A Decade with 'The Dojo': Ten Years, Top Ten Essays.

 

On June 19^th 2023, The Sociologist’s Dojo blog will celebrate its 10^th anniversary. In this brief paper, I will look back on the last ten years of Sociological film analysis, and give “The Dojo’s: Ten years, Top Ten essays.”  The criterion for this curated list is eclectic; some essays are chosen for their significance to the blog, others are selected because they are connected to specific historical events at the time, while others are selected because of personal interest, they are well written, or haven’t been viewed/read by many people.  

 

ORIGINS

The following story also recounted in Episode 1 of the Podcast, and the Episode 312: Zen and the White Male Savior in Film from The Social Breakdown Podcast

            The start of the blog began with my first viewing of Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel in June of 2013. Being such a Superman fan since I was a young child, and growing up on the Richard Donner/Christopher Reeve Superman, I could not believe that this paragon of goodness, the best reflection of humanity, was a bleakly morose brooding child whose parents tell them to let people die, including themselves, and that secrets, above everything else, are worth keeping. In addition to the now typical criticisms of wanton destruction, civilian deaths, and Superman murdering Zod…Krypton’s Sun was Yellow!!!

 

Zack Snyder's 'Man of Steel' is such a bloated, shaky, incoherent mess, it robs Superman of his majesty, grace, morality, and above all...hope. Snyder "accomplishes" this through a disjointed plot, two- dimensional/underdeveloped characters, poorly written dialogue, and sloppy direction. (Man of Steel Review)

 

The film was an abysmal mess, and I could not let it go. My rage did not subside as I started to think about the many ways that the film misrepresented the character of Superman. I began to think about what Superman was as a cultural product, and what the imagery of Superman represented in the public consciousness. Initially, I was doing this to provide some “evidence” and justification for my hatred of the film (not good research, to be certain). Yet, as I started to breakdown the character, applying concepts that I had learned from my expertise and training about masculinity and religion, I really got into thinking about film and popular culture in an academic way. So, I started a blog.

Externally, I told myself that the reason I chose the blog as the initial format for my content is because I wanted to be like Sociologist C. Wright Mills; to be a public intellectual and engage in “Public Sociology”. Public Sociology is a style of sociology that seeks to engage directly with the public to help foster more immediate and (possibly) greater social change. Internally, not unlike many of the egoistic fascist-like douche bag overtly masculine directors I despise, I wanted to keep “my vision” of the blog pure. Truthfully, I did not want to deal with the anxiety and feelings of rejection that come with academic publishing because I was afraid of rejection, and I did not want to deal with criticism. A self-published blog was the easiest way to achieve that.

What’s in a Name?

I chose the name “The Sociologist’s Dojo” for a couple of reasons. The first is that the name and the content represent my three main life passions: Sociology, the martial arts, and film and popular culture. All these things represent me, and my interests. Secondarily, aside from sounding cool, I asked the question: “Where is the Sociologist’s Dojo?” Where do they learn and train to hone their skills? We would traditionally see this to be in the ivory tower of academia, but in practice, it is within society. Sociologists are different than any other type of scientist in that we constantly participate in the very things that we study. Even we cannot escape cultural and social norms that we have been socialized to follow. The name is intended to reflect all of this.  

The Shifts in Focus

At the onset, the beginning of the blog had a much broader focus to cover comics, and martial arts. While some of the early essays reflect this broader scope, it was more so a starting point, raw materials that needed to be refined.

Trivia: The first post on the blog wasn’t an essay, it was a ‘Welcome’:

   Greetings all,

 

I created this blog as a space to discuss the things that I love: Sociology, Martial Arts, Superheroes, Books and Cinema.  This blog will focus on the social analysis of popular culture, Martial Arts and anything that I feel is "Geek" worthy.  Essentially, the posts that are to follow are going to be rants and/or raves about society, culture, social theory, martial arts, movies, and virtually anything else that comes into my head.

 

Enjoy :)

 

As I continued to refine my writing skills and find the voice of the blog, I began to narrow my focus to specifically film and popular culture. In that, I started to think about in-depth analysis of film from a Sociological Perspective which led to a shedding of a lot of comics and martial arts content, though it does come up again sporadically. One of the biggest shifts, early on, was the development of my ongoing series on a director’s filmography. In the ten years of the blog, I have covered the films of Christopher Nolan, Hayao Miyazaki, Karyn Kusama and The Chambara films of Akira Kurosawa. As this feature continues, I will attempt to do more Avant Garde and less mainstream directors, while trying to include as many women and people of color as possible. Also, I will not be covering the white male darlings of 70’s new Hollywood (Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg, Cameron, Kubrick).

