The gentrification of Litchfield prison
A bizarre, new phenomenon is occurring: Litchfield female prison is getting gentrified.
In Orange is the New Black imaginary correction facility, the quality of life has improved since we first visited the place three years ago. The crime rate is decreasing and the inhabitants are getting more and more sophisticated, their problems more mundane, their ways more gentle, their dialogues not kinkier than those of Carrie and Co. in Sex and the City... and a tiny bit more cultivated, spicing up the gender issues debates with frequent film references and reflections on contemporary literature.
In the first two seasons of the Netflix series, the opening episodes were terrifying. As a welcome to her new life in jail, Piper Chapman was denied any food and seriously risked starvation because of an unfortunate remark to the wrong person (the cook, of course). In the second season, she was temporarily sent to a Chicago detention centre that was just two steps up from hell: an overcrowded, hostile, violent, mixed sexes environment, with complete lack of intimacy, even on the toilet. Both incipits were shocking and so very efficient in communicating to the public at home that the heroine was about to enter a different, dangerous and downright scary new world, where everything she (we) held dear and took for granted in everyday life was completely absent or turned upside down.
The third season, instead, opens with an episode centered on Mother's Day, when the prison gates open for once to hundreds of kids to celebrate the special occasion with their mums. It's a smart way to introduce the heterogeneous and numerous cast to new viewers and refresh the memory of the loyal fans. A variety of different family situations and approaches to motherhood behind bars makes for a great episode: at times sad, funny, moving, squalid, provocative, dramatic... but never scary. I wondered if this was the sign that something had changed in the series. After a few episodes I had no doubt about it.
These women are not exactly the same women we met last year. They talk an act differently.
Take the “metheads”: they used to be obtuse and violent, now they're nothing of the sort.
Leanne is presented as a good Amish girl gone bad, educated, bilingual and strong willed, when in the previous seasons she was barely able to complete correctly a sentence in American and to think for herself, blindly following every idiotic initiative of her friend Pennsatucky.
The latter was a hater with homicidal impulses, a religious fanatic, psychologically unstable. Now she is still ignorant but in such a benign, naive way that she's almost become the official prison mascot. You want to cuddle her and tell her to love herself more.
Also Red, the Russian cook, has undergone a positive transformation. When the black girls steal all the corns she cultivated and counted on for a special theme dinner, she punishes them making them wash the dishes and the kitchen floor for the big night. In the first season she was determined to starve Piper to death just because she casually criticized her sloppy prison food! Goodbye fierce gang boss, hello foodie grandma.
Other girls discuss unachievable feminine beauty standards, gather in a Wiccan circle to pray the moon and pass an imaginary energy sphere, start a new cult and debate about codifying its rules to make it official, comment on how vulgar is to put cream in the Carbonara.
In the very first episode of the series, Piper ingenuously talked about her imminent detention as a chance to catch up on her reading list, but as soon as she set foot in prison that turned out to be just the naif dream of a WASP girl. Well, this season it looks like her dream has come true, and not just for her: all inmates are very into books.
They talk about Freakonomics and Fran Lebowitz, make very specific references to the Harry Potter saga, quote word by word Philip Dick.
When Fifty Shades is mentioned, I would have expected some dirty remarks, a sexual innuendo (I mean, these women are lonely and horny), instead we only get a comment on how poorly it is written.
After all the library volumes have been burned to get rid of bedbugs, some inmates get together in the garden to host a funeral for the lost books. They declaim the names of their favorite authors and novels, while dispersing their dust on a tree: Great Expectations, BFG,A High Wind in Jamaica,The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,The tale of Squirrel Nutkin, Swift, Lethem, Tropper, Franzen, all David Sedaris books..... It feels like something that could happen at Berkeley campus.
But hey, maybe detention really rehabilitates!
Of course in the previous seasons the characters were not 100% realistic, but there was a certain roughness to their dialogues and behavior that made them believable.
Also, the series was very clear about the prison approach to race: the inmates voluntarily segregated themselves into black, latinas and white, seeking natural understanding and protection in these groups, openly giving voice to their reciprocal racial prejudices. Last season's super villain Vee was a bit over the top, a mix of a soap evil queen and a Batman antagonist, but wasplausible in her purpose of making the black girls rule the place again and the ruthless ways she used to achieve it.
