Bad Movie Diaries: Good Girls and Bad Girls in I Know Who Killed Me (2007)

 

Look ma, I'm just like Dario Argento

           Like most bad movies, I Know Who Killed Me is constructed from the hacked-off pieces of other, better movies. Argento lighting. De Palma split screen. Doppelgangers from Lynch and  granddaddy Hitchcock and great-granddaddy Bergman. And like most bad movies, I Know Who Killed Me reveals that there is more to these great filmmakers than style-for-style’s-sake, that contrary to popular belief it is not that easy to make a Lynch film or a giallo, at least a good one. In these stylish movies, the style informs the substance; in their poor imitations, the style replaces substance.

Let me explain. What does the color blue mean in Blue Velvet? It is not too easy to say. It recalls the cheeseball Bobby Vinton song that gives the film its name, a piece of boomer nostalgia laced with unmistakable menace. Blue is associated with the night, with underworld cool, with the otherworldly. In Lynchworld, a blue rose stands for something that shouldn’t exist but does. The woman who wears blue, the beautiful Dorothy Vallens, is captivating but vulnerable, powerful but powerless, sexy but maternal. In gialli, the lighting turns red or blue to preface dream logic or extreme hyperstylized violence. In Lynch, the color changes to tell us we have entered an unreal-but-real place. In I Know Who Killed Me, blue means that Lindsay Lohan is portraying Aubrey, the good twin, and red means she is portraying Dakota, who is bad. See the difference?

Just found a blue rose, neat huh

Desperate as it is to sit at the cool kid’s arthouse table, I Know Who Killed Me is a tragic mess of a film, resigned to the exile of outré outcasts too well-funded to be grindhouse and too bad to be arthouse. As starry-eyed as it may be for the twentieth-century masters, it is 2007 through and through, a snapshot of two defining if short-lived trends that defined the moment: torture porn and the meltdown of the teen idol.

In 2007, Saw was on its fourth movie, Hostel was on its second. The horror reboot cycle was busy griming it up, and for the more adventurous and worldly horror fan, there was New French Extremity – Inside was released that year, Martyrs was close on the horizon. 2007 was also the year of the game-changing Paranormal Activity, and with the rise of Blumhouse the tide would eventually turn against torture porn. But in 2007, horror’s most publicly loathed subgenre since the slasher was at its peak. Dutifully, I Know Who Killed Me inserts a torture scene that manages to be both stylized and hyperealistic in its gore, and is successfully off-putting and gross. But the rest of the movie is a thriller. Classier film critics were offended by the violence while fans of Saw and Hostel were undoubtedly unimpressed, though its genre confusion is the least of the many things wrong with this movie. But while its awkward torture scene might give today’s audiences a nostalgic chuckle at the gross old days of ‘00s horror, I Know Who Killed Me doesn’t want to be Saw, and consequentially has little to say about torture porn other than its ubiquity. Its relationship to the child star gone rogue is much more interesting.

If this movie is remembered for one thing, it’s Lindsay Lohan. In the midst of her decline, Lindsay shot much of the movie in rehab, leaving the facility for the film-set by day and returning at night. Her reputation as unreliable, erratic, and drug-addled tainted the movie; her arrest for a DUI kept her from promoting the film. I was a wee impressionable tot in 2007 and I was not aware of this movie, but I was very aware of Lindsay’s downfall and the members of her child star cohort who made headlines around the same time. As a kid, I figured that this was the time-honored trajectory of the child star, youthful fame followed by a superstar burnout upon reaching adulthood, but while young performers had fucked up before, I now maintain that the public has never been so captivated by the spectacle as in the 2000s.

            I Know Who Killed Me should have been perfectly situated to capitalize on the public’s appetite for Lohan gone wild. One of the twin characters portrayed by Lindsay, aforementioned bad girl Dakota, is a stripper. The image of Lindsay pole-dancing in a corset (and no less, thanks to her no-nudity clause), was featured heavily in the marketing. But the movie was not rewarded at the box office, maybe because audiences could already lap up the spectacle of Bad Lindsay in real life, maybe because the movie also features a brutal scene of her hand being burned with dry ice and slowly amputated, maybe because the emotions of fascination mixed with disgust and pity aroused by the child star disaster are not pleasant to maintain for the length of a film, or maybe, just maybe, because this film is bad. Very bad. So bad.

