#radio.wav

the core concept of yellowjackets is, on the surface, a very familiar one. a survival horror in the vein of lord of the flies (it was originally pitched as an all-female reboot), the idea of a group of survivors stranded in the wilderness together and descending into chaos has its roots in colonial fiction, and continues to uphold a lot of its worst tendencies. yellowjackets is not exempt from this tradition.

but, where the show does (imo) falter in meaningfully challenging imperialist ideologies, there are two major differences that make it particularly compelling:

the show centres teenage girls.

the story is told to us across timelines.

in the vain hope of keeping this post at least a little bit concise, i won’t linger for too long on point 1. there’s an entirely separate post (or posts) that could explore the varied & complex interplay of womanhood(s) in the show—and who knows? maybe i’ll write it one day! for now, it’s worth mentioning that the show is absolutely (and centrally) concerned with the performance of gender. it explicitly rejects bioessentialist narratives that attempt to reduce “womanhood” to any simple or easily digestible definition, and challenges the assumption that women are inherently nurturing, collaborative, or non-violent. whilst i do think there’s more to be said about jackie (her inability to escape gendered performance also underscores her homoerotic relationship with shauna) and tai (her gendered performance should also be considered in negotiation with race), i think miller, gleeson, and gardner best sum up the ways that the show foregrounds subversive femininities here.

the show is not only interested in the formulations (and impositions of) womanhood, however, but also fractures in linear time. on a technical level, the cross-cutting between timelines allows for a satisfying narrative resolution: the themes unfolding in the teenage timeline correlate to their reverberations into the present (ex. the two hunts in the s2 finale). but that isn't all that it does.

the timelines aren't as neatly divisible as some would make them out to be—they bleed into one another. akilah and lottie have ambiguously prophetic visions of the future, a teenage shauna stabs adam in season one, and a teenage natalie appears to misty after her death in season 3. van encounters her teenage self on the plane, shauna encounters a teenage jackie everywhere, and mari hears the dripping of her own blood long before it is spilt in the season 3 finale. if (as queer theorist jack halberstam argues) "western cultures chart the emergence of the adult from the dangerous and unruly period of adolescence as a desired process" (152), fractures in linear time suspend the adolescent body in place. the characters' adolescences persist into the present in a perpetually unfinished process: adulthood beckons, but never fully arrives.

my favourite example of this appears in season three, where shauna hallucinates her stillborn child. as much as she tries to reach the shore, she's fixed in place—and in the final shot before she wakes, she's actually moving backwards. if her child represents an imagined future, her attempts to move forward can only bear her further into the past. the trauma of losing jackie and her child has trapped her in a circular loop.

The term "cannibalism" is relatively new. Prior to the 1400s, the dominant term for the practice of eating other people was anthropophagy, from the Greek anthrōpos (human) and phagy (eating). The earliest documented use of the word cannibal can be found in Christopher Columbus’ diaries, taken from his interactions with native populations in the Hispaniola island. He wrote of a warrior people, the Caribs or Caniba, who practised anthropophagy against their enemies—an account that (I don't need to tell you, I'm sure) should be subject to much scrutiny. A political construction more than a linguistic one, the framing of indigenous people as cannibalistic "savages" became a means of denying humanity to the perceived other and justifying colonial violence.

(It should be noted that, parallel to making these accusations, Europeans were actively partaking in cannibalism. We ascribe to the other what we fear in ourselves.)

Cannibalism has since become the standard (English language) term for anthropophagy. You might be tempted to argue that it has evolved, now, beyond those imperial roots, but I disagree! When we talk about cannibalism we are talking about these histories, implicitly or explicitly. Cannibal romanticism overlooks the simple fact that it is not a neutral term: someone is consumer, and another is consumed.

Since my research specialism is Latin American cinema (specifically Brazil, Chile, and Panama), I'm going to centre my discussion in Brazil going forward. If you're interested in learning more about the revolutionary potential of cannibalist narratives in the Caribbean, I'd recommend starting here.

