Ella Christiansen
INTRODUCTION
I have watched some of the most gratuitously violent, bone-chillingly terrifying movies I can find on the internet. So much so that it remains a miracle that www.effedupmovies.com has not given me a computer virus. I’ve been nothing but rewarded for this masochistic habit. Namechecking genre film deep-cuts has won me everything from arguments to an internship. However, the release of Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson’s Showtime program, Yellowjackets, forced me to acknowledge how ‘effed-up’ it is for genre programming to subject its femme audiences to endlessly disposable dehumanized women. Through this realization, I came to reevaluate the original ‘dead girl’ mystery show: Twin Peaks. In reconceptualizing my relationship to these television shows, I found that the differences between the mystery television programs Twin Peaks and Yellowjackets provide insight into the everchanging world of the television industry. Specifically, comparing these programs exposes cultural anxieties about hyperreality caused by the deficit of original storytelling, the genre-bending evolution of mystery television, and the dialogue between media and cultural shifts like feminism.
HYPERREALITY AND THE FILM / TELEVISION DIVIDE
Twin Peaks and Yellowjackets shared aspiration to cinema despite the constraints of the television medium reflects the misplaced cultural anxieties of the hyperreal amongst critical discussions of the film and television divide. Where Twin Peaks aspires to originality beyond simulacrum, Yellowjackets rejects this premise completely by borrowing from art of the past to craft biting fully-realized female characters.
Jean Baudrillard, a sociologist and postmodernist figurehead, argued long before Twin Peaks in his 1983 book, Simulations, that, due to evolving mediums, contemporary artists ground their work in prior art rather than in reality. He theorizes that this regurgitated ‘simulacrum’ is devoid of imperfections, emotions, or the ‘terrorist vision’ integral to genuine artistry. Culture’s interweaving of this simulated and authentic art creates a “... generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal,” (Baudrillard 1). Within this framework of the hyperreal, Twin Peaks is a fumbling hero in search of cinema amidst the serials while Yellowjackets emerges as a self-aware dissenter. Twin Peaks has long been applauded for its groundbreaking narrative complexity and Lynchian cinematic tonality (Lyons 2). Lynch and Frost’s artistic
efforts are, much to the appreciation of purists like Baudrillard, all but wholly dissociative from the medium of television. Jason Mittel who coined the term ‘narrative complexity’ and sparked endless debate about the film and television divide explains that the program welcomes cinematic techniques into television. He argues that, as a “...cross between a mystery, soap opera, and art film, Twin Peaks offered television viewers and executives a glimpse into the narrative possibilities that the episodic series would mine in the future,” (33). This tumultuous relationship between the story and the medium is best signified, not by the television series but by the 1992 film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which, along with erasing integral truths established by the series, begins the film “...with footage of an axe plunging into a snowy television screen signifying, for McGowan, the death of television ...” (Lyons 11). Thus, Twin Peaks’ legacy incorrectly conflates rejection of the medium of television with the establishment of narrative
complexity in television.
In contrast, Yellowjackets serves as a brilliant neofiguration that proves not all
simulacrum is as devoid of meaning as Baudrillard negligently argues. Yellowjackets
showrunners weaponize the show’s metatextuality by stealing history, technique, and space for the feminine brutality and rage at its center. Creators Lyle and Nickerson cast 1990s teen actresses Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis, and Christina Ricci to lead the show’s contemporary storyline. These pop cultural icons “...who shot to fame in the ’90s and are still picking out some of that shrapnel now...” inevitably invoke the images of their young selves; images of their youth to which they are irrevocably bound (Soloski). This flagrant embrace of the hyperreal illustrates a flaw in Baudrillard’s unrelenting criticism of contemporary media: the filmmaking horizon has been desecrated by a century of good art and bad commerce, leaving the marginalized filmmakers who have been blockaded from this industry for nearly a century with the keys to a crumbling castle. Through this dissenting view, one can reconceptualize that Lynskey, Lewis, and Ricci are survivors of the misogynist media of the 1990s finally getting their due in the world of the hyperreal. Thus, through the difference between these television series, one can re-examine the pervasive cultural anxieties about the mending of the film and television divide.
MYSTERY TELEVISION
Twin Peaks and Yellowjackets expose the continued necessity of genre-bending to market mystery programming. Both loosely categorized as psychological drama and mystery series, these two programs expose a phenomenon unique to the mystery category: the genre requires additive conventions from horror, comedy, police thrillers, or soap operas to distinguish a program and create a marketable product within the television industry. Colloquially defined as storytelling following the occurrence of a mysterious crime, mystery television remains an endlessly profitable enigma. From the science fiction of The X Files to the slasher family drama of Dexter, to the soapy teen spectacle of Riverdale, this type of show is rarely ever confined to a single style. These vastly different shows, when observed together demonstrate that the genre is rooted in anxiety, violence, and unanswered questions.