White, black, Latinas were members of rival gangs always on the verge of war.
This year it feels more like they belong to different college fraternities, still eating on their assigned tables and rooting for their team, but happy to mix and mingle whenever they feel like it, almost enjoying the multicultural environment.
Whites and latinas work together in the kitchen and share their food.
Poussey, black, hangs around all the time with a circle of white girls.
Black Cindy converts to hebraism with the precious counseling of two white jews.
We even witness the beginning of an interracial love story.
There is hope for world peace.
Similarly, the kind of troubles the inmate face have somehow shifted from life threatening situations to socializing issues or minor changes in the jail routine: anew charismatic counselor, bedbugs, who gets to do what duty and for what salary...
Let's just look at the two storylines our heroine is involved in: one is purely sentimental, her on-and-off relationship with Alex, now after three seasons deprived of every dangerous and mysterious quality, and the equally mild new romance with a younger inmate; the other shows her setting up a contraband of used women panties to sell online to perverts all over the world. It looks like Piper is having a surprisingly good time in jail, fully embracing her new single status and showing badass businesswoman attitude. It's entertaining, but never suspenseful, or deep.
In one of the season long term storylines, Soso, a young inmate, is having a hard time and finally opens her heart to the new counselor: she is depressed because she is lonely and wants to be more popular (although the word is never used) with the other girls. She is not heavily bullied, sexually harassed, threatened, or in any danger; she's not looking for protection, she just wants to fit in and be accepted. Like in a teen drama. Of course everybody needs human touch and a buddy to talk to. Still, you would think this smart, bourgeois, liberal college girl in detention would beprimarily troubled byfreedom deprivation, uncertainty about the future, maybe a general existential crisis, plus squalor of life conditions, frustrating daily duties and mere survival in an environment populated with dangerous criminals. Instead, her only problem seems to be she's not making friends. As if she were in summer camp.
Sure, life at Litchfield is no picnic and along the twelve episodes of this third season there are two fistfights and a rape. But for most of the time, interracial harmony reigns, language is not worse than in other series, violence is absent, sexual harassment is not more than what happens in an average American college, the inmates, with the exception of our heroine Piper, seem to be all completely chaste (two girls do have a crush on each other but they are bot shy and inexperienced and fearful of making the first step). Everybody is lovable. There is no sense of peril. I mean, even in high schools there is bullying!
The loudest things here is the religious group that reunites in the morning to yell their problems at the sky and get read of the negative energy.
Convicts don't struggle for sanity and survival anymore, but for self expression and social acceptance. Litchfield has been gentrified and it is now inhabited by smart, civilized, sophisticated women. Who happen to be drugs dealers and homicides, that is.
In our favorite prison now there are even a drama class, weekly élite gourmet dinners with fresh vegetables from the jail garden, an erotic literary saga written by an inmate that makes everybody, officers included, wait for the next chapter with anticipation and which at the end spins off its imitation (“Fan fiction is cheapening my legacy!” the author laments).
This place starts to remind me of the prisoners of war camp in Hogans' Heroes. I am just waiting for an inmate to set up a spa with sauna.
Most of the time Orange is the new Blackfeels unrealistic, a Hollywood fantasy.
Yet I enjoy it.
The characters are still strong and engaging, the dialogue is witty, the cast richer than ever. The overall experience is different than in the previous seasons, lighter, but that's not necessary a bad thing. I like to think of it as a heavy, X rated soap.
After all, we're already used to emancipated girls and explicit sex talk over brunch. Manhattan and L.A. a bit too familiar even to foreign audience. We've seen it all. The prison adds an exotic twist to the genre, leading to previously unseen situations and discourses. It opens up the dramedy to less traditionally telegenic kind of women and to new, interesting, potentially explosive characters combination that would never happen in the free world.
Granted, it's not how life in prison really works, but are we sure we want to see that? Personally, I am fine with smart women talking Potter, panties and politics.
