‘Yellowjackets’ & The Cult of the Teenage Girl
By Jordan DelFiugo
Showtime’s Yellowjackets tells the story of a high school girls’ soccer team that becomes stranded in the wilderness for 19 months after their plane to nationals crashes. As tensions and dangers arise, the girls become increasingly desperate to survive by any means necessary, escalating to savagery, cannibalism, and psychological torture. But underneath the bloodshed lies a universal truth about what it means to come of age as a teenage girl; the cult-like bonds that form, the hierarchies and power struggles, and the loss of innocence.
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On April 11, the gruesome finale of the series’s third and penultimate season premiered. While the highly-anticipated, 10 episode season is not necessarily grounded in reality, it continued the show’s legacy of very real, raw depictions of girlhood and trauma. The show’s power lies in its ability to present teenage girlhood as a religious experience — not in the sacred sense, but in its intensity, devotion and capacity to consume. It also doesn’t shy away from the more viscous aspects of adolescence. In the absence of society’s usual rules, the girls don’t build a democracy or even a rational system of survival. Instead, they form rituals, they crown leaders, and they follow.
Even before the team’s plane crashes in the forest, the girls are operating under an unspoken code of loyalty and silent hierarchies. Once stranded, all of this intensifies, with the girls falling into a system that closely mirrors real-world cult behavior, complete with charismatic leadership, psychological manipulation, and ritualized violence.
As the group loses hope of rescue, Lottie Matthews (Courtney Eaton) becomes a spiritual figure, claiming the wilderness is sentient and communicating with them. Her “visions” (which are likely symptoms of her unmedicated Schizophrenia) are treated as divine messages. For some of the girls, Lottie offers clarity and comfort in a place of desperation. Without even necessarily meaning to, she becomes the center of their constructed faith.
But as the series progresses, Lottie isn’t the only force at work. She shares the leadership with Shauna Shipman (Sophie Nelisse), arguably the most complex, well written character in Yellowjackets. Shauna, struck with grief and rage, becomes just as central to the cult-like system Lottie has built. While Lottie offers a mystical framework, Shauna embodies something darker: the enforcement of it.
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Cults often prey on vulnerability. They target people in states of confusion, loss, or emotional collapse, and that’s exactly where Shauna finds herself. By season three, Shauna has lost her baby and best friend to the wilderness, and in the aftermath, she has been left angry, traumatized and hungry for a sense of control. Over the course of Yellowjackets three season arc, Shauna transforms from a repressed, doe-eyed girl, stuck in her more popular best friend’s shadow, to a sadistic dictator who relishes in making others hurt the way she hurts. In addition to the physical violence she inflicts, she also breaks the girls down psychologically, through verbally abusing them, subjecting them to random bed checks, and fear mongering. When the girls have a chance of escaping the wilderness due to an encounter with a couple of researchers and a backcountry guide, Lottie decides she will stay, knowing the wild is the only place she can be her true, uninhibited self.
While Lottie isn’t as worried about whether the others will stay with her, Shauna knows that once the girls reach salvation, she will no longer have power, so she threatens and manipulates everyone to stay and becomes furious when she learns a divergent group of the girls have developed a secret plan for escape.
Shauna’s belief in the wilderness isn’t genuine like Lottie’s. She could care less about the supernatural aspects of it all. While Lottie seduces the group with the supernatural, Shauna gets drunk on the structure that allows her to act out her pain without consequence. Together, their forces feed the cult: belief and fear, devotion and domination.
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In seasons one and two, the deaths and cannibalism were purely survival, but by season three, Shauna and Lottie have turned them into ritualistic sacrifices. While Lottie truly believes in the powers of the wilderness and has justified these practices as sacrifices for the greater good, Shauna seems to get pleasure out if it, escalating the rituals and making them increasingly brutal and dehumanizing, especially with the most recent sacrifice of the series, Mari Ibarra (Alexis Barajas). Mari is killed in the season three finale after Shauna ordered the girls to hunt her like a wild animal. Killing and eating her isn’t enough for Shauna, she also demands the girls to bring her Mari's hair so she can weave it into her cloak, seemingly as a trophy or a warning to the others of what she’s capable of.
In a haunting voiceover at the end of the season finale, present-day adult Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) reflects on her time in the wilderness without any remorse, writing in a letter to herself, “We were having so much fun. That’s the terrible truth we left out there buried. Along with the people we called our friends. Except it’s all coming back to me now. The danger. The thrill. The person I was back then. Not a wife or a mother, I was a warrior. I was a queen.” The wilderness gave Shauna a sense of purpose, it forced people to see her and even fear her. Without it, meak, submissive Shauna just faded into the background.
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Teenage girls are often told they’re powerful, but their power is constantly monitored, challenged or taken away. That paradox is central to the cultishness of the show’s tone. The girls don’t simply want to survive, they want something to believe in, even if it demands blood.
If the team creates a cult, it’s only because they’ve been preparing their whole lives to live inside one. The cult of teenage girlhood: obedience, beauty, sacrifice – is the one they already knew. All they needed was a queen to follow and a god to fear.
