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 20th 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.
[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 30th 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.
