You’re Invited To Mary Kate & Ashley’s…
Deep dive into the Olsen twins' brand, gemini curses, and absence as presence
I’ll tell you a story that sometimes haunts me. It goes like this: my brother, barely 21 this year, staring at me blank-faced when I mention the words Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen. Usually when those names are spoken, whispered like an incantation, it invokes such strong feelings of nostalgia it takes me out at the knees. Butterfly hair clips, Fanta-flavored Lip Smacker, boys named Michel, a sense of security that comes with being enveloped in a cloud of Princess by Vera Wang. Peace. Tranquility.
Instead I watch as it takes every brain cell in my brother’s underdeveloped prefrontal lobe to conjure a face, a headline, anything to associate those words with a figure living in his reality. Then: “Oh, you mean Elizabeth Olsen’s sisters? Is that who you’re talking about?” Elizabeth. Olsen’s. Sisters. To equate the youngest self-made millionaires—girls who owned their own production company at six years old and have more hits on their IMBD page than Zendaya has years on this earth—with some Marvel girlie should be a crime punishable by public stocks. The offender gets strung up for hours while the public hurls spoiled fruit at them and scream-cries every line from It Takes Two. But the justice system is broken and so none of those things can happen. Instead I say something that makes me feel every line on my face, every place in my body that aches: “...yes. That’s them.”
The thing about that story (beyond being a cautionary tale) is that it’s a reminder that Gen Z will never fully understand the Olsen twins’ cultural impact. My grimoire (the Mary Kate & Ashley Wikipedia page) tells me they turned 37 on June 13. The girlies are pushing 40. That means that the last time they made a movie was almost 20 years ago. My brother would have been two. In the time since then they went to (and dropped out of ) college, they went to rehab, they got married amongst bowls of cigarettes, they got divorced, they transitioned their career from child movie stars to quiet fashion moguls.
They’ve worked hard to scrub themselves from the Mary Kate and Ashley brand that defined my childhood—and even harder to erase themselves from the public eye altogether. Sure, there are the random one off sightings: Ashley traipsing through the woods with an IPA and a machete; Mary Kate un-retiring from acting to deliver 12 lines as my personal sleep paralysis demon in 2011’s Beastly. But they are not the all-encompassing cultural force they were during the ‘90s and early aughts.
From 1992 to 2004 Mary Kate and Ashley made something like 36 movies. Let’s not even get into the TV shows (So Little Time deserved an Emmy) or the clothing deals, the book tie-ins, the make-up lines, etc., etc. Even without all that, they were still averaging three movies a year. That is some Taylor Swift level dedication to their fans. They were content-making machines in ways that outperform even this TikTok generation.
Because of that the reach of their influence knew no bounds. They were in reruns of Full House and spotlighted in the ads during the commercial breaks. They were asking us “Got Milk?” and spilling their beauty secrets in CosmoGirl! when the threat of acne was just a twinkle in their eyes. You could not escape their presence if you wanted to. And this during a time when social media was just an AOL away message where you butchered the formatting of Jimmy Eat World lyrics.
When I think about this reach, this level of influence, I worry it can’t be understood in the same way if you didn’t live through it. From the outside it seems like Mary Kate & Ashley were some sort of capitalist wet dream. They were less human girls existing in the world and more commodifiable objects we could possess, bend and twist to our will (literally! There were Mary Kate & Ashley Barbie dolls). They served us girlhood on a silver platter and we consumed them like Happy Meals. Their movies were not art pieces so much as set pieces for the bigger Mary Kate and Ashley brand. That brand had two singular messages: this is how to be a girl and oh, it isn’t being a girl fun. It was bubble gum pink, sticky with femininity.
That brand felt central to my DNA. I remember having long, almost hostile, arguments with my sister about which one of us was Mary Kate and which one was Ashley (I’m a Mary Kate until I die). They were both performing girl but doing it in different ways. One was always smart, the other ditzy and boy crazy. One was a guys’ girl, one was a girly girl. One was chill, the other was type A and neurotic. They might have been performing from opposite spectrums of girl but always that performance was shellacked in a glossy coated finish, bedecked in glitter and pops of pastel. The reward for that performance was always the same too: they got a big glamorous adventure (often in a big, glamorous locale) and the added bonus of romantic affections from the adoring dude-bro who happened to fall into their orbit during the course of said adventure.
I guess where the Mary Kate and Ashley brand fell apart for me was during the premier of their last big movie New York Minute in 2004. I remember seeing pictures of them walking the red carpet and Mary Kate looking very distinctly unwell. They were both doing their usual Mary Kate and Ashley thing—matching but not too matchy, evoking dainty femininity in swaths of satin and lace—except Mary Kate had gone off script. She’d dyed her hair a darker, almost reddish brown. The color juxtaposed with her skin made her look pale and sallow, a stark contrast to the glowing, round faces that propelled the twins to stardom.
She was also noticeably skinnier. Her face looked severe; you could see the bones in her chest. The overall effect was that she appeared gaunt, a shadow of her sister. While they were both still going through the Mary Kate and Ashley motions (they posed with Full House alums, they faked a Marilyn Monroe pose with a random teen boy) those motions felt hollow. They’d never seemed more like dolls in that moment, the phantom hands of their audience twisting them for each click of the camera, their eyes staring into nothing.
Later that year Mary Kate checked herself into rehab for anorexia. Any existing ad campaigns were pulled immediately from distribution. The twins ceased appearing in films. They started NYU. They bought a $7.3 million West Village penthouse but never moved into it. They started bundling themselves in large amounts of linen and oversized jackets, swallowing themselves in infinity scarves. And then there were the boys. They started necking with Greek shipping heirs and dating American CEOs twice their age. They were less human women existing in the world and more urban legend. Sightings of the Olsen twins became fantastical occurrences. They were the hunched creatures chain smoking in random corners of the West Village, the shrouded mist parting crowds at fashion week, recognizable only by their ever present cigarettes, the red strings of their Kabbalah bracelets.
