“Something indeed happened in those 19 months. It was magical and wondrous and absolutely vile. And that describes Yellowjackets, in all its ambition and savage beauty, probably best of all.”
Maybe Yellowjackets is my Ted Lasso? Well, I loved Ted Lasso too (although I keep forgetting to watch anything after the first season) — but in that ineffable way the best things feel made just for us, I feel Yellowjackets has my number.
Maybe it’s the “women under surveillance” trope that has haunted me since the TWoP days: Homeland and Good Wife, but even more honestly Pretty Little Liars and Gossip Girl. To grow up white and cis and gay means being sexualized (and surveilled) in much the same way young women are expected to weather.
I loved and love Jennifer’s Body for Jennifer’s (and Megan Fox’s) seething anger. Even before she (spoiler alert) dies, she’s pissed and playing with being an object, two things I know well. I think some of us identify with that anger, or that surveillance, to the point of speaking for women — this is why I don’t claim to be a feminist, because I believe you must show and not tell. But in Jennifer’s Body it comes straight from the cold, hot, raging source.
Karyn Kusama has a certain take on pleasantries, social lubricants, on the middle-class agreements we make to get by. The Invitation is, on one level, a horror movie about not offending anybody. What we do collectively pardons what we do individually, whether it’s demonic virgin sacrifice (in JB) or the dizzying fate of The Invitation‘s guests, which feels as destined and implacable in hindsight as it does shocking as it unfolds.
I did get to see Karyn Kusama speak once, at a screening of The Invitation, which was thrilling to me as a JB fanboy and which I attended for that reason — the same lucky SxSW year that I caught a glimpse of Corey from Teen Wolf on the street, visiting for his really poignant and beautiful star turn in the excellent queer Slash.
I don’t remember much of what she talked about, just that I agreed with every word and came away even more impressed with her mind, skill, and the way she approaches her work.
So maybe it’s just that — maybe it’s Karyn Kusama’s mind itself that I am grokking. That’s possibility number two and I don’t mind it at all. A Kusama joint with Christina Ricci and Indie Queen Melanie Lynskey, among a large and stellar cast of women? That would be enough for me. I watched the first three episodes on my phone and shrieked at the conclusion of the first episode — not out of surprise but simply to offload some of the horror and suspense that had been building all along. Scared Zooey, in fact.
Or maybe it’s the echoes of other things — back to The Wilds and thus Orphan Black, True Detective and Pretty Little Liars, even the first season of Cruel Summer — that find their level and graduate to fully adult horror here. Which isn’t to implicate non-adult or non-horror as less serious. Just that of all the shows that accomplish what they have set out to do, this is a stellar example. For a show whose constituent parts have mostly never been seen before, it certainly gives the impression of knowing, from minute one, exactly what kind of show it is.
The show follows a girl’s elite soccer team on the days leading up to their 1996 plane crash, the nineteen months they spend stranded in the wilderness, and their 2021 adult fates as they try to find peace, in ways that range from mind-bending to straight up harrowing. Modern-day murders, pre-crash betrayals, ironic and instant movements through time all add up to a portrait of something dark, foreboding, shocking, loving, funny and wild — a lot like life.
Nineteen months is a long time. A lot can happen in nineteen months. Fifteen years is also a long time. A lot can happen in fifteen years. What this show asks is: What if the things that happened, in those nineteen months and the subsequent fifteen years, were almost too scary to remember, talk about, or watch on a TV show?
Not to scare you off. There’s nothing here that will melt you down, no animal torture or jump scares. There’s violence, both human-made and circumstantial; both out of cold hatred and from primal nature, red in tooth and claw. The mysteries of teenage cruelty, shading everything with deeper meanings. There’s the fact that some people aged out of it (seemingly) unscathed and others are very much still in the woods.
Hey, maybe that’s it: Maybe a story about being lost in the woods just speaks to me, in a mythopoetic sense and in the sense that “the quest is not a metaphor for therapy, therapy is a metaphor for the quest” and whatever pithy sayings I find myself repeating. Wolves around the comforting fire we build to keep the night at bay, and so on.
If you’re lucky, I’m sorry to say, becoming an adult is like finding yourself in the woods, praying for a path of shining stones or bits of bread — without fairytale parents to guide or save us, stuck on our own, eking out some small survival. It doesn’t feel like this most of the time, and we outgrow it for something maybe a bit more comfortable, a bit bleaker.
Libba Bray’s Beauty Queens is the story of a group of pageant girls whose plane goes down, stranding them on a beach… It’s one of my favorites, as they reinvent a more blessed society. But my favorite of the girls believes she’s a werewolf, whose sexuality and sensuality are fused into a single monster that she must protect and cage up.
