Via Emma Jabbari

Maya Jabbari

Editor-In-Chief

When Yellowjackets, the 2021 survival and psychological drama begins, it disguises itself as no different than any other series in those genres: the token soccer team flies to a tournament and suddenly goes down in a plane crash, forcing them to survive. But what the show delivers in outdoor survival and psychological drama, it uses to reveal how girlhood is raw, complex, and transformative in ways society rarely allows. It forces its characters and its audience to ask: What happens when teenage girls are stripped of all rules except those instinctual survival demands, and what remains of them when they return back home?

By grounding itself in a recognizably teenage way, with cliques, rivalries, adolescent sexual experiences, and the pressure to conform, it demonstrates the true realities the girls are living with, which are deemed “normal” to the high school experience. As Vogue’s Emma Specter puts it, “They submit to sex that doesn’t actually do anything for them, get harassed by guys from passing cars, paint each other’s faces and lip-synch to the radio before pep rallies, and—crucially—take their aggression out on each other, often brutally, on the soccer field.” To me, and my experience on an all-girls competitive soccer team, these scenes are engaging, frustrating, and wildly familiar. They stake out the terrain of girlhood even before the true wilderness-trauma begins. 

Yellowjackets truly reels you in; you’re familiar with its narrative, but then it lets go of your hand and expects you to follow along with the characters as they’re simultaneously freaking out about the crash. And once that crash occurs, the wilderness doesn’t just do its own thing in the background, unbothered; but no, it, of course, amplifies everything: fear, identity, survival instincts. The girls must now create their own rules, moral codes, and decide who will take authority. Pure, pure chaos ensues. 

Assistant showrunner Ashley Lyle said in an NPR interview that they intended not to draw too neat a line between “high school mean girl behaviour” and actual violence in the woods. The show repeatedly demonstrates that the girls, unlike the stereotype, are already capable of cruelty, wielding power, and moral compromise before rescue or redemption.

One of Yellowjackets’ greatest achievements is, to me, the way in which they expose the emotional underbelly of girlhood, that being the shame, the trauma, the rage. The wilderness becomes a house for them to lash out and express everything they’re feeling. The girls bond in raw and brutal ways. One second, they’re on the same page, and the next, they’re having a screaming battle or worse, physically fighting with one another. Violence is often internal (between friends) rather than just external (starvation and/or predators). Through characters Jackie and Crystal, we see the true outcomes of internal battles, leading to the killing of them by Shauna (to Jackie) and Misty (to Crystal) on the team. These displays of violence flip the narrative of what girlhood is stereotypically deemed: here, it isn’t a delicate thing; it carries internally and manifests into violence just as intense as any external threat. 

It must be noted that the series doesn’t just end once the girls are rescued; the show continuously jumps back in time (to the crash of 1996) and to the present day, with the girls as adults. These women never leave their trauma behind in the forest; rather, they carry it with them into adulthood both physically and psychologically. It’s specifically adult Van, Shauna, Natalie, and Lottie who harbour the trauma of what they did and what was done to them. In an Entertainment Weekly article by Samantha Highfill in conversation with the actress of adult Van (Lauren Ambrose), Ambrose says “I think they all are, in a sense, stuck in the trauma.” It’s clear: girlhood isn’t a stage you just pass through.

Yellowjackets asserts that girlhood is never just a lead-up to womanhood. It is rich, violent, beautiful, and terrifying. The series highlights the fact that many of the ways society tries to control us that affect our rage, appearance, loyalty, and fear, are not anomalies but a part of the thing. Audiences are more receptive to stories that deal with the reality society is living in. 

“If society expects girlhood to look a certain way—quiet, compliant, aesthetic—Yellowjackets refuses that.”

Girlhood never truly leaves us; it transforms within us. Even when all grown up, the show reminds us that we carry the wilderness inside us.