Edible Complex writer Jonathan Lisco dissectsYellowjacketss long-awaited feast.
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It continues to haunt me and live inside me, even though I wrote it.
Did a supernatural entity help cook Jackie?
Why would it want to keep the Yellowjackets alive?
Edible Complex doesnt exactly answer those questions.
Was eating Jackie always the first narrative priority of this episode?
We didnt know whether she was really right for it.
We decided to keep it very lean.
I should mention one thing about this anatomy of desire.
Its the name of a short story by John LHeureux that I read when I was 13 years old.
Its the story of a man with this weird, intense desire to do more than just love.
He wants to possess this woman, and he also wants to be possessed by her.
He could only desire the feeling of being possessed.
He winds up at the end pulling at his skin and crying.
You want to consume that person and dominate that person and be dominated by her.
Whats the next step?
Did you do barbecue research?Heck yeah we did!
But it is conceivable.
Go back to Jack Londons To Build a Fire, where the snow falls and it smothers the fire.
If its big enough and the snow is hard-packed enough, then could this actually happen?
As a punishment, one of the bodies is cooked by this chef.
Then he turns to the quivering person who cant believe what hes seeing and says, Try the cock.
Its all laid out there, and nothing is hidden.
Its this perfectly browned body.
We felt, Could the wilderness serve that up?
The scene that precedes this is the sex scene between Natalie and Travis.
He goes into a quasi-religious reverie when shes doing that.
Why is this happening?
Lottie represents faith, Lottie represents hope.
Natalie represents cold pragmatism and resignation.
This sex scene is really a battle for Traviss soul a battle for whats meaningful to a person.
Do you maintain faith even in the face of adversity and very low probabilities of anything good happening?
Or do you just give in?
Were caught up in a rhapsodic montage where she cooks, because what is happening is supranormal.
This whole experience is emanating out of her desire and her need.
But really thats just a pretext, because the train has left the station at that point.
When the Yellowjackets eat Jackie, the scene is intercut with these images of everyone feasting at a bacchanal.
Theyre dressed in these beautiful Greco-Roman robes, with wine goblets and lit candles.
We coupled that with this idea that they probably would have all taken world history and studied ancient Greece.
To consume Jackie, they had to get themselves there.
It served two functions.
We do not shy away from the gruesome, but we also dont want to be gratuitous about it.
But you have to, at some biological level, feel sated.
That has to feel good.
Two, that it was sort of beyond reason.
Three, that it was almost libidinous, like a quasi-erotic, hedonistic experience.
And four, that they were actually having the most harrowing and traumatic experience of their lives.
Certainly taboo breaking, and youcouldargue from many angles that it is immoral.
What interested me most during this scene is how they justify it.
This person is obviously not in need of her jacket anymore.
And yet Shauna feels like it would be undignified for Jackie.
But later on in the episode, eating her butt doesnt seem as undignified.
We felt we were ready to do it.
Were also not in the business of manipulating the audience for something they already know is coming.
The cast was very into it but then they realized what it actually entails.
Theyre just totally stunned.
Then, if you couldnt stand those flavors, there was a flavorless version made out of jackfruit also.
The cast is just laughing their butts off and yet also vibrating.
You could feel the energy: Oh my God, are we really gonna do this?
Some of them are nervous.
We all bet on whos gonna throw up first obviously just jovially.
If anybody was really uncomfortable, we would have stopped and we would have dealt with it.
But everybody was ready to go.
The way in which we filmed it was one or two of them would be onscreen at one time.
Everybody else just had to mime eating, and only those people onscreen at that time had to eat.
People were going for the face and the legs.
And yet theyre so talented that they grounded it somehow.
We had long conversations with them about tone, and I also talked to Ben about it extensively.
Thirty-five seconds, 40 seconds.
To do that, you really have to overshoot, and that was fun on set.
On the day that we were shooting the Greco-Roman feast, they were in such good spirits.
They came out and they were just regal the costumes by Amy Parris were so special.
One of the challenges we had is because they were so unique, we didnt really have duplicates.
We had to be a little craftier and a little bit more strategic about how we shot.
But the way they start is with that one strawberry.
But then theres Coach Ben, whos not down with any of this.
Was it established early on that Coach Ben would abstain?Yes.
Theres a third person saying, You saved his life, so he must love you.
And the man who saved the mans life said, No, obviously, he hates me.
Hell despise me forever.
And in this case, the abstinence.
Coach Scott is in a tricky spot right now.
Hes not experiencing the same kind of rhapsodic freedom as these young women are.
Because he abstained, he must think hes superior to them.
He must think what they did was awful and evil, and they feel judged by that.
And because they feel judged, they may have to neutralize him in some way.
I wrote, Is he next?Almost like we planned it!
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
