Prisons have always been choice entertainment fodder. But what does the success of a \"realistic\" show like <I>Oz</I> say about our baser instincts? <b>Mark Holcomb</b> reports.
PRISON, IT SEEMS ridiculously safe to say, is nobody's idea of a good time. Yet it routinely provides many of us with an odd form of escapism. From the anti-establishment allegory of Cool Hand Luke (1967) to the lecherous wish fulfillment of Fortune and Men's Eyes (1971) to the cathartic psychodrama of last year's The Visit, prison movies allow us to inhabit a social world that is at once violently anarchic, rigidly regimented, and comfortingly familiar. Indeed, thanks to the prolific prison genre, even those of us for whom incarceration seems a remote possibility have accumulated a set of preconceptions about life behind bars, usually without having set foot inside so much as a city jail.
HBO's popular cellblock series, Oz, which begins its fifth season on January 7, is arguably the culmination of this cinematic saturation. The show gives us what we've come to expect from prison drama in convenient weekly doses; hardcore devotees tune in religiously to watch the prisoners and staff of the fictional Oswald State Correctional Facility deceive, slash, sodomize, and (not infrequently) romance each other, occasionally taking a break during the mayhem to grapple with a weighty ethical issue or two. Oz amplifies the conventions of the prison genre to a level possible only in series format, mounting its complex plot lines and sensory violations in unrelentingly piecemeal fashion. More often than not, trying to retain one's moral bearings amid the chaos can be a disorienting, repugnantly thrilling experience.
Even its staunchest fans have a difficult time admitting that such titillation may be Oz's biggest selling point. Given the gravity of its subject matter, viewers and critics alike feel obliged to bestow social importance on the series (to say nothing of artistic legitimacy), typically resorting to labels like "gritty" and "realistic." Oz creator and co-executive producer Tom Fontana is eager to point to the instructive potential in his show, making a connection between the desperate isolation of prison and "anybody who is trapped in any element of their lives, whether it be in a job they hate or a marriage they hate or whatever. The questions there are the same questions we ask on the outside. They're just not quite as intense."
Whether anyone who hasn't been incarcerated can truly know the questions hard-timers ask themselves is almost beside the point. Rather, this imagined empathy simply goes to show how prison has been pressed into metaphorical service as "the world in small" (to borrow Fontana's phrase), from Plato to Malcolm X. Incarceration is often conceived of as a state in which inner liberation is somehow achieved in the absence of external freedom, and this notion lies at the heart of Oz's appeal. It also reveals the show's most troubling irony: To allow us to imagine how we would respond to life behind bars, Oz makes prison seem disconcertingly alluring. Oswald, and particularly the experimental "Emerald City" compound in which most of the show is set, represents a perversely ideal community where all those restrictive rules of social conduct have been abandoned: sex is available on demand, without messy emotional entanglements (the occasional long-term affair notwithstanding); antisocial and violent impulses go unrepressed and are even rewarded; and latent powers of manipulation and exploitation can be expressed without fear of moral sanction. It's a self-actualization paradise with three hots and a cot.
MANY IF NOT MOST of Oz's big-screen contemporaries portray prison in a similarly utopian-dystopian light. Director-screenwriter Frank Darabont's adaptations of Stephen King's prison novels The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999) rely on a mixture of repellant brutality and oddball mysticism to arrive at their epiphanies of -- as the title says -- redemptive affirmation. Even more risible, Tony Kaye's American History X (1998) goes so far as to suggest that the most entrenched, virulent forms of racism can evaporate in the face of prison-yard camaraderie.
