A New Prison

A New Prison Name: Simon Huber Student Number: Thesis for the completion of the RMa Cultural Analysis Supervisor: Hanneke Stuit Second Reader: Joost de Bloois Index Introduction 1 Chapter 1: The underrepresentation of Oz’ ambiguity 5 The ideological function of unrealistic hyper-violence 5 Queering in Oz 7 Oz’ mise en abyme reflection on the representation of prisons 9 Chapter 2: A History of Power Operations in EmCity 16 Accumulating mechanisms 16 Control and Spectacular Mechanisms in EmCity 22 Prison in a Control Society 25 Chapter 3: Prison culture and collective resistance 29 Prison Culture 29 Disrupting contained culture 32 Unruly dissensus in Oz 36 The Build-up 37 The Riot 39 The Aftermath 45 Conclusion 49 Works Cited 53 Appendix A: A List of Relevant Characters 56 Appendix B: A Full Synopsis of Oz 61 Huber 1 Introduction The object of my thesis is the prison drama Oz. The series deals with an experimental unit set up inside Oz, fully named Oswald Maximum Security Prison. The unit, called Emerald City1, is run by college-educated liberal Tim McManus2 who believes he can reform the inmates of this unit and offer them a better life. To do this, EmCity does not match other representations of prisons, which provide an image of a dark and dirty place dominated by steel bars. Instead it is a clean and well-lit cell block filled with clear glass pods and a spacious communal space. As such, it offers a new view of the prison. Oz ran from 1997 to 2003, totalling 56 55-minute episodes. It aired as the first hour- long drama on HBO, a premium cable TV-network. Unsure what kind of drama they wanted to make, they allowed the creator Tom Fontana full creative freedom. Additionally, HBO was not dependent on income from advertising, which allowed Fontana freedom from the constraints of the easily offended advertisers. This meant he could freely show all the violence, nudity and vulgarities he wished. As a result, most of the series' reception focused on Oz’ over the top shock value. I take the series’ new outlook up in a different perspective. The prison has already been taken up as a place where power operations concentrate in their most extreme manifestations, and as such has functioned as a model for how these power mechanisms operate throughout society. Most notably of course by Michel Foucault in his seminal work Discipline and Punish, which will feature heavily in the second chapter of my thesis. Since then, Gilles Deleuze has proclaimed that prisons, like all environments of enclosure, are in a general state of crisis, only waiting for the last rites to be administered. This had led to a shift in attention towards other loci of power operations. However, prisons have not died, the era of mass incarceration3 in the United States following soon after Deleuze’s proclamation. I then once again take up the prison as a model for how power mechanisms operate. However, I do not propose that prisons have stayed the same since Foucault used them as model for the disciplinary mechanism. This is why I will focus on the imaginary prison unit EmCity as presented in Oz, as it internalizes into the prison many of the new power mechanisms Deleuze proposes in his short but provocative article. My central questions are then: What kind of prison 1 In continued reference to the Wizard of Oz, Emerald City is where the Wizard of Oz resides. He is of course famous for not really having any magical powers, but deriving his power from pretending he did through an elaborate set of visual and auditory tricks. An additional reference of the name Oswald is Russell Oswald who was Commissioner of Correctional Services during the Attica Prison riot in 1973, which is heavily referenced in the riot at the end of season one. 2 For full descriptions of each of the characters that figure in this thesis, please refer to Appendix A starting at page 56. 3 The explosion in incarceration rates was already well under way when Deleuze published the text in 1990, with a rise from 503,586 citizens incarcerated in 1980 to 1,148,702 in jail at the time of publishing. Since then, the numbers have continued to increase, to top out at 2,307,504 in 2008. They have remained relatively stable ever since. Huber 2 does Oz represent? Which power mechanisms operate here? And what can the way in which its ambiguous inmates behave mean for our thinking on how these power operations can be resisted? My thesis has a dual relevance. First, for understanding the continued extreme numbers of incarceration in the United States. The most recent numbers, from 2015, indicate that well over two million people remain incarcerated there. With a new law and order president they could very well be going up, as they have in other parts of the world4. To