Episode ten. That’s the point in Orange is the New Black where its humor was eclipsed by depression.
Thirteen episode seasons are a little trendy but they also serve several excellent purposes. They’re compact (it’s hard to write filler when the entire storyline must be transmitted in less than thirteen hours), they prevent tedium (if they don’t, there was no hope for the show anyway), and they make it very easy to binge out on Netflix during the course of a single weekend. But such series also don’t always have enough time to both tear you down and build you back up. Your humanity feels compressed by time limitation. Here is a person you care about, even though she is fictional. You learn just enough to be affected. And that’s what happened with Orange is the New Black.
Take any character in the show and you are given ample opportunity to be depressed by her life. It’s not solely that these women are in prison. After all, as the characters themselves declare, to the non-inmates, they’re the “bad guys.” Society easily dismisses prisoners as being less than human, something the show both explores and admonishes. And yet, these people are, well, people. There are difficult backstories, understandable bad decisions, and even scenarios of unfortunate timing. Strangely enough, the vast majority of these humanizing events are so powerful that they actually seem to simultaneously underscore and excoriate the viewer’s humanity. How is that possible? Well, it’s so sad at times that you almost have to become numb in order to get through it.
Piper, our leading lady, is supposed to show the disconnect between expectation and reality. It’s fairly blatant from the constant talk about her blond WASPyness to the garrison guard who informs her firmly that she is not allowed to visit today, when in fact, she is there to self-surrender. She doesn’t “belong” there. What the show doesn’t explicitly state is that the other women don’t really belong there either. I could launch into a long discussion of prison reform and how most of the women incarcerated in the United States are nonviolent offenders. I really want to. I really, really want to. I won’t, though, because it’s ancillary to the show itself. Certainly it’s a factor in the storytelling but it’s not the focus.
No, the focus is confusion. It’s a confusion that is played out with snippy humor, absurdity, and ultimately the aforementioned depression. Episode ten happens to be the mark of eclipse because it’s the point where it becomes apparent that life just kind of sucks. It sucks in prison. It sucks outside of prison. It’s just sucks. *SPOILERS FOLLOW*
Piper’s confinement in solitary housing (SHU) is awful. She’s put there unjustly, something even the overzealous guards agree on. She’s cut off from others but she’s cut off from feeling like a human being. Of course, one of my biggest fears in this life is being trapped. The thought of being contained in a solitary cell is not inherently problematic but being kept from doing anything while in such a situation is utterly inhumane. (Again, refraining from the long on how we need serious prison reform in this country. Okay, maybe not, since I pretty much just said it.) It’s horrifying to watch someone’s personhood be ripped away because of arbitrary nonsense. She doesn’t deserve this punishment; she hasn’t done anything wrong. Meanwhile, she’s speaking to someone who may or may not be “real” who tells her that she has been in SHU for maybe nine months, maybe a year. Even for a violent offender, how is confinement without sunshine, without human contact, without activity a just and suitable punishment? It isn’t and the show begins to probe at this when abruptly, Piper’s problems are resolved, abandoning the question of others who are lost to the catacombs.
It hurts. It hurts when Piper cries while fellow inmate Sofia is washing her hair, saying “Sorry, its another person touching me.” She’s so accustomed to the loss of physical contact that she ends up with teary eyes at the first positive intimacy she experiences in weeks. I don’t know if I can relate directly to her message (I tend to have a problem with people actually touching me) but I get it all the same. Human beings are sensual creatures. We thrive on interaction with others. We require some measure of person-to-person contact. Being denied all such feeling goes beyond punishment to torture. A temporary loss of physical intimacy might be considered punishment but a long-term, systematic removal of it coupled with a loss of freedom is something depicted as cruel. (As I would expect it to be were it to be inflicted.) So yes, I find it hard to watch scenes like this one.
I admit I’m only half sympathetic when Piper reconnects with Alex in a sexual relationship, mostly because she is cheating on her fiancé, Larry. But I recognize that she has been so utterly destroyed that she cannot think clearly or without the needs of her body seeming to unduly influence her thinking. This speaks to the depression encountered at this point in the show. Everybody is broken. Every single person, including the CO and prison staff is broken. The overwhelming message seems to be that humanity is broken. it’s tough to see and tougher still to really think about. As rookie CO Sarah Fischer tells Piper, she, too, could have been put in prison had she been caught for her bad decisions. Nobody’s really that different.
That last point is something that I’ve often been instructed to think about while doing trauma counseling and advocacy work. Everyone, every single person out there, everywhere, makes bad choices. Some people are just unlucky enough to be caught. (Some choices are also certainly more dangerous or socially unacceptable than others, even though they might all be bad.) There’s an adage about how every success (as well as every failure) is part chance and part decision. It’s still a rough point to consider when thinking about how bad decisions translate into a life of further missed opportunity. I’ve often wanted to know why we don’t give funding to schools that are falling behind the requirements… if someone is already deficient, why force them into further deficiency by taking away additional opportunity? Which may be the point that created the biggest well of depression for me by episode ten. How do you fix things (fix people) when you keep hacking away at them?
So, anyway, yes, it’s a fantastic show. It’s garnered so much interest and fame because of that. But damn, yo, damn. It’s some rough watching sometimes.
Dumpster Jedi 