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‘Yellowjackets’ Is a Reminder That High School Was Never Chill ‘Yellowjackets’ Is a Reminder That High School Was Never Chill
(8 months later)
I believe unironically in 1990s nostalgia. I think the cultural landscape of my youth was better than today’s — objectively better, and not just when seen through the rose-tinted spectacles of middle age. I accept (with certain ideological footnotes) the iPhone theory of current teenage unhappiness. I vibe with this Freddie deBoer essay about coming of age before the internet.I believe unironically in 1990s nostalgia. I think the cultural landscape of my youth was better than today’s — objectively better, and not just when seen through the rose-tinted spectacles of middle age. I accept (with certain ideological footnotes) the iPhone theory of current teenage unhappiness. I vibe with this Freddie deBoer essay about coming of age before the internet.
But even justified nostalgia needs realism about what it’s remembering. For instance, in championing the ’90s against the current era, you can make a solid case that it’s more pro-social and embodied and relaxing to watch garbage TV with your friends in someone’s basement than to sit on your bed texting with a bunch of avatars. But it’s still important to acknowledge that there was a lot of garbage TV watching in the olden days, and that pre-internet teenagers were as likely to be watching “The Sandlot” or “Stand by Me” as to be playing pickup ball or roaming the streets and the woods in search of coming-of-age drama.But even justified nostalgia needs realism about what it’s remembering. For instance, in championing the ’90s against the current era, you can make a solid case that it’s more pro-social and embodied and relaxing to watch garbage TV with your friends in someone’s basement than to sit on your bed texting with a bunch of avatars. But it’s still important to acknowledge that there was a lot of garbage TV watching in the olden days, and that pre-internet teenagers were as likely to be watching “The Sandlot” or “Stand by Me” as to be playing pickup ball or roaming the streets and the woods in search of coming-of-age drama.
Or again, consider all the retweets of this clip showing footage from an unidentified secondary school, apparently two decades back, captioned: “High school in 2002 looked so chill.”Or again, consider all the retweets of this clip showing footage from an unidentified secondary school, apparently two decades back, captioned: “High school in 2002 looked so chill.”
Are there ways that high school 20 years ago was less stressed-out than high school is today? Yes, I think so. Was high school as a total experience ever actually chill, as opposed to a zone of often ruthless hierarchy where hormone-addled half-adults rend and wound one another while they compete for dominance? I remember the answer: It was different before the internet, but it wasn’t chill.Are there ways that high school 20 years ago was less stressed-out than high school is today? Yes, I think so. Was high school as a total experience ever actually chill, as opposed to a zone of often ruthless hierarchy where hormone-addled half-adults rend and wound one another while they compete for dominance? I remember the answer: It was different before the internet, but it wasn’t chill.
Indeed, depending on how you define “chill,” you could argue things the other way, since in certain senses the world created by the internet has made high school safer than it was in my own youth, by separating kids from one another more than in the past, creating fewer opportunities for physical mayhem and nonvirtual stupidity. The problem with this separation, with the teenage retreat into the virtual, is that it appears to be deadening, dispiriting, alienating, driving kids to anxiety and depression. But the earlier form of teenage life was physically more precarious — more drinking and driving, more actual sex with actual bodies, more pregnancy, more violence.Indeed, depending on how you define “chill,” you could argue things the other way, since in certain senses the world created by the internet has made high school safer than it was in my own youth, by separating kids from one another more than in the past, creating fewer opportunities for physical mayhem and nonvirtual stupidity. The problem with this separation, with the teenage retreat into the virtual, is that it appears to be deadening, dispiriting, alienating, driving kids to anxiety and depression. But the earlier form of teenage life was physically more precarious — more drinking and driving, more actual sex with actual bodies, more pregnancy, more violence.
This reality is the driving dramatic force in Showtime’s “Yellowjackets,” whose first season I just caught up with and whose second is ongoing. The show is a literal high-school nostalgia trip, moving back and forth between a contemporary story line and a 1990s-era teenage narrative, soundtracked with the music of that earlier era and complete (as in “Fleishman Is in Trouble”) with iconic Clinton-era thespians like Christina Ricci and Juliette Lewis playing the teenage characters in middle age. And it’s all about the idea of high school as a zone of ruthless physicality, traumatic violence and hyper-embodied peril, to the point of gruesomeness that I wouldn’t recommend to everyone — an effect it achieves by telling the story of a girls’ soccer team whose plane crashes in the Canadian wilderness and has to survive the winter without rescue or relief.This reality is the driving dramatic force in Showtime’s “Yellowjackets,” whose first season I just caught up with and whose second is ongoing. The show is a literal high-school nostalgia trip, moving back and forth between a contemporary story line and a 1990s-era teenage narrative, soundtracked with the music of that earlier era and complete (as in “Fleishman Is in Trouble”) with iconic Clinton-era thespians like Christina Ricci and Juliette Lewis playing the teenage characters in middle age. And it’s all about the idea of high school as a zone of ruthless physicality, traumatic violence and hyper-embodied peril, to the point of gruesomeness that I wouldn’t recommend to everyone — an effect it achieves by telling the story of a girls’ soccer team whose plane crashes in the Canadian wilderness and has to survive the winter without rescue or relief.
