Warning: Some of the following gifs and images contain blood.
Dear Hannah,
I know that it’s currently January, but here in this month’s letter it’s feral girl spring!!
(from our texts:
Hannah: Why is spring the most feral
Kelsey: things growing, things being born, everyone horny, weather playing tricks on everyone, pollen floating around everywhere)
I can’t get into a whole pre-amble about how much I’ve missed writing this with you, because I will get all overwhelmed and weepy and it will keep me from actually WRITING THE THING, which is a type of avoidance I have become very accomplished at in the last year and a half. As you and many of our dear readers know, 2021 pretty much just sucked eggs for me, and 2022, while having several bright features, was also deeply and at times excruciatingly challenging in its own ways. And among the things that have kept me going over the last year — including but not limited to the support of family and dear friends, therapy, SSRIs, snuggling my cat, reading poetry, absurd crochet projects — was a triad of film and television properties that I watched between November 2021 and January 2022 and that formed the cornerstone of perhaps my favorite of my letterboxd tags: feral girl cinema.
It started with Raw, a French movie from 2016, about a young woman in veterinary school who is forced to eat meat for the first time during a hazing ritual, which opens up a vicious and seductive need in her to eat not just raw flesh, but raw human flesh. I watched this a week before a brutal heartbreak, and not only did it completely captivate me, returning to it in my thoughts somehow soothed my own very raw feelings in the weeks and months afterwards.
Shortly after came Yellowjackets, a TV sensation that premiered mid-November 2021, and waiting for each new episode to air, and theorizing and evangelizing about the show during the interims between episodes, quickly became the center of my pop culture world. I’ve typically described it to people as “Lost + Lord of the Flies + Bend It Like Beckham.” In the first episode, you learn that the show is about a team of teenage girl soccer players whose plane to Nationals goes down in a mysterious forest. Like Bad Sisters, it takes place in two timelines, only the timelines are 25 years apart from each other: 1996 and 2021. Also in the first episode, you learn that at some point of their stay in the woods, they engage in cannibalism, although whether it’s to stay alive or to engage in some cultish ritual, or both, isn’t clear by the end of the first season.
Then in January 2022 I watched The Novice, a new release starring Isabelle Furhman as a college freshman who joins her college rowing team and becomes consumed with the need to be “the best,” a daunting and perhaps impossible goal that gradually erodes both her physical and mental health. Although there’s no literal cannibalism in this one, it immediately felt spiritually linked to the other two for me, for its body horror, for its queerness, for the aching hunger of its protagonist splashed inescapably across the screen.
There are a lot of links between these three stories, but the one that feels most central to me is the brutal and fully embodied often-frustrated longing expressed across all of them. The longing encompasses so much across them—for intimacy in all its shapes, for survival, for sustenance, for success, for relief. Watching them felt like letting out a good, cathartic, full-bodied scream, the kind I spent much of 2021 and 2022 too timid and frankly sad to find or let out.
Yellowjackets is closest to the top of my mind at present, partially because I’m eagerly anticipating the second season’s starting air date of March 24 (which I’ve warned my girlfriend and, indeed, most people I know, will usher in a return to this show becoming my entire personality), and partially because I’ve been rewatching the show with said girlfriend, introducing it to her so she is not completely shocked when March 24 rolls around and I go full feral girl mode.
Although I am in a much better place generally than I was for the majority of 2021 and 2022, the universe has not ceased in throwing curveballs at myself and my loved ones at a rate of approximately one every other week, so I do not anticipate needing my feral girl cinema any less in 2023. They remind me that one of the most powerful things movies and TV can do is not just hold up a mirror but break the mirror and yank us through, letting the desire they reflect hold a megaphone up to our own. Put THAT in your AMC speech Nicole Kidman!!
Always in feral yelling with you,
Kelsey