āWe are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.ā
Iāve always found myself disagreeing with the reading that Jackie was fundamentally incapable of surviving in the wilderness, or that she died because she flourished in civilisation and the Wilderness culled her for being weak. I think it overlooks a lot of the deeper, more nuanced character context.
TW: Discussion of suicidal ideation and depression
Itās worth remembering that the very first act of brutality in the wilderness was Jackieās doing, setting a precedent for what was to come. She left Van, someone she considered a friend, to burn alive at the possibility that helping her might risk Shaunaās life in some way; thatās an incredibly revealing insight into Jackieās character. It shows us what ā or who ā will cause her to override all other principles. We see this hold true throughout the season, where she acts in petty, vindictive, and manipulative ways with Shauna as the catalyst (e.g. picking a fight with Nat, publicly exposing Shaunaās pregnancy, sleeping with Travis). Yellowjackets goes out of its way to highlight how anyone, no matter how squeamish or good-hearted, is capable of terrible things and becoming a base version of themselves in extreme circumstances, and Jackie is no exception.
Thereās a lot made of her not pulling her weight around the camp, but Jackie does make a genuine effort after Shauna points out that people are noticing her lack of pitching in. She organises the seance to boost morale (even if it backfired), she checks the snares and fishing nets, sheās part of the rescue party for Tai and Van, and she helps prepare for Laura Leeās fight. Hell, even before the pep talk, she helps with the foraging and finds the abandoned plane. Sheās certainly bratty about it at points, and the resentment from the others isnāt totally unwarranted, but itās less that Jackie doesnāt want to contribute and more that she doesnāt know how; her entire frame of reference has been upended.
I feel thereās sometimes a false conflation between maladjustment and incompetence or laziness when it comes to how we interpret her behaviour in the wilderness. Itās the lack of feeling that she has anything of value to offer in these new circumstances that leads her to give up so easily, because for Jackie, perceived inadequacy is a source of paralysing shame. If she believes sheās needed, then sheās able to find the resolve within herself. Thereās reason to believe that Jackie could ultimately have adapted with the right motivation, but between losing the respect of her teammates, being kept at armās length by Shauna, and discovering just how little her best friend apparently thinks of her, she loses that and succumbs to her apathy.
Something I also donāt see accounted for enough in this discussion is that Jackie undergoes a significant character arc in the first season. Itās a self-destructive spiral, but it also sees the breakdown of the pretences and values she previously devoted all her energy to upholding. By the time we get to Doomcoming, sheās āa fiercer, more honest, more nihilisticā version of herself. Although her fight with Shauna was an inevitable breaking point, if Jackie had survived and found something to live for (i.e. recognising that Shauna still needed her) I think we could have seen a major shift in the dynamics and her character because, as messy as it was, they would have finally aired their long-festering grievances towards each other and taken a step towards emotional honesty (Iāll caveat this by saying that the words of the argument itself werenāt necessarily honest, but the catharsis was). Of course, Jackie isnāt there when she dies, and itās holding onto those vestiges of self-denial that seals her fate, but this is a recurring theme in Yellowjackets ā characters are killed off just as theyāre on the cusp of actualising, due to a combination of collective complicity and their own fatal flaw.
Like many characters in Yellowjackets, Jackie is often regarded in a reductive way by the audience, much like how she is by her peers. Sheās characterised as a vapid mean girl when sheās a very deliberate subversion of that archetype. Sheās compared to an animal associated with innocence and prey when the text of the show makes it clear that this doesnāt truly represent Jackie as a person, but the warped idea of her filtered through outside perspectives.
Though really, who can blame them when Jackieās own sense of self is so fractured? Sheās introduced to us faking pleasure for her boyfriend while the lyrics āIāll burn my eyes out before I get outā¦ I wanted more than life could ever grant me, bored by the chore of saving faceā blare in the background. The whole song is about how things canāt get any worse because you already feel like a suicidal shell of a person trapped inside your life. None of this is subtle, yet itās still so easy to overlook. In a lesser show, our first impression of Jackie could have been of a self-assured girl living in total contentment to juxtapose her fall from grace in the wilderness, but instead it chooses to present us with something much more complex: a girl whoās miserable when nobody else is looking.
Because the Jackie who thrived in New Jersey was the Jackie who excelled at performance. Many of the hallmarks of success for which sheās lauded are hollow, a pretty veneer. To paraphrase Ella Purnell, in reality, sheās deeply lonely; she has no real intimacy or connection with anyone that isnāt Shauna, who she clings to with every fibre of her being to the point of suffocation. Yet the act is so convincing that Jackie is forever remembered for the facade she constructed, and as what others made of her in turn, when the truth is she didnāt even know herself.