A quintessential exercise in genre, Twin Peaks is disorienting for the mystery film fan
and paradigm-shifting for the soap opera fan. The show found its footing during the golden age of English language soap operas, notably Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless, and The Bold and the Beautiful which premiered just three years before April 8, 1990, when Frost and Lynch changed the landscape of television with the Twin Peaks pilot. To further set the stage, both Beverly Hills 90210 and Law and Order premiered within six months following the release of this pilot. Despite the success of this type of young melodramatic programming, Twin Peaks failed at sustaining its audience, likely because it is not the average soap opera. While Twin Peaks is stylistically a melodrama, it is, first and foremost, a slow-burn psychoanalytic oedipal murder story desperately trying to shoehorn its way into a populist, melodramatic form. Due to this discrepancy between genre conventions and the product, the show struggled to find
its footing and its audience. Jason Mittell explains this roadblock in the groundbreaking essay “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television” where Mittell argues that all complex storytelling exists in contention with the American media industry’s adoration of marketable spectacle. He says “...the norms of Hollywood still favor spectacle and formulas suitable for a peak opening weekend; comparatively, many narratively complex programs are among the medium’s biggest hits, suggesting that the market for complexity may be more valued on television than in film,” (31). One could extrapolate that the miscategorization of Twin Peaks as a melodrama from the mind of an auteur burdened the series with expectations of cinematic spectacle rather than the space to tell a slow and complex story. Thus, by observing the different receptions and structural similarities between mystery television programs almost three decades apart, one observes the mystery genre’s weak conventions and potential for genre-bending innovation.
FEMININITY AND TELEVISION
Mainstream television programs Twin Peaks and Yellowjackets treat their femme characters in manners emblematic of their respective cultural landscapes. Where Twin Peaks only carves space for its character, Audrey Horne, to inhabit both the position of the viewed and the voyeur, Yellowjackets uses genre and casting to craft an elegant thesis regarding the brutality of existing in a femme body. Namely, Twin Peaks uses Audrey’s shifting perspective to create a fully realized female character against a backdrop of dead blondes. Further, Yellowjackets frontlines middle-aged women, recontextualizes violence against female bodies, and kills its ‘Final Girl.’
David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks does not have the best reputation with regards to its treatment of women. Everyone and their mother heard the story that both Maddy Ferguson, introduced in episode four, and the film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me were written because David Lynch was captivated by his dead girl Laura Palmer and surprised that Sheryl Lee, the actress behind her was a tour de force performer in her own right. Similarly, Lynch attempts to afford his femme characters nuance with Josie Packard, in her first scene views herself in her mirror, much as the audience does (03:04). This effective commentary on the internalization of the male gaze is squandered as mere acknowledgement of the symbolic annihilation the male gaze inflicts on women does not make Josie’s objectification any less of a reality. These endless examples of seemingly tame misogyny are best illustrated by the reaction of feminist and musician Kathleen Hanna. Twin Peaks gained negative notoriety amongst young feminists when Bikini Kill released their song “Fuck Twin Peaks.” The band’s frontwoman, Kathleen Hanna has long protested, when explaining the impetus of the song, that the show is “...based on a dead girl. That’s so fucked up. It’s based on a beautiful dead girl...” (Frank). While Hanna calls out Twin Peaks specifically, she articulates the fundamental misogyny inherent in mystery, thriller, and horror genres; maintenance of the genre film and television cannon is dependent on the torture, rape, and murder of femme people.
In Twin Peaks, Audrey Horne is a sexual woman afforded nuance and perspective in a television landscape of dead blondes like Laura Palmer. In “Twin Peaks and the Ideological Problematic of Feminine Representation” film critic Susan Wood argues that Audrey Horne functions as a narrative special effect by calling to attention the tone and irony of a femme voyeur (Wood 31). She exists beyond the bounds of the seen or the seeing by functioning as an audience stand-in and tone disruptor (Wood 44). For example, in the “Pilot” Lynch takes viewers into the classroom and into Donna’s headspace, seeing Laura is absent and then realizing she is deceased when a police officer arrives. As Donna’s point of view darts anxiously from Laura’s chair to her teacher to James, the audience follows, looking for answers and reactions in those images (Lynch and Frost 22:50). However, as Donna breaks down, the answer comes from Audrey who wears a sly smirk on her face (Lynch and Frost 23:22). While most would interpret this as a mere indicator of Audrey’s complicated character, Wood argues that Audrey’s perspective “...establishes the primary emotional tone of the entire series of Twin Peaks, that of human fascination with the hidden dark side of the mundane.” (Wood 47). Thus, finding Audrey in a realm of television replete with symbolically annihilated femmes who are only afforded “roles that are, as Wood would say, “...condemning, trivializing, or lacking” is quite like finding a needle in a haystack. In this way, Lynch and Frost, almost incidentally, introduce the possibility of complete femme characters in the mystery genre.
Yellowjackets, much like Twin Peaks, exists to disrupt its genre. Only, Yellowjackets does not have the time to reconceptualize television form as the show is far too busy deconstructing a century of profound misogyny in genre media. The showrunners valiantly pick up Audrey Horne’s feminist mantle, employing what series star Tawny Cypress calls “‘...a very specific feminine way of brutalizing each other...’’” (Soloski). Beyond the series embracing violence, Yellowjackets is notable for affording teen girls and middle-aged women, arguably the most maligned and least visible demographics, the space to lead a television series. The series does this, first and foremost, through its unconventional lead, Shauna, a mousy brunette framed in her younger years as a sidekick to her popular best friend and in her middle-aged years as a plain housewife. She is by no means a traditional hero, yet her nuanced character motivations and realistic moral ambiguity makes her a fascinating lead in a show that, with less deliberate writing, would focus on her more glamorous best friend or her husband.
