But it'd be better if I didn't: Managing to get through all of 2021's I Know What You Did Last Summer

Wednesday 5/29/24

I don't know how I managed to do this--though manage I did--but over the weekend I watched the whole of the 2021 Amazon series, I Know What You Did Last Summer.

This was not easy, for it's pretty bad. I've read the 1973 book of the same name, and seen the 1997 film. It seems to me that something pertaining to this idea should have been much better than any of these things were. I guess maybe the 1997 film is the best, but those filmmakers clearly thought, "You know, we're not great at this, so we're going to need a lot of shots of Jennifer Love Hewitt's cleavage," and boy did they deliver on that score.

The plots change in the three works, but the gist is that a group of friends accidentally kill someone one summer, dispose of the body so that their lives won't be wrecked, and then when they return home later on, some mysterious person is leaving signs--and words--saying that he or she knows what they did last summer, and people start getting bumped off.

Sounds like that ought to be decent, right? The book felt dated from the jump, like it was written by someone out of touch with their own times, and not in some "It's timeless" way. The 1997 film was campy but fun. Kind of like a 1980s horror film but in the year that OK Computer came out.

This 2021 series, though...

The characters are annoying in the worst kind of way--the digital media age way. Nothing is believable. Reactions are not believable. A character will get a text from the killer--and we never even understand who the killer, or killers, is--showing a friend being decapitated, and later that same night it's business as usual and we see them reacting and talking the way they would be minus having received a decapitated-friend video.

I wish I could say that this was some commentary on how dead inside everyone is. I dated an Oberlin student once--big mistake--and I couldn't believe how medicated and zombified she and her group of friends were. That's not what's going on here, though. It's the writing. These writers have no clue or they're not trying or they're so out of touch and there being no standards of quality in society, no expectation or need that you'd do anything well, that they don't know the first thing about what quality would entail.

It's very easy to imagine these writers, as you watch this eight-part series, having meetings where they ask each other, "What's the worst creative decision we could make here? Let's come up with something implausible and stupid, and then later, as a result, we'll have to make an even more implausible and stupid choice."

Obviously this isn't MFA fiction piss-poor. Nothing is as risibly, embarrassingly bad as Motorollah and its ilk (right, Sigrid Rausing? Nice entry coming soon about your own writing, by the way, and your lovely, corpse-hiding family--talk about a horror show). But it's dumb and not entertaining, and I find myself wanting to say, "Are you trying to suck?"

I think it's a legitimate question. I want to know. To a degree. Because I'm curious. Were you given these marching orders from the studio that the thing had to be stupid? Why? I feel like this was deliberately made to be poor. Doesn't that seem like a strange goal? I'm not sure how easily you could just be that bad at making a series otherwise.

The cop--and she's a woman, so it's not that fat, middle-aged douchebag male stereotype we're used to with horror films--is oblivious and not that stressed--really not stressed at all--that like ten people in her small Hawaiian town have been murdered--and in grisly fashion--that summer. There's the decapitation, someone gets killed by a Slushy machine. And the residents aren't that concerned either and put no pressure on her to solve, say, one of the murders anyway.

The acting is embarrassing. There's this thoughtful, nice-guy type, who is reckoned to be the moral conscience of the group of friends--I always think of this kind of character as the stock Linus figure--and it was as if they told this guy--or he thought it himself--to sort of squint his eyes like he was dazed by all that was happening and that would make him extra dramatic as an actor.

This adaptation is centered on twins and stolen identity, and the premise that no one, save one's father, and the mother one hasn't seen in ten years, can recognize one twin from another.

You know my buddy Amelia? My four-year-old niece? She has two little best friends, Charlotte and Winnie. They're twins. Amelia has no problem telling them apart.

The filmmakers gave the dad figure--I think he's supposed to be hot so that the adult women watching have someone to be into--these solo scenes in his car where he has to get upset, and each time one of them rolled around I found myself saying, "Time to act, bitches!" because that's what I imagined the actor thinking before he started pounding the steering wheel in rage or grief or both. But then a minute later he'd be fine and humping the sheriff lady again in the back of his snack shop when you'd think she'd want to be out finding the person who cut the head off of one of this guy's daughter's friends a few hours earlier. Eh, no muss, no fuss.

I made it through, though. I don't really know what happened. I can't explain any character's motivations for anything. There's a lot of stuff about a cult and none of that made any sense. The Linus kid gets blamed in the end by the twin who assumed her sister's identity after running her over by accident--or not, you can't tell that either--which was one hell of a coincidence so she can, I think, have her life made intentionally worse by this narcissistic TikTok woman, each of whose reappearances on the screen I dreaded, though the Linus guy, who goes to jail and finds God, also may have killed someone or some people and been a cultist or a cultist-come-lately who read a pamphlet somewhere offscreen during the series and liked the gist and gotten involved, though the cult people also would have been twice his age or more and mostly all died decades ago. (The math also doesn't make much sense in the series.)

Confusion is a technique that gets used often in shows, films, books. Makers of stuff will throw confusion at you, like that will keep you from noticing that there isn't too much of anything, if anything, there. It's like a trick. There's a difference between mystery and things not being explained away and different people in the class, so to speak, being able to put their hands up and offer their different views on what happened and what it means, and just "We'll do a fake-out, that should probably be good enough."