A Philosophical Study on JackieShauna’s Bond

I wrote this a while ago for my philosophy class, and my teacher actually loved it...??Only two people have read it besides me (my teacher and my friend)but I figured I’d post it here too, because why not? Also, if you haven’t watched Yellowjackets, you seriously need to. It’s so good.

I kind of yapped a lot in this essay, but I love JackieShauna so much, so… enjoy!ദ്ദി(˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ✧
P.S. This was originally written in French, so if some parts don’t make perfect sense, that’s probably why.(ᵕ—ᴗ—)

INTRODUCTION꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑

There are friendships that end quietly, dissolving into the background hum of adulthood. And then there are friendships that end in catastrophe, leaving one life shattered and the other carried forward, forever fractured. Jackie Taylor and Shauna Shipman of Yellowjackets belong to the latter category. Their story begins in suburban ordinariness: best friends, inseparable girls navigating the banalities of adolescence. But when a plane crash maroons them in the wilderness, their bond is tested, distorted, and ultimately destroyed. Jackie freezes to death in the snow, but her absence becomes the gravitational center of Shauna’s existence. Shauna survives, but she does not live untouched. Jackie lingers, not only as a corpse preserved by the cold, but as a ghost in Shauna’s mind, a voice in her conscience, a phantom she cannot abandon.

What makes the relationship between Jackie and Shauna compelling is not merely the dramatic circumstances of their survival, nor the betrayal that stains their friendship—Shauna’s secret affair with Jackie’s boyfriend, Jeff. What makes it compelling is how their dynamic forces us to confront some of philosophy’s most intractable questions: What does it mean to love someone? What is betrayal? What becomes of love when the beloved is gone? Can absence be more powerful than presence?

Philosophy has long been concerned with the Other—that mysterious figure whose gaze shapes us, whose presence affirms or denies our being. Sartre argued that we are “being-for-others,” dependent on their recognition to know ourselves. Heidegger showed that our very existence is entangled with death, not only our own but also the deaths of those we love. Lacan insisted that desire is defined not by possession but by lack, by an absence that can never be filled. And Derrida, perhaps most hauntingly, reminded us that the dead never fully leave—they remain as ghosts, structuring the world of the living.

In Jackie and Shauna, these philosophical concepts take on flesh and bone. Jackie, radiant and commanding, becomes the mirror in which Shauna sees herself. Shauna’s betrayal of Jackie—through Jeff—reveals not only treachery but also the impossibility of naming desire within the confines of heteronormative expectation. Jackie’s death is not an ending but a transformation: she becomes absence, yet absence that bleeds into Shauna’s every choice. Shauna’s survival, far from being triumph, is shadowed by guilt, a Kierkegaardian dread that freedom comes always bound to despair.

The story of Jackie and Shauna, then, is not just a teenage tragedy. It is a meditation on love and haunting. Love here is not reducible to romance or friendship, nor even to betrayal; love is the persistence of the Other in the self, the inability to shake the ghost of the one who is gone. Their relationship forces us to reckon with the paradox that absence can be more present than presence itself, that love may endure most powerfully not in union, but in loss.

This essay will explore their story through four philosophical lenses: dependency and identity, betrayal and desire, haunting and absence, freedom and guilt. In doing so, it will argue that JackieShauna represents one of the purest illustrations of love as haunting in contemporary storytelling: a reminder that we do not simply love those who live with us, but also those who live on in us, even after death.

DEPENDENCY AND IDENTITY꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷

Every friendship carries a question of balance: who leads, and who follows? In Jackie and Shauna’s case, the answer seems obvious from the beginning. Jackie is radiant, confident, effortlessly adored. She organizes their social world, decides their plans, embodies the future they are both supposed to walk toward. Shauna, in contrast, lingers in her shadow—quieter, reserved, more reactive than proactive. Their relationship is not one of equals, but of orbit: Jackie as the sun, Shauna as the planet drawn irresistibly into her gravity.

This imbalance might at first appear superficial, the ordinary hierarchy of teenage friendships. But beneath it lies a philosophical truth. Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, insists that our identities are never self-contained. We are being-for-others: creatures whose self-conceptions depend on the gaze and recognition of those around us. To know myself, I must see myself through the eyes of another. Shauna, in this sense, does not merely love Jackie—she exists through Jackie. Jackie’s recognition grants Shauna an identity; her disapproval threatens to shatter it.

