'Orange Is The New Black' - Seasons 1-3

'Prisoner', American Style

I used to watch 'Prisoner' as a kid in NYC. IN the reverse of my current situation where I pine for things New York, I was in New York, oddly pining for things Australian. The accent, the diction, the delivery, the clunkiness was all oddly appealing. I think it was broadcast on one of the loser stations that didn't have baseball. It may even have been PBS. Anyway, watching a TV series about a female prison keeps evoking those memories, although I have no particular fondness for the genre of prison stories or lesbians in prison stories. I read 'Papillon' when was 13 and it left a lasting impression of just how awful any kind of incarceration gets, so if anything, it's a genre I'd rather avoid.

Still, OITNB gives us an updated, fresher, more upfront and frank view of life behind bars for women in America. The drama is sort of unfocused, but there are plenty of interesting, compelling characters running around.

It's hard to watch in a binge sitting. There's a lot going on and the subject doesn't lend itself to wanting to see a lot of it at once. It gives you this pall of depressing dread about incarceration, and then springs some black humoured moments on you in-between. Mostly I wanted to run out of the room for the first 3 to 4 episodes; it's good but I felt "I don't really need this in my life!" for a long while. After a while I learned ignore it - but honestly I'd much rather be watching Ricky Gervais' 'Derek'.

What's Good About It

The story is pretty simple. Piper's ex-lesbian lover is a mid-level drug trafficker who gets caught and offers up the main character Piper to the authorities, which places her in this minimum security prison. There, we get to see what life's like in minimum security prison as she awaits her time to pass. Of course, this being prison, waiting quietly just doesn't figure into it the way it might in other circumstances.

Considering the material and the risk of it turning into a soap or a serial sitcom, the performances of the actors is what stays with you the most. I'm not big fan of the main character Piper, but Taylor Schilling is remarkable in the role. Kate Mulgrew's Red Reznikov is a fantastic study and a far cry from Captain Janeway (another character of Mulgrew's that I liked), while the lesser known black actors keep turning in amazing character studies, episode after episode.

I found myself empathising with most of the characters' backstories, whether it be the transgender firman turned hairdresser, or the lesbian army brat or the political activist nun. There's a lot of meat there to these stories that offer up a kaleidoscope of American society in different strata. All the characters are motivated and energetic. It's surprising how well the cast and writers have put together this series. It's great watching whole stretches of screen time centred around non-white people having very involved scenes. Some tremendous performances are being captured and some amazing ideas get explored by this part of the show.

What's Bad About It

I really don't like Piper Chapman. I haven't read the book so I don't know but I imagine I wouldn't like Piper Kerman whose book this is all based upon, much either. It's hard to like somebody so shallow, manipulative, self-satisfied and dishonest as Piper. This makes it a bit of a struggle to stay with the show. But that's probably just me being a moralist with the luxury of freedom.

The show can also be tedious at times. I'm not sure if any of the slow burn stories are going to amount to anything and this being television, the obvious villains that come and go are perfunctory and boring when compared to the complexity of the actual characters we regularly see. Vee Parker who comes in to lead the black women is a psychopath. Her charges are more interesting than anything Vee has to offer up, but the dynamics demand that Vee be the antagonist and the story - as loose as it is - lumbers around the psychopathic persona of Vee for the entire season.

Overall, it is a good show so my complaints are purely personal taste things. It's on a losing wicket with me: It's about prisons, lesbians, psychos, and the brutality of solitary confinement within the  incarceration. They're not exactly things that excite me. It's sort of in contrast to something like 'Mad Men', which has great production design, with loads of beautiful things I like looking at. This is decidedly not a show about beautiful things - it's more a show about ugly things and ugly truths. It gets a little trying after a while. I found it much harder to binge watch this than the ugly politics in say, 'House of Cards'.

What's Interesting About It

Watching this show, you'd think that gender outlines are a lot less firm with women than men. I don't know what to make of it, but half the main characters are either practicing homosexuals or bisexual, except the abject religious nut who rails against homosexuality. There's also the feeling you get that the best thing about lesbianism is that it is all a girl's own sexual adventure. Having it explained that the best technique for making a woman come is "two (fingers) in the pink and one in the stink" is at once amusing but also confronting. Once you get past that, it's all a blur of girls behaving badly in prison.

I'm no expert but I never would have guessed that gender identity amongst women was this fluid. The transgender Sophia stands out as being somebody who is totally fixated rigidly on their gender identity, but of course, she started as a he. Otherwise all kinds of characters are seduced into homo-sex in a way that is hard to imagine with a male population. You learn something new everyday.

Absent Fathers

There is a layered motif in this series, which is the absence of fathers. There is a warden to this prison in Litchfield who is never seen. Presumably he is like an unseen God-like figure of the microcosm that is the prison. Late in series 3 the warden is replaced by a corporation, and it happens completely off screen.  It's worse than a silent God; it's more like a silent Wizard of Oz who says he's in charge but the place is totally out of control.