Conversely, there were things that I have written about in the early days, that I will not do anymore or have moved away from. Early on, there were straight reviews for films with little Sociological analysis, such as the reviews for Guardians of the Galaxy, Gravity, or Transcendence (yeesh!). I eventually ended my straight reviews, without a specific Sociological bent to it with X-Men: Days of Future Past when I began to develop the (now) typical structure for the film review that can be found in the Analytical essay for James Mangold’s Logan.     Additionally, where I used to write a lot about the character of Batman, given “The Dark Knight Trilogy”, as of my essay on police brutality and popular culture during the 2020 protests (see below), I will no longer writing about Batman.

 

TEN YEARS, TOP TEN ESSAYS IN ‘THE SOCIOOLOGIST’S DOJO’

With each of the essays that I will highlight in this section I will give some greater context of the blog:

 

2013: Man of Steel Review Part II Analysis of an Icon

            Where it all started. This year saw the most essays written for the blog in a single year and started the director series with The Films of Christopher Nolan. This year, the essay that really stands out for me is the essay “’Man of Steel’ Review part II: Analysis of an Icon” the second part of my evisceration of Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel. This essay was the first breath of what the blog would eventually become. I also came back to this subject years later with the second Podcast episode “Sparring with Superman.”

2014: TFCN: The Dark Knight Rises

            During the second year of the blog the structure of the essays and the focus of the blog began to crystallize. But still there were less analytical essays and pieces on current pop cultural news that became too difficult to keep up with. This year also saw essays on the Michael Brown murder in Ferguson and an early review of Bong Joon Ho’s  Snowpiercer. The essay that is important out of this sophomore year is the essay on The Dark Knight Rises which signifies the solidification of the structure of the blogs essay analysis.     

 

2015: The Furious Age of Feminism: The Mad Max and Avengers' Gender Controversy

            The third year of the blog saw some misfires with the soft commitment to writing a “Comics Character Profile” This idea was later scrapped when I realized that I just wanted to write on one of my favorite characters: John Constantine. I later repeat this mistake in 2017. 2015 also had several “Sociological Alert essays on the Paris attacks, and Marriage Equality  as well as Rachel Dolezal and the Domestic Terrorism of Dylan Roof. I would often use the phrase “Sociology Alert” to convey that the essays would be more societal/current event focus and not localized to films (Last used in 2021). However, there was an intersection of current events and film with the very different blowback felt by Avengers: Age of Ultron and Mad Max: Fury Road each sexist and anti-feminist in nature. This is what let to that essay getting the spotlight.   

2016: The Machete Cut and the Diminishing Margin Utility of Star Wars

        Year four of the blog begins the lean years. This was a period of 3 years where I was building new curriculum, writing new degrees/courses and going through a personal crisis or two, that did not leave a lot of room for non-work-related fun essay writing. However, I still managed to write my “Trump Analysis Trilogy” three interlocking essays which served as my process for working through the events of the 2016 election.

 Part I: “Donald Trump and the Rise of Reality Politics”

 Part II: A ‘Trumped up’ Future: The Shaping of the 45^th Presidency

 Part III: Racism, Donald Trump and the Price of Nostalgia  

Additionally, in the space of film and popular culture, we were amidst a new Star Wars Trilogy, and I decided to watch the original trilogy in the famed “Machete” order and realized that perhaps, I do not like Star Wars as much as I thought I did.  

2017: The Distilled and Sterilized Feminism of Wonder Woman

The beginning of the fifth year of the blog saw another awkwardly introduced, but never followed through, segment spotlighting Social theorists when all I really wanted to talk about was C. Wright Mills. I also wrote a bonus essay not included in the  “Trump Analysis Trilogy” discussing “Trump, Propaganda and Linguistic Imperialism” This year also saw the first essay of a new film by a director I had already covered (Nolan’s Dunkirk). Yet, the essay I chose to spotlight here, goes back to the misfire of Patty Jenkin’s Wonder Woman and how the character in the Zack Snyder DCEU did not work.  