If Mary Kate and Ashley girls were bright, bubbly, and brimming with possibility, something you could tangibly grasp on to and repurpose in your own life, the Mary Kate and Ashley women were muted, all grays and whites and blacks, as corporeal as smoke.
I would be lying if I said it didn’t feel like a betrayal. These are the women who sold me on the idea of girl. I wore the butterfly hair clips! I begged my mom for a beret! I prayed to god that I could witness a crime and get the chance to be shipped off to Australia to meet some boarding school hotties! Where was the payoff? What was my reward?
Mary Kate in particular was an idol of mine. She was always the chill, cool girl twin. The tomboy who said things like “A dress, me? You gotta be kidding me!” and stuck her nose up at the girly girls. She was everything I wanted to be growing up. I was really awkward and nerdy. I hit puberty young and was both disgusted and terrified by my body. I didn’t like girly things and I definitely didn’t want to be a woman, not when the boys I liked made fun of the girls in my class who wore too much pink and said even worse things about the girls who had full breasts and hips already, who were worse at hiding their bodies than me. To be Mary Kate was to balance out all the girl parts of myself I couldn’t control. Funny that I used Mary Kate as a model for control as she privately struggled with an eating disorder. I’d absorbed an identity that hated her body as much as I hated mine.
Mary Kate’s eating disorder collapsed the Olsen twin brand and re-shaped it into something I’d privately guessed but hoped wasn’t true: this is how to be a girl and oh, isn’t being a girl shit? The Olsen twins may have mapped the road to girlhood for us—say this, wear that, befriend her, crush on him—but what they didn’t do, maybe refused to do, was show us a desirable way to be women.
If we look at them through the lens of who they became rather than what they were then maybe we misunderstood the brand all along. Maybe they weren’t so much symbols of commercialized femininity, but figures of a Greek tragedy. Not to get all astrological and shit, but the Gemini of it all is astounding. According to lore (and the ChatGTP that authors my astrological updates on Co-Star) the Gemini constellation is closely associated with the twins Castor and Pollux of Greek mythology. Castor and Pollux were like the Lucas and Nathan Scott of Greek myth, except one was mortal and the other immortal. When Castor (mortal) was killed in battle, Pollux (immortal) begged Zeus for immortality. Instead he turned them into stars, cursed to spend half their lives as immortal celestial objects, strung up for us to worship and dissect and blame our shitty dates on, and the other half dwelling in the underworld, mortal but also less than.
It makes you wonder if Mary Kate and Ashley were ever destined to be anything else or if the Gemini of it all stalked them like a Final Destination fate. Instead of getting their organs sucked out of their buttholes by a swimming pool intake jet (real thing, look it up!), their fates involved constantly trying to outrun the laugh track haunting their youth.
It reminds me a lot of a Leslie Jamison quote about her grand unified theory of female pain. In it she posits that women are inextricably linked to pain and injury, that our experiences when given voice position us as wounds not women. “These are the dangers of wounds,” she writes, “that the self will be subsumed by it… the wound can sculpt selfhood in a way that limits identity rather than expanding it—that obstructs vision.” The wound subsumes the self, becomes the self. You can’t untangle the two. You can’t unsee it. I can’t watch Billboard Dad without also thinking about the fact that someone made Twin Tracker, a website that cross referenced the age of the twins with the age of legal consent in every state. I can’t watch Michelle Tanner and not think of The Washington Post report that claimed Ashley was so terrified to come on set that Mary Kate had to film most of the first season of Full House.
And maybe it’s that their present selves haunt their past selves that makes it impossible to view their earlier work in the same light. That makes me question the brand of girl they popularized. The philosopher Jacques Derrida has this theory about absence as presence. Meaning when there’s something established or presumed (the Olsen twins as wounds) it’s absence (from, say, Our Lips Are Sealed, a movie about the Olsen twins in witness protection) is still present in our viewing experience of those films (their banishment to Australia mimics their self-imposed banishment from the public eye). Where was the payoff? What was my reward? I was seeing it splashed across every tabloid, in every Deuxmoi spotting.
Gen Z doesn’t see the twins at all. There’s no wound. There’s no absence as presence. There’s just absence. This is evidenced by my brother’s, quite frankly, reckless assertion that Mary Kate and Ashley are just Elizabeth Olsen’s sisters. (I’m still an advocate of the stocks btw). They aren’t just anything. When I started writing this essay I wanted to prove that the Olsen twins are conduits of grief—and I still think that to some extent—but now I’m wondering if they’re just conduits. They didn’t project girlhood onto us, we projected it onto them. They took on our hopes, our dreams, our pain, and it burned them bright. It burned them out. We cursed them, like Zeus did Castor and Pollux, to be our stars but they still had to be human. They still had wounds.
Notes & Afterthoughts
This was a labor of love (emphasis on the labor!!) so I hope you like it and share it and learned something from it! If you’re looking for more resources see below. I promise I’ll be back on my regularly scheduled bullshit next week!!
Leslie Jamison:
Absence as presence resources:
The Kardashian Kolloquium introduced me to this term. MJ Corey is doing some very smart, very cool things in her analysis of the Kardashians that has challenged me to dissect pop culture occurrences in a new light.
But for an actual source: https://theopolisinstitute.com/leithart_post/derrida-on-presence-and-absence/
Gemini resources:
https://historycooperative.org/castor-and-pollux/
https://cosmonova.org/gemini-constellation/