Published in the first edition of the Revista de Antropófagia in May 1928, Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago (you can read it in English here) incorporates sixteenth-century accounts of alleged cannibal activity by native Brazilians into an argument for the cannibalisation of European histories and ideologies in order to create a new Brazilian culture. Informed by the European conception of the New World cannibal—linked by Neil Larsen to "the first reports in Brazil of 'cannibalism' among members of the Tupínamba tribal aggregate" (80)—and subsequent justification for colonial expansion, de Andrade argues that the exploitation of Brazil by colonial and capitalist forces is ironically cannibalistic in its own right, digesting and stifling Brazilian cultural identity in its exploitation of the Global South: "[w]e are acting against this plague of a supposedly cultured and Christianised peoples. Cannibals" (304).

Far from opposing cannibalism altogether, de Andrade instead resolves to embrace the taboo for its revolutionary potential: "the spirit refuses to conceive a spirit without a body. […]  Need for the cannibalistic vaccine" (302). The Tupínamba tribe (Larsen’s rumoured cannibals) are referenced directly in the Manifesto, in a cannibalisation of the works of William Shakespeare that suggests that, as well as using cannibalism as an allegory for consumer culture, indigenous cultures might digest European ones as a rejection of neocolonial domination: "Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question" (300). The Manifesto would go on to form the basis for the Brazilian Anthropofagia Movement, an offshoot of modernism that rejected "[t]he determination of progress by catalogues and television sets" (303). In a capitalist system increasingly defined by the fetishisation of the machine, and the alienation of the worker from their own body and the products of their labour, the "cannibalistic vaccine" offers a critique of the ways in which neocolonialism and capitalism shape our bodies into consumer goods, as well as a means of resistance against the naturalisation of these systems.

If the 1950s and 1960s were a "boom time" (72) for capitalism, they were built on the back of this exploitation: the United States in particular began to stage direct military intervention into the governments of the Global South, ravenous in their hunger for power and resources. Within this context, the Manifesto Antropófago would go on to inform the Tropicália Movement of the 1960s—a response to the US-backed coup d’état of Brazil in 1964 and the right-wing military dictatorship that followed. Dr. Amy Pederson-Converse argues that the anthropofagous qualities of the Tropicália movement "encompassed ideas of violence, appropriation, and a post-colonial Latin American artistic production burdened by the vocabularies of international contemporary art" (2). Like the Anthropofagia Movement, cannibalism—both literally and allegorically—played a key role in Tropicália as a means of consuming and regurgitating seemingly disparate influences (such as the popular and the avant-garde) into something uniquely Brazilian. As Pederson-Converse puts it: "[t]hrough ingestion, digestion, and subsummation, the cannibal bridges the gap between political science and moral philosophy, nature and civilisation, north and south, east and west, the self and the other" (2).

It wasn't just art and literature that sought to use anthropophagia as a means of articulating transformation and resistance—there was also cinema. Parallel to the Tropicália art movement came the advent of Third Cinema across Latin America, which rejected both the consumer spectacle of Hollywood (First Cinema) and the auteur art cinema of Europe (Second Cinema). Focused on collective expression and revolutionary activism, the filmmakers and theorists of the Third Cinema movement sought to reject the vocabularies of international contemporary art altogether, exploring the paradox wherein an anti-imperialist filmmaker must both subvert and exist within the system.

The Third Cinema movement, as well as its guiding philosophies, can arguably be traced back to four manifestos written across the late 1960s and early 1970s: Glauber Rocha’s Esthetic of Hunger in 1965, Julio García Espinosa’s For an Imperfect Cinema in 1969, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s Toward a Third Cinema in 1969, and Jorge Sanjinés’ Problems of Form and Content in Revolutionary Cinema in 1976. All grappling with the internal contradictions of anti-imperial and anti-capitalist filmmaking within a capitalist system, it was Glauber Rocha who gave a name to the "essence" of Latin American society: hunger.

A detailed discussion of the politics and aesthetics of hunger in Latin American cinema is beyond the scope of this (already very long) post, unfortunately. But these aesthetics, and anthropophagia/cannibalist narratives in particular, are a deeply versatile and affective means of grappling with imperial and neocolonial legacies, and the current and ongoing exploitation of the worker under capitalism. To those who enjoy cannibalism in their media, I would encourage moving beyond the romanticism of cannibalism to explore its revolutionary potential. Who consumes who? Why do we consume them? When we embrace the other as ourselves, what do we become?

Some recommendations:

La Casa Lobo (Cristobal León & Joaquín Cociña, 2018—my favourite film of all time)

How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1971, which you can watch for free here)

Somos Lo Que Hay (Jorge Michel Grau, 2010—not the American remake, which completely misses the point)