Here we glimpse the paradox of dependency. On one hand, Jackie’s presence provides Shauna with a sense of self. On the other, that same dependency traps Shauna in a role: the follower, the quieter friend, the one destined to accompany but never to lead. Sartre might describe this as a form of bad faith—Shauna accepts a definition of herself that is not freely chosen but imposed by the Other’s gaze. Yet it is not so simple to resist. When love is entangled with dependency, to rebel against it risks not only autonomy but also the annihilation of the relationship itself.

The wilderness intensifies this problem. When the crash strips away the scaffolding of suburban normalcy, Jackie and Shauna’s roles are suddenly tested. Jackie, whose charisma had sustained her in the world of school dances and college brochures, finds herself unmoored in the forest. Shauna, by contrast, adapts. She learns to cut, to kill, to survive. In this inversion, we see Heidegger’s being-towards-death at work. For Heidegger, death is not simply a biological event but the horizon against which all life acquires meaning. To live authentically is to confront death, to acknowledge its inevitability and adapt one’s existence accordingly.

Shauna, by necessity, begins to live in this Heideggerian way. Death surrounds her: in the crash, in the hunger, in the constant threat of nature’s indifference. To survive, she must acknowledge death and learn from it. Jackie, however, resists. She clings to the rituals of the past—social status, expectations, the illusion of normalcy. Death, for her, is something to deny, something to keep at bay with chatter and tradition. But in refusing to confront death, Jackie becomes its victim. She walks into the snowstorm as though refusing to yield to the transformation survival requires, and freezes there, untouched by adaptation, preserved only as absence.

The inversion is devastating for Shauna. For years, her identity had been defined by Jackie’s presence. Now, paradoxically, her identity is redefined by Jackie’s absence. Where once she was the follower, she now becomes the survivor, the pragmatist, the one who carries life forward. Yet the shadow of Jackie never disappears. Even in death, Jackie is the measure against which Shauna understands herself. Her every decision carries the weight of Jackie’s lost future, her every survival instinct haunted by the one who did not survive.

This paradox reveals the deepest truth of dependency: it does not end with death. The Other is not only indispensable to my being while they live, but also when they are gone. Shauna’s adult life demonstrates this vividly. Married to Jeff, raising a daughter, living in the supposed calm of suburbia, she remains tethered to Jackie. The hallucinations, the imagined conversations, the inability to sever the bond—all point to an identity that cannot stand alone. Shauna may have outlived Jackie, but she has not outlived Jackie’s role in her being.

If Sartre is correct that the Other is indispensable, then Shauna’s tragedy is that her indispensable Other is gone, yet she cannot escape her. She is left defined by absence, shaped by a gaze that no longer looks back. Her very selfhood becomes spectral, half-living and half-haunted. Jackie, once the sun around which she orbited, becomes the ghost whose gravity continues to pull at her across the chasm of death.

Thus, Jackie and Shauna’s relationship illustrates a profound philosophical tension. To love another is to allow them to shape one’s identity. To lose them is not to regain independence, but to remain tethered to an absence. Identity, once defined by presence, becomes redefined by haunting. In Shauna’s survival, we find not liberation but a new form of dependency—one that binds her to Jackie more tightly in death than in life.

BETRAYAL AND DESIRE꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦

The ethical and emotional complexity of Jackie and Shauna’s relationship comes most sharply into focus in the moment of betrayal: Shauna’s secret affair with Jackie’s boyfriend, Jeff. On the surface, this act could be read as a simple adolescent lapse—a conventional narrative of teenage love and jealousy. But from a philosophical perspective, it is a far richer and more disturbing phenomenon, revealing the intricacies of desire, repression, and the impossibility of fully naming one’s feelings.

To understand this, we can turn first to Freud’s theory of displacement. Freud proposed that human desire is rarely expressed directly; instead, it often appears as a proxy, a misdirection. Shauna’s sexual liaison with Jeff, then, is not merely lust or spite—it is a symbolic substitute for her deeper, unarticulated longing for Jackie herself. Shauna cannot confront the intensity of her feelings—feelings that may be romantic, queer, or deeply intimate—so they find expression through an act that is socially legible, yet existentially unsatisfying. This act of displacement demonstrates a tragic paradox: desire, when constrained by societal expectations and personal fear, may manifest in ways that betray both the self and the beloved.

