It seems in Hollywood, you can’t talk about women without talking about witches.
This is a guest post by Kaitlyn Soligan.
If “Women in Television” has a unifying theme of the moment, it is this: Everybody Wants a Witch. American Horror Story, Witches of East End, Salem, and HBO’s new Jenji Kohan projectThe Devil You Know are only the latest instances in recent years of television venturing deeply into witchy woods, with decidedly mixed results. Besides a litany of recent shows devoted solely to Magical Women and Where to Find Them, witches also play various parts in the plethora of supernatural and fantasy shows on television right now; witches are featured in main or recurring roles on Supernatural, The Vampire Diaries, and Grimm, among recent others. More general mainstream fare, including Outlander, Pixar’s Brave, and even the upcoming Avengers: Age of Ultron have fantastical elements and crucial plot points that include or revolve entirely around witchy women. It seems in Hollywood, you can’t talk about women without talking about witches.
Historically, witches have been everything from women who speak their mind to women who own property. Witches have been men who supported women or wouldn’t back down from an argument; witches have been those with a more fluid gender expression or characteristics that failed to fit neatly into an acceptable box on medical forms. Witches have been those with a race or ethnicity that differed in any way from that of those around them, particularly when they occupied the space they did as a result of forceful intervention and colonization. Witches have been the poor and disenfranchised and unlucky. Witches have been sexually powerful and enviable, wealthy and confident; occasionally, witches have been anyone who accused someone else of being a witch, when the tides quickly turned and luck was unsettlingly re-distributed. Witches have those with a faith that differed even slightly from the dominant one of the place and time, including, at intervals, Jews, Pagans, Wiccans, practicers of Hoodoo, and those with basic medical knowledge or an interest in science, among others.
Witches are in the very fabric and nature of gender and queerness and the margins we live in. So if “the season of the witch” just won’t end, how, exactly, should a show about witches be? How about this: Womyn-centric. Gender queering. Aware of race and ethnicity and faith and their role and lived reality in any particular time and space. Deeply intersectional and examining of those aforementioned spaces in the context of that intersectionality. And, without reservation and above all else: totally, joyfully bonkers.
Recent attempts to bring witches to the mainstream have succeeded and failed in almost equal measure. American Horror Story: Coven, created by an out gay man, had a sense of camp about it that harkened back to The Witches; it had something of the horrible feminine in those early images of Kathy Bates smearing her face with blood, of what women will do for power when power is ferociously limited by age and desire; it had some notion to examine race and its implications in magic and magical portrayals. Unfortunately, it also had an abhorrently mishandled rape scene in the first episode, and, whether for fear or incompetence, neither asked the right questions about race nor answered any at all.
Salem, while certainly a missed opportunity to examine the actual Salem witch trials, which were consumed by all of these questions and more, also has camp, gore, and a gleefully nuts sexuality going for it. Witches – both men and women – are everywhere among the good townspeople, who are painfully repressed and not particularly good. The devil is real and holding massive orgies in the woods. Two witches seduce a man, pin him down, and force-feed him a frog. One witch feeds the frog nightly from an extra nipple. Pure insanity abounds.
Also, Salem is pretty gross.
What Salem and so many other shows that feature witches gets painfully wrong is race. The character of Tituba is weak and jealous, and, as one of the only characters with implications of queerness, leaves us with a jealous almost-lesbian who practices a weirdly racialized magic as the sole character of color on the show. While plenty of other characters are similarly messy or even mishandled, having the entire diversity of the cast rest on that one token portrayal makes Tituba’s mismanagement unconscionable as well as flat-out uncomfortable. Moreover, Tituba actually is a fascinating historical figure, and deserves some of the dignity of the woman herself, whose story is one of dislocation and survival in an extraordinarily dangerous time.
Surprisingly, Lifetime’s Witches of East End’s sometimes diverse cast handled the intersection of race and magic well – to a point. One early character was an African American librarian who thought magic was a fun game of pretend and was the incidental victim of real magic gone wrong, as was a brief romantic lead who became a ghost (obviously). A later romantic interest for one of the main characters was a badass warrior witch that resulted in a few episodes that explored a magical, interracial same-sex relationship of equals, making those traits incidental and the relationship itself about commitment and ego and family. The cast on the whole was diverse in a laid-back way that really worked, until a storyline about an ostensibly Caribbean witch fell into a trap earlier laid by historical misrepresentation, AHS: Coven, Beautiful Creatures, and many others: magic was suddenly racialized, with the Caribbean witch doing dark “blood magic” with bones and powders that was nothing like the ostensibly “better” or cleaner magic practiced by the white leads.
