American Gurls #4: Strong(ly Dysfunctional) Female Leads
Buffy walked so Yellowjackets could run.
Welcome to She Was an American Gurl, a 5.5-part culture series for paid subscribers to Burbank Industries. Thank you for supporting my work! Wanna join us? You can do that here:
In this installment, we’re discussing the most upsetting show about teen soccer players you’ll ever see. But first, some updates from Burbank Industries:
What I’ve been up to: Through the end of June, I’m filling in as a reporter at Axios Seattle, drafting a daily newsletter with a former Seattle Times colleague. You can subscribe to it here if you’re local and want a skimmable daily roundup with some original reporting and lots of emojis. (We have an emoji style guide! 🤓)
What I’ve been reading: Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, which honestly explains a lot, especially if you’ve lost someone in your life to the wellness-to-QAnon pipeline.
The Breeders’ Last Splash feels like a good parallel text for Yellowjackets, and I cannot recommend enough this NY Times story on their experience opening for Olivia Rodrigo, which made me feel both old and wonderful. I particularly loved this detail about an audience member who saw the show with her dad, a Breeders fan:
Another fan, Elle, 16, was with her father, who saw the Breeders at Lollapalooza alongside Smashing Pumpkins and the Beastie Boys. “For me, this was really cool,” he said. “I don’t know the tour’s other openers as well, but I’ve loved the Breeders since ’94 when I saw them last.”
One of my ballet teachers wrote an absolute banger at Seattle Dances on how collaboration across dance styles in Seattle can undo some of the harm caused by ballet’s institutional primacy over less gatekept forms:
Like so many arts that come from a European tradition, we see it poised as the pinnacle of achievement and a standard through which all else must be viewed. I love ballet. I teach ballet. But it’s important to widen our view of dance so that we can experience other value systems. Contemporary is part of that widening. And inside the ballet world, more progressive policies (like some PNB has recently embraced) is part of that widening too.
A recent diagnosis got me thinking about dietary changes that could hypothetically reduce inflammation, but when I looked into the reality of it, I found a lot of grift, not much evidence, and a lot of repackaged diet culture. This post by
helped me see the value in approaching dietary changes for reasons genuinely linked to health in moderation and with discernment:
After reading this excerpt at Bomb, I’m really excited for Suzanne Scanlon’s new book: “Sylvia Plath helped me explain my suffering. It was language that I would use to get help.” If you haven’t read her work, start with Promising Young Women (not to be confused with the mediocre movie with a similar title).
Thanks for being part of Burbank Industries! Now let’s get to the real reason we’re all here: to celebrate the fact that Melanie Lynskey is finally getting her flowers on prestige TV, playing the wine mom answer to Breaking Bad’s Walter White.
She Alone Will Not Do Anything: On Yellowjackets, the Legacy of Buffy, and the Fascinatingly Messy Co-Leads of Prestige TV
At the height of the shallow girlboss feminism that animated early prestige TV and the cultural discourse immediately before and after the 2016 election, a new category showed up on Netflix’s home screen: Strong Female Lead.