themselves. Triptych is a nice example of how such a separation can become destabilized later in life.