You can feel the sexual tension radiating off of this photo, and these two weren’t even the ones sleeping together.
Aside from the sadly typical mishandling of representation, Witches of East End had some of the things one would hope for; certainly bonkers, sexual, funny, community and family oriented, it also had a messy, sometimes defiantly non-existent narrative structure that in and of itself queered television – if only by making it almost unfollowable, requiring the viewer to give up on the notion of neat boundaries and control.
It’s this new Jenji Kohan HBO vehicle that shows the most promise and gives audiences the most to hope for in terms of what genre-bending things a show about witches could bring to TV. Kohan has headed the excellently written and extremely diverse Orange Is the New Black, proving that she gets women and deliberately women-centric spaces in television. That show also did some cool things with narrative structure, partly as a way to bring an audience in through a typical white-girl-fish-out-of-water point of entry and then go to different, much more interesting places. That cast gave us the unbelievably fabulous Uzo Aduba. The Devil You Know offers similar cause for excitement. It’s full of less-knowns who’ve shown enormous potential, particularly Zawe Ashton, who was part of the weird and moving Dreams of a Life, a queer kind of cinematic endeavor in and of itself, and better-knowns like Karen Gillan, a movie star and genre favorite in her own right as well as a badass action star who shaved her head for a role. Most significantly, the cast includes Eddie Izzard, simultaneously a seriously phenomenal dramatic actor and one of the greatest stand-up comedians in the world, who once explained to a reporter, “Drag means costume. What I do is just wearing a dress.” And all of these moving pieces will be on HBO, the venue that brought us True Blood, which was, for all its problems, queer, dark, funny, extremely sexual, and absolutely, joyfully, bonkers.
Witches are an energetic reality; like ghosts, monsters, and loneliness, they wouldn’t have such a deep psychological pull if they weren’t. We examine these things because they obsess us and keep us awake at night; we examine these things because they are an unquantifiable, intangible, undefinable reality, but a reality all the same. Witches have been terrified victims, sexual beings, rich women trapped in penthouse apartments and more; all of this is so. But what witches do has been and is another matter entirely. Witches upend: dreams, homes, lives, whole villages and cities. They make us uneasy. They steal outright: babies from cradles, men from beds; they take quietly in the night: crops, a sense of security; they give: love potions, stories, endless wonder. They pervert and fascinate beyond measure.
Witches have been wild and untamable for all of recorded human history, and for as long as we’ve had the written word, from The Brothers Grimm to Arthur Miller to Bewitched to Buffy, hardly a storyteller hasn’t tried to tame them. It’s time to stop trying. Let loose the beasts. They won’t promise not to hurt you, but if rumors or true, they will show you a hell of a good time.
Kaitlyn Soligan is a writer and editor from Boston living in Louisville, Kentucky. She writes about that, and bourbon, at www.ivehadworseideas.com. You can follow her on twitter @ksoligan.
Yet although the show deals with a number of important social issues, and contains naturalistic elements, its subversive, socio-political power lies in its vivid, carnivalesque interpretation of prison life. It contains heart-breaking incidents but it also honors endurance and joyous resistance. Celebrating individuality, personal expression, and sensual pleasures, ‘Orange is the New Black’ ultimately humanizes women who have been dehumanized.
I went on one of those Netflix benders recently and consumed the entire first season of Orange is the New Black in a little less than 24 hours. A little late to the party, you might say, but my timing, I believe, is perfect. I do not have long to wait for my next binge. The show returns in June. For those who have yet to sign up, Orange is the New Black tells the unusual, colorful tale of Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), a young, affluent, college-educated white woman incarcerated in a women’s prison in upstate New York. Piper is serving time for smuggling drug money a decade previously. The pretty, bourgeois life she has mapped out for herself–a loving fiancé, Larry (Jason Biggs), and business plans with her best friend–has been put on hold as her connection to her ex-girlfriend, and drug cartel member, Alex (Laura Prepon), has come back to haunt her. In fact, her past is made flesh in her new residence: the beautiful, exotic Alex is also an inmate. The show is based on Piper Kerman’s 2010 memoir, Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, yet although it addresses serious issues such as addiction and lack of prisoner training and education, the tone of the show is not, for the most part, dark. Created by Jenji Kohan, Orange is the New Black can safely be categorized as a comedy-drama. It is funny, subversive, and teaming with interesting and eccentric characters.
