Our teenage years are a vibrant, chaotic time. These years are tumultuous; your body is changing and doesn’t feel like your own, your agency is questionable, your relationships are filled with firsts. A low-level of fear is with you always. Am I doing this right? If I fail this class will I not into college? If I don’t get into college will my parents still love me? If I sleep with my first boyfriend will he still respect me? Everything feels… existential. The teenage girl, in particular, is one of the most represented characters in all of literature, film, and television. Perhaps at one time, tales of her formation were aimed at her peers; that all important 18-24 demographic. But many shows about teenagers today are clearly not for teenagers, but are instead written to evoke nostalgia/fear/panic/envy for and of and about the teenagers we once were. Yellowjackets, Class of 07, and Paper Girls in particular are three recent shows all about teen girls as seen through the lens of their older selves.
This technique isn’t wholly new, but in these shows’ hands it feels fresh. In Yellowjackets the narrative is structured around two timelines, one where the girls are in their teens and the other 25 years later. In Class of 07 a high school reunion brings a graduating class together and inspires flashbacks. In Paper Girls a supernatural event transports a group of teens into the future where they encounter their adult selves. All three of these shows feature primarily female casts; their interest is in exploring the charged world of female friendships, rivalries, and loyalties. All three also feature supernatural elements and catastrophic inciting incidents that strand the characters in a hermetically sealed plot bubble. This is especially true in Yellowjackets and Class of 07, which often read like serious/comic versions of each other. In Yellowjackets an all-girls soccer team has crashed in the freezing Canadian wilderness; the social hierarchies that emerge determine not only where you’ll be sitting at lunch but also who you’ll be eating when you do. In Class of 07 a series of apocalyptic weather events seems to have drowned all of Australia with the exception of one all-girls Catholic school that happens to be perched high on a mountain. Only the girls gathered there for their reunion survive, stranded and trying to reconcile their adult selves with the children they were when they were last there, among these people.
I wrote about Yellowjackets in an earlier post, noting that what made the disaster-aspect of the plot so compelling was that it didn’t take a bunch of blank-slate girls from normal teenager to feral cannibals. Instead, it revealed the brutality, ingenuity, and power that had been latent or hidden or already poking through to the surface. The two timeline structure shows the audience that whatever veneer the surviving girls put on to fit back in post-rescue, it’s a thin and easily scratched one. Similarly, in Class of 07, when Amelia asks former class bitch Saskia to take charge and scare the leaderless, panicking horde of girls into submission, Saskia reluctantly accepts and does her job flawlessly. Amelia tries to get her to loosen her grip a bit, but Saskia refuses, saying that she’ll never forgive Amelia for making her turn back into what she spent so much time trying not to be. But now that it’s done, it’s done. In Paper Girls, a commitment to the overtly sci-fi elements of the story allows characters to not only summon the memories of their past selves, but to actually meet them face to face. In the first episode they confront both the apocalypse and run-of-the-mill asshole teenage boys, fighting together to survive. But the real trauma occurs when they see who they will become.
In Yellowjackets, the catastrophic incident happens to the girls in their teenage timeline and the ongoing fallout for how they handled that incident follows them throughout their adult lives. This leads to a fruitful character tension; we can see who these characters have become without fully understanding how that transformation happened. We see the seeds of who they’ll become germinate and flower slowly as more information about the plane crash timeline is revealed. Adding to the building tension, we have seen an image at the beginning of the first episode indicating somewhere along the plane crash timeline the girls turn to ritual cannibalism and pagan worship. As we learn more about the characters we can see two pivotal points on their timeline approach. This makes the adult timeline unstable. We don’t know how to trust these women because we don’t know what they’ve done and can’t predict what they’ll do next. It’s only by reconnecting with their teenage selves that we seem them develop as characters.
In Class of 07 this dynamic is flipped on its head; the traumatic life-altering event is happening to the adult women, but the characters are trapped during the event reliving their high school years with their old classmates and in their old school. They quite literally sleep in the beds they slept in as teenagers, quickly regressing back to their teenage personalities and hierarchies. Furthermore, strategic flashbacks make it clear that although they may not have had to contend with an apocalyptic event when they were teenagers, the stress of change and impending adulthood left its mark. Although the show is ostensibly about surviving the apocalypse as adults, the actual event takes a back seat. We don’t know why it happened or if it will go away, but we do know a lot about the teenage friendships of our characters. The two main characters, Zoe and Amelia, experienced a friendship-ending misunderstanding, one that changed who they would be as adults. Both ambitious, Zoe ended up being embarrassed and psychotic on The Bachelor and Amelia married the high school maintenance guy and became a peanut farmer. No one is who they thought they would be, and now they’re back in the crucible of their youth with no way to escape and no world beyond to prepare for.
Paper Girls takes this to an extreme, having our characters meet their adult/teenage selves face to face. In the midst of apocalyptic circumstances, our young characters become observers of their own lives. Although they consider trying to change their fates, it’s clear that the forces that will lead them to their adult lives were already inexorably in motion when they were teens. Whether it be an illness already taking hold in one character or another’s sexual orientation, in many ways the apocalypse merely exacerbated and sped up what was already growing. Indeed, it is that thread that connects all three of these stories: the real original trauma is being a teenage girl. These girls are put under extreme stress and their becoming is not smooth, but for who does it it ever feel smooth?
For me, the appeal of these shows lies in their topsy-turvy relatability. High school is hell; reunions are a return to that hell. Shows that traffic in the supernatural use those tropes to make it easier for us to see what was there all along, to catch it out of the corner of our eye until we are ready to look it in the face. Reunions are a real-life plot device that forces you to look head on at your high school years, to remember the fights and the everyday warm grasp of friendship, the horrifying body transformations, the crushes so intense you couldn’t breathe. We are all still who we were then, and shows like this force us to remember.