A Million Reasons for Wanting to Carry on Living

And so it's December, and what have we done? A trip to Winterville and then to Brighton (again).

Song: Lion Babe - Jump Hi Lazy, Nina Simone-sampling hip-hop.

TV:

Justfied. The story is of a US marshall who feels that it's justfiied to kill Bad People (white supremacists, wife beaters), but that's all by the by. I liked the self contained stories with guest star of the week (Pam from True Blood, Steve, Miranda's boyf from SatC, Cameron from Ferris Bueller) in which you have to work out who the baddy might be. Timothy Olyphant, a Hollywood also-ran, stars as the laconic, world-weary, hat-wearing sexy Raylan with ex-wives, a deadbeat dad and a Kentucky hang up (”I wish I was back in Miami”). Occasionally, he takes his shirt off. Therer's nothing not to love.

Weeds: We got a free month of Amazon prime and I binge watched this, because I miss OITNB. There is a similarity in the basic plot - an upper middle class woman is drawn into drugs, but it's more Breaking Bad in the Gilmore Girls world than the Litch. Actually, it reminded me of The Railway Children – husbandless woman (he had a heart attack whilst jogging) is forced into making money by unconventional means. The kids have adventures, although more sex, drugs and judo-based than railways and scavenger hunts, and Mrs Waterbury never had sex with a Mexican drug dealer on the hood of a rangerover (that I recall). They still have a maid despite being 'poor'. The clichéd black family (”I'll whoop dat black ass" etc) stands in for the poor but proud working class family (Perks, Mrs Perks etc).

I also can see where Ryan Murphy got his characters from, especially the middle-aged, taut-faced, racist-but-amusing ladies and it even features Jane Lynch in a tracksuit as an aggressive sportsfan, which Murphy basically nicked for the character of Sue Sylvester.

Here’s my refutation:
It's not that quality TV can't be racist. Half way through its ten series run, ER introduced two new characters, both black. One was upstanding, ex-army, polite, hard-working; the other was a rascal. In nominative determinism gone mad, the former character was called Galant, the latter, Pratt. It seemed that they wanted to cast a black actor as the wide boy, but then wondered if they would be accused of racism, so they created a "balancing" character, which I found rather crass. Meanwhile, over on HBO, True Blood conceived two fantastic characters in Tara and Lafayette, then sidelined them so it could concentrate on the eternal love triangle of Sookie, Eric and Bill, which no-one was invested in, not even the actors. Ditto Lost: there was a multicultural cast, but every week, the story was Jack's white man's burden ofbeing the patriarch of the group or Kate deciding whether she preferred him or Sawyer (let's not even get into sexism in TV storytelling). In the series one finale of The Walking Dead, two characters, one black, one white, decided to stay behind and die rather than face the zombie-infested world once more. Guess which one changed her mind and escaped?

OITNB is hardly like this. The creator said that she wanted Piper to be a Trojan horse: "You're not going to go into a network and sell a show on really fascinating tales of black women and Latino women and old women and criminals". Controversially, I didn't like S2 as much as S1 because it hasn't concentrated on Piper. Not because I'm a white supremacist, but because there needs to be a central character to follow. In S2, Piper has been sidelined in favour of telling the stories of the black, Latina and OAP characters. Diski's accusation that "only the African Americans are shown to be arrogant bullies relying on and rejoicing in brute force and fear to maintain their hegemony" could equally apply to the bad guys in S1: Pornstache, Healey, Pennastucky, all white. It's not about race so much as power. The power struggles amongst the inmates is reflective of their powerlessness within the prison system where the guards have the ultimate control. They can't turn on the guards so they turn on each other. In the same way that people hovering just above the poverty line in Clacton blame the immigrants for their problems, they tribally form small groups and blame other groups, it's the safest thing to do in a dictatorial environment.

