The Mirror Self

The latest episode of Yellowjackets (3.8 A Normal, Boring Life) is the next chapter in a long and fucked up journey of these women. For those who don’t know, the show is two timelines: their younger selves, stuck in the Canadian wilderness for months on end forced to do unspeakable acts to survive, and their adult selves dealing with the fallout of their youth which they have never been able to escape. 

This contrast of selves, the teenager versus the adult, is but one kind of dichotomy of personhood in the show. Another, more sinister and as of yet not fully explained dichotomy, is between lead character Taissa and “Evil Tai.” Evil Tai has appeared since her childhood and continues into her adulthood, prominently rearing its ugly head back in season one when we saw Tai outside her home eating dirt, and prominently again now in season three. 

The show contrasts these two versions of her in somewhat predictable ways. “Regular” Tai was a functioning adult who ran for office and won. She had a stable family, a wife and a son. “Evil” Tai is childish, irresponsible, rash, and does whatever it can to save their love, Van, including murder. In the most recent episode, we actually see Regular Tai pleading and begging with Evil Tai, who has taken over her body for an indeterminate but probably lengthy time, to stop. 

This kind of portrayal, where another version of a character is more sinister, isn’t new. It was a prominent feature in Twin Peaks with evil versions of people that lived in the Black Lodge and sometimes visited this reality to inhabit their twin counterparts (and then do evil acts). Another example goes back to the original The Twilight Zone with the season one episode “Mirror Image” from 1960. All three of these posits the possibility of a heretofore unknown self taking over the “regular” version of a character, something that they try very hard to prevent or overcome. And if that sounds very familiar, it should because that is a timeless human story. We recognize versions of ourselves that we may not like or may not want to show others and try our best to either hide it or get rid of it. 

My current television watch rotation also includes two other shows right now that prominently feature the idea of “another self”: Severance and School Spirits. In Severance, the two selves are completely separate and required to be separate, where the characters do their best to find out who their other self is and attempt to “reintegrate” them. Similarly in School Spirits, our main character is involuntarily separated from her body and is trapped in her high school, forced to watch her body run around town with another spirit inhabiting it. 

In both of these shows there is a drive to reconnect a fractured self, as opposed to the example in Yellowjackets of an attempt to hide a part of one’s self. This take on “other selves” feels especially relevant today. In Severance specifically, the fractured self is caused by, and maintained by, a malevolent megacorporation who’s reason for doing this is of course for profit in the healthcare industry and a vague expression that it will be a landmark achievement for humanity (when a specific project is completed). Our “innie” main characters sit at computers all day, placing “scary” or “happy” numbers in a bin. And none of them really know what it’s all for (until the end of season two). Similarly, many office workers today feel alienated at work, feeling like they are doing meaningless clicks on a computer, and then they go home and do it all over again. Workers separate their lives in two, creating presentable versions of themselves on social media, as many companies view them as “representatives” of that company and must be respectable at all times. The other version of these workers, their alts and finstas, are their true selves that they share with their close ones. 

In School Spirits, our main character Maddie is knocked out of her body by a spirit that’s been trapped in the school boiler room. Maddie can now see both the other ghosts living in the school and her closest living friend Simon as a consequence of her spirit disconnecting from her body but her body still being alive. As we learn later on, it’s not just about bringing the self whole again, but a contrast in what kind of life we live. The spirit who has inhabited Maddie’s body, Janet, was unjustly killed in a fire when she was a teenager in the 1950s. Her dreams of becoming a leading female scientist were stopped by both her father and her tragic demise. When she returns to the world of the living in Maddie’s body, she yearns for living that life she could have, being excited at visiting a college campus and the possibilities now in front of her. But if Janet’s dreams were to come to fruition, Maddie’s dreams of living a normal life and going to college with Simon are now dead. 

Many of us battle shoulda, coulda, wouldas and linger on the what ifs of our past if we had made different choices at different times. Would I be happier if I did X? Would I be richer if I did Y? Would I be closer to my dreams if I did Z? We hold inside faint versions of ourselves that push and pull on our desires to make themselves manifest. For many of us as well these days, this characterization of an alternate self is also very relevant. A year into the pandemic, there was a huge trend in people ditching their jobs for different ones in very different fields. People saw the existential threat that a deadly pandemic caused and saw an opportunity to live more freely, much like Janet saw the freedom that Maddie could give her and jumped at the chance. 

These varying portrayals of alternate versions of ourselves – evil, exploited, opportunistic – are not just perennial challenges that we try to explore through storytelling, but each new iteration of the story can add a new layer of understanding for whichever audience decides to watch it. When we see more of the self, the more we can understand the self. 

Andrew Proctor is a film editor, queer film historian, and creative producer, as well as a contributor to The Forum. He resides in the New York City area.