Those stories — Beauty Queens, Lost, The Wilds, even Orphan Black again — take what is a personal feeling and make it objective correlative: The wilderness is everybody else, and the world they inhabit, and all the ways you will let them and yourself down. (We’re just a skipped stone away from something on the level of Sharp Objects, which imbued the everyday sometimes literally with menace.)
If you’re not-so-lucky, as I think most of us are not, then those feelings and their meanings predate adulthood by years. You’re lost in the woods before you even know what woods are, you never had fairytale parents to disappoint you, you never had to wake up one day and exit the Garden because you were never in the Garden to begin with. You do not hide from the wolves — you are instead raised by them.
Or maybe it’s the way trauma revisits us, echoing out again and again until we’re not sure who’s at fault anymore — how much of this, the current day in all its monotony and struggle, is just a story I’m telling myself? If my body makes it out of the woods, how do I solve for the spiritual jetlag that left my heart back in that darkness?
Much is made of the brilliant casting here, as we see the women each of these girls will grow to be already pretty formed. We can see the cracks in the foundation that bring us across those fifteen years. The broken ones stay broken and the happier ones get more broken still. (Christina Ricci, going for camp here as she is wont to do, appeared of course as part of the junior generation in 1995’s Now and Then, the show’s most basic filmic forebear.)
It feels almost impossibly intricate, the way the show by its own remit must give us not one but a dozen believable links between the present and the past. None of which is the reason I personally love it, although this last point makes it unbelievably satisfying in a craftsman-like way.
But it’s not just the aerial acrobatics of charting these dozen lives across those fifteen tumultuous years — it’s the acting on the individual level. Both the girls and their grown-up selves are pitch perfect, carrying the greatest burdens imaginable but still wry, unexpected, vibrantly human. Melanie Lynskey elevates everything she’s in, for example, so imagine what happens when she’s in something that is already stratospheric.
The next part is spoilers for the first episode, so we can leave it here until you’ve had a chance to watch. It’s a sensational feast, in every sense of the word, with ambient sound and editing and utter strangeness all adding up to a very real, sensible and deep-rooted, dread.
The King in Yellow has nothing on this majestic Queen of the Hunt, her brides or bridesmaids or ladies in waiting or supreme court, or maybe all of those or maybe none of those. Her masked and bloody daughters, who’ve given — not just their names and not just their reason — but their faces themselves, over to the wilderness. Chief among the mysteries, preserved by the masks but not for too terribly long, is less of a whodunit, then, and more of a howcouldyou.
Something indeed happened in those nineteen months. It was magical and wondrous and absolutely vile. And that describes Yellowjackets, in all its ambition and savage beauty, probably best of all.
And knowing me, it’s probably the real reason I love it so much. The implication being that, through some natural sequence of events yet to be uncovered, anybody is one plane crash and some amount of loneliness away from reinventing God, out of broken pieces of wilderness. They had me with the antlers, of course, but the hints — tantalizing, ritualistic, silent, dreadful — are of something altogether sharper, mossy, chthonic. The Deep Magic.
Because it’s not just unlucky kids on planes and unlucky women in subjugation to their trauma, who go about making up God from what’s terrifying and what’s lying around: That’s everybody.
“Hansel & Gretel” tells us what it feels like when your parents can no longer meet your every wish — how we must create a solution out of the nothing that presents itself. The Persephone or Ereshkigal or Orphic myth cycles tell us what it’s like to descend into darkness, and find your way up and out again (for at least a little while). What is God if not our image of God, how we seek and find it for ourselves. A terrifying journey.
What the show is brave enough to admit is nothing so simplistic as a Rousseauist treatise on man’s wild inhumanity barely kept at bay by our traditions and our patriarchy and so on. That’s not brave, that’s lazy (and replaced by The Matrix anyway, in most ways that count). And though, as in The Invitation, we see that collective action blesses and pardons what would be unforgivable if accomplished alone… That’s not the real secret. Not what they became, not even really why, but: How it felt.
But if the woods here are a stand-in for the Woods, and the magic here a stand-in for the Deeper Magic Still — if these women under surveillance shift shapes under the moon — something magical and wondrous is about to happen…
Vile or not, but almost certainly dreadful, it happens to us all eventually.
That night, under the dark of the moon, when you look at what you’ve made of the world — and realize it’s everything you are. Make peace with that — with the part of yourself that will never know peace, as Joss Whedon once said — and the rest of the game is pretty easy to play.
All it costs is, you know, everything you thought you were. Which can feel a lot like dying, or worse. And while that is diametrically opposed to anything Ted Lasso has to say, there’s part of me to which it appeals in the same way: In both cases it’s about a radical response to the general spontaneous mess of life.
Radical unblinking kindness, for Ted; for these girls, possession by the moon and worse.
And much, much more beautifully, better.