2018: The Feminism of “Suspiria” terrifies the Patriarchy

            In 2018, the blog had a lot of firsts. It saw the beginning of the series on The Films of Hayao Miyazaki (that lasts for 2 and ½ years). This year was the first time something I wrote, “Zen and the Death of the White Male Savior.” got outside attention (From The Social Breakdown Podcast). This year also saw the first of the blog’s “Top Ten” lists, and the first time I saw Panos Cosmatoes’ Mandy  I have talked about Mandy a lot since that initial review. I have done a Bonus Commentary episode on the Podcast about it, and most recently, I was a guest on “Who’s There: A Horror Movie Fan Podcast talking about Mandy. So, I think it a bit self-indulgent to put this review, yet again, front and center. Instead, I am choosing Luca Guadagnino’s remake of “Suspiria” because anything that terrifies the Patriarchy that much, I. Absolutely. Love.   

   

2019: TFHM: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

            This year saw the continuation of analyzing Miyazaki films, and a look into the sociological relevance of the villain motivation in The Legend of Korra  Few essays were published during the calendar year 2019. I was experiencing the lead up to, and onset of, a personal crisis that lingered for years afterwards. I had to find out who I was again and what I wanted. Turns out, I wanted to analyze film and Popular culture by using the Sociological Perspective.  

2020: BLM, Batman and Police Militarization

            With my personal crisis in full swing, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and I like most people, was under lockdown beginning in March of that year. I ended up not going back to my office and teaching in person for almost 2 years. However, with that time, I decided to recommit myself to the blog, promising myself to provide one essay a month, or at least 12 essays a year. This is a commitment I still hold to three years later. To that end, this year saw essays on a Comparison between Kurosawa’s High and Low and Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, as well as the bulk of Miyazaki essays on Castle in the Sky, Totoro, Kiki’s, Porco Rosso, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away. I also wrote a “scathing” critique of the comic book film genre in defense of M. Night Shyamalan’s “Eastrail 177 Trilogy” as well as reviews of Birds of Prey and Akira.

In October of 2020, I started The Sociologist’s Dojo Podcast, with an equal commitment to one episode a month. As of this writing, I have published 31 episodes, 4 episodes recorded yet to be published and 3 episodes planned but still to be recorded. I have had the fortune to have great guests, many of them turning into friendships. Those that want to be on the Podcast contact me on Twitter or email me at thesociologistsdojo@gmail.com. Yet, given the context of the hellscape that was 2020, the essay I chose to highlight above reflects a part of that disruption.

2021: Vader’s Flesh is Sacred: Disability Personhood and Victimhood Through 80's Representations of Robots and Cyborgs

            The beginning of 2021 was a scramble to write something relevant to the Jan 6^th Insurrection. After which, I finished up the Miyazaki series with Howl’s Moving Castle, Ponyo and The Wind Rises, Continuation of The films of Christopher Nolan with Tenet, and the start of “The Chambara Films of Akira Kurosawa”. This year I began to dip my toe in the academic publishing waters with a review of the documentary Crip Camp for the American Sociological Journal Teaching Sociology. I also wrote an article that was featured at the North East MLA conference on Disability and Capitalism among Horror Antagonists, and a essay on the brilliance of Nicolas Cage which I used as the basis for Episode 20 of the Podcast aptly titled “The Nic Cage Episode.”. The essay I chose to feature was inspired out of discussions with friend of the podcast Dr. Liz W. Faber, as they developed their ideas for their new book Robot Suicide: Death, Identity and AI. in Science Fiction.    

2022: A Gender Analysis Gemini: When Gender Socialization met the RomCom… / Police, ‘The Punisher’ and Performative Masculinity

The boon of recognition continued in 2022 as an essay I wrote in January of that year was reworked and published in the anthology Global Perspectives on the Liminality of the Supernatural From Animus to Zombi edited by the fantastic Dr. Rebecca Gibson, friend and frequent collaborator on the podcast. This year saw the finishing and bulk of The Chambara films of Akira Kurosawa ( Throne of Blood, Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo/Sanjuro, Kagemusha and Ran) and the Start of the Films of Karyn Kusama (with Girlfight and Aeon Flux). The two essays that I chose to highlight were essays that were a long time coming, some brewing for years (The romcom essay) others needing a catalyst (Uvalde school shooting) to provide enough motivation to write the essay.     

2023: Best so far: Death, Taxes, and Bureaucracy a Weberian Analysis of Kurosawa’s Ikiru  

2023 has been consumed by the completion of The Films of Karyn Kusama (Jennifer’s Body, The Invitation, Destroyer and a bonus essay on Season 1 of “YellowJackets”). The remainder of this year will see an essay analyzing Thema and Louise to commemorate the recent 4k Criterion release, and the start of “The Films of Ana Lilly Amirpour”. The essay I chose to highlight this year is my long gestating essay trying to talk about the aspect of Weberian theory in Kurosawa’s Ikiru.    

