If you can even recall hearing about, much less seeing, the Lindsay Lohan bomb, I Know Who Killed Me (2007), count yourself in good company. Critics by and large panned the film and its eventual contention for the Razzie Awards (a kind of Oscars for bad movies) was inevitable. I Know Who Killed Me received plenty of advanced press thanks to the partying antics of its starlet. By the time the film came out, there was already a bad taste in many a reviewer's mouth. Ultimately, the on- and off-screen specter of Lohan may have proved more compelling to moviegoers than any horror the film's plot might have conjured up.
As to that plot: a young high school student named Aubrey (Lohan) has three problems in her life. She's tired of piano lessons and wants to quit, her boyfriend constantly pesters her for sex, and she has a creative writing assignment due soon. Things get a bit more exciting when Aubrey disappears after a high school football game. Soon after, "Aubrey" turns up severely injured on the side of the road. Her were wounds are so grievous that she has to have a leg and arm amputated. Even stranger, "Aubrey" claims to be "Dakota," a stripper with a come-and-go case of retrograde amnesia. No one believes Dakota—not her parents, not the FBI, not even Aubrey's boyfriend who happily beds the recent amputee, whether she's really Aubrey or not. As if things weren't weird enough for Dakota, she suffers inexplicable wounds. Most infamously, her finger falls off during a pole dance. Later it is revealed that she suffers from "twin stigmata." As it turns out, Aubrey and Dakota are twin sisters, separated at birth, and Aubrey is currently held and tortured by an unknown assailant. Any time Aubrey receives physical trauma, so too does Dakota. Dakota goes to save Aubrey (she hunches that Aubrey's jilted piano teacher is the culprit) and ultimately succeeds.
The plot is "bolstered" by an in-your-face blue and red color scheme repeatedly likened to that of David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986). No doubt the film's general themematics of the deviance and decay lurking beneath the placid suburban exterior also owe something to Lynch's work. The other dominant aesthetic of the film is the voyeuristic sadism colloquially known as "torture porn," popularized by films such as the Saw series (2004-), Hostel (2005), Wolf Creek (2005), etc. I Know Who Killed Me takes many opportunities to show its victims having their hands squished between blocks of dry ice, or fingers cut off.
The last thing worth mentioning in exposition is that I Know Who Killed Me in fact had an alternate ending featured on the DVD release. The alternate ending—the one originally intended for the film—reveals that the entire proceedings are in fact a piece of creative fiction fabricated for Aubrey as a creative writing assignment. The entire story is the work of a high school student. The revelation is disappointing from a dramatic standpoint—probably why the producers decided to drop it from the theatrical release—but at least it makes sense of the many plot holes and clichés in which the film indulges.
I can think of few reasons why anyone should spend much more time discussing I Know Who Killed Me than I just have, which makes the following all the more peculiar. On the popular movie database website, IMDB.com, a user calling his/herself "heavenly_love7" posted a thread titled "you guys don't understand this movie SPOILERS" on August 7th, 2007. Since the first posting, there have been 448 responses (as of July 21st, 2009). By contrast, the most popular thread on The Shawshank Redemption message board (Shawshank [1994] is IMDB users' highest rated film) has received a mere 76 posts.
Heavenly_love7's post, in summary, offers an alternative "theory" or interpretation of I Know Who Killed Me. The thesis statement: "The majority of the movie (the parts with ‘Dakota') are imagined by Aubrey Fleming, an aspiring writer, while she is slowly tortured and killed by her abductor. She is suffering from shock, and is desperate for a different ending then the one she is facing at the hands of this serial killer. So, she makes one up in her head." Heavenly_love7 primarily supports this claim by citing how "unbelievable" most of the plot, as I described it above, is: "All of these things are sooo unlikely, BUT they are the made-up story that a desperate, and tortured girl is clinging to her in her final days." Considering the original ending of the film which reveals the entire movie to be a creative writing assignment made up by Aubrey, Heavenly_love7 is in a way half-right: the movie is a story made up by Aubrey. However, Heavenly_love7 offers no evidence whatsoever to support the claim that Aubrey is being tortured and that the audience is merely watching her psychic manifestations that could not just as easily be explained by the alternative ending.
Heavenly_love7 has two addenda to his/her original post. The first argues that the real killer is not, as depicted, Aubrey's piano teacher, but instead her family's gardener: "I believe the real killer was the gardener guy, since we saw his truck in subconscious scenes in Dakota's realm of Aubrey's imagined tale..." Heavenly_love7 actually does attempt support this claim with circumstantial evidence from the film. He/she hypothesizes that the gardener has a motive for hurting spoiled, rich girls and also that the first appendage that Dakota/Aubrey loses is her middle finger—used earlier in the film to "flick off" the leering gardener. Of course, against these arguments is the fact that the film explicitly shows the piano teacher as Aubrey's killer at the end of the film.
Lastly, Heavenly_love7 applauds Lindsay Lohan for her performance in the movie, and claims the other actors "just didn't *get* the script." The director is also faulted, amusingly, for not being "direct enough, I don't think he had a clear idea of what he wanted each scene to tell the viewer about Aubrey's psyche... it was kinda willy-nilly."