The obvious comparison is “Lord of the Flies,” but that William Golding novel is about boys regressing from civilization to the primitive, whereas “Yellowjackets” is about teenage girls enacting a heightened version of the adolescent savagery that civilization doesn’t fully subdue. The power of the show comes from the way the familiar stuff of adolescence — the influence of alcohol or shrooms, the specter of a teenage pregnancy, the “ick” of puberty and bodily transformation, the harshness of teenage social hierarchies and the shocks when they turn over, the deep resentments of the not-yet-fully-empowered nerds — becomes more vivid and recognizable under extreme circumstances. Even the most intense elements, the grisly consequences of the crash and the cannibalism that clearly awaits the characters, are literalizations of a feral, carnal aspect of adolescence that even a bland American suburb doesn’t tame.
For a single season of television or a limited-run series, this is material enough: The first season of “Yellowjackets” doesn’t close its circles or complete its story, but it almost stands alone. The intention of the show, however, is to combine its grisly adolescent action with the other kind of story its plane-crash narrative evokes, the mysterious island melodrama of “Lost,” with all its mystery boxes and mythology. And so woven throughout the teenagers-being-teenagers action are threads of supernaturalism, encoded enigmas, weird signifiers, bread crumbs for the overeager viewer.
I like this stuff (you know I like supernaturalism), but I expect it to lead ultimately to dramatic failure. My particular hatred of the ending of “Lost” will never die, but with time and distance I can see that its failure was characteristic of the larger genre of sprawling, mythology-based television. This is a style that works really well with serial TV, where the week-to-week watching schedule allows for slow-unspooling storytelling and obsessive fan fixation on clues and red herrings. But the rewards for multiplying mysteries are greater than the rewards for figuring out how to wrap them up, so in almost every case you get an overpromise, an overcommitment, and then a crashing disappointment.
The ur-example of this problem wasn’t “Lost” but (speaking of the ’90s!) “The X-Files,” which dealt with its tangled tapestry of conspiracy in a way so painfully unsuccessful that nobody actually remembers any of the later seasons. With “Lost,” the failure was more abrupt and infuriating, with many viewers believing in a master plan right up until the end and then realizing that most of the loose ends had just been deliberately abandoned. The original Matthew McConaughey/Woody Harrelson run of “True Detective” condensed the arc of mythology show failure into a single season, brilliant until its empty finale. “Game of Thrones” demonstrated how well this style could work in a literal fantasy world — there are many more deliberately unresolved mysteries in George R.R. Martin’s world than in, say, “The Lord of the Rings.” Yet the presence of magic and dragons didn’t help much with the how-do-we-wrap-this-up problem. (Notably, Amazon’s “The Rings of Power” series tries to bring the mystery-box style to J.R.R. Tolkien’s world without even initially successful results.) And “Westworld” manifested the same pattern in science fiction, with a transfixing first season and complete collapse thereafter.
Probably in the long list of shows I haven’t watched there’s a more successful case study. But the rule is failure.
My hope for “Yellowjackets” is that its plane-crash world is built to be more self-contained than the sprawl of “Lost” — a single supernatural force, a single cult, a limited cast, fewer weird four-toed statues crying out for explanation.
My fear, though, is that choices made in the first season — particularly the death of two key characters in the 1990s timeline, deaths that were dramatically effective but substantially shrank the nonsupernatural narrative possibilities — are going to push the story deeper and deeper into its mythos and further from its original insight: that every high school experience is a little like a plane crash.
Michael Brendan Dougherty on Good Friday (from 2021).
Emma Green on the Hillsdale model.
Freddie deBoer on progressives and adoption.
Bill Ryan on art and commerce and the Coen brothers.
New research on demography and economic growth.
When did the West begin its rise?
“You might assume that when faced with a problem of overriding public importance, government would use its awesome might to sweep away the obstacles that stand in its way. But too often, it does the opposite. It adds goals — many of them laudable — and in doing so, adds obstacles, expenses and delays. If it can get it all done, then it has done much more. But sometimes it tries to accomplish so much within a single project or policy that it ends up failing to accomplish anything at all.
“I’ve come to think of this as the problem of everything-bagel liberalism. Everything bagels are, of course, the best bagels. But that is because they add just enough to the bagel and no more. Add too much — as memorably imagined in the Oscar-winning ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ — and it becomes a black hole from which nothing, least of all government’s ability to solve hard problems, can escape. And one problem liberals are facing at every level where they govern is that they often add too much. They do so with good intentions and then lament their poor results.”
— Ezra Klein, “The Problem With Everything-Bagel Liberalism,” Times Opinion (April 2)
On Wednesday, April 12 at 7 p.m., I’ll be kicking off the Film & Culture Series at the Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture in Chicago, with a talk on “The Decline of Cinema.” The discussion will be followed by a screening of 1982’s “Tootsie.” Seats can be reserved here.