 

CONCLUSION

            Part of finding purpose in life is in the pursuit of marrying your work with your passions. I have dedicated my life to the study of society, and I love to write and discuss film and popular culture. I hope that my obsession and life’s mission has brought both my readers and my listeners some perspective and entertainment in equal measure. Late in my graduate study, a good friend of mine astutely professed that to know me, to talk to me, is both parts wisdom and absurdity in equal measure. I hope I have brought those qualities to my readers over these last ten years. For those who have stuck with me over the decade, I hope you can say that both the blog and my style have refined and gotten better. If not, thank you for riding the wave of quality over the years. Looking forward, I have no plans on ending this site or its mission. If life creeps and affects the frequency of publication, please be patient. Lastly, if you have only read my written work, please check out my Podcast. It is a lot of fun, and I talk to interesting people about film, popular culture, and their work.  Here’s to another 10 years of Sociological analysis of film and popular culture. Please join me, it will be an adventure. 😊     

The Films of Karyn Kusama: Yellowjackets

 

This final essay in my series on the films of Karyn Kusama will be looking at the director’s ‘small screen’ work; focusing on the gendering and sexist misogyny of being a non-male director in Hollywood using the lens of their recently produced and directed critical darling, Yellowjackets. Through this focus, this paper will address the historical consequences of identifying as a female director, many of them languishing in either director jail, regulated to television or both; and in the analysis of the narrative of Yellowjackets, tackle the subversion of and disintegration of societal and gender norms for the sake of survival, ritualism, tribalism, and Durkheimian Totemism.

 

PLOT

            In 1996, high school female soccer champions traveling to a National Competition get stranded in the Canadian wilderness after a plane crash. For 19 months, friendship, honor, loyalty, and morals are tested among the group as they await rescue. Bonds are broken, pacts and promises thwarted, as a cult and tribalism start to rise.  In present day, some of the remaining survivors, now middle-aged adults, begin to be blackmailed by an unknown source. After so much time, the “Yellowjackets” must ban together once again to stop this new threat, lest the secrets (and bodies) they buried out there in the wilderness come back to haunt them.

 

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

            The Hollywood incarceration of Female Directors

            The trajectory of Karyn Kusama’s career can be used to track the parabolic arc of sexism through the industry.  She “paid her dues” [read as “for being a woman”] through the independent movie scene and was praised for her first feature Girlfight because at the time (early 2000’s), it was novel, and the then flavor of Hollywood “girl power” feminism, to take a typical near cliché story about a man, in this case a boxing film, and make it innovative by putting a woman at the center.  Like the characters of Ripley in Aliens, or Sara Connor, in Terminator 2, Diana (Gina Rodriguez) was characterized as masculine with the aesthetic trappings of femininity, rather than be a full three-dimensional human being.  This was not threatening to the Hollywood structure because it forced women (both behind and in front of the camera) to still tell stories about men and masculinity.  The success and support of Girlfight, especially by director John Sales, catapulted Kusama into being a premiere young director. From there, she took on Aeon Flux,   but too much studio interference, and a lack of producers understanding of the source material, lead it to box office failure. However, the blame was not laid at the feet of the producers. Instead, Kusama took the brunt of the criticism for the film and the industry, once again, came to the erroneous conclusion that “Maybe” [ Read as “Definitely] women should not be at the helm of big budget tent pole blockbuster films anymore. This put Kusama in “director jail”.

As noted in my Aeon Flux review “Director Jail”:

  …is a state of limbo filmmakers get put into after a notable or typically horrendous film is poorly received by both audiences and critics. Incarcerated directors are given few offers to direct projects, and any personal or independent projects they have will not gain traction.  Unfortunately, but to no one’s surprise, female directors often are given longer sentences than male directors. Since the patriarchy tends to see women in occupations to be niche, and therefore both being too specific and too general at the same time, the industry is unwilling to “take a chance” on another “female director.” Meanwhile, if male directors get sent to “jail” they often do not stay long, constantly giving many of them another shot. However, there has been an increasing trend of male directors being allowed to fail upwards. In these situations, male directors don’t go to jail, they’re given the industry equivalent of diplomatic immunity.