Pilot director Karyn Kusama places her young protagonist, Shauna, played by Sophie Nélisse, in the margins of her friend Jackie’s life. For example, despite being Shauna leading the show, Kusama opens the pre-crash 1990s plotline in Jackie’s bedroom where she hooks up with, but notably does not have penetrative sex with, her boyfriend Jeff (Lyle and Nickerson 4:20). By all standards, Jackie is perfect which makes it all the more interesting when Kusama closes the Pilot with Shauna and Jeff having sex behind Jackie’s back (Lyle and Nickerson 37:20). This direction exposes our misogynistic expectations that the thinner, blonder, more moral, and more popular girl ‘win’ the love interest and win our attention. Kusama not only reaffirms Shauna’s right to have her imperfect personality centered as a lead, but also exposes that women like Shauna have only been deprived of this leading role because the ‘male gaze’ has limited what a woman ‘worthy’ of attention looks and acts like. Dead blondes like Laura Palmer are afforded center stage (though they too experience great dehumanization on the basis of their gender) while Donna is left sobbing in her classroom, memorializing the thin, white, wealthy, blonde ideal. With this comparison in mind, Yellowjackets becomes all the more interesting as Jackie, that blonde ideal and our assumed ‘final girl’ is left for dead at the end of season one rather than her seemingly plain friend not afforded the first introduction in her own story.
Further, Yellowjackets’ killing Jackie represents not only the inherent value of the
‘average’ woman but also the slaughtering of the pervasive notion of the ‘final girl’ which is prevalent in mystery and horror storytelling. In her landmark book on genre and femininity titled Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol J. Clover defines the ‘final girl’ as a femme scream queen with boyish qualities; she is tough an ‘masculine’ enough to serve as a surrogate for male audience members but ‘feminine’ physically weak enough to sexualize and victimize. Clover further specifies that the ‘final girl’ is placed in opposition to her friends who express their femininity in a more material way (Clover 40). Where, the ‘final girl’ trope is not present in Twin Peaks which pads its mystery storytelling with soap operatic characteristics rather than horror influences, this trope was integral to horror and mystery storytelling during this time. Series like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, both of which premiered after Twin Peaks, serve as strong examples of the prevalence of this trope in the mid-90s. Clover explains that, out of desperation for strong female leads, feminists idolize these characters, engaging in a “... particularly grotesque expression of wishful thinking,” as we search for humanity in these hollow sexualized shells (Clover 53). The ‘final girl’ is a masculine fantasy and, despite being clawed to shreds by critics amidst the #MeToo movement, she stands alive and well. From Happy Death Day (2017) to X (2022), she has remained alive and kicking. Yellowjackets season one killed the ‘final girl’ and ate her by front lining femme solidarity and killing its ‘perfect’ character. In painting teenage girlhood as an effort to survive the brutality of our environments, in high school or a plane crash, and in killing off Jackie, the male ideal, Yellowjackets crafts a poignant feminist thesis amidst the masculine mystery genre.
Yellowjackets also carves out space for middle aged women as fully nuanced people
onscreen. The 2016 #MeToo movement forced a re-evaluation of the way media brutalizes women in the television industry, from the belligerent harassment Yellowjackets stars faced as teen actresses in the 1990s to the ‘symbolic annihilation’ of middle-aged women who are routinely “...pigeonholed as “the wife” or “the mom”—or, conversely, the career woman free of domestic responsibilities,” (Lewis). The show calls attention to this intergenerational torture by casting middle aged powerhouse actresses who were also teen stars in the 90s. A 2012 Clemson University study analyzing gender composition of leading roles in film found that “At 20, women play four-fifths of leads: Hollywood is very interested in them at their nubile prime. Fast-forward to 40, and that statistic is reversed. Men utterly dominate the juiciest parts,” (Lewis). Along with shows like Killing Eve and Big Little Lies, Yellowjackets challenges this lack of nuanced female roles in mystery television programming by showing that on any network, women above thirty can anchor dark genre programming.
CONCLUSION
Thus, comparing mystery television shows from almost three decades apart exposes the mystery genre’s fixation with masculinity. . Examining these programs through a postmodern lens exposed that most critical anxieties about a lack of original content are just anxieties about marginalized people finally taking up their rightful space in the director’s chair. I observed the influence of marketing and genre on audience expectations and a show’s reception. I also mapped the changes in mainstream feminism via their representations on and behind the camera in Twin Peaks and Yellowjackets. Further, observing the evolution of genre television encouraged me to cultivate an updated discerning eye when it comes to the horror and mystery media I consume. I have grown to appreciate that powerful and problematic storytelling can coexist within one episode and that, in many ways, to truly love a genre is to elevate my expectations for the storytelling that takes place within it.