What’s the Point of Wet Hot American Summer?

Answer me this: is there anything more stressful than sitting next to a friend who is watching a movie you treasure? You anticipate favorite scenes to see if she laughs, side-eye her to make sure she’s paying attention. You mouth along with lines not because you want to show off, but because you want your friend to adopt these quotes, too.

Worse is the soul crushing moment when the credits roll and she tells you, “I don’t get it.”

This just happened to me with a friend who’d never seen Wet Hot American Summer. In anticipation of today’s Netflix series release, I sat her down in front of the movie and audibly stress-breathed like that guy from Hey Arnold. When it was over, her reasoning wasn’t that she didn’t like the movie but rather, “There’s just no point.”

BUT THAT’S THE POINT.

Very rarely is an argument won without a point. You can stop a fight by saying, “There’s no point,” and then everyone’s like, “Oh you are so right, let’s hug.” You can interrupt a Scantron test with the same sentence, too, by holding up your broken led pencil and being the asshole who forgot to bring — per the directions — at least two No. 2s. But to be the victor in a dispute when your thesis statement is “X is good because there’s no point” — that takes dedication to the craft of proverbial snapped writing utensils.

Yet I stand by my reasoning: some of the best movies have “no point.” Think about Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Dazed and Confused or Metropolitan. Things happen, conversations happen, but at the same time…kind of nothing happens. It’s the anti-sitcom, the opposite of formulaic. It’s just kids going on with their life. For the movies, it’s weirdly real.

Wet Hot American Summer is a parody of this genre. It’s set in the 70s, it revolves around sexually charged teens who live in a bubble; there’s even a whole drugs and alcohol montage: the coming-of-age-requisite in these kinds of films. (Why? As the cliché goes, because there was nothing else to do.) But parodying the theme of pointlessness doesn’t negate the fact that Wet Hot American Summer still has none — and that’s why it’s good. That’s why it’s so loved.

Maybe the point is just to make people laugh. I’ve got to assume that will be the Netflix angle. But still, sometimes the most satisfying answer to the question, “Why are you laughing?” is an honest, “I don’t know.”

(Now, since it’s Friday and none of us are focusing, tell me the movie that makes you most nervous to watch with someone. Does it have it point? Do good movies have to? Are you nostalgic for the way movies once were? Or are you like, “Amelia, you’re an absolute balloon — all I care about is the new Mission Impossible“?)

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