Tunes of Orange is the New black

The music in Jenji Kohan’s new flagship show, Orange is the New Black, is particularly noteworthy. Good music isn’t rare on TV. Typically though, music on TV only aims to tell you how to feel during a specific scene. Orange is the New Black doesn't do this, or at least this doesn't come off as the explicit goal of the show. Instead it delivers tracks at key points conspiring together to support the aesthetic, never to overpower it. The show does this while winking and nodding with it’s choices, which only serves to accent them in my memory. Even going as far to have the inmates talk about the music used on the show in their own terms, which is just some of the best writing of the show. This self-awareness is key. It’s so hard to control how people will feel about the work you create, no matter how many times Scrubs plays The Fray’s How to Save A Life this won’t make me feel remorse for J.D. It’s just not going to happen, sorry Bill Lawrence.

Having fun with the music & being elated by it happens on Orange is the New Black, but none of the choices up to this point have been reused to strictly control how you feel about a scene. The Regina Spektor’s themesong each episode, it harkens for me back to Waylon Jenning’s Omaha which I love, sets the tone for the show. You know what sort of show you're about to watch by listening to the sample of that song each episode, if you didn't already. Kohan never hits you over the head with the music, not even when she’s sampling Boss’s I Don’t Give a Fuck. Instead of recycling the the music like most shows, Kohan is just keeping to her aesthetic while matching her scenes to great music. While sampling The Dutchess & the Duke, Leagues, or Tune-Yards they’re obviously(to me) placed to breakup just how morbid the show can get with these good tunes. It does this while never breaking with the aesthetic which seems easy but few shows come to mind that do it well in this way. Orange is the New Black isn't just worth watching, it’s worth hearing.

Comic Disbelief

The original Prophet, if you aren't familiar, was a Marvel comic run in the 90's at the height of comics. Flash forward to 2013, and the boring 90’s comic hero stereotype John Prophet has been revitalized to serve as an avatar in a short self contained story collection by Image comics. Each comic a self contained story that explores the alien, yet familiar. John is designed in each as an avatar in which the author uses to interact with absurdly fascinating alien settings. Prophet suffered from many of the same problems of Prometheus and was originally a rather self serving comic. Neither their characters felt true to themselves, especially in the case of Prometheus, they didn't feel true to the Aliens series. The original Prophet was just a Marvel comics hero from the 90's, boring to put it bluntly. What the original Aliens struck on that the Image revival of Prophet does also, is that good stories tell the truth. It doesn't matter if they haven't ever happened or never will. They're truthful in their own ways.

The problem that Prometheus suffered was that of it’s design, something that it could have learned from Prophet’s short story format. None of the characters in Prophet, or the original aliens for that matter, overstay their welcome. It’s this brevity and simplicity of their brand which allow “Game over man.” to hold more emotional weight than say “Big things have small beginnings.” As much as I rag on Prometheus, I really did not hate it. The film is infinitely recommendable on it’s look alone, and acting was top notch, even if the lines they were asked to deliver weren't. Prometheus just suffers from being too clever for its own good, with the gun on the mantelpiece choreographing every potentially interesting plot twist in the film. From the fact that the Charlize Theron’s segment of the ship is a lifeboat to the fact that Noomi Rapace is sterile, Damon Lindelof set his cast up for failure at every turn.

If you’re going to have a film have a run-time of over two hours, you can’t have a collection of themes which overpower it’s characters. As much as I wanted to love David as an analog for Lawrence of Arabia, the film openly contradicts itself on this front. David’s trajectory of pessimism downward throughout the film, in stark contrast with Lawrence, which begs the question why did they even include that entire theme to the film? Possibly if his arc had been left more vague, these schisms would not have existed. Each Prophet story is like stacks of violently beautiful graffiti painted over a wall, overlapping each other but self-contained shining through like peeling plaster. That is the sort of experience I expect out of Ridley Scott, not a comic book.

As I Lay DS9ing

I want to travel into space before I die. But would you really? This fantasy we often create for ourselves of the stars is so wonderfully represented in Star Trek. Unlike it's contemporary The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine accepts the responsibility of having characters which must accept the consequences of their actions. By having a static location, they bear their burdens when mistakes happen and do not claim to a prime directive. When you contrast the two main bars of the two show. Quarks feels lived in, like a place where people would actually go for entertainment & drink while the bar on the Enterprise feels like the 90's fantasy of a bar on a space ship. Stale in it's simplicity and bourgeois in atmosphere, being more of the embodiment of what most fusion cuisine restaurant look like than an actual bar working stiffs would frequent.

