in defence of jackie taylor: yellowjackets and the teen idol

on the prom queen archetype, cannibalism, and lord of the flies. spoilers ahead, obviously.

Class Queen of 1996. Team captain of the WHS Yellowjackets. Queen Bee. Sexy idiot Jeff on her arm, the student body at her feet. She’s that bitch. Jackie Taylor epitomises regular society.

You either love her or you hate her.

Pre-crash, she functions symbolically—every bit The Face. Wiskayok High School’s dream teen, upper-middle-class It Girl checks all the boxes. In any other media, Jackie would fit right in with your Regina Georges and your Heather Chandlers. Perhaps this, along with her generally unhelpful behaviour in the Wilderness, is part of why her character is so divisive.

Except Jackie doesn’t have it all. Her life kind of sucks, actually.

Her sex life with Jeff is sterile: walls grey, room cold, eyes empty. Jeff fingers her, she fakes an orgasm—and she does it well. Rarely do we catch a solitary Jackie. However, when we do, the signature pep is soaked out of her skin. On her relationship to soccer, Purnell stated in an interview with Vanity Fair, “She gets to escape from the pressures of herself, her parents, Shauna, all of the bullshit. She just connects with her body and connects with herself. Because at the end of the day, she is a character who is terrified of herself.”

How dull and tragic it is, then, that she is only elected captain due to her influence—not skill, or passion, or anything substantial. Her social role.

So is she a mean girl? Well no, not really. Sure, sometimes. She is controlling towards Shauna, although without realising it. She is bossy, spoiled, and self-important. Her venom towards Natalie—already socially spurned, slut-shamed to hell and back—is pretty gross. Purnell plays Jackie with a razor-wire fragility: never malicious, yet insecure and inadvertently insensitive in turn. Sometimes she spits fire. What teenage girl doesn’t?

It’s also Jackie who, in the pilot, gets the girls to line up and say one nice thing about each team member, which she leads. It’s Jackie who, amidst the discord, professes her earnest admiration for the Yellowjackets: Van’s smile, Laura Lee’s faith, Natalie’s rebelliousness:

“I love that you don’t care what anyone else thinks. You’re more completely yourself than anyone else I know.”

Her approach to the team-building exercise is markedly self-referential. With her hollow grin, fickle drive, and compulsive people-pleasing tendencies, Jackie commends the qualities she feels she personally lacks—an aspirational projection from her own lack of will. This neurosis fully reveals itself when the girls crash into Oblivion:

“Why am I the only one not getting off on this boring back-to-the-land bullshit?”

Jackie is woefully inadequate in the wilderness: I will have no part in all this survivalist bullshit, thank you very much. Her refusal to collaborate is an oft-cited (and valid) source of much vitriol from fans. She sleeps constantly, puts off her chores, refuses to eat, and is quite fond of bringing up everyone’s inevitable demise. Thanks, Jackie! Helpful. The captain’s lack of cooperation is a fairly criticised flaw, for sure. But why? Why is she like this? It’s easy to write her off as petulant. And sure, okay, maybe she has an entitled streak (“Hey, that’s mine!”). Is that all that’s happening here, though?

Jackie lives like there’s a mirror around every corner—and costume choices signify this. As highlighted by Vanity Fair, she is always dolled up and never wears anyone else’s clothes post-crash. She has perfected the art of highly curated performance. Control. The striker intuitively grasps the social mechanics of teenage politics, a cut above the other girls. This is her superpower, and her failure. There are no mirrors in the woods.

To the end, Jackie clings to the petty rituals of normalcy, from the infamous Doomcoming to hooking up with Travis. A boy. A status symbol. The queen bee is propelled by a pathological inertia—a flimsy sense of self which, ultimately, falls apart without the safe and familiar confines of high school. In the words of Lottie: she doesn’t matter anymore. The old gods of linoleum corridors and prom are officially dead. Long live the Wilderness.

She can lambast Wilderness Jesus’s weird cultish ways all she likes, but the truth remains that she has no social pull. The one thing that gave her any purpose back in the normal world is gone.

Jackie is depressed. I think she always was. Inefficient, sure. But passively suicidal. Her uselessness is under-read if not in this context. These aren’t the behaviours of a mean girl. Just a teenager who is scared and isolated, and her best friend is fucking her trophy bitch on top of all of that. And then said best friend drops this bomb:

“I’m not jealous of you. I feel sorry for you. Because you’re weak. And deep down, I think you know it. This was actually a lucky break for you, wasn’t it? I’m sure everyone’s so fucking sad about losing their perfect princess, and they’ll never know how tragic and boring and insecure you really are. And that high school was the best your life was ever going to get.”

Alright, Shaunibal Lecter.

With one clean chop, she affirms it all.

In a final, last-ditch attempt to assert the old social order, Jackie orders Shauna out of the cabin. The group does not back her up. She’s the one to leave. No one comes to get her. She dreams of it—love, acceptance, the warmth of her best friend. But it is not to be. And then the cold comes in the morning. Like the queen bees of the team’s namesake, the Yellowjackets’ captain thaws out. Permanently.

