‘Orange Is the New Black’ and the Persistence of Oppression and Privileges

It’s been some years now since that which has been most interesting and socially relevant in the world of audiovisual production has been concentrated in a series – those aired on TV as those thirstily consumed via Netflix.

Since “The Sopranos,” the HBO series about a mafia family which ran from 1999 to 2007, it seems to be the consensus among critics that this format, today more than the movies, captures and expresses the zeitgeist. The acclaimed series “Breaking Bad” and “Mad Men,” along with “The Sopranos,” are customarily treated as the holy trinity of this era of television production, which, with cinematic techniques and clever scripts, excel in narrative quality and distance themselves from the ordinary canned traditional model.

Television series were normally seen as pure entertainment, but today the model performs a bit more of an intellectual function, and one of the most notable characteristics of this phase of series programming is the inclusion – in many of them – of thought and feminist discourse. “Mad Men,” which is about the advertising industry in New York during 1960s, excels in choosing to explore the negative consequences of a patriarchal culture in the lives of all the characters in the show. The series furnishes many examples of situations where what we call white masculine privilege is revealed, so that it comes to facilitate the understanding of the concept for the layman.

Feminism in “Mad Men” is not expressed, because at the time the narrative takes place, the so-called second wave still had not properly broken out. It is just in one of the last episodes that a feminist name appears (that of Betty Friedan, who launched “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963).

But feminist thinking is embedded in the creative process, and this is very evident in the unfolding of the arcs of the protagonists’ storylines. It is impossible not to see that the success and weakness of Joan Holloway, Peggy Olsen and Betty Draper are indelibly intertwined with the relations of power which inform their relationships with men, at work and in the home.

But if “Mad Men” stands out, it is not the only series to demonstrate how it is possible to insert feminist questions into a production. The series based on Marvel Comics represent women in very different ways from the classical female roles in their stories about superheroes; gone are the lovely co-stars who need to be saved, enter complex protagonists full of humanity.

The relationship between Jessica Jones, superheroine for the eponymous series, and Kilgrave, her tormenter and nemesis in the first season, is a sublime metaphor for abusive relationships and the necessary strength needed to leave them.

Many other series released in the last 10 years incorporate difficult questions about gender in their scripts, and sharp feminist criticism can also be found in productions outside the U.S., beyond the usual canned goods from there. From the clever mind of Tina Fey came “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” a situational comedy which satirizes everyday life in today’s New York with hilarious and completely fallible female characters.

The New Zealander Jane Campion denounces patriarchy through the rape culture in the drama “Top of the Lake,” where the ease with which feminism can also become a cult is addressed. And it was the series “The Fall” which gave us Stella Gibson, the character written in maybe the most competently feminist form on record.

But the series which perhaps most explicitly approaches questions about women – and with a brutal honesty, with as many dramatic scenes as those with more comical moments – would be “Orange Is the New Black.”

For the new viewer, at the beginning, it may seem that “Orange Is the New Black” is about Piper Chapman, a narcissistic white woman convicted for carrying money for her trafficking lover, and Piper’s entrance into the prison system through Litchfield Penitentiary, where the story unfolds.

It soon becomes evident that the series is actually a tragicomic saga about interactions between women who live on the margins of society, dealing with the persistence of oppression and institutional privileges related to gender, ethnicity and social class.

This description applies to the first three seasons, and in the most recent, more openly politicized than the previous season and which has been available on Netflix since June 17, questions of cultural identity and tensions relating to racism and authority are tested in a new and dense context: overcrowding, unbridled corporatism and the ascension of a militaristic fascism in the recently privatized jail.

The show remains touching, but the strong emotions which it already usually engenders are intensified in this season, which is even more dark and bilious. The combination of the privatization of the prison and overcrowding of new prisoners is perfectly utilized by the series as evidence of not just the lack of ethics which pervades certain corporate decisions, but also to explore the motivations behind the violence, which permeates the life of people without social privilege.

The insertion of new inmates and the new correctional staff into the story gives a continuity to the habit of the creators of the series of utilizing characters as symbols of social structures. Since the first season, the male roles are especially used as archetypes, stereotypes or prototypes of groups, institutions and positions of power and patriarchal privilege.

The prison director, Joe Caputo, well-personifies this symbolism, and it is noticeable how his power oscillates according to the situation: before the inmates Caputo comes across as tough, but in front of his superiors he generally embodies the executive pushover.

Caputo is a complex human being, but the show makes it clear: he is a man in a position of authority, and in spite of his suffering to reconcile his genuine desires with the course of his career, he counts on a social system which validates or even glorifies his most egotistical actions and decisions.

The newest masculine role, that of the prison guard Desi Piscatella, focuses on mysogynist homosexuals and personalities with totalitarian inclinations, and it is precisely the sordidness of this gay fascist which inspires an unexpected coalition among the inmates, thus reinforcing the symbolism of the complexity of post-modern feminism which the series seems to aim to project.

