nowinmyopinion

While self-describing as a nontraditionalist, there are times when sticking to what is tried and true is the best course of action. In this case, I will remain tied to my relation of environment with films/media and find the intersection that deeply craves attention. With that being said, please walk with me here as I argue that Showtime’s Yellowjackets is an exemplary example of transcendentalism through a teenage girl with its character, Charlotte Matthews. 

For context, the Yellowjackets are a high school women’s soccer team whose plane crashes in the wilderness on their way to nationals. The story is told via dual timeline, pre-rescue and 25 years post-rescue, with young actresses having adult counterparts. The show is inspired by Lord of the Flies but explored with teenage girls in the 90s and their descent into pandemonium and desperation while trying to survive in the wilderness. Charlotte Matthews, or Lottie, is an extremely wealthy and tortured teenage girl. She’s incredibly private, popular, pretty, deeply sad, and altogether weird. Her home life is terrible, and her parents are completely absent, signifying that she has been alone her whole life. She takes medication for an unnamed illness that comes from her ability to feel or see things that others cannot, i.e., signs from the universe. Of course, after the plane crash, Lottie secretly runs out of her medication. She quickly grows closer to her religious teammate, Laura Lee, who baptizes her in the lake. Lottie is drawn to her because she accepts Lottie’s strangeness and behaviors as signs from God. Not long after, Laura Lee met a heroic death. As the show goes on, Lottie slowly becomes a revered power to many of the girls, especially after a particularly strange night where Lottie speaks fluent French (a language she doesn’t speak) and correctly predicts the future. She feels and sees things, does odd rituals to protect the group, and operates as the main source of hope.

Her ascent to godlike status is genuinely unwanted; she actively does not like it but truly believes The Wilderness is working through her. What does that mean, though? Lottie often speaks to “The Wilderness,” and things sort of do happen with it. At one point, the group is starving, and Lottie, by herself, kills a bear that seemingly fell into her lap. Most of the group believes the bear was provided to them by The Wilderness because of Lottie’s influence, and their devotion to her only grows stronger. There are those in the group who do not buy into the “Lottie-is-supernatural” idea. But they grapple with “othering” themselves by taking opposition. Lottie continues her strange rituals, like making people who are going out to hunt drink a tea mixed with her blood or bleeding herself over a pile of dirt by a tree with an emblem carved into it, begging for The Wilderness to speak to her. What the hell? The most interesting part is that her weird bullshit works. Or at least, it seems like it. Her teachings from The Wilderness generally help keep the group from spiraling into madness, even after they end up cannibalizing their friend, Jackie, who passed on because Lottie said The Wilderness wanted them to. Stuff like this continues for many episodes. 

Lottie’s influence is very avant-garde, as she was not like this back home. Back in New Jersey, she was a lonely, sad, but pretty and popular enough girl who played well on the soccer team. She was disregarded by her parents and fell into the background of most situations. The other girls now see her as a larger-than-life presence to hold on to, but viewers of the show can see that while her communication with The Wilderness could be real, her mental health definitely is. Lottie Matthews is likely schizophrenic, at least by the standards of the world back home. In this brave new world, The Wilderness, Lottie Matthews is not sick. She is important, revered, helpful, and beloved. It’s made abundantly clear that Lottie wants so much to please, and she wants so much to be loved by both those around her and The Wilderness itself. What does that mean for environmental communication, though?

Ralph Waldo Emerson, known playboy and best friend of Henry David Thoreau, was a leading Transcendentalist alongside his buddy during the mid-19th century. Being a transcendentalist, Emerson had many ideas surrounding god and theology, with one of his main principles being how individuals have a self-contained, internal divinity. This means there is not a need for the church to bridge the gap between Man and The Divine, but that our connection to the world is inside all of us and cannot be taken away. Transcendentalists believe that the divine can be found in Nature, that God is sort of Nature, and building our connection to Nature is what can transcend us into understanding the world. There is an Emerson quote displayed in one of the episodes, too, reading, “the happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship”. To me, Lottie’s character serves as a vessel for the girls to interrogate and accept what is happening around them and the choices they make. Lottie is unknowingly their direct connection to Transcendentalism, slowly turning them all into some level of transcendentalists. The decision-making of the soccer team is justified through Lottie’s connection to The Wilderness. 

To them, it’s okay that they ate Jackie because The Wilderness said so. 

To them, it’s okay that they ate Javi because The Wilderness said so.

To them, it’s okay that they draw cards to see who is next because that’s what The Wilderness wants.

To them, whatever The Wilderness demands of them is acceptable. 

Transcendentalism helps us understand the relationship between man and nature. Lottie Matthews is an interesting way to demonstrate how we communicate with the natural world around us. It leads us to questions such as: do we influence nature or does nature influence us? How does nature communicate with humans, and why does that matter? Who is Lottie talking to? Is it The Wilderness, or is it herself? Are they one? There is no better way to understand the thesis of Yellowjackets than the following lines:

Shauna: “You know there’s no ‘it,’ right? It was just us!”

Lottie: “… is there a difference?”

I’d like to think that our sweet Lottie doesn’t have an assigned spot. Instead, she is everywhere.

All Images Sourced From Google Images.