Retrospection is in the air. Younger millennials, apparently, are rewatching “Girls” in record numbers to parse the just-vanished particulars of their early 20s. Before “Yellowjackets,” I binged “Fleishman Is in Trouble” and was totally caught up in the backward excavation of its hapless middle-aged characters. I exchanged texts with my peers about the promised reappearance of Aidan on “And Just Like That,” an unheimlich but irresistible return to “Sex and the City,” a show that gave my generation a formative if deeply inaccurate picture of what our adulthood might hold. Cultural offerings like “Impeachment” or “I, Tonya” take up the specifics of the 1990s’ sensational moments and examine them in a new light. What a time, then, for both of the “Yellowjackets” story lines: its murderers’ row of former icons — Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci, Melanie Lynskey, now Elijah Wood — playing middle-aged roles, as well as the opportunity to see those characters as their past selves, a vicarious simultaneity.
The show takes the common awfulnesses of teenage girlhood in that era (which of course persist today, with their own temporal inflection) — the unsettling sexual experiences or outright assaults; the casual racism; homophobia and misogyny; Kate Moss languishing in her underwear — and discreetly moves them out of the way. A primary love story in the woods is a queer one; the romance between Van (Liv Hewson) and Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) is a loving and fully realized relationship from the jump. The only adult man present, the team’s coach, Ben Scott (Steven Krueger), is gay, and his period-appropriate terror of being outed is understood and neutralized by the empathetic perspicacity of Natalie (Sophie Thatcher), who navigates her own halting romance with Travis (Kevin Alves), the only teenage boy in the cabin. Unlike the characters of “Euphoria,” whose goal seems to be to show as much pretend-under-age boob as possible, those in “Yellowjackets” have access to a form of fundamental self-respect and agency that many middle-aged women took years to attain. Maybe that’s part of the fantasy, too.
There’s something fundamentally melancholy, though, about all this looking back. Toward the end of the first season, in a wilderness interlude, Van is attacked by wolves, her face torn open. Back at the cabin, the girls work together to hold her down while one draws a curved needle through her cheek to stitch the wound. In the next moment, we see 40-something Taissa (Tawny Cypress), now at Shauna’s modest New Jersey ranch house, where Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) makes up her teenage daughter’s bed, beneath a poster that reads “Keep Calm You Can Still Marry Harry.” The two old friends lie in bed, and Shauna muses about what would have happened had they not crashed, had she gone to Brown the way she planned, where she would “write amazing papers on Dorothy Parker and Virginia Woolf” and fall in love with a “floppy-haired, sad-eyed poet boy.” Taissa, meanwhile, describes a litany of successes that actually came to pass: Howard University, “a bunch of beautiful women,” “first string on the soccer team,” Columbia Law. But achieving a dream can also become ash in the mouth. “Not a single one of those things felt real,” Taissa says. It was their time in the woods, when everything was terrible and vivid and somehow fundamental — and cheeks were stitched with twine — when feeling and reality were truly one.
Or at least that’s what the show wants us to think at first. That’s certainly how the characters feel in the early episodes, quietly assenting to the fate suggested in their bad marriages, puzzling children and unfulfilling jobs. But then the gang gets back together, and their efforts to keep their shared trauma among them amount to a kind of quest. Their days become unpredictable and enlivened again. At some point, viewers sense that the women approach their present-day escapades with the same ferocity they brought to their exploits in the wilderness.
From some angles, this vicarious pleasure might confirm our worst suspicions that for women, middle age signals the decline after the peak. But the notion of a miserable midlife turns out to be another bait and switch. “Yellowjackets,” then, becomes a deliciously macabre play on the midlife crisis. Certainly, healing and redemption appear to fall outside the boundaries of a “Yellowjackets” universe. So, like other women before them, these restless heroines begin to make the most of the diversions life finds for them, grim as their circumstances might be: sex, camaraderie, adventure and wild fun.
Source images for opening artwork: Showtime, the New York Public Library, Russell Lee via the New York Public Library.
Lydia Kiesling is the author of “The Golden State,” which was a 2018 National Book Foundation “Five Under 35” honoree. Her novel “Mobility” is set to be published in August. Sarah Palmer is an artist, photographer, and educator based in Brooklyn. Her solo exhibition, “The Delirious Sun,” at Mrs. gallery in Maspeth, is on display until May 6.
