"You are What you Eat": Why Yellowjackets Successfully Disturbs Audiences

 

photo credit- Showtime, Yellowjackets. Season 2 episode 2: "Edible Complex"

(This post contains spoilers for Showtime’s Yellowjackets (2021))

             The image above is a frame from the infamous “Greek Feast” from season 2, episode 2, of the Showtime series Yellowjackets. For reference, the full scene is at the bottom of this blog post. (Trigger Warning: this scene has flashing images, gory sounds/imagery, and depictions of cannibalism that may be distressing). 

            A plentiful feast is spread out on a table, accompanied by the glow of warm orange candles and silver cutlery. At the table (shown from left to right) sit the characters Misty Quigley (Sammi Hanratty), Travis Martinez (Kevin Alves), Lottie Matthews (Courtney Eaton), and Shauna Shipman (Sophie Nélisse). Shauna holds a morsel of food up to her mouth. She hesitates to eat, and the others watch her anxiously. Shauna takes a bite and savors the taste of the food. Shortly after, the others begin to dig into their food, cherishing the savoury tastes. Suddenly, the meal quickly turns from polite snacking to a ravenous frenzy, as the team feverishly tears up the feast. The image of this divine feast begins to be distorted into a cold and dark depiction of the team’s reality. Viewers discover through this overlap of scenes that the team was not in glamorous comfort, but instead eating another one of their deceased teammates, Jackie Taylor (Ella Purnell).  

            The show Yellowjackets, created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, is a popular horror TV series that follows the narrative of a girls' soccer team surviving a plane crash in the Canadian wilderness. The series focuses on two narratives: the team surviving in the wilderness, and the team's processing of the trauma into adulthood. In particular, the teen timeline highlights how this soccer team went from a tight-knit community to a considerably violent and cannibalistic clan. While the show is still running, with another season on the way, the story has various examples of durkheimian sociology applied not just in the fictional story, but also for the viewer consuming the media.

           The context behind the first image above is the result of the team’s struggle during their first winter. The plot of the show only gets stranger from here, and there are various plots, characters, details, etc that if I elaborated further on, this post would be five million pages long. So, I am going to try to stay simple with this plot summary. Before the feast, the team had already been through multiple traumatic events: the initial plane crash, a fatal attempt at rescue, Shauna realizing she was inconveniently pregnant, multiple close deaths, this event called “doomcoming,” and so on. Point being, the team is exhausted by the time this first snow rolls around and is consequently starving. On top of that, Jackie’s death symbolizes the eventual disconnect the team has from society. She was the captain of the soccer team and, as captain, served as an influential model for the team, but especially for Shauna (her best friend). However, her death is initiated through a fight between her and Shauna, and she ends up spending the night outside their shelter and freezes to death. Jackie’s presence within the show afterward as a ghost highlights her influence and the importance of her character as a catalyst through continuous reminders of her death. This idea that maybe the team didn’t have to lose touch with society if Jackie didn’t die. This loss of metaphorical civilization detaches the girls from potential rescue, and their desperation boils down to eating Jackie for the excuse of survival. With time and other influences, however, the act of cannibalism begins to become a ritual of salvation for the girls rather than just for survival. Originally, Courtney Eaton’s character, Lottie, becomes a sort of prophet to the girls through the things she provides for the team in the wilderness. Thus, somehow, she creates a sort of religious cult following within the team that begins to guide the group’s overall judgment. Lottie begins to claim that the wilderness favors sacrifice in exchange for their survival, and thus the girls create a hunting tradition where they chase down and kill their teammate to eat in efforts to “please” the “wilderness.” In a way, their creation of religion in this wilderness helps them cope with the fact that their methods of survival (cannibalism) have distressed them into needing extra justification for committing it. This ritual, out of cannibalistic tendencies, is deviated from their societal life, where norms are derived from this idea of the sacred and profane. They are in a state of survival where their ideas of sacred and profane from their lives at home are not applied to their lives in the wilderness, thus creating fictional scenarios that purposefully unsettle the viewers.