            Meant to be a twisty thriller but with all the smarts of a Scooby-Doo episode, I Know Who Killed Me begins with good girl Aubrey, a successful teenage pianist and aspiring writer, who is abducted by a local serial killer who wastes no time taking her apart. She is discovered seventeen days later, barely alive by the side of the road; when she comes to, she’s short an arm, a leg, and an identity. Aubrey thinks she’s Dakota, underage stripper and daughter of a dead crackhead whose limbs simply started falling off one day. It turns out that Aubrey had been writing a story about a long-lost twin named Dakota before she was abducted. Just when we think Dakota is a figment of Aubrey’s traumatized mind, Dakota’s half-assed investigation leads her to discover that she really is Dakota, that the twins were separated at birth when Aubrey was purchased from her biomom by her wealthy adopted dad to replace a stillborn child, and that the real Aubrey is still in the killer’s clutches. Dakota’s inexplicable injuries were the product of her psychic connection with her kidnapped sister. Duh. The killer turns out to be Aubrey’s piano teacher, pissed that Aubrey quit piano for writing, and Dakota saves Aubrey just as she’s being buried alive in a bespoke blue coffin.

Omg twinsies

            Just like many of the directors who inspired it, IKWKM is obsessed with the duality of the good little rich girl and her bad counterpart. This duality is of course not about actual women and their moral complexities, but about what a given cultural moment or filmmaker thinks makes a good girl or a bad one. Brian de Palma’s Sisters for example features conjoined twins, one good and one evil. The good twin is demure, passive, sweet, and sexually available but not sexually aggressive. The bad twin is moody, withholding, and ultimately violent. The movie begins after the twins are separated, when the evil twin murders her good counterpart’s nice guy hookup. The big twist is that the evil twin died on the operating table, and that the good twin restored the balance by dissociating into her evil sister. Both are archetypes of the het male imagination. De Palma was inspired by a photograph of a real-life pair of conjoined twins; central to the bad twin’s perceived badness is that she didn’t smile for the camera.

            Twin Peaks is more interesting because it collapses the good girl and bad girl into one figure. Laura Palmer is homecoming queen, a successful student who volunteers with disabled children and feeds the hungry. She is also a drug addict and a sex worker with two secret boyfriends, one of whom is the father of her classmate. When the show reveals Laura’s murderer, it doesn’t just solve the mystery but reframes Laura’s entire story. Laura was killed by her father who had been raping her for years. Laura’s so-called bad behavior was a way of coping with unspeakable trauma. The genius of Twin Peaks is that Laura’s “badness” is a product of her “good” world; the worst things to happen to Laura don’t happen in the roadhouse or the brothel or even the abandoned train car where she is murdered. They happen in the bedroom of her idyllic middle-class home.

            IKWKM tries to be a class commentary, suggesting that Dakota’s transgressions are a product of her impoverished upbringing. But the movie is impeded by its cartoonish understanding of poverty. Dakota discovers her dead mom in a room with peeling wallpaper and a sink without a faucet, an image straight out of a Mary Worth strip. The fact that drug addiction, bad parenting, unhappiness, and heck even sex work can happen within wealthy enclaves doesn’t occur to this film. Dakota’s life and Aubrey’s have nothing to do with each other; one is not the dark side or the product of the other. It only makes sense if Dakota is a sheltered rich girl’s idea of what poverty looks like, which was indeed the original ending of the movie (which is also unsatisfying). But with Dakota presented as real, the movie is just naive.

She's b a d

The camera is fascinated by Dakota’s sex work, giving her lines about her encounters with ugly old johns and treating us to three separate scenes of her grinding on a pole with all the enthusiasm of a drowsy panda. But these scenes don’t feel sexy or scandalous or even exploitative; they seem to be there because the filmmakers know that the sight of a child star on a stripper pole is shocking, but they don’t know why. It’s a shallow characterization of sex work, even though the movie is ultimately sympathetic to Dakota.