The show has been praised for its inclusiveness and diversity. Its large, predominantly female, multi-racial cast of characters and embrace of a multiplicity of femininities is impressive for an American television show. Piper, it is true, is the central character but Season One incorporate the stories of a number of her fellow inmates. There are interesting, well-drawn and outrageous characters of many backgrounds. All the women’s lives are interesting.
Pennsatucky
Orange is the New Black should also be celebrated for its vivid, humane appreciation of the female body in all its forms. The show features a life-affirming variety of female bodies: thin, voluptuous, boyish, corpulent, athletic, ailing, aging, pregnant, transgender, desiring, desirable, and celibate. The body is, in fact, one of the central themes of the show. This is not surprising. Prison depersonalizes and dehumanizes human bodies. The female inmates in the show are constantly watched, frequently searched and sometimes molested and exploited. As it is clear from the very first episode, looking after your basic physical needs is not easy in prison when the authorities do not supply basic items. The problem often demands creative solutions. Orange is the New Black depicts and celebrates acts of free expression by the incarcerated women that serve to challenge the constraints that the prison regime puts on their bodies. These include exercise, yoga, running and dance. Prison also, of course, seeks to silence the human voice, but speech and song provide self-affirmation for the inmates. Expressing sexual desire is also a manifestation of freedom and autonomy. It is, however, read as subversive by the authorities. When Piper dances suggestively with Alex at a party, she is thrown in isolation. The decision is made by prison supervisor Sam Healy (Michael J. Harney), who shows a half-paternal, half-sexual interest in Piper. He has a near-pathological obsession with lesbians and initially sees the privileged, engaged Piper as respectable. His punishment is both misogynistic and homophobic.
Coming together
Orange is the New Black’s appeal lies in watching the women express themselves freely. The show has a deeply human, celebratory appreciation of the women’s condition. The inmates fight darkness with laughter. In fact, the prison world of Orange is The New Black can be likened, strangely enough, to Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding of the carnival in its celebration of the anti-hierarchical spirit, socially subversive and sacrilegious acts, sensuality, eccentricity and unconventional connections. In his reading of the carnivalesque literary world of French Renaissance writer, Francois Rabelais, Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin underlines that carnival “marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions.” Laughter is also celebrated as an anti-establishment weapon and Bakhtin explains that “festive folk laughter presents an element of victory not only over supernatural awe, over the sacred, over death; it also means the defeat of power of the earthly kings, of the earthly upper classes, of all that oppresses and restricts.” He notes, however, that the laughter of the carnival is “universal” and “directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants.” The carnival, furthermore, supports “marketplace” anti-official, profane, parodic and abusive language. Orange is the New Black also mocks power and faith while celebrating joyous, subversive laughter and inventive, parodic speech. Both laughter and speech provide the female inmates with vital, democratic means of expression.
Orange is the New Black also valorizes sensual pleasure, particularly female sexual desire. Like other ground-breaking US TV shows of the last decade, it is merrily anti-puritan. It also has a rare, carnivalesque, in-your-face frankness. This is illustrated by repeated shots of vagina selfie shots of a female inmate who has been taking them in the women’s toilets while pretending to talk with the devil. Equally true to the ethos of the carnival, Orange is the New Black embraces the profane. Female inmates have sex with each other in the prison chapel.
Although the women dedicate themselves to maintaining personal hygiene, looking after their hair, bodies, and general appearance, the show is not frightened of depictions and discussions of emissions from the body. There is a scatological interest in bodily functions in the show. In Season One, a male guard and female inmate pee intentionally in places other than the bathroom while a bloodied tampon is served up in a sandwich in the prison canteen. This focus on the lower regions of the body equally recalls Bakhtin’s concept of the “grotesque body.” In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin explains, “In grotesque realism…the bodily element is deeply positive. It is presented not in a private, egotistic form, severed from other spheres of life, but as something universal, representing all the people.” The “lower stratum” should not only be celebrated; it has anti-authoritarian significance too. Bakhtin notes that the function of the medieval clown is to remind the powerful of the “lower stratum.” In Orange is the New Black, emissions from the body also assume an anti-establishment, socio-political importance.
Sophia
It is, in fact, unsurprising that the upper-class heroine of the tale finds herself on the receiving end of bodily waste in this carnivalesque world. It is Piper who is served the used tampon. She insulted Red’s cooking, albeit unintentionally. Charismatic, red-haired “Red” (Kate Mulgrew) is the prison’s Russian chef and matriarch to many. She also punishes Piper by withholding food. The latter needs to pay for her upper-class conceit and adapt to their world. It is also Piper who is forced to watch an admirer, Suzanne (Uzo Aduba) pee on the floor, in front of her bed, in response to being slighted. More on the unconventional Suzanne later but Piper is, in a way, also being punished for her vanity in this outlandish, amusing incident. The representative of the upper class is, furthermore, being reminded of “the lower stratum.”