            In Mary Douglas’s piece, “Purity and Danger,” Douglas goes into depth on the symbolism of the body and the consideration of sacred and profane. One of the main points Douglas writes about is the idea of determining the sacred and profane: “There is no such thing as absolute dirt” (Douglas 2002: 2). What she means by this is the idea that it is hard to have an object be universally considered sacred or profane. Douglas considers that ritual is collectively established by societies, but that different societies have different religious practices and rituals. From these rituals emerges what the practicing group determines to be sacred or profane. Therefore, in some rituals, dirt may be considered profane/dirty, or sacred/clean- it depends on the society that determines that. Furthermore, Douglas argues that the action of classifying is purely a human trait. In conjunction with Durkheim, this human act of classifications and rituals is a collective decision that influences the morality and rules of society.

            Within the show, the girls struggle as teens and as adults to process their actions in the wilderness. One thing that Douglas focuses on regarding body symbolism is the Coorg tribe. Douglas explains that, “The ritual life of the Coorgs… gives the impression of a people obsessed by the fear of dangerous impurities entering their system. They treat the body as if it were a beleaguered town, every ingress and exit guarded for spies and traitors. Anything issuing from the body is never to be re-admitted, but strictly avoided. The most dangerous pollution is for anything which has once emerged gaining re-entry” (Douglas 2002: 152). In the U.S, there are even specific laws regarding the methods to “gaining” human meat (such as murder, grave robbing, etc- all very illegal), and in particular Idaho is the only U.S state to have an official statement outlawing cannibalism. As a Western society, we are conditioned to believe that consumption of the human body is not just physically unsafe, such as transmission of disease through consumption, but also profane and morally wrong.

            The way the sacred and profane effects and influences in this scenario can be distributed into two parts: one, the sociological theory in place within this fictional story, and the second being the external reactions of the show from viewers.

            In the show, it is clear that the girls are initially averse to cannibalism for survival, and thus do anything they can to prevent their starvation besides that solution. Once that initial threshold was passed with eating Jackie, though, their morals for this consumption begin to unravel. At first, there are arguments within the group that it was just a one-time occurrence, as the collective reaction to this incident is distress. However, that shifts with the continuation of the team’s isolation within the wilderness, causing them to branch off more within Lottie’s following and so on, to which the cannibalism ritual now comes back, not just for survival, but because it has become a practice and ritual. At one point, the team doesn’t even have the excuse to eat their teammates for survival; they just start killing each other because they start to believe that the wilderness is telling them to do so. There are at least three separate occasions beyond Jackie that they do this ritual, along with one unsuccessful attempt. This act of sacrifice becomes such a habit that when they are presented an opportunity to return to civilization, half the group votes to stay in the wilderness out of fear of society. The idea that society would learn about what they were doing and give consequences for their actions scared them so much that they preferred to stay in the woods rather than return home. They know that in their society, the acts they committed in the wilderness are profane, they would rather not face those consequences and remain in the community they created there for themselves.

​             As a viewer of the show, it's easy to be disturbed by the content. Beyond the visuals being disorienting and frightening, the concept of this event transpiring in real time is scary to think about. Yellowjackets is loosely based on the Andean crash in 1972, in which a soccer team’s plane crashed in the Andes mountains, which forced the survivors to resort to cannibalism for survival. Besides the fictional elements within the show, what's scary to the audience is also the instance that this could potentially happen. Not some of the paranormal aspects of the show, but the fact that, as humans, you are put in a place where you may have to stretch your morals for survival, is in itself scary. This show works in the horror genre because it provides an event that could (hopefully not) happen, and the real consequences surrounding the violation of Durkheim’s sacred and profane. 

Trigger warning: this scene has flashing images, gory sounds/imagery, and depictions of cannibalism that may be distressing

References

Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and Danger. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, 1(1). Retrieved from https://moodle.kenyon.edu/pluginfile.php/545384/mod_resource/content/0/Douglas%20-%20Purity%20and%20Danger%20A.pdf

Youtube. (2025). Shauna and Melissa (and Snackie) Yellowjackets 2x02 (Shaunahat Scenes) [Youtube Video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/47N2k0yopFE?si=m6_NBYJZxSH7aRzn