Building on this, Lacan’s psychoanalysis illuminates how Shauna’s desire is structured by absence. Lacan distinguishes between the objet petit a—the unattainable object of desire—and the real object, which can never fully satisfy us. Jackie, in this framework, becomes the objet petit a: an idealized, unreachable presence whose attention and affection structure Shauna’s yearning. Jeff is the tangible substitute, but the satisfaction he offers is necessarily incomplete. In Lacanian terms, Shauna’s affair is doomed to failure because the desire it ostensibly fulfills is never truly directed at Jeff; it is directed at the absent, unavailable Jackie.

From a queer theoretical perspective, the affair also reveals the oppressive constraints of heteronormativity. Shauna’s desire for Jackie is socially unnameable: the narrative of teenage friendship cannot accommodate queer longing, particularly when it exists alongside the culturally scripted “correct” romantic interest in a boy. Thus, the betrayal is not simply moral or interpersonal; it is a forced displacement of queer desire into socially sanctioned channels. Shauna’s act embodies the tension between authentic feeling and societal expectation: she seeks intimacy with Jackie but enacts it via Jeff because the world does not permit her desire to exist openly.

Ethically, this situation complicates traditional notions of betrayal. Betrayal is not simply the violation of trust; it is also the intersection of desire and constraint, a symptom of a system that renders true desire dangerous, invisible, or forbidden. Shauna’s guilt, then, is twofold: it arises from her betrayal of Jackie, and from the impossibility of loving Jackie in a way that is fully recognized or accepted. Her act is simultaneously intimate and destructive, a misdirected proof of love that paradoxically alienates her from its object.

Finally, the philosophical tension of this betrayal illuminates the nature of longing itself. Desire, especially queer desire in a restrictive social context, thrives in ambiguity, absence, and impossibility. Shauna’s longing for Jackie cannot be expressed through conventional means, and yet it shapes every action, every emotional choice she makes. The affair is less a story of lust or betrayal than a testament to the persistence of unacknowledged, socially constrained love—a love that exists as much in absence and repression as in any concrete act.

Jackie and Shauna’s dynamic thus reframes the concept of betrayal as a philosophical problem, not merely a moral one. It asks: Can love ever exist fully without recognition? Can desire be ethically fulfilled when social and personal constraints make its authentic expression impossible? Shauna’s act demonstrates that love and desire are entangled with repression, displacement, and societal invisibility; it is a betrayal that paradoxically affirms the power of the very bond it violates.

In this way, JackieShauna exemplifies a broader existential truth: longing cannot be neatly contained or morally categorized. Desire, especially that which society refuses to name, will find expression in ways that may wound the self and the other, yet also reveal the depth of human attachment. Shauna’s betrayal is thus simultaneously a failure and a confession—a proof of desire that is too complex to be admitted openly, and too powerful to be ignored.

HAUNTING AND ABSENCE꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦

Death, in Jackie and Shauna’s story, is never an ending. Jackie’s physical body succumbs to the cold wilderness, but her presence persists in Shauna’s consciousness, shaping her actions, decisions, and emotional life. This phenomenon—where the departed continue to influence the living—is what Derrida famously terms hauntology: the study of how ghosts and absences structure reality. In JackieShauna, Jackie becomes not merely a memory but a force, an absent Other whose absence defines Shauna’s being.

Shauna’s hallucinations, imagined conversations, and obsessive reflections on Jackie illustrate how absence can exert more power than presence. In Lacanian terms, Jackie represents the objet petit a, the unattainable object of desire, whose lack structures Shauna’s subjectivity. Even in death, Jackie cannot be possessed; she is always partially beyond reach, shaping Shauna’s thoughts, guilt, and longing. The haunting is not symbolic alone—it is ontological: Shauna’s very selfhood is entangled with Jackie’s absence.

From a philosophical perspective, this raises questions about the persistence of love and memory. Heidegger writes that death is the ultimate horizon of human existence, the condition that gives meaning to life. For Shauna, Jackie’s death expands that horizon: survival is no longer merely a biological imperative but a moral and existential struggle. To live is to carry the ghost of the dead, to allow their absence to shape every ethical and emotional decision. Jackie’s death does not liberate Shauna; it ensnares her in a new form of dependency, one that no longer allows for the simple clarity of living alongside the Other.

