Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp (2015)

Although Netflix has a few flagship series under its belt by this point in time, none have nailed the peculiarly flexible serial time that characterises the Netflix experience quite as acutely – or perhaps fluidly – as Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp. In some ways, that’s because the original film, released in 2001, was already in Netflix-time before we had Netflix to experience it. Set over a single day towards the end of a Maine summer camp in the early 1980s, it trod a slippery, promiscuous line between narrative, sketch and standup comedy that turns out to have been quite prescient of how all those forms would devolve and develop in the 2010s, as well as preventing a veritable who’s-who of up-and-coming comic stars, many who have become household names in the intervening decade and a half. Critical to that distended, improvisational, inclusive sense of time was the serial comedies of the early 80s, whose raucous, disorganised, chaotic vibe made you feel as if you were participating in their production, experiencing cinema as a live art, if only vicariously – films where the sheer fun of shooting, rehearsing and just goofing around was barely concealed by the fictive surface overlaid at the last minute, or in the editing room. However, whereas Wet Hot American Summer used those films as springboards, jumping-off points, First Day of Camp has moved beyond them – in some ways, it’s what the original film envisaged – meaning that it feels less indebted  to the 80s – there’s a polish and sheen to the cinematography here that’s light years away from the original – but more confident in crafting and luxuriating in its own sense of time as well. And that sense of time is pretty crazy from the outset – although this installment is shot some fifteen years later, it’s actually set a couple of months before, on the first day of camp, with all the same actors, some of whom are quite visibly aged – and some who look the same, which is in some ways uncannier and more traumatic – playing the same roles this time around. Add to that an uncanny taste on the part of series creators David Wain and Michael Showalter for hiring new actors, like Kristen Wiig, who simply feel as if they were part of the original incubation-film, and there’s a totally disoriented sense of time and register that confounds nostalgia with every other experience and affect. That in itself would make for an odd experience, but what’s even stranger is how absolutely the series embraces – or explicates – the purely nominal nature of the Netflix episode as a unit, playing more or less as a series of sketches that depend for their ambience and rhythm on the overarching sense of the series as a whole, but don’t necessarily feel affiliated to the individual episode in the least, which make less of an effort to end on a meaningful episodic note than just about any other series in the Netflix empire. The result is a story that functions as a kind of objective correlative of the Netflix model itself, which is to say a scenario, space or topos more than a story per se – a single day that’s only meaningful if you experience it as a day, but, like all days, is inevitably open to the peculiar pacing, pausing and perusing of each person who occupies it. And that’s the way the cast inhabit the series as well – they inhabit it as viewers as much as actors – which is perhaps why the series doesn’t really subsist on actual jokes – even fewer land this time around – so much as on accidental, incidental and spontaneous reaction shots, the sense of some flexible collective acting, viewing and enjoying both at the same time, comic in the broadest and most profound sense of the word, comic in the same way that a mobile troupe is comic, gathering you up into their rhythm as they escort you along the road a ways.