Okay; so I’ve been trying to make my way through OITNB, and it is making me miserable. I thought sharing my loathing with the world might possibly make the burden less, so this is my effort to do that.
Probably live-tweeting would be the cooler, more up to the minute thing all the cool kids are doing, but I’m old and fusty and I still like my blog. So I’ll be live-blogging my way through it in the comments, since that’s easier than continually updating the post. Feel free to chime in with comments as well if you want, presuming anyone’s reading.
Indie theme music. It was fine the first 7 or 8 times, but now the twee quirkiness seems just a little too a propos.
They’re working on putting together the cigarettes.
Vee says she’s taking most of the profits from their illegal endeavor because she’s trying to get them to make something of themselves. As always, her transparent bullshit is bullshit.But all the other swallow it because they’re innocent and stupid. It’s a shame that in order to give us one smart, determined, fun villain woman of color, all the other women of color in the vicinity have to be portrayed as morons.
Someone escaped during Valetine’s day, apparently. Caputo tells the guards they’ve all got to write up more inmates; he gives them a quota. Which seems pretty awful; you need to find reasons to get inmates in trouble? Caputo’s been more likable the last couple eps; maybe they’ve decided to change their mind about that.
Black Cindy is getting petty ante pissed on by the guard; flashback to when Black Cindy worked in airport security and would do petty ante pissing herself. Irony.
She steals stuff from people’s bags and gropes guys; airport security nightmare.
When she gropes the poor guy going through checkout, there’s cheery music playing in the background; it’s supposed to be funny. Same with the contest in previous episodes where Nicky and Big Boo were trying to sleep with as many women as possible. Sexual assault is funny when women do it. Barf.
Piper is meeting with the reporter who is trying to find misconduct at litchfield. She complains about not getting furlough; he tells her she doesn’t have it so bad. Which I guess is supposed to be another example of how Piper is privileged and all, but Christ it seems pretty insensitive and awful.
Anyway, the reporter babbles about how prison is a terrible institution and people are raped and abused, which is all true, but it rings oddly hollow because that’s not actually how this show presents prison. As we just saw; Black Cindy got abused, and then we immediately see that she does the same thing to others as is being done to her.
Seems like it’s the writers justifying themselves to critics, rather than actually trying to incorporate any kind of institutional critique.
Vee is the bad guy on this show, not the prison system.
Also…like, isn’t Piper worried about reprisals if she dreveals prison corruption? Shouldn’t the reporter be worried?
Ah, okay; she finally says she’s worried, and the reporter condescends to her. Are we supposed to think she’s failing or being a coward because she doesn’t want to get throughn in solitary again? Are we supposed to think that not being able to see your loved ones is totally cool and not at all part of why prison is awful? Or what?
Laverne Cox says she can give Mendoza a “don’t fuck with me look” and Mendoza says, “I also use my face for that.” That’s a good line.
Dueling contraband sales. Peppy music signals us that this is all good fun. It’s like competing lemonade stands or something.
My understanding is that it’s all fun and games until someone brings in the heroin. Cigarettes and lung cancer are cute; heroin is evil though.
Daya’s guard byfriend brings in an ipod contrabnad because the kitchen staff is blackmailing him. The line about how she’s pissed because the ipod just has fleet foxes and shit is pretty funny…though I think she was ssaying she liked the Smiths before? I guess you’ve got to choose your mopey indie rock carefully….
Brook’s critique of agribusiness is presented as being privileged and stupid. No political commitments allowed.
Black Cindy flashback; we meet her beloved little sister and her long-suffering mother.
The difference bet these flashbacks and Oz flashbacks are really startling. On OITNB, it’s all heart-tugging melodrama; in Oz, it’s sudden flashes of violence. Gender and genre; can’t separate them.
Nicky gives Poussey wisdom about how she needs to make nice to Vee so Tasty doesn’t hate her. Of course, Poussey is actually right, and Vee is awful, but no one is allowed to realize that because Vee is the conniving awesome bad guy so everyone else has to be stupid.
Also…maybe I need to be more inured to television or something, but the characterization by , “someone told her something important, now she will change her life” — isn’t there a better way to do this?
Subtlety is not where we’re at here, obviously.
This is sort of a queasy moment; Bennett finally deals with being blackmailed by abusing his power, writing people up, and throwing one of them in solitary. The way one of the blackmailers says, “I didn’t know he had it in him,” sort of underlines why it’s icky; we’re supposed to be rooting for him, I think.
I guess you could see it as being thoughtfully ambiguous in terms of viewer emotional investment. But it also just seems like another way in which serial melodrama and interpersonal dynamics in the show trump any sort of institutional critique.
