What Jennifer Did (2024)

TV-14, despite the fact that this is the true story of a brutal murder, coupled with a drug dealing side story in the movie.  It's pretty dark, yet it's funny to think that this, if only taking the rating as a guide, might be something that my little kids would watch.  I'd like to point out, it is not at all appropriate for little kids.  But TV-14 is TV-14, I guess.

DIRECTOR:  Jenny Popplewell

More like, what DIDN'T Jenny do?  Am I right?

Okay, it's actually pretty straightforward.  If you were waiting for some other shoe to drop, don't.  Your first instinct was mostly the right one.  It's more of a matter of how she killed her parents more than if she killed her parents.  I watched this one because one of my students said some good things about this.  I actually feel a little bad because I watched the wrong true crime doc before this thinking that it was the recommendation I got in class.  Odd coincidence that actually kind of scans?  It was made by the same production company, RAW Productions.  Is What Jennifer Did amazing?  No.  Did it fill up an evening.  Yeah, kind of.  Honestly, it's more one of those stories where the viewer needs to invest the self to really find something to talk about.  Lucky for me and this blog, I have some thoughts.  Not a lot.  Probably not completely profound.  But I do have some thoughts. 

There are two things that Popplewell wants to get across.  1) Empathy is one of those things that can mask logic.  2) Cultural pressure for success is a powerful motivator.  It's not that the movie doesn't completely condemn Jennifer.  There's enough of that dramatic footage coupled with haunting music to imply that Jennifer was a real psycho.  Literally, at one point, it was just a photo of Jennifer in high school sticking her tongue out and that true crime chord boomed over the image, making it upsetting.  There's a lot of that.  But honestly, the beat-to-beat unpacking of this story isn't necessarily the story of a mastermind.  It's just the juxtaposition of this little girl who seemed to have it all together compared to the brutal murder of the girl's mother.  The movie starts with the emergency phone call to the police.  Jennifer seems like she is very much the victim of this story.  Her screams seem real and troubling.  But the gosh-darned thing is called What Jennifer Did.  Geez, I mean, there's no scenario where this story wasn't going to go to some weird dark place.

​This is me completely talking with no expertise at all, just intution.  I think we're all aware that there are people who study psychology and what makes people tick.  But the only thing that really stuck to my ribs about Jennifer was the fact that the crying was almost paradoxical.  The movie really sells the notion that there was no regret or emotional attachment to her parents.  There's this moment in the movie where someone came forward and said that Jennifer had tried this in the past.  It wasn't that she backed down.  It was that circumstances didn't allow for her to commit murder.  That's what really kind of gets under my skin a little bit.  Jennifer, throughout interviews, cries a lot.  But knowing that the tears were either part of her mask or were only there in fear of imprisonment, the scary part is that she probably has no real moral code.  Okay, I laughed at the cliche that the lead detective brought up in his interview.  He described Jennifer Pan's crime as "pure evil" or something like that. While incredibly dramatic, there is something there that can be said about that read of the murders. It's not like she slept on it and then changed her mind.  

Part of it comes down to acting.  That phone call sounded real.  Like, I knew she totally did it.  Everyone did.  But do you know what what we tend to do when we knew that she did it?  We listen for the inconsistencies.  (Note: the officer's arguement that she couldn't make a phone call if her hands were bound didn't make sense in a post-Siri universe.) But that phone call seemed totally real.  The tears in the interview room sounded totally real.  That's the upsetting element of the movie.  To invest oneself that deeply into a lie, I wonder what the real tears are.  That's where my brain goes, by the way.  It says that there is no such thing as real tears.  There's screaming and there's hate in my brain.  But I think that Jennifer doesn't cry like that when things get real.  Or, she's just one of those actors who can bring reality to life.

Now, it's not like the movie goes into victim blaming...much.  It might be a bit of a shorthand to show an Asian family and then say that the reason that Jennifer murdered her family in an absolutely horrific way was that they were pressuring her to succeed.  Now, there's both something universal about this, her sense of arrested development coupled with a massive spiral of lies.  It just seems like there's something that is being said that is meant to be specifically cultural.  I don't know.  I kind of wish the motive was something a little less on the nose.  Part of what really bothers me, besides perpetuating a stereotype, is the idea that there's a one-to-one connection between familial disappointment and the urge to murder.  There were times in my life, especially in my early 20s, where I just felt like an absolute piece of trash.  The expectation for success versus the comfort of just being my own person got me into scrapes that I didn't necessarily love.  Mind you, I never dated a drug dealer.  I also probably am not wired for this.  But for all of the times that I just wanted to get away, the intrusive thought wasn't homicide.  It was running away with an occasional suicidal coloring to the whole thing.  It's odd that the police just jumped to "I lied about college" to "I will hire a hitman to kill my whole family."

It's so odd because, like I mentioned, I watched the other Netflix original true crime thing by RAW Productions.  That one seemed far more critical of police, who seemed to be using a lot of the same shorthand to get what they wanted.  Sure, American Nightmare balanced it out by stressing that there was a good cop who understood what it meant to be a woman and a police officer rather than just opening and closing cases.  Maybe watching these things back-to-back was a bit much, but it was odd how the look of something stayed the same, but the message almost seemed to be completely different.  I even noticed that some of the language of the film was the same.  For the interview scenes, both productions used the exterior of the interview room with the little light to stress that things were happening back there.  It's just that the messaging went in two wildly different places.

True crime is weird to write about, especially when you've watched a fair amount of it.  Part of it is a commentary on the storytelling, but there's almost a language to the true crime documentary that almost minimizes anything outside of the norm.  I keep teasing that I mean to rewatch F for Fake by Orson Welles because I love the nontraditional storytelling that happens in it.  But it is hard to analyze movies like What Jennifer Did because real world horror tends to be told the same way over and over.  It's either pro-police, where we are trying to unpack why someone goes off the wall and kills someone.  Or the other end is that it is anti-police, where we look at how shortcuts lead to bad policing.  It's a bit of lather, rinse, repeat, honestly.  It's not that it isn't interesting.  It is just that we have a narrative coloring the events that almost minimize things that could be done with these things.  Until we get something revolutionary, these blogs will be the same.  I can comment on how crazy Jennifer Pan comes across, but I don't have much beyond that.

Also, I could have sworn that "Homie" or "Homeboy" was just bad improv until they got a warrant for the phone. Sure enough, labelled in there as "Homeboy."  I just loved the Canadian police continually say "Homeboy."