After presenting the only talk about Yellowjackets at SCMS 2023 — one of only two at the conference focused on the show until this year — it was a thrill to join a panel of scholars all discussing different aspects of this deeply weird, horrific, tragic, and compelling series. My talk, “No Return, No Reason,” addressed Yellowjackets‘ complicated and trauma-influenced relationship to nostalgia. Everyone on the panel, “The Wilderness is Us: Xennial/Millennial Lessons in Surviving Disaster,” is, like me, from the same generation as the characters, who entered adulthood on or after the turn of the Millennium. There was a significant element of autotheory in each of our talks — discussing what drew us to the show and how it intersects with our own fractured memories of the decades since 2000. The talks were thoughtful, sad, funny, and incisive and I was honored to be be included. It added an extra layer to the complicated web of recursive memories and hauntings to be in Chicago where I last lived when I was the same age as the characters, fast approaching the cliff of 2001.

Abstract

Over the past decade, increasing numbers of television series have referenced or rebooted media from the 1990s, from tabloid crime dramas (American Crime Story, Monster), to continuations of series like Roseanne and Frasier, along with the runaway streaming success of Friends. Despite this, there have been few original productions set in the ’90s that focus on the lives of young people — long a staple of nostalgic TV, from Happy Days to That ’70s Show. Yellowjackets stands out among recent series for both its faithful recreation of the lives of a team of teen girl soccer players in 1996, and its survival to a fourth season. Despite its soundtrack of Riot Grrrl and Lilith Fair, however, Yellowjackets is not an easy place to visit for a kitschy hit of nostalgia: the series begins with a horrific plane crash that strands the team in the wilderness for 19 months, during which they struggle, starve, and resort to cannibalism. “No return, no reason,” the show’s theme seethes over and over and the pages of its characters’ teenage diaries are spattered with blood. Yellowjackets and a short list of other shows set in the ’90s, most of them focused on teen girls who are often queer, BIPOC, or otherwise socially marginalized, display a complicated relationship to remembering through overlapping storylines in which teen and adult versions of the central characters reckon with the traumas of their young lives that continue into the present. Lizardi argues that, typically, nostalgic media encourages a comforting longing for the past — a “narcissistic nostalgia” that is individual, idealized, and solipsistic as opposed to collective or critical. Cobb, Ewen, and Hamad note that this strategy centers on media’s ability to connect with positive feelings of a time when life was simpler. Yellowjackets and its kin though, critically remediate the ’90s — they trouble the familiar pleasures of nostalgic viewing by combining them with apocalyptic and unresolved plots about collective survival that serve as synecdoche for the difficult realities of Xennial and Millennial lives, as well as the particular violences of being femme, queer, and othered within US mass culture. Flashbacks from before the crash and depictions of life decades afterwards are almost equally full of bullying, violence, and despair at the material conditions of the characters’ lives. For the Yellowjackets, the future is unthinkable and the past is unsafe.

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