Piss and menstrual blood are, used, therefore, as socially subversive weapons in Orange is The New Black. This carnivalesque treatment of Piper is all the more potent, and amusing, in the light of her professed love of bath or shower time–associated with both cleanliness and sexual love–as well as her job making artisanal bath products. But they do not, actually, have cruel intent on a symbolic level. They are, instead, democratic: Piper must surrender her bourgeois ego, sterile, little world, and join the carnival. The parodic insults Piper endures are also, incidentally, amusing. As she herself memorably notes, “I have been teased, stalked, threatened and called Taylor Swift.”
Orange is the New Black also addresses age-old American racial divisions and tensions. We see inmates welcome “their own” and vote on racial lines in leadership contests. Yet although the women hang out in racially segregated groups, these lines are broken quite regularly. They are happily transgressed in the carnivalesque spaces the prisoners create for themselves. Movie night and leaving parties function as joyful, heterogeneous, egalitarian spaces where women of all races mix and subvert racial divisions.
Miss Claudette
Orange is the New Black, what’s more, celebrates unconventional, carnivalesque connections. A particularly interesting, and lovely, one is between Sophia (Laverne Cox) a young African-American trans-woman, in jail for credit card fraud, and Sister Ingalls (Beth Flower), a white, political activist nun in late middle age. The Sister exercises a pastoral role to some extent–and Sophia ultimately appreciates her warm, no-nonsense advice–but there is nothing patronizing or judgmental about her manner and intent. Both are intelligent, compassionate people and both laugh–wisely–at the madness of the world around them. They are, moreover, interesting, likeable people. Sophia is, in fact, arguably, the most attractive, well-rounded character in Orange is the New Black.
But the show has a great number of interesting female characters such as Miss Claudette Pelage (Michelle Hurst), Piper’s “roommate.” An older, Haitian woman, Miss Claudette is in jail for killing a man who was abusing one of the young maids who worked in her cleaning company, a service comprised of young, illegal immigrants. A certain mystique has built up around Miss Claudette. She keeps herself to herself and does not have visitors. Dedicated to order and neatness, she is sharp, unwelcoming woman but gradually warms to Piper. Her fate is a deeply sad one.
Suzanne (crazy eyes)
Orange is the New Black also incorporates another important carnivalesque trait, eccentricity. Which brings us back to Suzanne. Nicknamed “Crazy Eyes” by many of her fellow inmates, Suzanne is a little different. As evidenced by the peeing incident, she is also unpredictable. Her manic intensity is, however, coupled with an engaging openness and sincerity. The characterization of Suzanne should not be read as naturalistic. Her unbalanced state is not portrayed in a clinical fashion. She is a carnivalesque, excessive figure who transgresses norm and boundaries and we are encouraged to enjoy her “madness.” A young, gay Black woman, Suzanne, in her eccentricity, also arguably goes beyond race and sexuality. There is another outrageous, key character is the show: Tiffany or “Pennsatucky.” The makers’ portrayal of “Pennsatucky” could be seen as classist–she is a lank-haired, racially prejudiced, rabidly homophobic young white “Jesus Freak” with appalling teeth–but she is so completely over-the-top that she cannot be said to represent the average, working-class, white, born-again Christian. The show’s most unlikeable character is, also, in fact, quite complex and her back story is out of the ordinary. “Pennsatatucky,” furthermore, has an important political function in that she exposes literalist, narrow-minded interpretations of faith. Compare the young woman’s Christianity with that of Sister Ingalls.
Red
Orange is the New Black sends up the prejudiced, powerful, and comfortable. It takes deft, funny swipes at heterosexist, patriarchal attitudes as well as white privilege and complacency. Piper’s snooty, bird-like mother embodies the latter. When her daughter observes that she is not better than anyone of her inmates, she proclaims: “You’re nothing like any of these women. Any jury worth its salt would have seen that…” Parody is another carnivalesque weapon used in the show to puncture establishment pretensions. In one scene, friends “Taystee” (Danielle Brooks) and Poussey (Samira Wiley), whose love for each other has not quite been articulated, vividly parody the speech of a bourgeois, heterosexual white couple. Corrupt, sexist and homophobic prison guards and supervisors are also amusingly derided in the show. George Mendez (Pablo Schreiber) is one such example. “Pornstache,” as he also known, smuggles drugs into prison and sexually exploits the inmates. The show’s portrayal of “Pornstache” serves to drain him of power. Although a sleazy, dangerous character, he is meant to mocked rather than feared.