From the original pilot it is clear the intention of the show was to establish a moral progeny, which eventually led the show to becoming the most pious & politically charged of all the Star Trek shows I have seen(all but Voyager). The scene which most illustrates the length at which they go would be Quarks critique of  liberalism. With that scene Armin Shimerman owned his role as Quark, which is so uncharacteristically Star Trek in nature, by being so good. The show continues to critique the liberalism present in Star Trek and in doing so divorces itself from the rest of Star Trek. Instead of presenting the fantasy of traveling the stars, DS9 constructs a harsh reality of living among the stars with the inevitability of war.

From the Founders Melian dialogue-esque view toward other races, to the existence of warships in the Federation to the way the show dealt with PTSD, DS9 is unmatched when it comes to shows in the Star Trek universe in covering the human condition through war. It's through these hardships and the fact that they must accept the consequences of their actions that divorces the show from the usual fantasy of Star Trek & delivers a transformative story. The philosophical difference between TNG & DS9 is the difference between a show that always has a good ending and a show that can end tragically.

When viewed in aggregate after I've finished both, the difference in practice is profound. While the former was clearly influenced by television at the time, it's clear to see that the latter was trying for something new for the time that's currently in vogue by shows like Breaking Bad or The Wire where there is true character development. The dynamic between characters on TNG is stagnate, few characters end the show in a different position from whence they started. The irony is that despite traveling thousands of parsecs across the universe, the TNG cast generally leaves the show in the same place that they started. While in DS9 all the universe's a stage, and all it's cast mere players, they play many more parts & trek so far without travelling but a few parsecs from whence they came.

The Ouroboros & the Soapbox

After reading @botherer on twitter mock a blog post from Sean Malstrom which attempted to critique his post on Rock Paper Shotgun I decided that I too shall write about this topic. There has been a steady rise among the enthusiasts press in games to write and talk about the plight of women depicted in games and women working in the industry itself. Good for @botherer, the blog in question sounds as though it was written by a lunatic, but the recent rise of dedication to this one topic for the past year or so has worn thin. I don't know if it exactly started during the #1reasonwhy campaign or when Anita Sarkeesian got her kickstarter funding, but since about a year ago gaming enthusiasts have been writing and talking up a storm about this great injustice. I mean that without an ounce of insincerity, but it's exhausting.

I never knew Machinima was hosting a video on their site of scantly clad women slapping each other on stage until @botherer wrote about it. As an aside, I would love to find out how many people are actually consuming, or even have knowledge of such media before it's added to such a piece. The vast majority of the time I've never heard about something in gaming which is considered sexist until it's plastered on every front page of a gaming enthusiast website. From the number of people in the comments section who write of their support of such articles I assume that I am not the only one who doesn't enjoy consuming such media. The continued coverage on this one topic is really exhausting, and making me wish more outlets would cover other worthwhile topics. Such as accessibility in games. Something @botherer covered earlier this year but very few have. Probably my favorite website to consume gaming content is Giant Bomb, which has two gaming enthusiasts which are color blind but have run no stories on accessibility in games.

As a member of the Giant Bomb community since it's conception, and as such I've had to now endure the comments section Patrick Klepek's #1reasonwhy pieces and let me tell you, it's exhausting. It's exhausting to have something which you love be torn apart by certifiable idiots who deny the existence of sexism and misogyny in every instance. Oddly enough, it's actually more exhausting having to read the torrent of comments telling the idiots why they're wrong and why such things are important. As someone who loves Giant Bomb and just loves reading/playing video games, the most exhausting is having to see the chat section explode whenever Carolyn Petit talks about a game on the Giant Bomb/Gamespot livestream. It's what I described in Patrick's post but worse, and it's a travesty. As worthwhile as it is to read @botherer's enthusiasm in tearing apart the problems of gender present in games, I actually enjoyed much more his writings on Experimental Game Workshop earlier last year and was disappointed there was no such in depth equivalent for GDC. Same goes for Carolyn, the only thing I can think of when I see the chat section explode when Carolyn appears on the livestream "Can all you idiots just shut up and listen to her talk about Luigi's Mansion, she's quite meticulous?!". As wonderful as it would be to engage in the chat with the legion of defenders of Carolyn, I can't help but think that's more destructive than the trolls because it detours the conversation away from the games and it feeds the trolls. At the end of the day I just want to talk about video games the internet, and watch intelligent people who can be funny do the same. The rest is secondary.