In Yellowjackets, We’re All Stranded in the 90s

In Yellowjackets, We're All Stranded in the 90s

Yellowjackets is a show about being stranded. Across two time periods, one in 1996 and the other in modern day, the members of a girls’ high school soccer team are adrift and astray. Those that survived the ordeal of 26 years ago still carry their scars with them in the present. While the premise hinges on their struggle to survive the Canadian wilderness for 19 months, the show itself as an artifact of entertainment hinges on a wasteland far more insidious than the deep Canadian forest: the cultural glue trap of the 1990s.

From its opening with glitchy VHS-style graphic effects to its soundtrack full of pricy and recognizable 90s alt-rock hits, Showtime’s Yellowjackets is as much a nightmarish spin on VH1’s I Love the ‘90s as it is a feminine Lord of the Flies. In their adulthood, main characters Shauna, Taissa, Misty, and Natalie still struggle with the trauma of what they had to do to survive in the woods. As such, some part of them is, eternally, a version of the people who went down in that plane in 1996. The show’s flashback-heavy structure reflects these women’s divided minds and imposes this same schism on how the audience experiences the story. We, like them, are occupying two spaces and times at once.

Because Yellowjackets tethers itself between two parallel timelines, we’re watching them unfold side by side. This might sound obvious, but the way information is doled out means that we don’t actually know much about the past that’s revealed in the present, other than that at least four members of the Yellowjackets survive. Every other person in the woods is Shrodinger’s Soccer Player — equally alive and dead in the future. An early line about how many of the survivors “live off the grid” tells us not to count someone as dead just because we haven’t met them yet.

Because there are so many characters whose status we learn in flashback scenes, they essentially only exist in the 90s era. It’s not that they’re dead in the present — the fates of most are uncertain, though for some, their survival seems less likely than others. These unaccounted-for-in-the-present characters only exist in 1996; the 90s are their entire world.

Beyond the thematic resonance of these adults being mired in their traumatic teenage years, Yellowjackets has plenty of non-diegetic anchors that keep us half-braided with the past. The opening credits, set to the original song “No Return” by Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker, artfully traces crunchy 90s girl-fronted grunge. Furthermore, the sequence is full of images of characters from the past and present, scrambled by TV static and the whirring lines of a rewound VCR tape. The VCR itself is an obsolete piece of technology, signaling a bygone era like a digital clock blinking 12:00 or the idea of one’s phone, camera, and music player being separate devices.

Then there’s the casting of Yellowjackets’ central characters: Melanie Lynskey as Shauna, Christina Ricci as Misty, and Juliette Lewis as Natalie all play on viewers’ familiarity with these actresses’ work. (Tawny Cypress, who plays Taissa, had her first professional film and TV work in 2000, narrowly missing the cut but still fitting into the tail-end of the 90s pop cultural cycle.) Lynskey rose to prominence with Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures in 1994 and cemented herself in 90s counter-culture with queer hit But I’m A Cheerleader in 1999. Ricci similarly made an impression in the 90s in The Addams Family, Casper, and Sleepy Hollow among others. Audiences watched Ricci, who hit the screens at age 11 in her first role, grow up across films. Lewis was a 90s pop culture mainstay as well, moving from supporting roles like in 1989’s Christmas Vacation to more substantial roles in hits of both high- and lowbrow fare in the next decade, such as Cape Fear, Natural Born Killers, and From Dusk Til Dawn. Yellowjackets doesn’t lean too hard on the nostalgia bait here — it’s not a Marvel show, after all — but casting these actors does incept the audience’s associations with the films of three decades ago into their viewing and comprehension of the show. The memories are unspoken, but they’re present all the same.

Beyond the faces on display, Yellowjackets’ needle drops are all of a certain vintage as well. Crucially, these 90s hits from bands like The Smashing Pumpkins, Hole, or Liz Phair are not constrained to the flashbacks. Even in the present day, everyone’s radios are tuned to the frequency of the past. A climactic scene sees our main characters triumphantly entering a reunion set to The Offspring’s 1994 song “Come Out and Play (Keep Em Separated),” a song about school violence that takes on a different tinge in the modern era of constant mass shootings.

The characters also actively seek solace in the pop culture of the 90s, especially in their post-crash existence where these fleeting connections to the world they used to live in are their only sources of refuge. Episode five features a joyful moment of the team dancing to Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It.” At one point, Yellowjackets goalie Van entertains her fellow survivors by recounting the plot of the 1995 Sandra Bullock rom-com While You Were Sleeping. The penultimate episode sees the whole team joining a sunny sing-along to Seal’s “Kiss From A Rose.” These scraps of organized society are tenuous connections to the world before the crash, but they show why these characters, and the show by extension, would have no choice but to cling to them.

While Yellowjackets is conscious of the way its lead characters’ childhoods have warped and stretched to contain them in the present day, much of today’s pop culture is just as tethered to the same era without the same awareness. Plenty of ink has been spilled about the endless parade of reboots and rehashes flooding out of Hollywood: Ghostbusters Afterlife treats the original Ghostbusters, a Bill Murray-vehicle goofball comedy, as if it were a solemn cinematic milestone. The recent trailer for Chip & Dale: Rescue Rangers takes a meta approach of making the two lead chipmunks into former actors who performed in the original cartoon series. This lets the creators dunk audiences in manufactured affection for the original series, as the characters themselves can bask in literal love for their past selves. The trailer also features references to Roger Rabbit and Jurassic Park. A remake can’t even be about its own past anymore — it has to vacuum up other pop culture properties for maximum “Remember this?” factor. Yellowjackets is different — the nostalgia isn’t where the vein of meaning ends, but rather the tipping point. Being lost in the 90s isn’t exactly helping the women of Yellowjackets, and their struggle to get out from under the crushing weight of their youth is the core conflict of the show.

But why, as a culture, are we so bogged down in those darn 90s? For many people watching Yellowjackets, the late 80s/90s do not hold the same gravity over their memory and imagination. The 90s ended over 20 years ago, after all. People born in 2000 can now legally drink, hold jobs, and write and produce TV or films on their own. It’s getting crowded in the space of ideas, as the old era of nostalgia-bloodlust refuses to fade and new voices of entertainment struggle to be born. It doesn’t matter if you, the person reading this, don’t care about the 90s — the people making your entertainment do, and they’re the ones authoring the media you consume. So it may be that we’re all still wandering the wilderness of the 90s, fending for ourselves and eating the same lean scraps of the same stories over and over again. At least Yellowjackets calls this pop-cultural recycling out for what it is: cannibalism.

Author: Deann Hawkins