understand this continuity, we have to look at the place the prison takes in contemporary society, where power acts upon mobility and through enclosure simultaneously. I will do this in my second chapter, in which I discuss the integration of Oz in broader circuits of power. Second, I believe the series to have a very strong metaphorical power. In line with traditional characteristics of the prison genre, i.e. “the promise of an unfiltered, raw, and realistic perspective on criminality, systems of authority, and the socially marginal” (Wlodarz 66), many academics have tunnelled in on the question whether Oz is ‘realistic’. Instead I focus on the metaphoric quality of the series, leaving realism behind, instead focusing on what could feel real. Here I am indebted to Monika Fludernik’s concept of the carceral imagery to denote what viewers who most likely have no experience of being in prison imagine being in prison is like. In her article on the carceral imaginary, she traces through history the metaphors used to either describe prison through other places (prison is hell, entombment etc.) or that use prison as a source domain (marriage is prison, my job is jail etc.). Fludernik argues that these metaphors feed directly into the way we as a society imagine prison to be, congealing into a ‘carceral imagery’. As our imagination feeds into our opinions on the subject, the metaphors and the imagery they solidify into must be the object of critical examination. She notes how most literary metaphors pose prisons as sites of ‘uncanny familiarity’: at once terrible places of extreme enclosure and violence, coupled with “the placid attractions of the familiar space of domestic seclusion” (23). The inmates in the same metaphors are set up as a victims worthy of our sympathy, but without real agency. She notes how these tropes function to construct prison as a fantasy world, familiar enough to engage with, but filled with criminals who have to undergo terrible injustice and thus deserve our sympathy. By letting this dual paradoxes of homely-hell and criminal-victim play out at a safe distance in an ‘exotic heterotopia,’ the fundamental ambivalences in our imagination of prisons are resolved without us having to fully engage with our “real-world emotions” (24). I believe Oz refuses to do exactly this. It lets the ambivalence fester, offering no real resolution so as to keep us engaged. Yet, the violence figures along with the nearly exclusive setting of all action within the four walls of Oz to transfer the 4 An example of incarceration rates rising after Deleuze proclaiming the death of prison is Turkey, where the incarceration rate, the amount of people locked up per 100.000 citizens, has doubled since 2006. Many countries fall into either of these two trends, either stabilizing or going up since 2006. Some countries, like the Netherlands, have seen a falling trend. The Dutch incarceration rate has dropped by about 52% since 2006. <www.prisonstudies.org/world-prison-brief-data> Huber 3 sensation of permanent enclosed precariousness onto us, especially if we binge-watch it5, so that we cannot remove it into an ‘exotic fantasy world’. This transferred ambiguity is what I believe many viewers recognize when they call the series ‘real’6. Where most metaphors Fludernik notes seem either cliché or privileged: if I was in prison I could finally focus on myself, I could finally start really working out, finally write that book, I think that Oz’ ambiguity disturbs these metaphors. By being familiar in a different way, by representing the inmates as subjects to some of the same power mechanism that we experience in watered down form, Oz can function as a model for imagining how we would experience and deal with the power operations represented, living out some of the violent fantasies that result from a permanent sense of enclosure and precariousness. My first chapter engages with academic work already done on Oz. I separate the academics into two camps. The first is populated by theorists exclusively concerned with the gruesome depiction of violence in the series. I argue that they become stuck between a criticism of the series’ ‘unrealism’ on the one hand, and their wish that all inmates depicted on TV would behave like model citizens on the other. The second camp reviews the series more positively, recognizing what Oz does in terms of ‘blurring’. Their reviews have, however, not extended far beyond paying attention to what it does in the progressive depiction of homosexuality and an erotically laden depiction of the male body. I try to extend on their thoughts, by discussing S04E09, in which a TV-crew enters EmCity to film a short segment for a show.

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