‘YELLOWJACKETS’ SATISFIES OUR APPETITE FOR TALES OF BRUTAL SURVIVAL
Setting a survival tale among women makes for an interesting show, writes Tymon Smith
William Golding’s classic survivalist novel Lord of the Flies is almost 70 years old but its tale of schoolboys stranded on a desert island after a plane crash, and their descent into barbarism, remains the blueprint for a whole genre of popular riffs on this idea and has seen the book remain a firm favourite on high-school syllabuses across the globe.
Films such as two adaptations of Golding’s book and Alive (made in 1993), which dramatises the true story of the Uruguayan rugby team who resorted to cannibalism to survive after a plane crash in the Andes, plus the hit ’90s TV show
Lost, prove that the question of to what lengths supposedly civilised humans will go in order to survive when reduced to the most terrifying and basic of circumstances continues to fascinate us.
Most of these stories have tended to focus on men, echoing Golding’s paternalist opinion that “women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men. They are far superior and always have been. But one thing you can’t do with them is take a bunch of them and boil them down, so to speak, into a set of little girls who then become a kind of image of civilisation, of society.”
Four years ago, when writer and producer Ashley Lyle read an article about a planned female-centred film-reworking of Golding’s novel, the comments on the piece seemed to echo Golding’s assertion. One smart-alec male commenter quipped, “What are they going to do? Collaborate to death?”
As Lyle recently told the New York Times, her response to that jackass was: “You were never a teenage girl, sir.”
Lyle’s more visible and game-changing response was to — in partnership with her producing partner and husband Bart Nickerson — come up with a fresh, nasty, unashamedly feminist take on Lord of the Flies that’s become the Showtime series Yellowjackets.
It’s one of recent television’s most widely praised and fervently debated shows, keeping legions of eager fans wondering where it will take them next in its dark, twisting and not always easy-towatch mash-up of survivalist drama, supernatural-tinged, gory horror and mean-girls backstabbing high-school thrills.
The show’s narrative is split between two timelines: one takes place in 1996 when a high-school girls’ soccer team is left stranded in the Canadian wilderness for 19 weeks after the plane carrying them to a championship final crashes. The other follows the survivors 25 years later in the present day, living their post-Lord of the Flies lives as best they can while trying to forget about the horrors they experienced out in the woods. When a mysterious trickster starts sending the survivors messages demanding that they pay hush money or risk exposure of their long-kept secrets, they’re drawn back together to once again ensure their survival.
That time-jumping, split-narrative device is the first of Lyle and Nickerson’s ingenious interventions, and helps to elevate the show above the teenagecentred traditional obsessions of the genre.
The second comes in the form of smart casting decisions that see three of the most recognised, angsty actors of edgy ’90s cult teen favourites playing the middle-aged survivors: Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci and Juliette Lewis. This adds a clever extra layer to the show’s grunge-era nostalgia evoked by the younger Yellowjackets’ sloppy fashion choices and predilection for the angry feminist punk music of Hole, Liz Phair and PJ Harvey.
While the present-day mystery involving the blackmail isn’t always as confidently handled as it could be, the performances and the mysteries of what happened in the woods all those years ago keep us coming back to see what its ruthless group of scary but also ordinary young women will do next.
It turns out that contrary to Golding’s belief — and dazzlingly demonstrated by Lyle and Nickerson’s clever imagining — you can boil the story of a group of stranded young women into a dark and troubling vision of civilisation and society that’s far from a gentle, eternally peaceful Shangri La — and much more interesting.
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