Relentlessly pushed as Lord of the Flies but with girls, Jackie’s death is one of the most Golding-esque things about the show. Early in the book, when the boys first crash, they use a conch shell. A pretty, shiny, hollow conch shell. The conch mandates who speaks and when:

“And another thing. We can’t have everybody talking at once. We’ll have to have ‘Hands up’ like at school.”...“Then I’ll give him the conch… I’ll give the conch to the next person to speak. He can hold it when he’s speaking.”

Its function is mimetic: a replica of civilised society. Of course, as the boys descend into madness, the conch fades into obscurity. As their brutality escalates, and poor Piggy is killed, the shell eventually shatters altogether:

“The rock struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee; the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.”

Similarly, Jackie’s death—the death of regular society—is narratively coupled with unnecessary violence. In perhaps the show’s most famous twist, they eat her.

Lord of the Flies is interpreted, generally, as an overall critique of mankind’s innate corruption. This misses some things. Golding’s hoity-toity classic reflects the infrastructural failure of British boys’ schools to socialise young men beyond contrived hierarchy. Of course their attempts at civilisation fail. They did everything they were taught to do.

As did Jackie.

Her death, then, is the logical end of patriarchy’s performance demands. Significantly, the girls who thrive best in the Wilderness are wild themselves. Suburbia can’t contain socially compromised Misty, mentally ill Lottie, or damaged outsider Nat.

Girls like Jackie are primed for consumption: tailored to serve, represent, and be seen. A product. Women are sex. Sex and food are synonymous. Cherries, aubergines, cucumbers, forbidden fruit, eye candy. He ate her out. She’s a feast for the eyes, she’s a snack. Cannibalism here confers the indictment of many well-packaged women: groomed for presentation, eaten up, then punished for it.

The feast—a gauzy haze of grape and gold laurel—is Dionysian in its fervour. Evocative of the Bacchanalia, Roman festivals of Bacchus (Dionysus), the god of wine, ecstasy, madness, and ritual, the surreal sequence blurs the brutal tactility of the act into dreamscape mythopoeia, into metamorphosis. In its frenetic unordering, the orgiastic banquet takes the Jackie Taylor cake and eats it too. In the Lynchian tradition of Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer, our Prom Queen is left to be little more than her crown. Even in death, she is reduced to a symbol.

One the Yellowjackets are happy to tear their teeth into. It’s like a communal purging of what they’ve been taught to be and what they’ve been taught to resent.

Similarly, I think Jackie is hard to swallow (haha) for a lot of fans because, really, most of us are not a Jackie. We’ve known Jackie, been exposed to Jackie-adjacent girls through the never-ending rolodex of pop culture queen bees, but she reflects a near-impossible standard. It’s hard not to resent it. There’s a formula. The one-note Alpha Bitch gets her easy comeuppance. Whether hit by a bus (Mean Girls, 2004) or slashed like the many big-boobed ditzes of horror, we expect her takedown to be quick, clean, and easy. Jackie’s narrative haunting urges the audience to challenge their inherited inhibitions. On my first watch, I found myself struggling not to default to this auto-critique.

If Lord of the Flies—albeit very British and very boyish—dismantles social hierarchies, what does this say about our favourite cannibalism show? Yellowjackets practically disembowels the cultural fetish of the all-American queen bee. Her death is not an imputation of shallowness, rather the shallowness of assumption.

William Golding once, quite famously, stated that there are no girls in Lord of the Flies because girls are much too clever and much less like “a scaled-down version of society,” as he so puts it, than little boys would be. I, frankly, think that is nonsense. As does Yellowjackets, dicing his thesis up with gory precision. Golding’s gummy girlhood is a myth. Male ferocity is clobbering; female violence is all teeth. It’s surgical, incisive, and intimate. As invasive as Shauna nibbling a posthumous Jackie’s ear.

Even Shauna—her best friend—idealises, objectifies, and resents her. As the first act of cannibalism in the show, it typifies this closeness. It’s messy. For once, she takes. The blood clot of emotional consumption—envy, idealisation, possession—has curdled. And she soaks in it. The literalisation of this pulsing, under-the-skin need for merging further scripts Jackie’s Teen Queen Legend. Cannibalism becomes a conduit for social control.

I think there is this implicit urge to cast Jackie’s death as simply a failure to adapt. That is certainly part of it, at least on the surface. In a broader sense, it’s a bit more bleak. It marks the collapse of a system that doesn’t even serve her. What Yellowjackets makes hauntingly clear is the futility of the tools girls are taught to wield: without social currency, Jackie is completely penniless. Traditionally feminine survival mechanisms—cultivated likability and performance—prove fruitless when winter comes. You can do absolutely everything right as a girl and still, your body will be picked apart. You will never leave seventeen.