This haunting also carries an ethical dimension. Shauna’s guilt—over surviving, over her betrayal, over the impossibility of fully loving Jackie—is inseparable from the spectral presence of her friend. Derrida’s notion of the ghost is useful here: the ghost is both absent and present, invisible yet active, a force that demands recognition even as it cannot fully be confronted. Jackie’s presence after death forces Shauna to reckon continually with what she has done and what she has failed to do, with her survival and her desire. In this sense, the ghost is not a supernatural flourish but a manifestation of ethical and psychological reality: the consequences of love, betrayal, and dependency endure beyond the immediate temporal frame of life.

The haunting also intersects with queer theory. Shauna’s suppressed feelings for Jackie render the haunting doubly potent. Not only is Jackie absent, but the desire she represents cannot be fully named or socially acknowledged. The ghost, then, embodies the unspoken, forbidden aspects of desire: it is the image of what could have been, the possibility that was never realized, and the love that cannot be admitted. Haunting, in this sense, is a psychic manifestation of repression—a constant reminder that the true object of desire remains inaccessible, even when it has departed physically.

Furthermore, the haunting demonstrates how love is inseparable from absence. The very intensity of Shauna’s attachment is amplified by Jackie’s unavailability: the more unreachable Jackie becomes, the more powerful her presence in Shauna’s mind. This paradox echoes classical notions of love as longing: Plato’s Symposium describes love as a desire for wholeness, a pursuit of what is missing. Jackie, as ghost and absent Other, embodies this lack, structuring Shauna’s inner life and ensuring that even in her absence, she remains central to Shauna’s sense of self.

Ultimately, Jackie’s haunting transforms Shauna’s survival into a complex existential burden. To live is not simply to breathe or act but to carry the spectral weight of the lost Other. Shauna’s choices, her relationships, and even her sense of moral responsibility are shaped by a presence that is simultaneously dead and alive, absent and constitutive. In JackieShauna, haunting is not a metaphor but a condition of existence: love endures not only through presence but also through the irreversible imprint of absence.

FREEDOM AND GUILT꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦꒷꒦︶꒷

Survival in the wilderness is rarely straightforward; it is both a physical and an ethical trial. For Shauna, surviving the plane crash and its aftermath is not simply an exercise in endurance—it is the beginning of a lifelong confrontation with freedom, guilt, and existential responsibility. Jackie’s death transforms Shauna’s existence: she is free in the most literal sense, yet that freedom is inseparable from the weight of the other’s absence. In this duality, the story of JackieShauna becomes a meditation on the paradox of survival: life without the beloved is freedom entwined with torment.

Kierkegaard’s concept of dread illuminates Shauna’s predicament. Dread, he writes, is the “dizziness of freedom,” the vertigo that arises when we confront the infinite possibilities of existence. For Shauna, freedom manifests in stark form: she can act, survive, and make choices unbounded by Jackie’s direct influence. Yet every choice she makes is haunted by Jackie’s absence, every act of self-preservation shadowed by guilt. Survival is not liberation; it is a form of ethical vertigo, a constant oscillation between agency and remorse.

The guilt Shauna carries is twofold. First, there is the survivor’s guilt: she lives because Jackie did not. This is compounded by the knowledge that her betrayal—sleeping with Jeff—may have indirectly contributed to the dynamic that led to Jackie’s death. In existential terms, Shauna cannot claim innocence, for her very existence is entangled with acts and omissions that have ethical consequences. Freedom is inseparable from responsibility: to live is to bear the consequences of living, including those that involve others’ suffering.

This tension mirrors Heidegger’s notion of being-towards-death. Authentic existence requires confronting mortality, yet Shauna’s experience complicates this notion. Death is not merely a personal horizon but an interpersonal one: Jackie’s death forces Shauna to confront not only her own finitude but the permanent absence of the other. Shauna’s choices after the crash—whether to survive, whom to trust, how to act—are all measured against Jackie’s absence, illustrating how the death of another can structure the living’s ethical and existential terrain.