 

One method of Incarceration for directors at that time was to be regulated to directing episodic television. At this point, as film reigned supreme as the content of prestige and status, television directors had less clout, responsibilities, and overall influence on the projects they oversaw. They were a glorified camera operator that often had to defer to the cinematographer and producers to maintain continuity. They were often pejoratively referred to as “directors -for-hire.” It was designed as penance, and unfortunately for many female directors, became a life sentence.  Thus, it was after the box office flop of Aeon Flux, that Kusama started directing TV.

 

            Riding the tide back into a Still Rocky Shore

           

            As Kusama began to “do her time” by direct episodic television of The L word, Halt and Catch Fire, Chicago Fire, The Man in the High Castle the television landscape began to change.  Beginning in the early 2000’s, with the popularity of such shows as Mad Men, and The Sopranos, ushered in a shift in status and value from long form to short form content. We were moving away from “Features” (Films) and entered into “ The Golden Age of Television”.   This new age was manifested through the development and accessibility of home theater technology. Through the distribution of high quality, high frame rate televisions (HDTV’s with 1080+ 4 k resolution) for home use, television production had to increase their quality[1]. The increase in the quality of the production, and the lure of an expanding narrative[2] began to attract creative talent to television that would have sworn it off just a few years prior.  By the time Kusama was exclusively doing Tv gigs, after once again being thrown back into “Director Jail” between her modest features Jennifer’s Body and Destroyer, she was directing a total of 18 episodes of a variety of well-known shows including Casual, Masters of Sex, and The Outsider. Suddenly, the prison didn’t seem so much like a punishment anymore.

            Kusama was on the cutting edge of the next transformation of entertainment distribution with the development and release of her 2015 feature: The Invitation. Because Kusama wanted to retain final cut for her films, she became a pariah to most producers in Hollywood. It wasn’t until she was approached by then film rental company Netflix, who was branching out into creating and producing content to put on their own platform, that she was able to work out a deal where Kusama would be able to retain final cut of the film, as long as distribution of the film (aside from independent film festivals to create buzz) would be exclusive to Netflix.

With more and more of Millennials cutting the cord from cable in the early 2000s, coupled with the increase in high-speed bandwidth internet, Netflix became an early streaming juggernaut because they were able to license content from other prestige producers at the time (like Showtime, HBO, Warner bros, and Paramount) who did not, as of yet, have a platform.  However, much like Movie Pass was the test case for Theater chain subscription services, Netflix was the experiment that would lead to our current “Streaming War” where every producer and owner of intellectual property (IP) attempts to have their own service; thereby pulling, or more likely, letting contracts on licensed content expire for other older services like Netflix and Hulu.  This became a boon for monopolistic media conglomerates like Disney who’ve not only acquired the Marvel and Star Wars content to increase their hold on young boys attention, but recently took control of all of the 20^th century Fox creative IP including all of MGM’s catalog of content. 

These mergers and acquisitions are a key factor in the current “Streaming War” because of Streaming’s unsustainable business model. Profit for these streaming services  is not based on the number of viewers of each piece of content, or even the number of viewers on the service per month,  but in how many new subscribers sign up each month. This has a built-in saturation point. Even if you cut down on password sharing  and other fraudulent behaviors, there is only so many people, and at some point everyone (or most of them) will already be subscribers (Arditi 2021).

For the consumer, with each new production company launching their new premium service with exclusive access to their own IP, the cost of these services (each one often hovering around $10-15.99) a subscription to three or more streamers is more expensive than cable. Inevitably now, consumers often make the choice to stick with a Streamer until they get through the content that they want and then cancel their subscription and get another one in order to keep costs low. They will dip in for The Mandalorian, or Stranger Things but once they are done, they are out, again.  This has lead to content providers now breaking up seasons, or going back to the weekly model like broadcast television in hopes of keeping their viewership numbers up. This has lead to many companies not only losing money (Disney Plus is at an operating loss of 1.5 billion dollars) but to enter into a scramble for new content (Arditi 2021).  This has become a financial windfall for companies like Sony and Showtime who have opted out of the Streaming wars and instead just be the arms dealers of premium content.  One of those pieces of content is the Karyn Kusama Produced Yellowjackets.

Production

Yellowjackets was first conceived by Ashley Lyne and Bart Nikerson as an amalgam of The Donner Party, the Andres Flight Disaster and an adaptation of Lord of the Flies featuring a majority female cast. While many were skeptical that girls would resort to the same level of barbarism that is depicted in Golding’s classic story, Lyne and Nikerson new that given the social hierarchy of teenage girls, and the female relational aggression that exists between them, that the barbarism is not only possible, but inevitable (Simmons 2002).  Lyle and Nikerson serve as showrunners on the series along with Jonathan Lisco who brought in Kusama as an executive producer.  Kusama got the pilot script three years before it went in front of a camera. She was initially intrigued by the shows premise, believing that:

 “ putting women in these types of stories is still undiscovered territory…we romanticize the notion that if women were just left to fend for themselves [it would be a utopia]. But what would that really look like?...It would just be as thorny and as problematic as any clan fighting for survival” (Ford 2022).

