It’s hard not to think of the drama of the Andes in front of Showtime’s survivalist thriller Yellowjacketscreated by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson (Narcos). Worn by Christina Ricci (Sleepy Hollow, The Adams Family) and Juliette Lewis (born killers, Nerves on edge), the series available on MyCanal since March 3 tells how high school girls from a football team survived a plane crash in a wilderness in the North of the United States.
Yellowjackets – “the yellow jackets”, a reference to the colors of the heroines’ team – navigates between two temporalities: the 1990s when these teenagers have to survive in a hostile nature (and perhaps haunted, we don’t really know); and twenty-five years later where four of them struggle with their demons, literally and figuratively.
The series surfs on several genres – teen dramagore, psychological horror, paranormal – and manages to create a suffocating but terribly jubilant suspense. Yellowjackets sows doubt between the paranormal, madness, hallucination so that the public adheres to the story without asking questions. Will the young girls end up killing each other? Eating the remains of corpses to survive? Are any of them possessed? While the series suggests cannibalism without showing it (perhaps in season 2), it suffices to take a detour by the history of Fuerza Aérea Uruguaya Flight 571 to imagine how these young girls were able to get out of it and why they sealed a pact of silence.
“You get very smart when you’re dying”
The parallel is obvious and the creators of the series do not hide being inspired by it. The crash of October 13, 1972 has already given rise to a film, The survivors (Alive) released in 1993, starring Ethan Hawke. The plane in which were rugby players from the Old Christians team of Montevideo crashed in the Andes mountain range. For two months, the sixteen survivors had to face hunger and extreme weather. Thinking they were doomed, they ended up eating the bodies of the dead passengers, whose remains were preserved by the cold, thus breaking one of the main taboos of our human societies. If in the real story, it is men and not women and if they were rescued after two months and not nineteen months, the similarities are numerous with the American series.
The character of Misty (Christina Ricci) is reminiscent of Roberto Canessa, one of the survivors turned doctor who wrote a book to tell her story: I had to survive: How a plane crash in the Andes inspired my calling to save lives (2017). “I was a medical student, I took care of the wounded, he explained to National Geographic during a 2016 interview. I had to drain infections from the boys’ legs and stabilize broken bones. I was also in charge of transporting the corpses, which some people couldn’t stand. We melted the snow to get water. We stuffed our rugby socks with meat for hiking and used kitchen insulation to make sleeping bags. At night we used rugby balls to urinate because if you went outside the urine would freeze. You get very smart when you’re dying.”
The Survival Team
In this interview, he argued that it was not cannibalism, which involves killing the person before eating it, but cannibalism. “We had to eat these corpses. The flesh contained proteins and fats, which we needed, like cow meat. I was used to medical procedures, so it was easier for me to make the first cut. (…) Your mouth doesn’t want to open because you feel so miserable and sad about what you have to do. For him, they did not survive thanks to the corpses but because they teamed up among survivors, as in Yellowjackets.
In the series, all the teenage girls who had the misfortune to get away from the horde did not survive or ended up in very bad shape: one sees her face torn off by wolves, another explodes in an old cuckoo clock. abandoned that she tries to drive, a third dies of cold… If we suspect that they will end up, with the approach of the frosts, by feeding on corpses, the first season keeps the mystery. But the unspoken transgression overtakes them all violently. Roll on season 2!