Jackie was depressed and unfulfilled long before the plane crashed; the wilderness just stripped away the only things that gave her a true sense of worth and purpose ā or rather, it exposed how fragile those things were in the first place. Shauna was already chafing against her; her team was already doubting and undermining her; she was already feeling lost within herself. Jackie was sheltered and prissy and didn't take well to their new lifestyle, but it wasnāt any of those things that ultimately did her in: it was high school drama and clique culture; it was a codependent homoerotic friendship; it was the remnants of civilisationās social dynamics placed in a life-or-death context; it was the years of societal conditioning, emotional isolation, and repression that kept Jackie in a gilded cage her entire life.
While thematically her death was necessary and represents the collapse of the old order, I donāt believe the tragedy of Jackieās death is that she was a lost cause, always destined to die because of some innate deficiency of character; itās that it was avoidable and could have been prevented by the characters not caving to their insecurities. Jackieās pride born of shame; Shaunaās refusal to self-reflect or accept her feelings; their respective issues with communication; Mistyās fear of ostracism and desire to feel included even if it meant throwing people under the bus; Taiās faltering confidence in her own control and authority; Benās abdication of responsibility; Lottie clinging to faith for a sense of meaning; Mari aligning herself with whoever holds power in the social hierarchy; the collective disgrace over their actions that Jackie called out. Just as the Yellowjackets brought the Wilderness back with them, they brought the wounds of civilisation to the wilderness, and it was that, not the cold, that doomed Jackie.
Jackie herself represents civilisation in the same way rabbits represent her: while thereās a connection, itās not a simple or clear-cut one. Iād argue that if she can be boiled down to any one theme, Jackie more accurately represents how society suppresses young women (especially queer women, because Jackieās comphet/closeting is essential to understanding her) through expectations and presumptions, how it dictates their identity and strips away their personhood and agency. This theme is baked into the premise of the show and permeates all of its main cast, much like Jackie literally and figuratively does. Thereās a reason sheās the very first character weāre formally introduced to, and in such a specific way. Jackie is so frequently misunderstood because sheās designed to be misunderstood. But weāre provided all of the tools to see the broken person at the heart of it all.
I think it does the show a disservice to sanctify Jackie, just as it does to demonise Shauna (and visa versa). The former is as multifaceted and flawed as anyone else in the cast, and the latter didnāt start out as a bad person ā in fact, she was one of the most caring characters in the show before her experiences in the wilderness hardened her. They were both capable of great selflessness and empathy and selfishness and jealousy. They both hurt each other, those around them, and themselves. They both relied on maladaptive coping mechanisms; Jackieās controlling anxious attachment and Shaunaās avoidant attachment that manifested as resentment. Their relationship only reached the explosive conclusion it did because they were both crazy about each other in similar yet conflicting ways and didnāt know how to express the intensity of their love.
It's been said that Jackieās only crime was being a normal teenage girl while the rest of the Yellowjackets were feral by comparison, but you could make the case that they were all normal teenage girls, each with their own struggles. I believe itās a misconception that Jackie was somehow uniquely immune to the Wilderness. āItā represents āoneās truest, most authentic selfā, in Lottieās words. Jackie very much possessed that self, but locked it away and buried it. The Wilderness can be read as an allegory for what society stifles: mental health issues, queerness, sexuality, trauma, uncomfortable emotions. It is the destructive, liberating product of unleashed repression. Jackieās character embodies that repression, a repression that runs so deep it destroys her. Not because she didnāt feel āItā, but because she felt it so strongly she had to smother it inside herself until she was convinced there was nothing left but an empty shell.
Jackie is a character revealed through contrast and contradiction, through whatās left unspoken. Despite everything, she possessed to capacity to change, to self-actualise, to accept herself, and thatās what makes her role in the narrative so poignant. Thereās a bleeding hole of a person carved out among all those lies, but that person was always real.
āRight now, there is a version of you that knows exactly who you really are and what you really want. A primal, elemental self. And there is nothing more painful than hiding that self.
āWe want to blame the world for our pain... the parent who didn't support us, the lover who didn't love us back... but the truth is, we are the ones making ourselves sick.
I think when I was a kid, anything that would give me any sort of excitement or amusement or enjoyment, it always got kinda f*cked. You know, I donāt think my family meant to ruin it or anything like that, you know. I donāt think they did it on purpose. But I thinkā¦ Sometimes they just, they try too hard. You know, or theyād make promises that they werenāt able to keep.
If Greta Gerwig is somehow able to tap into yet another part of my experience that I havenāt even truly noticed affects me so deeply and that I donāt have the words to fully describe, but she is able to articulate so perfectly through the art of cinema, IN THE BARBIE MOVIE (?!) I genuinely wonāt know what to do with myself.
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