Other than Aubrey’s wealth and privilege and Dakota’s sex work and supposed street smarts, the movie doesn’t do much to differentiate the two girls, another way it feels more like a paper cutout of the films it copies. Aubrey is no virgin; she’s actually pretty sexually empowered. She toys with her football player boyfriend, but the reason she doesn’t sleep with him isn’t because she’s a prude, as Dakota implies, but because, as Aubrey tells her friends, she’s “done sleeping with boys she’s not in love with.” Seems like a nice way of saying she’s sick of having mediocre missionary with bland beefcakes; I’m happy for her. She’s got an attitude; shimmying for and then raising her middle finger at her family’s creepy gardener. If Dakota is a projection of the sexuality she can’t express, that doesn’t make any damn sense. She’s not exactly sexually repressed, nor is she confined by her good girl image. The movie can only manage to delineate its two women by class and whether or not they get to decide when to take their clothes off.

The irony of all this clumsy binarism is that the movie’s star was right smack in the middle of her own good-girl-to-bad-girl journey. All the money and success in the world didn’t stop the real-life Lindsay Lohan from struggling with addiction and mental health; indeed, it’s almost certain that the press scrutiny and the behind-the-scenes horrors of being a raised-by-Disney child star contributed to her decline. That’s a far more interesting story about the binaries into which women, especially women in the public eye, are forced to straddle.

For all that the figure of the teenage girl captivates American culture, I don’t know if the media empires that made 2000s teen idols ever knew what to do with her. Her coming-of-age isn’t interesting because she gains psychological depths or intellectual maturity and insights. It’s interesting because she parties, does drugs, messes up, and most of all becomes sexual and sexually available. Mean Girls aside, Lindsay’s keepers didn’t seem to know how to turn her from a cute and innocent kid into a grown woman, in other words, how to let her be a teenage girl. And the media wasn’t interested in depicting Lohan’s fuckups as adolescence excess or experimentation, but as a collapse that annihilated the possibility of adulthood (legally, in the case of Lindsay’s musical counterpart, Britney Spears). In her acting career, Lindsay tried to move immediately from kid roles (Mean Girls is justifiably a teen classic, but it’s very tame) to adult roles, and adult meant sex, so in this movie she sort-of strips. It’s maybe no surprise that the child stars who most successfully made the shift to adult stardom where those who, like Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson, were famous for roles that moved smoothly from kid to adult, or who like Jodi Foster took roles in adult fare early on in their careers. I’m sure it also helped that their lives weren’t micromanaged by the corporations who employed them and that they were not themselves, as famous as they were, sold as the product to their young audience.

I have a certain respect for the Disney girls who came after Lindsay. Miley Cyrus, who had her own scandalous coming of age only a few years later, played the bad girl game that the media loves to tsk at, but did it without ever losing control of the narrative. Cyrus’ scandalous phase was no doubt choreographed, but felt more like a genuine youthful explosion of bad taste from a woman who was at last able to take control of her own image. Elsewhere, the teen girl coming of age story enjoys a renaissance, fascinated with the teen girl for reasons far more interesting than her budding sexuality (though the girls are, more often than not, played by women in their 20s). And if we get nostalgic for the bad old days, we can always look back to IKWKM and remember, hey, at least we got some terrible movies out of it.

Trivia:

·       Hands-down the best shot in this movie is when Dakota finds the killer’s hideout and discovers a possum in a tiny car. Seriously. Either CGI animators worked tirelessly over that possum or a real possum and its entourage had to be brought to set. For a single shot. Of a possum. In a tiny car.

·       The killer not only has a fancy blue coffin to bury Aubrey in, but he severs her limbs with a deluxe blue knife and his torture chamber is filled with dangling prosthetic limbs. I don’t fucking know why.

·       Also, if the serial killer lives in the same town as Aubrey, he is surely confused by news reports that Aubrey has been found. He must be like, I just saw her tied to my table five minutes ago. I just chopped of her pinky. She is right here. Why is he so surprised when Dakota shows up? He must have had a very confusing few days.

·       I totally forgot to mention that Dakota is given a fancy cyborg hand and a fancy cyborg leg to replace her missing limbs. She learns to use them immediately. A big deal is made of her needing to charge her cyborg leg, but this never matters to the plot.

·       I swear the makers of The Perfection, another movie that features limb-severing and tyrannical music instructors but that successfully manages to be an exploitation flick, must have seen this and said we can do better than this.

·       Do ya think Boxing Helena is this bad? Should I watch it and see?