Orange is The New Black’s back stories depict the struggles of the underclass. Addiction, homelessness, neglect, and sexual exploitation are among the social issues addressed. The back-story of the young addict Trisha (Madeline Brewer), marked by abuse, addiction, and prostitution is not an uncommon one, while Taystee’s fate speaks volumes about the lack of support prisoners face when they are released. Yet although the show deals with a number of important social issues, and contains naturalistic elements, its subversive, socio-political power lies in its vivid, carnivalesque interpretation of prison life. It contains heart-breaking incidents but it also honors endurance and joyous resistance. Celebrating individuality, personal expression, and sensual pleasures, Orange is the New Black ultimately humanizes women who have been dehumanized.
Orange is the New Black has more buzz than an apiary this summer, and with good reason: it’s funny, emotionally affecting, intensely watchable, and as a Netflix original series, suited to an immensely satisfying weekend binge-watch. But on top of all that, OitNB offers a lot to talk about beyond “Did you watch Orange is the New Black yet? It’s so great!”
It’s actually kind of a shame that Orange is the New Black is so revolutionary and fresh. The show has gotten a lot of attention and praise for the character Sophia, a black trans woman, portrayed by black trans woman Laverne Cox (and her twin bother M. Lamar in flashbacks, in some truly fortuitous casting). I wish that kind of representation didn’t seem so revolutionary and fresh, but honestly, it is still revolutionary and fresh merely for there to be a show mostly about women, much less one like OitNB that does its best to reflect womanhood as anything but monolithic and directly addresses race, class and sexuality.
Laverne Cox as Sophia
Of course, the central and point-of-view character, Piper Chapman, is a privileged white woman–a Smith graduate whose mother is telling everyone she’s volunteering in Africa as an alibi for her 15 months in Federal Prison. Orange is the New Black does its best to address, challenge, and sometimes mock Piper’s privilege (she compares her prison-issue shoes to TOMS), but it can be frustrating that she is the focus while the audience has to wait many episodes for the serious treatment and backstories of some of the most compelling characters of color.
And it is fitting that the most interesting thing about Piper is her bisexuality, which is the one dimension she isn’t at the top of the hierarchy. Again, it shouldn’t be so fresh and unusual to have a bisexual main character, but it is. And Orange is the New Black doesn’t just use Piper’s sexuality as a representation token or an opportunity for hot girl-on-girl prison action, but as an actual platform to explore the complexities of sexual identity.
Larry (Jason Biggs) and Piper (Taylor Schilling)
Piper enters prison engaged to a man, who had previously known nothing of Piper’s same-sex relationship with a drug trafficker ten years prior. Piper, her fiance Larry, and her future in-laws are all too happy to brush off that history as a long-passed phase. Larry only becomes nervous about Piper cheating on him in prison when he learns her ex-girlfriend Alex is also incarcerated there. She has to lecture him on the Kinsey Scale to point out that the presence of Alex isn’t going to “turn her gay.” When Piper (spoiler alert) does have sex with and fall for Alex again, it doesn’t make her fall out of love with Larry, defying the common portrayal of bisexuality involving some kind of toggle switch.
Piper and Alex (Laura Prepon)
Orange is the New Black also side-steps the trope of Piper only being “gay for” one person. In a flashback sequence Piper tells her best friend Polly, “I like hot girls. I like hot boys. What can I say? I’m shallow.” [That’s also an absurdly simplistic representation of bisexuality, but absurd simplicity is fairly honest to Piper’s character.]
Piper’s sexuality is as hard for Alex to accept as it is for Larry, though. When their relationship hits the rocks, Alex angrily says she broke her rule number one: “never fall in love with a straight girl.” Alex bonds with Nicky, another lesbian inmate who had been having sex with another “straight” girl engaged to a man. Seeing these characters express frustration with bisexual characters’ ability to “opt-out” and enjoy heterosexual privileges puts Orange is the New Black‘s simple “Kinsey scale”/”I like hot people” depiction of bisexuality back into a realistically complicated and often painful context of negotiating sexualities.
Discussing Piper’s rekindled affair with Alex, Larry says to her brother Cal, “Is she gay now?” Cal says, “I’m going to go ahead and guess that one of the issues here is your need to say that a person is exactly anything.”
His issue and everyone else’s, Cal.
Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town, and that is not a WASP-y cover story for a prison stint.
