In Greek mythology, the female followers of the god Dionysus were known as maenads. These women would intoxicate themselves through excessive drinking, drug use, and dancing until they reached an ecstatic, frenzied state. They would wear animal skins, weave ivy into their hair, and crown themselves with horns. The goal of their worship was to reach a state where they were outside of themselves. Only then, the legend goes, could they commune with their god. As part of their rites, they would sometimes tear a bull to pieces with their bare hands and eat the meat raw, symbolically tearing and eating the body of Dionysus himself. Once they consumed the body of the god, they were one with him. Famously, they did this to the singer Orpheus who, mourning his dead wife, refused to entertain them on his lute. They chased him down, tore him to pieces, and ate him alive.
One of the most famous cases of cannibalism in the 20th century is the 1972 crash of an Uruguayan rugby team in the Andes. After the plane crash, the remaining members of the team survived for 72 days on a glacier in the October cold. The survivors, mainly young men, did not initially disclose that they had had to resort to cannibalism to survive. The news leaked and turned them into a media sensation; stories of cannibalism have always held a macabre fascination for us. The Showtime series Yellowjackets riffs on this story with one notable difference: nearly all the survivors are teenage girls.
The series moves along two timelines: 1996, in the immediate aftermath of a plane crash carrying a high school girls soccer team (the Yellowjackets) on their journey to nationals, and 2021, as the surviving girls begin to receive blackmail notes threatening to reveal what really happened in the Canadian wilderness 25 years earlier. The audience already knows what they’re afraid will be revealed; the series opens with the girls clad in furs and masks chasing another girl through the snow until she falls into a pit of spikes. In the next scene, they present the meal to their queen, a girl wearing an antler crown and a veil. It’s not just cannibalism that the women in 2021 don’t want the world to know about - it’s ritual cannibalism.
It’s a strong image to start the series with, one that is often at odds with the rest of the show. Most of the series stays rooted in reality because that reality is horrifying enough. In 1996, the girls spend their time learning to hunt, clean animal carcasses, and distinguish good mushrooms from bad. It’s more reminiscent of the early episodes of Lost, as each character’s unique skills emerge and help the group survive. In 2021, the women who survived are all leading diminished, twisted lives. Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) is a bored housewife who kills rabbits with her bare hands; Taissa (Tawny Cypress) is running for public office and doing some creepy sleepwalking; Natalie (Juliette Lewis) is in and out of rehab and desperate to find fellow survivor Travis, who she fell in love with in the woods; Misty (Christina Ricci) is a psycho nursing home aide and amateur detective with a pet bird named Caligula. The blackmail messages they have begun receiving bring them back to each other and remind them of who they were out there in the wilderness when there were no rules beyond the ones they made themselves.
Until the penultimate episode, we’ve mainly seen the girls attempt to survive in 1996 and deal with the trauma of their experiences in 2021. In Doomcoming, all of that changes. In 1996, the girls decide to throw an apocalypse-themed homecoming dance to blow off steam. Misty attempts to spike their coaches’ drink with magic mushrooms (because she thinks she’s in love with him and she’s absolutely nuts), but accidentally spikes everyone’s drink. The mushrooms unleash something in the girls, turning everyone except Natalie and Jackie feral. Jackie has been off losing her virginity to Travis; when the other girls realize this they turn on her, running together as a pack. Their formalwear streaked with dirt, their faces stained red by the fermented berries they’ve been drinking, they hunt down the lovers. The girls lock Jackie away and begin to seduce Travis themselves, kisses soon turning to bites as their frenzy builds. Travis breaks free and the girls give chase, hallucinating him as a stag. They catch up to him and Shauna pulls out a hunting knife, holding it to his throat. She begins to cut, but Natalie bursts into the clearing and stops her, breaking the spell.
Up until this point, circumstances have kept the girls’ power leashed. Their male coach has acted as a patriarchal leader, controlling who has the weapons, breaking up minor disputes, and dispensing paternal advice. The girls have acted as homesteaders, taking over an abandoned cabin and trying to live on the land. But there have been hints throughout that something is seething underneath. In an earlier episode, aptly named Blood Hive, the girls all get their periods at the same time. Although partly played for laughs, this event harkens back to the primal feel of that opening scene. Whenever that scene takes place, in it the girls are clearly a tribe bound together by murder and blood. In Doomcoming we see them unleash themselves for the first time. The result is terrifying and glorious to behold; no longer bound by society or convention, they become maenads willing to tear a man limb from limb.
In Lord of the Flies, another obvious inspiration, the stranded boys also descend into bizarre ritual and murder but their descent is an allegory of the civilized (read: British) world descending into chaos and privileging the will to power. In Yellowjackets, we meet the girls before they are stranded in the wilderness and it is clear that they are far from civilized. Taissa decides she doesn’t like a younger player and bodychecks her during a match, breaking the girls’ leg in gruesome fashion. Shauna and queen bee Jackie are sleeping with the same boy and lying to each other about it. Natalie’s father is a violent drunk who she threatens with a shotgun, which he then accidentally blows his own head off with. What is revealed in the wilderness was already pushing to the surface long before the crash.
We are fascinated by the potentiality contained in teenage girls: the latent power, the group dynamics, the fecundity. There are countless cultural products that explore this: Pretty Little Liars, Cruel Summer, Cruel Intentions, The Virgin Suicides, Gossip Girl, The Wilds. In coming-of-age stories centered on teenage girls, they have to contend with their repression and sexuality in a way teenage boys do not. Teenage girls are reviled and desired in our society, receiving constant signals about who they’re supposed to become: wife, girlboss, mother, virgin, whore. If you’re lucky, you respond to this pressure by gathering forces. In Pretty Little Liars one of the characters says, “When guys have a fight, there’s a punch, it’s over. Girls don’t fight fair. They gang up, they keep secrets, plot, and then cut you down with a look.” Yellowjackets wants to explore what happens when this is taken a step further, when the coming-of-age is taking place under conditions of extreme stress. What happens to teenage girls who already know how to gang up, keep secrets, and plot when they have the opportunity to cut you down with more than a look? What happens when they’re let out of the box society likes to keep them in? What happens when they’re given real power in a world they can rule over? And finally, what happens when that all goes away and they have to live in our world again?