Shauna’s survival also demonstrates a paradox of autonomy. On one hand, she becomes freer: freed from Jackie’s orbit, freed from the social hierarchies of adolescence, and freed to act in ways Jackie never could. On the other hand, this freedom is inseparable from the moral and psychological constraints imposed by Jackie’s absence. Shauna’s decisions are constantly shadowed by what she “should” have done, by loyalty and love deferred. In existentialist terms, her autonomy is conditional: true freedom is never fully separable from responsibility to the other, living or dead.

Moreover, Shauna’s guilt and freedom intersect with the ethical ambiguities of desire. The longing she felt for Jackie, suppressed and displaced, now returns as a spectral presence in her survival. Every act of care, every intimate interaction with others, is tinged with the unfulfilled love that she cannot articulate. Here, Freud and Lacan converge: desire remains structured around absence, and the ethical weight of survival includes the unresolved, unexpressed longing for the one lost. To live fully is impossible; to live ethically is fraught with irresolvable tension.

Ultimately, JackieShauna illustrates the cruel duality of survival. Shauna’s life after the crash is defined by freedom, yet that freedom carries a ceaseless burden: the weight of Jackie’s absence, the guilt of betrayal, and the haunting persistence of unacknowledged desire. The wilderness they endure together was only the beginning; the true existential trial begins afterward, in the long shadow cast by absence. Freedom is real, but it is inseparable from suffering. Survival is achieved, yet it is never innocent.

In this way, Shauna’s post-crash existence embodies the core existential paradox: life is simultaneously liberation and imprisonment, possibility and burden, agency and ethical entanglement. To live after the death of a loved one is to navigate the vertigo of freedom while carrying a ghost whose gravity can never be escaped. Jackie’s absence structures Shauna’s freedom, shaping her identity, her choices, and her desire. Survival is never simple, for it is haunted by the lives it outlasts.

LIVE LAUGH LOVE JACKIESHAUNA!!!!

In conclusion , the story of Jackie and Shauna is, at once, a tale of friendship, betrayal, desire, and survival. Yet beyond its narrative drama lies a profound philosophical meditation: on love as dependency, desire as displacement, and the enduring presence of absence. Their relationship demonstrates that human bonds cannot be neatly categorized into friendship, romance, or rivalry; they exist in the liminal space where devotion, betrayal, and longing intertwine.

Jackie and Shauna show us that love is inseparable from the Other. Through Sartre, we understand that identity is always relational: we exist in the gaze of the Other, and their perception structures our sense of self. Heidegger reminds us that existence is shaped by mortality; Shauna’s life, and Jackie’s absence, reflect the ways in which death informs identity and freedom. Freud and Lacan reveal how desire operates in displacement, often unacknowledged, unfulfilled, or socially constrained. Derrida’s hauntology underscores that absence is not emptiness but a force: Jackie’s death does not terminate her influence on Shauna; it amplifies it, structuring her choices, her guilt, and her yearning.

Shauna’s betrayal of Jackie is emblematic of the complex ethics of desire. It is neither purely moral nor purely selfish; it is a manifestation of love constrained by societal norms, unspoken queer longing, and fear. Desire, in this context, becomes both an expression and a distortion of affection, demonstrating that human bonds are rarely neat or ethically unambiguous. Love, when constrained by absence and repression, can wound as deeply as it sustains.

Yet haunting, as Jackie’s continued presence in Shauna’s life demonstrates, also carries a kind of existential significance. To love is to be shaped by absence as much as by presence. The dead remain in the lives of the living, their absence a force that structures identity, morality, and desire. Shauna survives the wilderness, but her survival is inseparable from guilt, longing, and the spectral persistence of Jackie. Freedom is attained, but it is inseparable from ethical and emotional vertigo; life after the Other is both liberation and burden.

Ultimately, JackieShauna illuminates a central philosophical truth: love does not end with death, nor does desire find simple resolution. Love endures in absence, shaping the living in ways that presence never could. It is in the haunting of the Other that the depth of human attachment becomes most visible, where devotion, regret, longing, and identity converge. Jackie’s life and death, and Shauna’s survival, remind us that human relationships are simultaneously sustaining and destructive, that freedom is inseparable from responsibility, and that to love is to be forever entangled with those we cannot fully possess or release.

JackieShauna is, therefore, not merely a fictional pairing or a story of adolescent tragedy. It is a meditation on the ethics of attachment, the ontology of absence, and the enduring complexities of human desire. Their relationship teaches that absence may be the truest measure of love, and haunting the deepest expression of connection.