Similarly, Piper's own father is hardly seen at the prison and we are shown how absent he was from her life while growing up. The whole prison is a hellish nightmare for her precisely because it has the dynamic of a schoolyard but on perpetual camp. All of this gives the impression that the emotionally immature are being sadistically schooled in the ways of a cruel world. Echoes of Marquis de Sade's writings come to mind as well as 'Milgrim's 37' experiment.

The show certainly presents a strong argument that if the state insists on strong Law & Order implementation and incarcerates people, it certainly has the obligation to better look after the human beings it incarcerates. Of course, the way the show sees it, the authority figures are habitually absent and so the lower level corrections officers are made to bridge the unbridgeable gaps to sustain the system. It seems entirely appropriate that as a Gen-X text, the absent father is central to the construction of both the riskiness of character as well as the sense of being adrift in chaos that pervades the show.

Embracing The Inner Criminal

It is hard to fathom what the point of incarceration is, from the point of rehabilitation. The show makes an explicit case for how institutionalising people results in recidivism, just to get back into the institution, which is a perverse outcome. Worse still, you don't get the feeling that the COs - the corrections officers - do any 'corrections' at all. People are essentially incarcerated under our justice system to be taken away from normalcy as punishment. As such, there is really no thought given as to what kind people they become through the institutionalisation, and in what shape they are returned to society.

Piper spends much of her time struggling to fit in and accepting she is there because she committed a crime. This leads her to accepting herself as an inmate that is deservedly inside the prison. From there, she rationalises that her criminality is somehow integral to her being. It's an alarming mentation, but we are forced to accept it as the audience because we ca;t conceive of how she will rereleased and whether she can truly return to the outside world.Instead, we are forced to share this notion that prison is a place where people discover their inner selves and often this inner self is a criminal.

If this is the point of the justice system, it makes you wonder how anybody can return to the world, with their mental health intact.

Mad Women - The Unattended Insanity 

One of the more troubling episodes involves an elderly inmate who clearly has advanced Alzheimers. Unable to deal with the inmate having such a condition, the prison releases her on "compassionate grounds" so it does not have to deal with her illness. We are led to believe the old woman who is without any kin or friends, will die as a homeless person in the wider world. It is one of the grosser ironies of the system wherein they are happy to make people mentally ill through the prison system, but the very system is totally unwilling to deal with the mentally ill subjects in its care.

There is a broader issue of whether we are medicalising criminal problems, but in some ways watching this show you get the feeling that there is a lot more of criminalising medical problems going on. The character Suzanne Warren clearly is suffering from something that looks like schizophrenia and nobody seems to be noticing it as a problem walking around the prison compound. There are plenty of other characters exhibiting mania and manic depressive behaviour. Even Piper seems to be somewhat manic. Mind you, she also displays signs that she is a psychopath, so it's hard to say.

It's not a problem unique to America. One is reminded of a survey in the early 2000s that found 70% of the NSW prison population were depressed. The warden made a statement in response to the findings that that was the point of prisons - to make people feel bad for the crimes they committed and if there were a low number of depressed prisoners, he would feel he wasn't doing his job. While I don't know what the solution might be, prison systems seem to be a form of punitive mental asylum in the manner of 19th century asylums.

Lesbianism As A Way Of Life

The main character Piper emerges in the show as a lesbian. We are first introduced to her as having a fiancee and being essentially white, upper class and normatively heterosexual. This stereotype is steadily eroded to reveal she was a lesbian in the past and a willing lesbian in the present tense, while she cheats on her fiancee. She is surrounded by lesbians of varying assertiveness, but if her natural inclination isn't towards homosexuality, it's hard to conceive of the appeal as being so appealing as to be easily overcome. This is the bit where I just cannot fathom this show. On one level, it is about criminal incarceration, but on another level, it seems more like "Piper's lesbian holiday camp".

Early on in Season 1, Pipers pursued by Crazy Eyes who was to make Piper her 'prison wife'. Piper refuses the advances, and we are given the strong impression that this is because Piper has fiancee outside of the joint, but in actual fact as the show progresses it becomes evident that it isn't lesbian sex she's worried about, nor the infidelity it represents, but the fact that Crazy Eyes is black. On that level, Piper is not above the rank racism that swirls around her in prison.

It's a strange show too in that you see more moments of lesbian intimacy than heterosexual intimacy, and heterosexual sex is portrayed in a very unflattering and uninviting way, whereas the lesbian sex - particularly the bits enjoyed by Piper - are portrayed around shots of ecstatic carnal abandon on Piper's face. The show is decidedly down on regular straight sex, and idealises lesbian sex. Which is, neither here nor there, but effectively (and oddly) in praise of prison life. Piper's having a gay old time; she just won't admit it because she's meant to be ashamed to be in prison, but it is hard to argue she is seriously inconvenienced. She has a departure date, and so she is merely a tourist from the affluent world, slumming it for fun and pleasure. Her complaints are largely ornamental.