To get to that place, Kusama took inspiration from Elem Klimov’s Come and See, a 1980’s Russian war film about a boy who glorifies the war against the Nazi’s until he gets directly affected by it. Through this lens, Kusama saw the story of the Yellowjackets soccer team as a war story (Ford 2022). “I saw these women [like soldiers] coming home from war…and how their experiences followed them and shaped their lives.” To that end, Kusama decided to link the two timelines together, not through typical action callbacks where the behavior a character does in the future, is a call back to the past, and vice versa. Instead, the links between the timelines are more psychological and thematic, illustrating the changes in the characters from their younger counterparts; allowing the audience to ask the questions about the characters rather than the basic plot of the story. For example, the audience will question how does the character of Natalie played in the 1996 timeline by Sophie Thatcher as a troubled grunge obsessed goth, but straight edged burnout, transform into the Natalie of the present, a gun toting drug fueled one-woman badass wrecking crew of revenge? The Natalie of the present holds all the clues to the journey we will watch her younger counterpart experience in the past through each subsequent season of the show.

Since Kusama got in on the production early, and got the opportunity to direct the pilot, she was allowed to imprint her visual aesthetic into the overall style of the show moving forward, making sure all future episodes would have a “Karyn Kusama flavor” in each shot.  Kusama plans to return to directing future episodes of the series (now renewed for a third season out of a planned series arc of 5) including the season finale of season two, which, as of this writing, is said to be a “doosey” (Ford 2022).

 

SOCIAL ANALYSIS  

Setting the Unequal Gender table of Hollywood

In 2022, 31% of producers, 24% of the directors, 21 % of editors, 19% of writers  and only 7% of cinematographers of the top 250 films were women. In front of the camera, it is not much better: 38% of major characters 33% of Protagonists with many of the roles, going to younger female actors (14% of roles featured female actors in their 40’s) and overrepresented in the horror genre.  Only 11% had more female characters than male characters and 9% had an equal number.

Because of this bleak landscape, made more barren when you take an intersectional analysis and include Race, Sexuality and Disability into the equation; when women creatives attempt to get anything made that is not reinforcing at least one of the plethora of sexist tropes that permeate the medium, they run into a variety of roadblocks: reluctance of producers, funding drying up, and being dropped from studio consideration. The fact that 40% of unproduced “black list” scripts were penned by women in part because of these roadblocks and the inability of major studios to believe in women is both expected and disheartening       

            The sexism of the Hollywood industry can be measured by the assumptions and wrong lessons that it takes from female creatively led projects.  Firstly, women have always been considered a niche/specialty market. Granted, this is nothing new since white women are  still considered to be a member of a marginalized group, and remain the biggest recipients of gains made by affirmative action policies. Yet, because female lead projects often tell stories about women, the industry standard assumption is that those types of stories will not attract the coveted 18-40 male demographic. Even when streaming content has since changed the landscape and narrowed the gap between, and the importance of, that once coveted group. Still, the industry persists, continuing to see women and their stories as a risk; and Hollywood is famously risk adverse even though women consume 71% of all media content. And when something does manage to break through, the industry, being short term profit driven, desperately wants to jump on the bandwagon…without really understanding why unique stories about women are important and necessary.  

One such cinematic example where Hollywood took the wrong lessons is the Callie Khouri written, Ridley Scott helmed  Thelma and Louise.[3] After the initial blowback upon the film’s release calling the film “degrading to men” the film found a resurgence among female audiences seeing themselves in one of the two titular characters, and their decision to live their life for them, right to the end, spoke to a whole market Hollywood did not consider. But instead of focusing on the creative voices, choice and perspectives of women, Hollywood, in true patriarchal form, just saw the aesthetics. They saw attractive gun toting women go on a bank robbing road trip kicking ass and blowing shit up. Thus, we get subjected to the Charlie’s Angles remake franchise and numerous other films that reinforce a male crafted story with masculine energy just featuring women.

