This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.

You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/07/opinion/yellowjackets.html

The article has changed 6 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.

Version 4 Version 5
‘Yellowjackets’ Is a Reminder That High School Was Never Chill ‘Yellowjackets’ Is a Reminder That High School Was Never Chill
(about 8 hours 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.
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.