Yellowjackets through an Ecogothic Lens
By Peter Raagaard
A single plot line from the Showtime series Yellowjackets is interesting, partly because of its narratological ambiguity as both flashback, flashforward and teaser for the second season, but also because it’s a good way to apply the concept of the EcoGothic on the series.
The first season of Showtime’s Yellowjackets (2021–) has been discussed widely on social media this winter. It has been referred to as the new Lost (2004–2010) — and like this show, several fan theories have formed around the series and the unanswered questions it leaves viewers with after the conclusion of its first season.
Yellowjackets’ first plotline takes place in 1996, where a highly talented girls’ soccer team crash lands in the desolate North American forests. For 19 months, they must cope without outside help. In the show’s second parallel narrative, we follow the now-adult lives of the four main characters 25 years later in 2021 in their hometown, New Jersey. The focus of Yellowjackets is the mystery of what happened in the woods back then and how it affects them as adults.
Already from beginning of the series’ pilot episode, the viewer is given hints that the stay in the woods has not been peaceful: In a chase scene which reminds of The Revenant (2015) as well as an Italian cannibal film, a terrified, half-naked girl runs for her life through a snowy forested landscape. However, the attempted escape fails, for she ends up in a pitfall, pierced by wooden stakes — hence the nickname “pit girl” among fans. Subsequently, a group of furclad, masked figures gather around the hole, drag the corpse through the snow and hang it up for dismemberment. Later, they gather again to cook and share the meat at a ritual meal, centred around a mysterious, figure adorned with antlers.
Through close-ups, our attention has also been focused on some important details such as the heart necklace the victim has around her neck, and that one of the primitively furry hunters is wearing pink Converse shoes. However, since we don’t see the faces of either them or the hunted, we still don’t know anything about their exact identity, except for one who takes off her mask and smiles at us: Misty (Samantha Hanratty/Christina Ricci), whom we already have got to know as psychopathically calculating and behind much of what happens in the first episodes.
In this way, the viewer’s curiosity has been fed some excellent chunks from the very beginning which build up to the highly dramatic cliffhanger that ends the whole season in episode ten: We have grim expectations and want to know more. Elizabeth Parker’s (2020) concept of the EcoGothic is particularly useful in this context, providing us with the theoretical tools to understand the wilderness plotline — and Yellowjackets in its entirety — especially the difference between ‘place’ that is the familiar, and confidential and ‘space’ that is the unknown and scary (p. 47).
Looking at the teaser, it’s clear that we’re in “space,” where completely different rules apply than in the show’s other scenic space: the main characters’ homely and familiar “place”, New Jersey, which American cinema has traditionally portrayed as a safe but also boring suburban area. Here, in the forest, on the other hand, it seems that all forms of civilisation have disappeared: people hunt each other for food, and only the strong survive. So far can humans sink (Murphy, 2013, p. 133-177). Or is there more than just food at stake in the hunt? What follows raises suspicions that the previous hunt was part of a ghastly, carefully planned ritual.
The final scene, which stands as the climax, finally takes us back to a distant primeval time or post-apocalyptic barbarism: It’s a primitive cult ritual in which the participants cut chunks of the barbecued “prey,” present the best pieces to the veiled figure who has been nicknamed “The Antler Queen” on internet forums, and join in. The scene introduces most of the tropes that belong to folk horror, and so we again switch subgenre (Keetley, 2019). Sweet little Misty’s smile out at us as she takes off her mask and puts on her nerdy glasses is the last frame we see in the pilot.
The chase and meal-sequence consists of five scenes that intertwine with the two main narratives of the pilot episode, so that they frame its dramaturgical highlights. Therefore, an ambiguity arises when we have finished watching the first season due to the fact that the events shown in the plot line do not happen in the first season during the 1996-narrative. It therefore serves as a flashforward and teaser for the second season (Bastholm, 2012). At the same time, the manhunt must also be understood as a flashback from 2021, where we follow the four, now middle-aged protagonists in their attempt to cope with the past — for the split between ‘place’ and ‘space’ also takes place within the protagonists themselves.
Yellowjackets is an inverted form of coming-of-age narrative with a classic home-away-home structure. The events of 1996, of which we must assume the ‘manhunt’-sequence is a part of, represent personal secrets that the adult protagonists make every effort to hide, which becomes the focus of the events taking place in 2021. The split is most clearly seen in the two who have ‘adapted’ best to normal life: the housewife Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) and the politician Taissa (Tawney Cypress), who are frustrated in their daily life. What happened then gradually begins to affect their behaviour as an increasing aggressiveness that finally ends in murder. But at the same time, the awakening survival instincts are also of great help to them, as it makes them behave more confidently (Schubart, 2007, p. 5-38). Moreover, they both — literally — possess a hidden space, filled with memories related to the events of 1996. In this way, then, the forest has followed them back to ‘place’ as subconscious content, which gradually presses on.
Narratologically, then, the chase-sequence contributes plenty of input to the viewer’s construction of the series’ story with hints of events we haven’t yet seen unfolded in the plot itself, when Season 1’s final episode ends. This teaser moment introduced in the first episode is therefore one of the things that keeps us on the edge throughout the entire series.
Works Cited
Yellowjackets (Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson. Showtime 2021–)
Bastholm, Søren Rørdam. (2012) “Storytelling on TV”. In: Cut 98 – Member magazine
of the Media Teachers Association.
Keetley, Dawn: Defining Folk Horror. In: Revenant Journal, Issue 5, November 2019:”
Folk Horror”. Online.
Murphy, Bernice M. (2013) The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture –
Backwoods Horror and Terror in The Wilderness. Palgrave Macmillan.
Parker, Elizabeth. (2020) The Forest and the Ecogothic – The Deep Dark Woods in
the Popular Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan.
Schubart, Rikke. (2007) Super Bitches and Action Babes – The Female Hero in
Popular Cinema, 1970-2006. McFarlane & Company.
Author Biography
Peter Raagaard holds an MA in Danish and History from RUC 2002. He has been a lecturer in Danish at the universities of Tartu, Estonia, Saint Petersburg, and Reykjavik. He has previously published articles on Danish language and literature, including Karen Blixen and Naja Marie Aidt. Articles on Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, and Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers in the online film magazine 16:9. For the past few years, Peter has focused on setting and genre history within the horror and horror genres with articles on the role of water in It Follows and the return of folk horror.