Yellowjackets is a favorite anti-Internet show on the Internet

Nostalgia, they say, it comes in waves, each of them shattering as a new generation learns how their parents lived. In the 1990s, Radiohead’s The Bends narrator announced, albeit sardonic, “I wish it was the ’60s. In the end, pop culture was flooded with longing for the 80’s – an era that saw, perhaps, its last crescendo with the debut of Strange things in 2016. Now, in 2022, it seems that many people – or at least those who make films and television – are longing for those days when Radiohead themselves first dominated the airwaves.

This ebb, the phenomenon of people reviving the culture of the past every few years, is at best described as a cycle of nostalgia. The problem is that there is no real indicator of the frequency with which these revolutions occur. All thanks to shows like Crazy people, there was also an atmosphere of sentimentality from the 60’s, for example. Adam Gopnik writes for The New Yorker, called it the “Golden 40-Year Rule”, but sometimes culture grows much faster than that. All that is needed is for some children in TikTok to breathe new life Twilight to bring back the 2000s. Or, in the case of the drama mystery / horror / coming of age on Showtime Yellow vests, a deep longing assessment of those flannel days before social media and smartphones took the lives of teenagers.

Let’s be clear: Yellow vests it is not a hazy, rosy look of youth. It’s a football team of New Jersey high school girls who were trapped in the Canadian wilderness after a plane crash on the way to the 1996 National Cup. Some of them – the show is focused on how many – are returning to civilization. But there are hints, many of them, that many bad things have happened in these forests, including some sick rituals Lord of the flies jokes and maybe – cannibalism. such as Lost, he jumps in time – crosses between the childhood of girls and today, scattering unworthy of Reddit unsolved mysteries everywhere. But unlike Lost, its appeal is rooted in the desire to return to those quiet days before the Internet – while serving as a reminder that they were not so calm at all.

It’s hard to indicate exactly when, but at some point in the last few weeks, Yellow vests has gone from a low phenomenon to a cultural force. Example: There is already a BuzzFeed test designed to tell you which member of the football team you are. Much of the show’s popularity may be due to stellar reviews, excellent word of mouth and the fact that viewers had extra time during the holiday season to catch up – plus Omicron kept a lot of people at home watching. .

But there is something else, something even more fundamental in its appeal: it is a mystery full of the kinds of symbols, clues and Easter eggs that the internet likes to devour and hypothesize. There are topics on Reddit (many), news articles and more chatter on Twitter than you can shake the Queen of Horns, and in this deep winter moment of the Covid-19 wave it’s hard not to go down into an online rabbit hole trying to decode it all. Last night’s season 1 finale only gave fans more cannibalistic content to chew on.

All this is a bit ironic, because one of the things that are attractive Yellow vests is that it is so lo-fi. American teenagers had almost no AOL in 1996, and none of them had smartphones. They were listening to Snow’s Informer because it was on the radio and watching it While you slept on VHS because there was no Netflix. That doesn’t mean everyone is watching Yellow vests he wants to go back to a more primitive time before the Internet, but there is something appealing about life in this world – Generation X and the millennials who grew up in it, and the younger generations curious about its contours.

This is also a story that almost there is to be held in the previous decade. If the Yellowjackets were a great football team for high school girls now, they would all probably be quasi-famous TikTokers or micro-influencers. Their disappearance will be the subject of hours of online search, similar to the show itself. The reason why the survivors of the crash (which the public knows about so far) – Shawn (Melanie Linsky), Taisa (Tony Cypress), Misty (Christina Richie) and Natalie (Juliet Lewis) – managed to keep a slightly lower profile after their return in civilization is probably due to the fact that it happened before the era of Don’t fuck with cats– Facebook style keepers before Serial turned everyone into willing detectives. Not only is half of the show set in the desert with little or no technology, its modern segments include heroines who largely avoid it, with the possible exception of Misty, who is now a true drug addict herself. (The fact that Lewis, Richie and Linsky – three major indie films of the 90’s, which built their careers just before the era of celebrity blog culture and managed to survive her anger – to play the lead adult roles, remains the most good joke on the show.)