Yellowjackets and Feasting on Desire

In 1951, William Golding wrote a novel about a group of British schoolboys who believed that the collapse of civilization reveals the true nature of humans—which is violent, power-hungry, and cruel. If you stop and think about it though, what better example of social conditioning is there—then, as now—than teenage girls? Trained from childhood to take up less space, to be quieter, more polite, and more 'ladylike', women are not inherently nicer, kinder, gentler, or weaker. They're forced to be taught to act that way when others are watching.

Yellowjackets, a Gothic tale, explores the lengths teenage girls can go to when they are suddenly freed from the constraints of civilization and suppression of their darkest impulses. In a world where expectations for women are starkly different from who they truly are, it is far more interesting to watch them shed the illusion of 'naivety' and reveal their most savage instincts. What makes the show so chilling is how it forces us to confront the truth that is hard to digest: we're not as civilized as we think, or we like to believe. The idea that we exist on a thin line between order and chaos is not new, of course, but to watch high school girls turn into huntresses who create rituals to consume their friends is a thought experiment: Who are we once we remove our masks? And when we see what lies underneath, can we go back to wearing them?

While the show is mostly compared to Lord of the Flies, it is also partly inspired by the true story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, a 1972 plane crash that left a group of young rugby players stranded in the mountains for over two months, forcing them to resort to cannibalism to survive.  But the show goes even further than a survival story; starving and freezing, with nothing to lose, their transition to cannibalism becomes a ritual, including hunting one of their own like prey, wearing masks, and crowning an Antler Queen. Wilderness chooses, as they say.

“Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.”

Cannibalism, as horrifying as it is, has long served as a metaphor in literature and media, often representing an obsessive, all-consuming kind of love. It is an act of destruction, as much as passion and desperation. It symbolizes an extreme form of desire: the need to possess someone so completely that only consuming them can achieve true intimacy. In Yellowjackets, this theme is pushed to its limits; it becomes a mechanism for power. “The eating of a person is the ultimate way to dignify that person and keep her with you forever, while at the same time destroying her and dominating her,” one of the writers of the show says. The act of eating another person is not just about survival—it is also about control, domination, and to destruction. In the wilderness, the girls are starving, afraid, and brutalized by their circumstances, yet they wield more power over their own lives than they do as adults in the so-called civilized world.

The tragedy of Yellowjackets is that the girls get a taste of being free from the suffocating structures, and they can never truly go back. In the wilderness, they make their own rules, create their hierarchy, and decide violently who rises and who falls. Their hunger is not only for food but also for control. For having a right to take up space. The ability to live in a world that does not punish them for their rage, for their desires, for their monstrosity is what the girls are hungry for.