Thirty years later, this criticism is still apt when looking at a story of High School female soccer team fighting for survival while stranded in the Canadian Wilderness, in Yellowjackets. On the surface, this seems like another example of Hollywood taking the wrong lessons: just taking a typical male story and gender swapping the male protagonists. If this story was just an ill-advised cynical cash grab, like so many of its ilk, that is what we would have gotten, something barren and lifeless. However, under the care of Showrunners and creators Ashley Lyne, Bart Nikerson and Jonathan Lisco, with Kusama at the helm, they tell a story of female aggression and survival, the difficulty of shaking patriarchal norms, and religious devotion in extreme situations.  

 

Yellowjackets and the embracing of Direct Aggression

 

In their landmark analysis on female aggression, Rachel Simmons (2002) discusses the mechanisms of female aggression bound by patriarchically misogynistic gender norms. Briefly, because the gender messages that girls receive through the process of gender socialization impedes their ability to express anger in direct and open ways lest they be sanctioned as being somehow unfeminine; their expression of their anger is societally manufactured to take an indirect approach (Simmons 2002). Since girls and women are judged through their relationships, those relationships, especially with other girls, need to remain strong and intact, at least on the surface. This is in order for girls to maintain a moral air and good standing with adults in their orbit, otherwise the girls’ innocence, moral goodness, and purity are put into question. Therefore, the expression of direct form of aggression, often popularized by men and gendered as masculine, is elusive for girls in a western social order. Just think of how any angry emotional outburst is still minimized and gaslit by the assumption of menstruation.  Instead, to avoid this sanctioning, girls develop, and women perfect, indirect forms of aggression to express their natural feelings of anger and frustration. This includes using relationships as weapons through the practices of rumor spreading, silent treatments, nonverbal gesturing, and sarcasm (Simmons 2002). This relational aggression takes its form in the halls of middle and high schools, at parties and other social events, thereby shaping the inner interrelated life of young girls.

          It is this world of indirect relational aggression that the characters of Yellowjackets are familiar with when they find themselves stranded in the Canadian wilderness at the end of the first episode.  Throughout the first season, the leadership, support, and importance of each character shifts as the old gendered social hierarchy collapses, replaced by one based on survival. As the value of each person to the group changes, so does their gain and loss of prestige and social power.   This is exemplified through the two-character arcs of Young Jackie (Ella Purnell) and Young Misty (Samantha Hanratty) in season 1. “Back in the World” in the patriarchical organization of societal gender norms and high school clicks, Jackie reins supreme. She is beautiful, popular, accomplished and is well versed in the delicate social mechanisms of the teenage girl hierarchy. In the beginning of the first episode, we watch as she expertly deploys every indirect and relational aggression in her arsenal to get what she wants. She has clout, and the attention of her peers. Misty, on the other hand, is the weirdo outcast that doesn’t wear the right clothes, say the right things, recognize social cues, and desperately wants to be accepted. She actively cares too much about seeking attention and validation from others. After the plane crash, with Misty’s knowledge of medicine and survival strategies, she quickly garners favor with the remaining survivors. Whereas, without the lattice work of the overarching bureaucratic social structure to support her, Jackie, and her talents, become effectively useless.

While the juxtaposition is interesting at its core, the creators and Kusama make it more compelling by having these power dynamics shift slowly. It is the slow burn of the transformation from civilized to tribal that makes these character transitions so delicious. The creators question the nature of the female perspective when it is not tied to patriarchy. Those that seek to recreate it and have been propped up by the patriarchal bargain that they struck (Jackie), illustrate just how malignant and pervasive these toxic traits actually are. This is also again demonstrated when the survivors see whom among them is the best with a rifle (to hunt food). Travis exhibits some toxic masculine qualities as he assumes he will be the best shot. While he is good, predominantly because, like a lot of societal behaviors and products, rifles and other firearms were built with only men in mind, Natalie is the best. While the other girls support Natalie’s supremacy in this task, she still feels compelled to save Travis’ fragile masculinity by at first downplaying her accomplishments, even after Travis criticizes her. It is only when Natalie receives masculine validation from Ben (their coach) that she begins to accept her newfound power and status. Eventually, albeit under the influence of drugs and alcohol (Shrooms and berry fermented Hooch), the girls fully able to shed off the Hegemonic Masculinity of their previous lives and embrace the power of the lesbian existence[4] through the schism of the survivors into different factions based around matriarchical shamanism (Rich 1980).

