An Ecosystem of Desires & Fears
While Yellowjackets does certainly represent traumatic events—a plane crash, wolf attacks, a year and a half in the woods—it seems more interested in the formation of a collective identity in the future through this shared past.
If you want something scary, look no further than Twitter. It’s a snake pit. Due to some form of masochism under the guise of participating in the literary community, I, of course, spend too much time on the app. Lately, the discourse has been abuzz about trauma. Literary Twitter revved up following Parul Sehgal’s New Yorker essay on the trauma plot. The essay released over the holidays, when I was thankfully not hitting my daily max on social media apps, but I came to the discussion late and confused.
Sehgal asserts that our contemporary storytelling has evolved from the marriage plot to the trauma plot: “Unlike the marriage plot, the trauma plot does not direct our curiosity toward the future (Will they or won’t they?) but back into the past (What happened to her?).” More recently scathing reviews of Hanya Yanagihara’s anticipated third novel, To Paradise, proliferate. Using the warped mirror of Twitter, we can find these questions about trauma and backstory shimmering in the zeitgeist.
If you’re spending as much time on Twitter as I am, you’re also most likely encountering lots of buzz around the new Hulu series, Yellowjackets. Think Lord of the Flies but a girls’ soccer team; “flies may have been a fine analogue for boys, but girls require the ferocity of wasps, with their venom and their stingers,” as Doreen St. Felix says in her New Yorker review of the series.
Two timelines stitch together to tell the story of Yellowjackets. In 1996, the overshadowed girls’ soccer team—the eponymous Yellowjackets—wins the New Jersey state title. They get in a plane crash on their way to nationals, thrust into the wilderness where they must learn to hunt, forage, and survive together. In 2021, we follow four of the surviving women—Shauna, Taissa, Natalie, and Misty—through midlife, finding them still in New Jersey where they’ve buried their past from the plane crash. Sehgal’s argument is one worth bringing to bear on this series: how does Yellowjackets interrogate, or incorporate, or cast a light on, the hardships it represents?
The show ripples with 90s thriller fun: a soundtrack featuring Liz Phair, Seal, and Salt-n-Pepa; blackmail; affairs; a hostage in the basement taking a kidnapper’s creepy pet hostage. There are some familiar moves to other horror series with an ensemble cast; several episodes begin in a flashback on one of the non-main girls, and spend some time developing her arc, a move typical in Mike Flanagan’s two Haunting series. And while I found the first episode a bit disorienting—two timelines with four different main characters to follow among a whole soccer team’s worth of girls—the show’s ambition and storytelling quickly justify its flashes forward and back. Yellowjackets, in its imagination and character-building, feels entirely original.
In 2021, people are interested in the Yellowjackets. Online communities and cover stories surround them. What happened to this lauded high school girls’ soccer team in the woods for a year and a half? It’s not so hard to see the buzz around the disaster and find real world analogs—JonBenét Ramsey, Lizzie Borden. Misty herself participates in an online detective community. The show could easily turn its viewership on its head, its core examination a reflexive one—why do we, the show’s viewers, give oxygen to our voyeuristic impulses? Why do we want to plunder the wreck?
At a fundraising gala, a wealthy white woman asks Taissa, the only Black woman in the contemporary storyline, about what happened in the woods. Taissa asks the woman why she thinks she can have that, what gives her the right to possess what they went through in the woods?
Swiftly, the show situates itself in relation to this dark past and arrows forward. Yellowjackets asks other original questions. It transcends true crime and thriller tropes to unfold character in more interesting ways. Amidst the danger and destruction, Taissa and Van—the team’s redhead goalie with a strong voice and sense of self—share a beautiful gay love story, charged with their affection for each other as well as their opposition during times of struggle. Prior to the crash, Shauna sleeps with her best friend Jackie’s boyfriend and discovers she’s pregnant while they’re stranded. Jackie, the more conventionally popular one, reads Shauna’s journal and finds out. Their friendship buckles under the girls’ secrets and serial bad decisions in a way that feels so refreshingly real.
Instead of attributing all character development solely to the crash, the show reveals an ecosystem of competing desires and fears. It puts characters we can understand into high-pressure situations and allows them to make bad, human decisions. Jackie comes close to being characterized as the villain—she struggles with the “back-to-earth” work of the woods—but we too feel how she’s struggling with their potential doom. In the heat of the moment, she confides in another character, “It doesn’t matter. We’re just shells with nothing inside.”
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While this show does certainly represent traumatic events—a plane crash, wolf attacks, a year and a half in the woods—it seems more interested in the formation of a collective identity in the future through this shared past. Watching, I can’t help but wonder what will happen to all of the other girls in the woods. Do they all die? Travis, the coach’s son, appears in the present timeline as somewhat of a surprise. Who else could have survived, beyond the main four, living beyond the gaze of the show? “The parallel structure of ‘Yellowjackets,’ then, isn’t just a trendy storytelling gimmick. It’s as if the 2021 women, grizzled and mysterious, were answers to an equation, and the 1996 girls were its variables,” says St. Felix.
I think too of Jia Tolentino’s essay, “Pure Heroines.” In it, she discusses the troubling models of femininity presented by modern literature for girls, teenagers, and women and discovers something fresh in Elena Ferrante’s novels. Ferrante finds influence in Adriana Cavarero who “argues for identity as ‘totally expositive and relational.’ Identity, according to Cavarero, is not something that we innately possess and reveal, but something we understand through narratives provided to us by others.” As well, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s adaptation of Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, released earlier this month, pieces together a fractured history of mother- and selfhood across two timelines.
Yellowjackets uses its two timelines to assemble something of a collective history, moving beyond the prioritization of the self and into the group-identity. The girls and women respond to, affirm, and support each other across time. Sleepwalking and afraid she might harm her family, Taissa goes to Shauna for help. She stays over Shauna’s house and they discuss how they’d thought their lives might look when they were in high school. Shauna describes all she could have done—having been admitted to Brown prior to the crash—but never did. Taissa enumerates all she did accomplish but how none of it felt real. By following multiple accounts within the group, the show inspects how they come away from the wreckage and live with its echoes differently across time.
At the heart of Sehgal’s New Yorker essay is this: “With a wider aperture, we move out of the therapeutic register and into a generational, social, and political one. It becomes a portal into history and into a common language.”