The stories of the prisoners are always told through their interactions in the prison along with flashbacks of their lives before incarceration, which explore their psyches and give them a more human and less institutional character; what invigorates this series is that the protagonists are indisputably the women.

One inmate who was introduced this season, however, personifies the hierarchal systems within society. This was Judy King, a character who recalls Martha Stewart (an American Ana Maria Braga) who was sentenced to five months in prison in 2004 for involvement in a stock market scandal.* King symbolizes the power which resides in and emanates from the hands of celebrities.

King is a racist and egocentric, abuses the power that her fame bestows on her even with the staff of the prison, and thus she encapsulates the blindness and the inclination to dominate that are inseparable from rich, white privilege. “Orange is the New Black” is not afraid of tackling thorny questions, and the writers use exaggeration to augment the layers giving complexity to already polarized situations.

The arguments over religious semantics which happen in the fourth season between the Jewish convert Cindy Hayes and her new cellmate who is a Muslim are peppered with the doubts that gentiles use to question the two dogmas, but as the dialogue continues between the two black women, the heavy feeling of historical enmity is completely dislodged, and it is the surreal humor of the scene which eases the approach to such a dense issue.

Romantic fantasies also are deconstructed, especially through the idealism of Lorna Morello, who is now married to a husband whom we barely see, but whose visitation scene – particularly vivid and full of sexual tension, emotion and others’ embarrassment – transport us to a place of empathy for the lovers with daydreams that come from their loneliness.

Sexuality and interracial romance also are part of the packet of topics approached this season, and I confess that in watching the brief argument between Big Boo and the couple Poussey Washington and Brook Soso, I imagined that Judith Butler would be happy with the tension between gender, sexuality and race that the scene provides.

The Asian, Soso, says she loves people for themselves, not for their gender, and she loves Poussey, black and a declared lesbian; while practicing an informal game of basketball, the two are challenged by Boo, the most butch dyke of the series, who is white. She asks that the “special” Soso use some of her “sexual fluidity” to “slide off the court” so that “real men” can play. During the few minutes in which the scene takes place, the series validates the gender theory which it proposes: questions about sexuality and identity are better understood in a social context than as a function of biology.

The fact that all the participants in the scene are women and that the sexual orientation of everyone is lesbian does not stop a sports disagreement from being rhetorically marked by sexuality and the gender identity of its participants. Life is complex, and where there are gender relationships, there are relations of power.

Sofia Burset, the transsexual inmate of the series, a role which made the actress Laverne Cox, also a transsexual, an international popstar,** ends the third season in solitary, and it is there that she spends the major part of the fourth season. Her relative absence can be understood as an analogy for the social exclusion of trans people, and the graffiti on the wall of the common wards, which reads “Burset has a stick,”*** corroborates this interpretation: this season, the brief length of Sofia’s scene reflects the low social tolerance for transsexual subjects, who, when they are not annihilated, tend to be invisible or forcibly reconfigured because of their physiology.

Mental health was also a well-explored topic, and if Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren was the role which personified psychological instabilities during the three first seasons, in this last season, questions about sanity were well explored with other characters.

The rapprochement between inmate Lolly Hill and prison official Sam Healy, which takes place on the basis of the two sharing experiences and stories related to the subject of psychoses, rescues the humanity of both and reminds the audience that madness is not a crime.

But the central theme of this most recent season is racial and ethnic relations. Having the campaign of “#Blacklivesmatter” as a backdrop, the series does not miss the opportunity to demonstrate the speed at which anti-racist arguments are reframed, and in the face of the tensions that accumulate in the crowded prison, there is no delay in having a neo-Nazi group form there, bringing regression even within the confines of the already outdated penal system.

The increase in the number of inmates also signifies that the Latinas now are a majority, but this does not translate into supremacy. The flashbacks of Maria Ruiz, Maritza Ramos and Bianca Flores, along with the financial enterprises they conduct in the jail and the epithets exchanged between them (which refer to Cubans as “Bacardi Bitches”) explain many tensions between Latina lineages that we see happen with the prisoners.

The series, which one can and must see at least once because it is now fully available, addresses difficult questions without them becoming disagreeable, and manages to make a joke of absolutely all the politically correct care we normally take.

One of the dialogues involving the sensational Russian cook Galina “Red” Reznikov summarizes this spirit: by transforming the branding by iron of a swastika, made on one of the prisoners, into a window containing a cross, she says, “When God gives you a swastika, he opens a window, and then you remember there is no God.”

But Goddess, yes. And she loves “Orange is the New Black.”

*Translator’s note: Ana Maria Braga is very well-known personality and journalist on Brazilian television. The author is comparing her to Martha Stewart.

**Translator’s note: These words were italicized in the original Portuguese version.

***Translator’s note: Although accurately translated, the graffiti quoted could not be independently verified.