And we’re back to Larry’s story. Which I really could not possibly care any less about. Are we supposed to feel any sympathy for him at all? Or are we supposed to just find hmim loathsome? Either way, watching him smirk smugly or dither smugly or look lost smugly has to be the low point of the show if it weren’t for the other low points.
Oh good lord. Is Black Cindy going to cause some horrible thing to happen to her little sister? I don’t want to see that.
Love among the guards; not physically perfect people kssing on television. That’s cute.
Daya and Bennett have a moment where she tells him that he ha all the power and she doesn’t, which Is why guards aren’t supposed to have sexual relations with inmates, supposedly. It’s not really clear the show quite believes it though; way less worried about rape and sexual assault than it is with the fact that this could-be-real romance is corrupted by power dynamics.
Fig and her husband. “We’re the good guys.” Her husband who’s running for state senate is gay apparently and sleeping with his staffer. Would we really be able to figure that out in a 3 minute sequence while his wife remains oblivious?
I feel like the Wire was more subtle than this. Surely?
Vee goes to fuck with Black Cindy’s mind. “you’ve given up on yourself. You’re a loser.”
Christ. Caputo flirting is really painful.
And Black Cindy comes crawling back to make something of hersel. Though she puts on a happy face, she is actually sad underneath.
They release the senile inmate to the street as compassionate release. Suggestion is she’ll be worse off outside. One serious institutional critique is that they’re putting someone out who they should keep in.
And that’s it. Sad indie music plays as we go out. Dreamy.
Have you tried Sleepy Hollow?
I haven’t seen Sleepy Hollow. I’ve heard good things about it…
I think the next thing I’ll try is probably Oz. I watched the first episode and thought it was really well done. Some problems (the voice over telling us what to think, for example)but overall I thought the first ep character development, for example, was really nicely handled. Stylishly shot too, which I appreciate; OITNB just sort of sits there on the screen pretty much.
I like OITNB just fine, but clearly you either think it’s trying to have it both ways (serious commentary on prisons while being a zippy comic drama), which I think is a totally fair critique.
There is no “both ways” about Sleepy Hollow. It embraces its absurdity in a bearhug and never lets go.
Yeah; it’s a combination of that and of just not thinking the writing is very good overall. There were similar problems with Weeds.
Weeds would have been, IMHO, absolutely intolerable had Mary-Louise Parker been less stunning. Even as it was I never got into it.
At least OITNB showcases talented actresses we wouldn’t otherwise be seeing, in the sorts of roles that are otherwise mostly overlooked on TV. The writing I find to be pretty uneven, as it tends not to know what works (scenes with Natasha Lyonne or Kate Mulgrew) and what doesn’t (Piper’s melodramatic love life.)
Yep; the representation of women of color, and the many talented actors who otherwise wouldn’t get work at all, is the plus. The minus is it has only pretty limited ideas of what to do with them.
I kind of liked the season’s sympathetic portrayal of Pensatucky and her friendship with the anti-lesbian counselor. Maybe that was a reaction to the liberals-hating-on-rednecks criticism that you and others had of the first season?
There was definitely a lot of cheese mixed in, particularly with the backstories. Did you buy Tasty as a math prodigy who had memorized 20 digits of Pi as a 12-year-old ward of the state? I know that plenty of poor people are smart, but come on, unless the kid is autistic, she probably won’t do that kind of thing without a lot of encouragement. Poussey speaking German with her conventionally beautiful white girlfriend seemed off, too. I have a feeling they did that because the actress speaks German.
I bought the Tastee thing. She was trying to impress adoptive parents — she had plenty of incentive.
Poussey’s background as an army brat was established, too.
Well, maybe you’re right. I’ll admit that I’m not an expert at judging whether black female characters are realistic.
I thought it was nice to have a African-American woman speaking fluent german honestly; not something you get to see much on the television.
I think there is a lot of cheese though. How many melodramatic tragic backstories can you have before you start to sink under their weight?
I guess the thing that really gets me is the way the backstories are meant to provide a transparent key to each character. They are each wounded, and the woundedness is the truth about them. It just seems like really facile storytelling, especially when you basically see (for example) Black Cindy’s background trauma, and then see Vee unerringly exploit the background trauma.
I just saw the first episode of Oz, and I just thought the character development was handled with a much lighter touch. For example, the main character in the first ep (who dies) is white, but is attracted to the Black Muslim community. He’s also really homophobic. You don’t have some sort of tragic backstory which explains either of those things (my brother was beaten by homosexuals! my father was always talking about God! or whatever.) Not that his motivations are incomprehensible, but they’re not glibly explained either.
The worst with that is Suzanne, whose insecurities are basically all chalked up to her being a black adoptee of a white family. Which seems kind of offensive…especially since she’s pretty obviously suffering from a serious mental illness.