The wilderness is their happy place. Yellowjackets has always been about women with nowhere to channel their rage. *Spoilers for Yellowjackets Season 3, Episode 8*
Recently, a cop pulled me over.
Well, didn’t so much pull me over, but dramatically walked into an empty street as I was driving down a winding road. (If John Woo had directed this scene, white doves would have escaped beneath his jacket.)
“Ma’am,” he said, which was already a bad start, “it’s 15 in a school zone, not 40.”
I knew I wasn’t going 40. Maybe 30, but I never went 40 on this road. Also, how did he know it was 40 when he walked into the street before I had even gotten there? Clearly, there was no radar gun. Either way, whatever, I was in the wrong.
And yet, while I’ve been pulled over before, I’ve never had a cop come at me so hard. Usually, it’s not personal, it’s business — I get it. But this guy looked furious (maybe it was my stupid hat and jacket that made me look like an adult Madeline that put him off). He was so angry that I scoffed — I literally scoffed at a cop! I don’t know if it’s age or politics, but I wasn’t intimidated by this man — only provoked.
“Slow down!” he barked at me.
My first thought was, “Oh my god. Am I Shauna Shipman?”
Yellowjackets and the Wilderness’s Void for Female Rage *Spoilers*
Well, of course, I wasn’t Shauna (I didn’t kill or eat the cop), but I felt like a Yellowjacket. If I hadn’t been stopped by that cop, a man who looked like him would have been riding my bumper because I wasn’t going fast enough. Either way, I couldn’t win. Similarly, so much of the Showtime series is about women forced to compartmentalize themselves: their frustrated, primal id versus how they’re supposed to act in society.
After all, that’s essentially why Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson created the series in the first place: because men joked online that a female Lord of the Flies would be about “collaborating to death.” Women are constantly underestimated. Even in the pilot episode, Jackie (Ella Purnell) complains about a sign celebrating the boys’ soccer team when the girls are the ones going to the championships.
In Episode 8’s “A Normal, Boring Life,” the ’97 girls are at a crossroads. They might have the opportunity to go home, but some of them are concerned about leaving the wilderness. Tai worries about losing Van in the real world, Shauna doesn’t want to relinquish the control she finally gained, and Lottie fears leaving will sever the supernatural connection with the woods. . .and herself.
“I won’t be me, the me that was made out here,” says Teen Lottie (Courtney Eaton). “And that unwellness that I feel, I feel it so deeply in my bones. We’re safer here.”
They are finally able to be their truest selves in the wilderness, able to liberate their restrictions from home; going back means the mask goes back on. Tai has to be straight, Shauna has to go back to being a second fiddle, Lottie has to go back to being “crazy.” They all have to play pretend again.
“Eat it!”
No character exhibits this bottled rage more than Melanie Lynskey’s adult Shauna. Playing the role as a homemaker, she was once the fiercest one in the pack. Seeing her as a housewife putting away groceries is akin to watching Chimp Crazy‘s Tonka sit alone in a basement. This isn’t their natural habitat.
Before the plane crash, Shauna didn’t know what to do with her pent-up aggression against Jackie: her best friend, possible unrequited crush, and rival. Losing Jackie and herself to the wilderness allowed her to release that hostility, and when they got rescued, it piled up again.
When Adult Melissa (Hilary muthaeffing Swank!) details her happy life, Shauna says, “None of that matters to me.” Except it does. Like Melissa says, Shauna stirs the pot just to feel alive because the most alive she ever felt was out in the wilderness: “You hate yourself, and you want everyone else to feel just as miserable as you are.”
When Melanie Lynskey pounces on the two-time Oscar winner, it’s a culmination of more than two seasons of rage building within this character and collectively over the last 25 years. Of course, this fury occasionally comes out in bursts like killing her lover or a bunny, but in this scene featuring incredible work from both Lynskey and Swank, Shauna comes alive again. She reverts to her truest self. She lets the rage free.
Yellowjackets is streaming on Paramount+ and airs Sundays on Showtime.