For better or worse, Fontana refuses to play to such easy notions of atonement. "My obligation is to tell as close to the truth as I can, and then people have to interpret it any way that they can," he says. "If you shy away from that, then you shouldn't do a show about a prison." But while his series captures the depleting aspects of imprisonment with unflinching accuracy, it also leaves out something important. As Barry Holman, coordinator for the prison-watchdog group the Coalition for Federal Sentencing Reform, notes, "One thing that Oz obviously doesn't present is that there's a spectrum of prison life." Instead, he maintains, it reinforces the accepted belief "that all prisons are the same. That they're all very violent, that everyone who goes there is either going to be sexually abused or is going to be a sexual abuser while they're incarcerated, and that everyone who's there -- from the prisoners to the guards to the administrators -- is nasty."
Such narrowness is unfortunate, particularly when less assured works like Steve Buscemi's Animal Factory (2000) encompass the sort of range missing from Oz. Essentially a study of the ambiguous feelings a hardened con (Willem Dafoe) has for a prison newcomer (Edward Furlong), the film's characters are neither selfless nor awash in redemptive goodwill, yet manage to exhibit complex emotions that aren't entirely rooted in manipulative desire. They are, in short, recognizably human. Even better is Liz Garbus's 1998 The Farm: Angola USA, a thoughtful, heartwrenching documentary that tracks the small victories and bitter disappointments of a group of lifers in Louisiana's notorious state prison. Tom Cahill, president of the prisoner-advocacy group Stop Prisoner Rape, Inc., considers the humanizing potential of such films instrumental in softening the public's attitudes about prison. "I think [prison films] help raise consciousness," he says. "During the Vietnam War, movies started getting more truthful and graphic and made war more difficult to sell to the public. I'm hoping the same will apply to life behind bars."
FOR THIS TO OCCUR, however, Oz and its counterparts would need to characterize prison as part of a larger social structure -- something they have been reluctant to do. For the record, roughly two million Americans are currently in jail or prison, and recent studies project the number at over nine million by 2020; in the meantime, over 500,000 people will be released from prison this year alone. The nonviolent-offender population has tripled in prisons over the last thirty years, and drug-related admissions have increased eightfold. And while it can cost as much as $70,000 a year to house an inmate at New York's Riker's Island facility, federal, state, and local governments spent fifty percent more on incarcerating nonviolent offenders in 1998 than the federal government spent that year on welfare. And so on.
To his credit, Fontana regularly incorporates such facts and figures into Oz's episodes. Yet they inevitably come in the opening and closing monologues by Em City's resident philosopher, Augustus Hill (Harold Perrineau), where they feel tacked on and as divorced from the show's charged storylines as Oswald is from the outside world. By narrowly focusing on the exploits of its recurring characters and adhering to its metaphorical framework, Oz sacrifices broader social perspective and all but squanders the opportunity for political relevance. Charges that the series is little more than a bloody soap opera may not be so far-fetched after all.
Still, few of us watch television to be educated about the true conditions of prison or the intricacies of our criminal justice policy, and Oz has never been billed as social realism anyway. We require no more of Oz than it reflect our own lives in new and unexpected ways -- and, perhaps, confirm our worst suspicions about ourselves. Beyond that, the most we can expect it to do is remind us that incarceration rarely changes anyone for the better. Oz succeeds at this perhaps more effectively than any work in its genre, before or since.
But despite its occasionally searing indictments of our prison system and the pleasures of Fontana's provocatively ambiguous characters (best represented in his work on the late, great Homicide: Life on the Street), it's difficult to detect anything deeper in the series than a desire to stimulate. We may be well past the era in which a film can influence prison policy, as Mervyn LeRoy's I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang did in 1932, when its convincingly grim depiction of the Southern chain-gang system helped spark outrage and reform. Still, it's unfortunate that Oz forfeits a wider understanding of how prison diminishes the culture at large in favor of titillating idealizations of our basest fears and desires. It may be unfair to expect Oz to enlighten as well as entertain, but its success raises an inevitable question: Can a society that's growing more and more dependent on locking its citizens away afford to be diverted by quaint myths of fulfillment and vicarious thrills?
Mark Holcomb is a freelance writer living in New York City. His work has appeared in the Village Voice and indieWIRE.
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