This year I finally made it to Denver for SCMS, where I would have been in March of 2020 were it not for the whole global pandemic. I presented on ’90s nostalgia, xennial/elder millennial memory and Yellowjackets and Paper Girls, among other shows about women from the same generation that use catastrophe, horror tropes, and fractured, recursive timelines to trouble of the question of who gets to look back fondly. My talk, “Girls for Pele: Nostalgia, Precarity, Horror, and Trauma in Paper Girls and Yellowjackets” was included in a great panel on televisual queerness in Session N.
Abstract
Paper Girls (2022) is a sci-fi/horror series about a gang of misfit kids navigating the midwestern suburbs of the Reagan years, while dodging bullies and supernatural terror. Despite the superficially Spielbergian trappings—early-teen mobility enabled by bikes and RadioShack walkie-talkies—Paper Girls has a different take on memory and horror from Stranger Things, with which it is often compared. Paper Girls does not elide the trauma that its characters undergo by being both female and othered— Asian-American, Black, Jewish, and queer—in a white, heteropatriachal monoculture during a deeply reactionary period of US history that stretches tentacle-like into the present. In this, it shares common cause with the teen-girl soccer players of Karyn Kusama’s Yellowjackets (2022), more than with the D&D nerds of Hawkins, IN. The Paper Girls and Yellowjackets are all from the same shoulder generation (“xennials”): the first born and raised entirely in the era of neoliberalism, austerity, and the ever-accelerating predictable disasters that they have produced. Demographers assert that endemic instability has created a “generational pessimism;” after adulthoods that began between 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis and are coming full-term during a global pandemic, these characters are perhaps right to fear the future, but the past is no comfort—there are no technicolor arcade or galleria trips here. Paper Girls and Yellowjackets use science-fiction and horror tropes to explore this shaky new reality: both include parallel and sometimes overlapping storylines in which present-day versions of the same characters reckon with their unsheltered adolescent selves, the traumas they have endured, and the compromises they were forced to make to survive the particular nightmare of growing up female in the pre-Internet suburbs. In both shows, disastrous circumstances—a catastrophic plane crash, a breach of the space-time continuum—become a gloss for these various threads, stranding the girls in worlds not of their choosing and with no one to rely on but each other. Their togetherness saves these stories from being entirely dystopian, however, as there is some hope in the girls’ collective ability to endure, and perhaps heal. For the Paper Girls and Yellowjackets, where race, gender, orientation, and precarity intersect, nostalgia is not safe. Rather, in these shows, the past is a horror that must nonetheless be confronted in order to understand the catastrophes of the present.
Kristin M. Miller 