Religion and Tribalism among the Survivors

 According to Emile Durkheim (2001), the power of religion is in the people’s ability to believe in it. This is the social construction of religion. The content of the stories surrounding religion, and the use of allegories and metaphors, matter less than the belief that is placed on those stories. Effectively, it is not what you believe that matters as much as that you believe. Belief is the point.  A product of this religious belief is “collective effervescence”, the feeling of energy and harmony when people are all engaging in the same behavior for a shared purpose (Durkheim 2001).

Kusama and the creators root the religious rituals in the ancient religion of Totemism, which uses symbols as sacred objects to unify and embody a particular group (Durkheim 2001). The symbol that becomes religiously important predates the crash but is reappropriated by some factions of survivors to represent their worship of the wilderness, the manufacturing of “The Antler Queen”, and justify their practice of murder and Cannibalism which, in the first few minutes of Episode 1, seems fully ritualized and made sacred by their actions.  However, since we are dropped into media res, and meet the girls as they are accustomed to their stranded life in the wilderness, there are still many unanswered questions about how the girls we leave at the end of season 1, become those we see at the beginning of that first episode.

Another interesting religious thread the creators weave into the first season in the interplay between mental illness and religiosity. The character of Lottie Mathews is shown to have schizophrenia, and in the first handful of episodes she is shown taking medication to keep her condition stabilized. But as she first rations her pills, and later runs out, her mental illness manifests as worshiping of the wilderness. Through schizophrenic episodes, she is able to convince several other survivors to pledge their fealty to her and the Wilderness at the end of season 1. Similarly, Taissa, who exhibits characteristics of a as of yet diagnosed Dissociative disorder, sees visions of an eyeless man that may be a manifestation of death.  In her dissociative state, Adult Taissa murdered their family dog and ritualized it as an offering to an unknown entity. At the end of season 1 we see that young Taissa begins to disassociate when she and some of the survivors are attacked by a pack of wolves. While these depictions of mental illness are a part of the three-dimensional layering of these complex characters, it is yet to be seen if these interpretations will be ultimately compassionate and sympathetically humanizing, or devolve into yet another tired trope of mental illness being a short hand for villainy and the deplorably evil.

 

CONCLUSION

Kusama has always been underrated as a director, especially her feature work. In the spirit of other female filmmakers, like Elaine May, and Ana Lilly Amirpour she is uncompromising in her vision, recently directing her first political ad campaign to secure federal protections for body rights for women  and continues to pay the female tax for directing,   However, with the success of Yellowjackets, Karyn Kusama is starting to get the recognition that she richly deserves having been nominated for an Emmy and Winning the HCA  award for outstanding achievement in directing for the Yellowjacket pilot. Yet, even with her brilliance being recognized on the “small screen” in film she seems to still get the shaft. Earlier this year it was revealed that her Dracula film surrounding the character of Mina Harker was scrapped because the studio would not give Kusama final cut (again), unlike the weakly rumored reason that two competing Dracula themed projects (the other being Renfield staring Nic Cage) would lead to oversaturation. I will always long for this film, and I mourn that it will never come to fruition. Therefore, if you have come to Kusama’s work through the success of Yellowjackets, please check out her feature work. I’d start with Jennifer’s Body. If you didn’t know Yellowjackets was connected to Kusama, may you be as pleasantly surprised as I was, and continue to follow her trajectory, hoping that recognition finally catches up to her brilliance as is the hope for all non-cisgendered white male able bodied creatives.       

 

REFERENCES

Arditi, David 2021. Streaming Culture: Subscription Platforms and the Unending Consumption of Culture Washington: Emerald publishing  

Durkheim, Emile 2001. Thw Elementary Forms of Religious Life Oxford: Oxford University Press

Ford, Rebecca 2022. “Karyn Kusama says YellowJackets is a ‘War Story’ about Women.” In Vanity Fair Retrieved at https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/07/awards-insider-karyn-kusama-yellowjackets-interview Retrived on 5/12/2023

 

Rich Adrienne 1980. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence.” In Blood Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985. Retrieved at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/493756  Retrieved on 5/13/2023

 

Simmons, Rachel K 2002.  Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls New York: Harcourt.

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[1] Seriously, try and watch the 4:3 shot Buffy the Vampire Slayer or early episodes of ER  it’s a slog

[2] Instead of a single contained story that can be told and digested in a single sitting, now that could be extended over multiple episodes.

[3] Now getting a Criterion release on May 30^th 2023

[4] Even though this is an important moment in the transformation of the protagonists, this metamorphosis is unfortunately still not complete until there is an attempt at rape and sexual assault when the girls victimize Travis. The assault maintaining  the flavors of hegemonic toxic masculinity that the girls perform.