If you arenât watching or havenât watched Yellowjackets, youâre missing out, and I suggest you stop doing whatever youâre doing right now and start watching it. The show is absolute bananas but in a good way. Itâs about a girls soccer team whose plane crashes in the American northwest wilderness on their way to a championship game and the savageness that ensues in their fight to survive. Basically, itâs Lord of the Flies meets Alive, and the fact that this show is so hugely popular, in my opinion, speaks volumes for the general mood and temperament of todayâs angst among almost everyone.
What I love about this show is that it follows two timelines. The plane crash and survival story takes place in 1996 and then jumps to present day, showing how the survivors are getting on with their lives 25 years later. And I honestly donât know which storyline is more compelling. One is this raw, primal fight for survival that is oddly just as true in these charactersâ regular lives as it was in the wilderness.
But what really attracted me originally to the show was that these girls are seniors in 1996, which is exactly me. I graduated high school that year, so I was really looking forward to seeing the 90s brought back to life much in the way that Stranger Things so expertly recreated the 80s, but sadly, Yellowjackets falls flat in this regard, making me wonder if anyone who developed the show was actually a teen in the 90s. It’s doubtful. The whole thing has this feel like someone just simply did âresearch.â Much in the way I might try to recreate, say, the 50s.
But all this talk about Yellowjackets isnât the point of this editorial. (And thank you for your patience until now.)
What Iâm really talking about is nostalgia. Iâve been feeling it a lot latelyâyes, because I watched a show that attempted to bring me back to my youth. And I miss the way things were in the 80s and 90s, mostly before this humungous tech boom weâve been experiencing since the early 00s, which is seemingly unabating and never ending.
Iâm not complaining too much, I promise. Some of the things we have today are beyond cool and make life much easier (producing this paper in the 80s would have been hell, thatâs for sure) but mostly much of the things and the way things are today are frustrating.
Is it me or does anyone else not see that this stuff doesnât really work well? Almost none of it. If it doesnât break right out of the box, it does soon. And if it doesnât break at all, itâs slow and/or malfunctions on the regular. Or itâs incredibly difficult to understand. Like many households, over the past several years, weâve been slowly and steadily switching all our lightbulbs to basic LEDs or the smart LED bulbs. While the basic LEDs are mostly fine, the smart ones are temperamental and fail often, producing these blinking fits because theyâre no longer âconnected.â (When I was a kid, if something wasnât connected, it meant it was âunplugged.â) Even the basic LEDs have this weird lag. Have you noticed that? Whenever I flip a switch that controls an LED bulb, thereâs a very apparent lag for when the light turns on, completely unlike an old incandescent, which turns on quicker than you can blink.
And I think this loss of control many of us feel (at least, I certainly do) that has developed in the past 20 or so years is what makes a show like Yellowjackets so amazingly popular among my generation. At the root, Yellowjackets is about a severe loss of control.
Okay, wow. This editorial was way âdeeperâ than it was intended. Sorry for the moment. But come on, does anyone else miss Blockbuster on a Friday night? No cell phones? Light bulbs that just turned on? No 24hr news cycles that are loaded with more commentary than actual news? Card catalogs? The Beastie Boys and Adidas ringer shirts? My So Called Life? Hippie-grunge? Family Ties? Full House? Alternative Rock? Or even Metallica before, well, you know? BMX bikes? Vision Skateboards? And letâs not even talk about whatever happened to Fruit Roll-ups.
Iâm aware that much of what I wrote here may only ring a bell to my generation, us late-season Gen Xers who seem to be the perpetual middle child of the past century, but Iâm sure you all know what Iâm talking about, and Iâd love to hear about the things you miss from your youth, whether that youth was in the 50s or all the way up to the 00s.
But for as much as we may miss the charm of yesterday, I hope I never to stop looking forward to the adventure of tomorrow.
