We understand Lynskey’s suburban repression to be murderous, to be lustful, before it even becomes that, because we know Lynskey already and what she’s fighting to hold back. In every scene, Lewis carries the threat of orgiastic violence. She’s unmistakably, viscerally Christina Ricci, whoever and whatever that means to you.Ī show built in this way works through the management of moods the way a face will irresistibly conjure for you, the viewer, a feeling. Either way, when that actor looks into the camera for the briefest of moments, she’s not future Misty, not yet even a character on the show. Maybe she’s Wednesday Addams to you, maybe she’s the kid from Mermaids, or maybe she calls to mind the metallic sense memory of Buffalo ’66. And then, in the episode’s final moments, we cut to the present, and we see her all grown up. All through the episode, set mostly in the show’s mid-’90s timeline, we’ve followed this mousy, rage-possessed teen girl named Misty as she’s shunted aside, socially brutalized, and stranded with all her bullies after a plane crash. Anyone who’d seen promotional images for Yellowjackets would have known she was a co-star, but the show withholds her from us until her entrance matters most. Lewis and Lynskey (along with Cypress, who didn’t make her screen debut until the aughts) anchor most of the episode, but it saves Christina Ricci until the end. Yellowjackets’ pilot uses this double vision to great effect. Send me updates about Slate special offers. Like the Liz Phair or Radiohead on the soundtrack or the SnackWell’s scavenged from the plane crash, the characters are part of a visible internal joke that sustains the show: These kids would definitely know who these actors are. The pulsing memory of these films with those faces accomplishes a tremendous amount of work for the show. For Gen X and elder millennial viewers who grew up with them, these actors signify worlds in and of themselves. Lewis, Ricci, and Lynskey’s ’90s canons especially play a substantial, subterranean part in the show’s aesthetic as well as its drama: Natural Born Killers, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Cape Fear, The Addams Family, Mermaids, Heavenly Creatures, But I’m a Cheerleader-the show is basically a dark version of the young Ricci’s similarly time-hopping nostalgia blast Now and Then. A series about trauma and ’90s nostalgia, Yellowjackets works not just because of the quality of performance it gets from its adult leads Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci, Tawny Cypress, and Melanie Lynskey-or the uncanny duets they play with their young counterparts-but because of the iconic baggage they bring with them. Yellowjackets is a funny, violent, and compelling puzzle-box series, but its heart is in its stunt casting. That’s what makes it so strange and so great and so wonderfully, specifically Yellowjackets when he shows up two episodes into the show’s second season. The Yellowjackets of Wisayok High School, whose plane crash-landed in the wilderness in the spring of 1996, were suburban teens in the mid-’90s, which is to say they all would have known Wood on sight.
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