Yellowjackets' horrifying ear moment is more poetic than you think
Yellowjackets season 2 episode one spoilers follow.
It's happened. The moment we've been anticipating since the Yellowjackets first crash-landed in the wilderness.
We've seen some truly stomach-churning things already – hacked off limbs, wolf-torn faces – and though we knew cannibalism was surely not far behind, the reality of seeing the first chew and swallow was nothing we could have prepared for.
It is Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) who takes the first bite and dead Jackie (Ella Purnell) who ends up in her digestive tract. The traumatic event in question occurs at the end of the season-two premiere. (Quite rightly so, we need a week between episodes to digest what she's just digested.)
However, rather than the repugnant moment we've been dread-wishing would happen from the jump, Yellowjackets somehow turns eating a human into something quite tender. Not melts-in-your-mouth kind of tender – that ear almost certainly had a gristly crunch – rather the sentiments behind the consumption were unexpectedly layered and complex. Shauna is dealing with some big emotions as she grinds Jackie between her teeth.
In fact the whole episode has pretty much been her trying to cope with the fallout of their last interaction. The fight that led to Shauna kicking Jackie out of the cabin overnight where she froze to death.
If Shauna felt guilty about her sharp tongue or for falling pregnant by Jackie's boyfriend Jeff (Jack DePew) before, then she is definitely carrying some burdensome regret now, considering their spat inadvertently caused Jackie's death.
With no opportunity for reconciliation – what with Jackie being a frozen corpse – Shauna does the only sane thing. She rescues frozen Jackie from the wild wilderness and keeps her in the meat shed for two months, where she continues on with their complicated friendship.
Just imagine Shauna playing both parts in this scenario, herself, as well as acting as the mouthpiece for a slumped over Jackie whom she imagines is still alive and kicking.
It's a little kooky, but it works to prevent Shauna from being overwhelmed by grief and guilt. The great thing is Shauna hasn't gone full "Norman Bates". She knows Jackie is dead and that she has unresolved feelings about that death.
Or at least that's what dead Jackie tells Shauna when she says: "Maybe we should dig into the past. That's probably why I'm still here. You're like, holding onto me or whatever, it's haunting 101."
Touché, because when they do start digging into Shauna's affair with Jeff things get heated. Not literally, we can't have Jackie thawing out and decomposing. Now that would be traumatic.
Instead Shauna is forced to confront the lie she told herself about why Jackie and Jeff had fought, a lie that had made it easier for her to reconcile sleeping with her best friend's boyfriend.
Shauna had made herself believe that the couple had fought simply because Jackie had told Jeff she didn't know if she wanted to be with him. In truth, Jackie and Jeff had argued because she refused to be pressured into having sex with him.
Dead Jackie then presses Shauna on the details of her first fumble with Jeff. When her question: "Did he kiss you?" is met with silence, dead Jackie reaches a startling conclusion. "Holy shit, you kissed him. Why?"
"I don't know," is Shauna's response, but dead Jackie is insistent, which leads to a tussle between the two. Aw, still fighting, even when one has rigor mortis.
Of course it's not a real tussle, more Shauna imagining a shoving match, which leads to her pushing a stiff Jackie to the ground. With more guilt to add to the steaming heap, Shauna scoops Jackie up from the floor and repositions her. To her horror Shauna then realises Jackie has lost an ear.
No amount of pressing it back to Jackie's face reattaches that appendage and so Shauna pockets it.
It becomes the metaphor for their irreparable relationship. No matter how guilty Shauna feels she can't fix what's come apart and so the ear becomes this weight she carries with her throughout the episode.
Later she takes it out and looks at it, this thawing ear, a symbol of their wrecked friendship and her emotions. A look of intensity and longing crosses her face as she becomes entranced by it, the spell only broken when her name is called.
Until finally, in the last moments of the episode, she pulls the ear out in private and holds it in front of her. No longer able to take it anymore, Shauna hurriedly pops the ear into her mouth and we hear the crisp crunch of the first bite as the screen fades to black.
Shauna is ravenous, insatiably hungry, in fact, but it's not the empty stomach she longs to fill, it's the pit of guilt growing wider and deeper that she's trying to pour into.
Shauna's is being eaten up by a remorse that she fails to find closure for through her talks with dead Jackie. Their last argument had been a bitter one on an epic scale, a cut-you-out-of-my-polaroid-pics kind of fight.
However despite the vitriol towards one another, Shauna loved Jackie dearly, had wronged her and has no way of putting things right.
In that moment, before the ear meets the teeth, Shauna is desperate to feel closer to Jackie whilst simultaneously there is an unquenchable desire to get rid of all the painful feelings she is holding onto.
That ear is emblematic of those feelings and through eating it she hopes to digest her pain all the while repairing the bond between her and Jackie. In consuming her they have, in some sense, become one.
It's not logical, it's instinctual. The act of eating satiates Shauna's need for peace but for how long?
This is no doubt a temporary fix to the way Shauna is feeling. It's possible that Shauna could begin secretly nibbling her way though Jackie until she's consumed her entirely, leaving her with fresh new guilt to deal with. The guilt of what happened to Jackie's remains. But surely Yellowjackets isn't that dark? Is it?
Yellowjackets season 2 airs on Showtime in the US and Paramount+ in the UK.
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