As much as I love coming of age movies and television shows, especially from a female perspective, an accurate (in my opinion) portrayal of the experience of the teenage girl always seems to be just out of reach. Despite identifying as non-binary, I still am mostly perceived as a girl by the people around me and society as a whole, so I am treated like a teenage girl. Being treated like a teenage girl isn’t a great experience: your opinions are usually discarded, you are constantly being critiqued by others around you, held up to impossible standards, and often ostracized. There is no true “teenage girl experience,” everyone’s life is wildly different, and The Wilds knows that. Through symbolism and exposition, The Wilds underlines the differences between a group of teenage girls, while still showing they can relate to each other and help each other grow.
The Wilds is about a group of girls ― Jeanette, Leah, Martha, Toni, Shelby, Dot, Fatin, Nora, and Rachel. The girls get into a plane crash and are marooned on a deserted island. Some of them know each other (Dot and Shelby go to the same school, as do Leah and Fatin, Martha and Toni are best friends, and Nora and Rachel are sisters), but for the most part each girl doesn’t know much about the others. As the series goes on, the audience is informed of each of the girls’ backstories, and how the lives they had “before” the island influence their actions on the island. Leah (Sarah Pidgeon) puts it aptly in the first episode: “Remember this when you see the others. When you try to figure us out. There is no ‘crazy.’ There’s only damage. And when you go looking for what caused it, don’t waste your time on that island. It’ll get you fucking nowhere.”
The island itself is quite a hefty metaphor. The island is girlhood itself ― a feeling of complete disconnection from the world, and only being able to connect with other girls or people your age. Growing up can be a very lonely experience, especially when you feel constantly judged or mocked, and this feeling is displayed quite well with the island. Throughout the season, the girls begin to lose hope that they will be saved, and realize that the only people they have is each other. All they can do is move forward; take it one day at a time. Adolescence pans out in a similar way. Oftentimes, growing up also entails facing our traumas and becoming aware of how those traumas affect our actions. For example, Rachel (Reign Edwards) is a diver who works extremely hard, to the point of hurting herself, and while on the island she expects everyone to behave in the same extreme way that she does, and lashes out when they don’t. Shelby’s religious parents have caused her a great deal of internalized homophobia, and that leads her to judge Toni (Erana James), who is an out lesbian. Growing up means facing your trauma ― they are often two sides of the same coin. While on the island, the girls are detached from their lives and are given time to think about the things that have gone on in their lives and how they are still affected by them.
Certain characters are given objects to underline their specific struggle. Shelby (Mia Healey), a Christian beauty queen from Texas, has a pair of fake teeth that she hides from everyone at all costs. Despite becoming close with all of the girls on the island, Shelby doesn’t want to share this part of herself with them. She’s ashamed of it. This is emblematic of how she feels obligated to portray a persona to the world that isn’t who she truly is. Her persona is who everyone else (especially her father) wants her to be: a pageant queen, a good girl, and, above all, heterosexual. As the audience learns more of her backstory, it becomes clear why she completely rejects her true self. Her father, a preacher, finds out that she has kissed one of her friends. He explains to Shelby that if she is “like that” she will lose her family and will be unloved and alone for the rest of her life. This frightens her deeply, and makes her suppress her feelings for her friend. At one point, while on the island, the girls see a plane and believe they are going to be rescued. A celebration ensues ― they drink alcohol that washed up on the shore from the plane, eat all of the food, and relax as they wait for a rescue team they expect will come. Everyone except Shelby. She seems distressed at the thought of going back to her “real” life. As she sits alone with a bottle of vodka, she sets her false teeth on a rock and winds up her arm, ready to smash them with the bottle. She tries, but she can’t do it. Every time she stops short of hitting the teeth. She stops short of going against the expectations everyone around her has set for her.
Shelby’s hair can also be put into the same category as the teeth: it gets tangled, and she ends up trying to brush it out. The brush gets stuck, and she begins hyperventilating. The other girls try to help her, but she doesn’t let them, and eventually cuts her hair (the audience learns later on that after she is rescued, she shaves her head). She feels restrained by how other people define her, and how traditional views of femininity dictate her every move. Often, a great deal of a woman’s femininity is symbolized through her hair, and Shelby cutting it is her detaching herself from the “femininity” that people are trying to force onto her. It’s exhausting, living every day on edge, analyzing your every move and predicting how other people will react, and Shelby realizes this while on the island. Shelby’s story articulates a common phenomenon of girlhood: realizing other people have unreachable expectations for you, and sometimes those people are your parents. Shelby knows that her parents love her, but feels suffocated by this love when it forces her to be someone she isn’t.
Another interesting example of the show’s use of symbolism is a goat that Martha (Jenna Clause) sees on the island. She is the only one to see it, until the girls have to go looking for animals to kill for food. From the beginning of the show, it is stated explicitly that Martha is a vegetarian and never wants to hurt any animal. When she learns that the girls want to kill the goat, she tries her hardest to scare it off in order to keep it safe. Martha is often berated by Toni and her family about living in a “fantasy world” where bad things don’t happen. She experienced a great deal of trauma in her life, but pretends it doesn’t exist until it’s impossible to ignore. Martha often toes the line between optimism and blind faith: the goat symbolizes her hope in the world; her vision that everything will be okay. In the end, Martha ends up killing the goat by herself, in order to save herself and the other girls. Being on the island helps her realize that ignoring problems doesn’t make them go away, and they will fester unless faced head-on.
The Wilds knows that the experience of being a teenage girl is different for everyone, and even reiterates this fact. The level of scrutiny and judgment they face may differ depending on things like race, sexuality, class, and so on, but even when these girls’ situations are wildly different, the world treats them the same: their opinions don’t matter, they don’t know what they’re talking about, and their actions are constantly analyzed and judged accordingly. They bond through this shared experience, and come to realize they can help each other, rather than add to the problems that affect all of them. Even after they physically fight and argue and say horrible things to each other, when they are telling their story to interviewers later on, they defend each other. They develop a close bond that grows stronger with time, and being on the island helps the girls realize that the world doesn’t only exist in terms of their problems ― everyone is struggling.
The Wilds uses symbolism to describe the heartache and development of their characters in a way I haven’t seen in the media in a long time. Being a teenager is almost universally understood as being the worst time in a person’s life, yet rarely is this time of life depicted compassionately and correctly. Even though being marooned on an island after a plane crash isn’t exactly a universal experience, the feelings they develop because of the experience are: fear, loneliness, and misunderstanding. These problems are exacerbated by minority status in society, i.e. misogyny. Teenage-hood is as close as you can get to understanding what it’s like to be alone on an island with no escape, seemingly lost forever, and only having your peers (who, a lot of the time, don’t understand you either). That’s okay, though. In this world where it feels like no one is going to save you, you can make the rules. You can decide what you do with your time and who you talk to, without anyone else watching. That’s freeing, in an odd sort of way. Just like growing up is.
