‘Yellow Jackets’ Based on Brutality


Four years ago, Ashley Lyle Read an article about a planned remake of William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies,” the 1954 crazy kids classic about prep school boys stranded on an island. this version sex swap girls for boys. Lyle, a writer and producer, read the comments and many suspected that the girls would fall for such barbarity.

In a video call she shared with her husband and producing partner from her home in Los Angeles, Bart Nickerson, Lyle remembered one man’s comment, “What are they going to do? Collaboration to the death?”

And she immediately remembered what she was thinking in response: “You were never a young girl, sir.”

It was Lyle. He vividly remembers those times and describes the relationships he formed at that time as “probably the most important thing in my life.” (She stopped here to apologize to her husband, who had joined her during the search.) She also remembers how brutal these relationships can be.

“There was a girl at my high school who poisoned another girl’s food for fun,” she said. “Just showing the girls getting along isn’t exactly painting a picture.”

On dog walks, walks, and dinner, Lyle and Nickerson got pregnant. “Yellow jackets,” a show that will paint this picture in very vibrant colors. (They are co-showrunners alongside Jonathan Lisco.) Premiering on Showtime in 1996 and today, “Yellowjackets” follows a high school girls’ soccer team whose plane crashes on their way to a tournament. The 2021 sequences follow the survivors as they negotiate the middle age still burdened by the past.

A show for anyone wondering what would happen if the Donner Party were all girls’ status, “Yellowjackets” is a shaky synthesis of folk horror, survival story, and mystery then and now. It’s also a crazy psychological thriller in both time periods. It discusses cannibalism, ritual murder, improvised surgery, insanity in its various forms, and yes, poisoned food, maiden brutality, with or without an aviation disaster, and how that brutality resonates in women’s lives.

“I wanted to tell what felt like a very true story about teenage girls,” Lyle said.

Television has a lingering interest in survival stories and what happens to groups of people who isolate them from wider society. A template of reality television shows “Survivor” (and if you think about it, “Graduated from a Universty” franchise) also informs fictional series such as “The Walking Dead,” “Under the Dome”, “100”, “Falling Skies”, “Survivors” and more. “Yellow jackets” are joining this trend – as if “Loss,” but for the ladies.

In the last few years, several shows (“Orange is the new black,” “Y: The Last Man”) also explored societies made up entirely of women. “The Wilds,” a plane crash survival drama that debuted on Amazon last year, is very similar to “Yellowjackets,” with less appealing characters and less crazy plot twists. The characters in these series offer an alternative to patriarchal power structures, while also delving into conflict and factionalism. Do you want to believe that women are kinder, kinder, more cautious? How nice for you.

loose inspiration 1972 Andes Flight Disaster, which gave the movie cute boys return to cannibalism. “Alive,” The “Yellow Jackets” from 1993 have been at the center of these concerns. It takes into account the ordeal of survival and social collapse as filtered through the lens of a woman.

“There’s a very special feminine way of being cruel to each other,” said Tawny Cypress, who plays the former version of Taissa, the team’s enforcer. “We can cut without weapons.”

Girls sharpen this edge early. After a cold opening—a young woman in a nightgown runs through the snow on her bleeding feet, then meets a bloodier ending—”Yellow Jackets” returns to show the girls before the crash, squealing as they win the New Jersey state championship. But there is a disaster here too, even in this suburb: one girl faces violence at home, another betrays her best friend, another badly injures her teammate.

Despite its heightened reality, “Yellow Jackets” is a rare series that takes female puberty seriously and portrays it without stereotyping and exploitation. There’s very little nudity or wobble—unusual for a top-notch cable show full of women—and nothing quite like a catfight. Girls have an eating disorder: They eat each other. The actual plane crash serves as both a necessary plot point and a loose metaphor for the ways growing up as a woman already feels like a disaster.

For girls in stable environments, puberty is often the first trauma, she said. Karyn Kusama (“Girfight,” “Jennifer’s Body”) directed the pilot. “The plane never had to crash for things to go completely dark between potentially everyone.”

But the plane crashes and everything gets extremely dark, and then even darker. This darkness does not end even though some of the women return to their more or less normal lives and move towards middle age. In terms of production design, the world of 2021 doesn’t look much different than it did in 1996, as a way to evoke lasting influences from the past.

“Yellowjackets” picked up several actresses for their 2021 drama — Juliette Lewis (“Natural Killer”) melanie lynskey (“Heavenly Creatures”) and Christina Ricci (“The Addams Family”) – gained fame in the ’90s and still chooses some of those shrapnel now. “I think they were really smart to touch the ’90s spirit with all of us,” said Lewis, who plays the old version of Natalie, the team’s rebellious daughter and abuse survivor.

Playing the adult version of Shauna, a top student and aspiring journalist, Lynskey roughly drew a parallel between the girls who survived the plane crash and her early experience of fame.

“You just don’t have the same kind of freedom to be anonymous and diffuse,” he said. “That was the part of Shauna that really resonated with me in the story.”

This shared experience informed the characters and created close bonds between the older actresses. “If you want to see fame as traumatic – I think it is – then maybe you could say we’re all connected by the trauma of being so young and so famous,” Ricci said.

These ties have tightened. “We knew each other’s triggers; we knew each other’s past; “We knew aspects of where we were similar and different,” Lynskey said. “I mean, that’s how I felt last time in group therapy.”

The producers, who recruited actors in their 40s, then had to find their younger counterparts. A superficial resemblance helped, but not too much—the purpose was ultimately what Kusama called “a kind of energetic resemblance or a kind of soul match.”

To create a sense of coherence between generations, actors old and young would talk about posture, gesture, personality, tone of voice. Connected performances by stars like Lewis and Sophie Thatcher as Natalie suggest a continuity between the past and present, while also showing how the accident and the disasters that followed have profoundly changed these women.

“We are very similar in how we see our Natalie, how we see her pain,” Lewis said.

Thatcher agreed. “Emotionally, we were on the same page,” he said. Natalie was a slightly exaggerated version of both of us.

To help spice up this page, Lewis created playlists that weigh in on era-defining acts like Thatcher’s Hole and PJ Harvey. In fact, classic hits from the ’90s were harder to listen to on screen – for a scene involving a mixtape, Lyle had to teach Thatcher how to use a cassette player.

“So that made me feel very old,” Lyle said.

For Lyle and others, it was somewhat unsettling to see it reconfigured as a period drama of ’90s teens. “I don’t mind getting old for any vain reason – I’m just afraid of death,” Ricci said. “So as a measure and sign of time, I found it awful.”

Still, “Yellow jackets” have also marked the times in more promising ways. All of the older actresses talked about the excitement and relief they felt playing characters that could never reasonably be described as cute. “Even 10 years ago, there would be a lot more talk about likability,” Ricci said. The show is full of strong women, none of whom you would want to share a bottle of chardonnay with.

This makes “Yellow Jackets” an outlier. It is clear on both the ravages of maidenhood and the ravages of middle age that she sympathizes with her characters without making them particularly good or beautiful. He argues that if adolescence is a wild time, maybe it’s middle age.

“Adult women [expletive] terrible people,” said Ricci admiringly. “None of them are emotionally secure. You can’t rely on them to make the right choices. And that’s great.”





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