My purpose in summarizing Heavenly_love7's arguments is not to refute or make fun of them; a mistake I find that institutional academia is too often guilty of, as I'll discuss below. Deriding the post would ignore the fact that Heavenly_love7 takes his/herself very seriously—even defensively. The post's opening line after a brief prologue on the history of the thread reads: "I think the majority of posters on this board are wrong." The argumentative tone continues, "I guess other viewers of this movie weren't paying attention… If you watched the movie you really SHOULD know that." Most angrily, Heavenly_love7 gripes in a headnote that:
***I don't know why everyone is focusing on Cobaltduck as the frontrunner for the "dream theory"; my thread is obviously the most visited, longest running thread on the theory AND the debates are lot more evidence-centered than the "OMG, I loved this movie" crap you get from Cobalt... Seriously? Why are people asking Cobalt these questions? He/she obviously isn't capable of answering them intelligently...why waste your time? Do you not really want your questions answered?
How exactly does one reconcile the inanity of the thread's subject matter (even Heavenly_love7 admits I Know Who Killed Me isn't that good of a movie) with the intense combativeness of Heavenly_love7's writing? To me, this dissonance illustrates two things. First, an assumed cultural/aesthetic value that obfuscated meaning is worth more than "clearcut" meaning. Second, the ability to decipher that hidden meaning is a valuable talent which is to be guarded jealously. Heavenly_love7's interpretation of I Know Who Killed Me may well be "wrong," but the way in which he/she went about defending that interpretation is not, in spirit, so out of whack with "traditional academia."
As to the first point, Heavenly_love7's writing suggests that for some the only way to elevate language to an artistic level is to obfuscate it. I can only hypothesize as to where this value came from—though my own experience in many an English class has validated, for me, its persistence. Maybe the value is a relic of the notion that to be educated was to understand what others could not. Even today much of the world is illiterate, and prior to the twentieth century and the development of the first literature departments in universities that number was even larger. The ability to read a text is a scalable skill—with more training one can read better than others and, by implication, understand more as well.
Or perhaps it is an unfortunate byproduct of the literary canon that is taught in schools. Reading William Shakespeare, as I suppose Heavenly_love7 once had to do, is like reading a fuzzy version of English. One can follow along for a while, but then a word or idiom is used that, without a helpful footnote, is like a brief burst of static interrupting the flow of understanding. Likewise, the poetic canon is for many students an exercise in frustration thanks as much to a poem's linguistic idiosyncrasies as any particularly difficult "meaning" the poem might offer. This is not to say that the hermeneutic process of "discovering" this meaning is useless. Learning new words or figures of speech is a wonderful thing and the act of discovering for one's self a word's meaning can, under the best circumstances, be its own reward.
But there is another, more nefarious hypothesis to the association of value with obfuscated meaning; one which I will call the ideological hypothesis. To revisit Heavenly_love7's vitriolic words: "Why are people asking Cobalt these questions? He/she obviously isn't capable of answering them intelligently...why waste your time?" True meaning, as Heavenly_love7 employs it, is a resource; a treasure to be possessed and protected. Or a better analogy: meaning is like an uncharted territory (or an "undiscovered country") and Heavenly_love7 is an Amerigo Vespucci (or a Prince Hamlet). Having found undiscovered land (and the analogous irony of America having been inhabited long before the arrival of Europeans is fitting) the critic is quick to plant her flag, stake her claim, and defend it adamantly as hers. Though obviously operating on a smaller scale, I wonder if the same ideology that drove 16th century explorers also directs the way in which some critics value the written word. Language is not an idiolalia, in this case, but it is nevertheless privatized and redistributed to those who would consume it. Heavenly_love7 sees Cobaltduck as a competitor in a marketplace of meaning-making. It is the same top-down economics exercised throughout history (the Pharisees and other disseminators of religious truths leap quickly to mind). Where this capitalistic impulse towards meaning came from I don't know, but one sees it in traditional institutions as well as young academics increasingly "specialize" in their fields; or in other words, learn to read a (hopefully marketable) set of texts better than others.
As to the second point, which stands in contrast to the first, the cruelest blow to the ego of Heavenly_love7, at least, is the popular resistance to his or her monopoly on I Know Who Killed Me's meaning. At least in the anonymous cyberspace of the IMDB forums, "readers" are free to ask Cobaltduck a question, pose their own answers, or write nothing at all. Despite Heavenly_love7's protests and his/her base plea, "Do you not really want your questions answered," in the digital age the reader or knowledge seeker is free to find meaning however they like. Just as prescriptive grammar eventually gave way to descriptive linguistics, perhaps so too will the study of popular meaning-making abandon its prescriptive roots ("Heavenly_love7 reads this text incorrectly") and will instead adopt a more descriptive tone ("This is how Heavenly_love7 reads").
There are already important trends in this direction—take Janice Radway's Reading the Romance (1984) as a paradigmatic case and likewise explore its progeny, its general methodological profusion over the last quarter-century—noting that the impulse stands, no doubt, to be further mainstreamed. What remains to be seen is if this phenomenon has any trickle-down effect on broader institutions of meaning-making: public schools, courts, legislatures. What will be the response from traditional literature instructors? Originally the reaction was one of scorn and then outrage—a student using Sparknotes? Grounds for cheating! Then mockery: I am, after all, discussing critics who name themselves with underscores and numerals or indiscernible references to waterfowl. Ultimately, the concern is that this kind of popular discourse "passing itself off" as critical reading will lower the quality of literary discussion and critical thought. These concerns are not unwarranted, but quality is a question of value and maybe sometimes its worth questioning where those values came from.