Vee isn't the baddie of season 2 because she's black, she's the baddie because of the storytelling motif of introducing a new character to create conflict. She is able to manipulate "her girls", not because they are black but because they are powerless, (in most cases) motherless, and they want to belong. It's a Faustian pact that Janae, Black Cindy and Taystee enter into. Girls who've never had an powers in their lives are now able to control others, even Crazy-Eyes Suzanne can lord it over her ex-crush Piper. This was the main drama of S2, and presumably there will be a different focus in S3. Diski references The Wire, as "banging on about wretched life chances and educational sink holes without losing most of your audience", but The Wire also had a white character as the protagonist (the mixed race lesbian was pretty much an extra by S5), and also used humour (e.g. Bunk and McNulty's “Fuck” scene) to cut through the tragedy. I've never been to an American (or any) prison, but I believe that they are self-segregated on racial lines. As Nicky satirically says in episode one: "It's like the '50s in here," and we do see moments when the racial lines are crossed, when (white) Nicky sympathises with (black) Poussey about her unrequited love for Taystee. Complaining that the worse characters are black is like complaining that the lesbian characters are predatory (for example, Big Boo and Nicky's bang-off). In the scene Diski refers to when Vee orders a hit, it's obvious that this isn't about race, it's about bullying and power. In the same ep, the white red-neck, Pennastucky, smashes her friend's head
against a washing machine door.

Red and Piper have no more animosity in S2 and Piper has come to “read” the prison and its inmates, to understand the unwritten rules, whereas Red has lost her former allies and her Top Dog position. It seems disingenuous to say that Piper beings out the good in everyone; Red has no need to harsh on Piper; she proved her point half way through S1. And in storytelling terms, antagonism can't last for 13 episodes. The fall out from the fight with Pennsatucky was dealt with too quickly, but now Penn has her new teeth, she's lost interest in Piper. She's like the girl from school who'd pick on you for a term, but then had forgotten all about it after the Xmas holidays.

Additionally, it seems unfair on black actors that they can't ever play bad people. Most actors seem to prefer being a bad guy than a girl next door, it's far more of a juicy part. To only have nice, noble, black characters seems as racist as having unpleasant ones. All of the black characters, apart from Vee, are nuanced, not clichéd. In S2, the drama is based around the black characters, whereas the white characters become the comic relief. I'd say that this was a step forward, not backwards. If the second series had kept the black characters in the background and had the main dramatic story arc as Piper's acceptance of prison life, it'd be as bad as the examples of the other TV shows that I gave above. If black characters aren't allowed to be bad, then what next? There can only be noble working class characters, polite lesbians, giving and suffering women?

Ditto, I don't agree with the warm heartedness at the centre of the show. Obviously there have to be some comedic moments, otherwise the series becomes too depressing and unwatchable, but the incident when Piper has to chew through some chilis to make a warming embrocation for Red to apologise for dissing her cooking was an important piece to show the lengths that Piper had to go to to survive. Plus Piper had no other skills - she makes organic soaps and lotions for a living. She has nothing else to offer. At the same time, Piper's good for nothing (ex)finance, Larry was watching Mad Men because he was bored, even though he promised to wait until Piper was released so they could watch it together - the story of S1 was Piper coming to terms with the fact that prison, not the Upper East side, is her life now.

I don't agree that her good education makes her an enabler. Her editing of the prisoners' appeal letters did not endear her to her fellow inmates and her attempts to get them interested in Robert Frost fell flat. When she makes an impassioned speech, acknowledging her white privilege, but pointing out that white people are people too, Suzanne throws a cake at her head. She discovers she's only a "two pointer" on Boo and Nicky's bang chart. Her attempts to make things better for the prisoners rarely succeed, and she ends up co-editing the newsletter as cover for trying to investigate missing funds form the prison's accounts, not as means of raising everyone's consciousness. She's hardly a white knight.

The point is that Piper, with all her privileges, made the same Bad Choices as those who had far less choice. The point is that is she is the same as them, that prison, or homelessness or any of the things that we think couldn't happen to us, could.

And finally when the girls turn on Vee, they don't beat her - even though it's four against one and more than one of them has suffered violence at her hands - they just oust her. They dismiss her, there's no physical contact. There's solidarity against the Big Bad without stooping to her level.

Freschard - Boom Biddy Boom - French trip hop
Zero Dezire - It's My Birthday - Chicks on Speed-esque Girls number
Ebony Bones - I'm Ur Future Ex Wife - I found this lurking on my hard drive from 2008. I don't remember downloading or indeed, anything about it, but it sounds weird and marvellous. Did she become a big star and I failed to notice?