Wain: Wet Hot American Summer (2001)

Released in 2001 and steadily increasing in cult acclaim ever since, this delirious delight takes place on the last day of a holiday camp in Maine in 1981, as the intrigues, romances and animosities between the various camp counselors are brought to a head. As the day proceeds, and we move from counselor to counselor, and incident to incident, we’re exposed to an incredible range of comic talents – including Janeane Garofolo, David Hyde Pearce, Bradley Cooper, Amy Poehler, Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Molly Shannon, Christopher Meloni, Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black – to the point where it doesn’t really feel like a regular ensemble cast so much as a looser, more flexible comic collective, poised somewhere between a comic summary of the 90s and a comic prehistory of the 00s. As might be expected, that works perfectly against the film’s own coming-of-age backdrop, since it’s a bit like watching a new generation of comedians cutting their teeth with a few mentors along to show them the ropes, blending two generations in the same way that writer-director David Wain tends to confound all distinction or hierarchy between the counselors and campers. Since this is something of a rite of passage, then, some of the jokes don’t land – in fact, many don’t land – but the joy of the film is more in its messiness, as Wain’s catch-all approach leaves space for an enormous number of comic styles, registers and experiments, even or especially when they’re a bit daggy, or demand a little too much joyful credulity from the audience. In that sense, it feels like a tribute to the films that these actors grew up with – and, in particular, to that moment in the early 80s when sex comedies started to impart something of their anarchic energy to serial comedies, with nods in the direction of National Lampoon, The Gods Must Be Crazy and the Zucker comedies, as well as more familiar flagposts like Caddyshack and Porky’s. For all their differences, those films impressed you with how fun they must have been to actually make – and, moreover, invited you to vicariously experience that fun, creating a kind of amateur involvement that was perhaps only really possible before VHS, and not unlike the involvement of watching a live sketch variety show, or even a stand-up set. In that sense, Wet Hot American Summer feels like an elegy for pre-VHS cinema as a live medium, or at least as a more enlivened medium than 90s cinema, whose ironic literacy is dismantled at every opportunity. Among other things, that creates an amazingly and distinctively 80s sense of immersion, despite the fact that what we’re watching is effectively a string of tangentially-related sketches, since it never really feels as if the stories stop when we cut to the next nook or niche within the camp – you can’t help but feel that the actors you’ve just cut away from are still there having fun, or goofing around, even if they don’t happen to be on camera at this exact moment. In other words, it never feels like a sequence of sketches because it feels like all the sketches are continuing all the time – they’re really just the dynamic that keeps this collective together – just as the various stories don’t converge so much as overlap, with dialogue from one increasingly dubbed over the next, all layered into the final camp talent show which more or less absorbs the film. In retrospect, it can’t help but anticipate the draining 80s nostalgia that followed in its wake, but, in its serial, chilled-out invitation to watch and participate at your own pace, it also feels like a forerunner of recent television, especially Netflix, who have picked it up for the miniseries Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, a prequel-sequel that feels wonderfully true to the film’s own coming-of-age contortions, its frenzied nostalgia fo the future.