Monday, June 2, 2014

Female criminal / lesbian spectator: Alex Vause, "demi"-potent lesbian antihero of "Orange is the New Black" (2013)





 An alluring member of the raunchy and often hilarious ensemble cast of women’s prison TV-series Orange is the New Black, drug smuggler Alex Vause (Laura Prepon) is introduced as a kind of villain to the show’s initial protagonist Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling).

Vause is among the first characters we actually get to see, right in the first seconds of the show. She is, however, only shown in flashback – like her femme fatale sisters of old, Vause is introduced as seen through the eyes of her former lover, Chapman. The viewer is therefore prepped to see Vause as a sultry and seductive antagonist who sets Chapman’s incarceration in motion. “I knew she wasn’t a good person, but…” Chapman whines after learning of her impending sentence. Immediately putting the blame on her ex for naming her to the feds, this is the start of the did-she-or-didn’t-she narrative that is mixed with the show’s handy will-they-or-won’t-they love story.

Vause herself doesn’t make her dramatic entrance until the very last seconds of the first episode. It is surrounded by so much emotional upheaval that for a few moments I, utterly un-spoilered upon the day of release of Season 1, thought Vause’s appearance might just be a figment of Chapman’s overtaxed imagination.


What fascinates me about Vause is how she is a fusion of two distinct film historical archetypes: while she is a femme fatale she is also the fatalistically melancholy (mostly male) film noir antihero. (After discovering that she and Chapman are stuck in the same prison, I half imagine Vause lingering about with a bottle of prison hooch or pretzels, muttering, “Of all the prison yards, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine…”; Like Rick in Casablanca, Vause calls Chapman “Kid” in moments of affection.) Though introduced into the story as an Ava Gardner of sorts – she even resembles Gardner a little at times in the flashback sequences – Vause is actually the wounded animal that is Burt Lancaster, waiting quietly up in his room, knowing he got what was coming to him. After being introduced to Vause as “not a good person”, we mistrust signals in the following episodes that show Vause actually being a, well, kind of good person: she is the one inmate who comes to Chapman’s aid (though not entirely heroically) in the second episode, thereby secretly risking her own well-being. She also claims not to have named Chapman to the feds, adding a convincing “fuck you for thinking it was.”

Very soon after that, the viewer (though crucially not Chapman) learns that Vause was in fact lying; whatever her agenda, keeping Chapman out of prison wasn’t part of it. While Vause blames Chapman for long ago leaving her brokenhearted and spiraling out of control, the viewer assesses that Vause is lying out of some pathetic wish to be regain Chapman’s love and affection. When Vause, after many twists and turns at the end of the season, admits to this, it is particularly heartbreaking for Vause because she seems to have gained neither – by lying and manipulating, she has merely gone back to being Chapman’s sultry seductress, a destructive femme fatale.


Unlike famous film noir criminals, even women, Vause never draws a gun or wields a weapon. Sexuality is Vause’s greatest asset. She brandishes it as means of persuasion, of power, threat, and revenge, even as an initiator of conversation (unlike other inmates, she never seems to use it as a currency). When Chapman refuses to communicate, Vause simply aggresses her.

Earlier in the show, Vause even threatens to rape and later sexually assaults a fellow inmate who has questioned Vause’s authority and Chapman’s safety (Vause later spins her revenge out more elaborately).

Her only consistent accessory is her attire – most prominently, her glasses. Vause shifts, lifts, and nudges her glasses in different moments of emotion, assertion, threat or vulnerability.

Like a cat, Vause flaunts and saunters through the background for most of the season, glancing over her shoulder, assessing information through observation, avoiding any sort of conflict or contact unless absolutely necessary.


In a show full of female criminals, Vause personifies the female criminal par excellence. For most of the season, her story and the origins of her antagonism remain a secret. We do know about her work for a drug cartel, her seduction of Chapman and the eventual persuasion of Chapman to smuggle drug money, though it is unclear who was manipulating whom.

With a penchant for camp, Vause likes to joke in comic-book style metaphors: “well, if it isn’t the invisible woman,” she calls out Chapman sarcastically. It later becomes clear, in a preview to Season 2, that the invisible woman is Vause herself – “maybe I should switch careers and become a jewel thief,” she quips, coating her insecurities over her under-representation in her then-girlfriend Chapman’s official life. Like many a film noir hero, Vause seems to dream of the “normal”, “good” life but mysteriously denies it to herself out of self-stigmatization or masochism.


What sets Vause apart from the show’s other incarcerated women and their story is her own agency and power in her criminal backdrop, her willingness, even pride, in her crimes and story, as well as her probable function as mastermind in her business. Her work in an international drug cartel seem less about making money than having power over others; the illegal aspect seems less about desperation than it is about attitude and a glee in risk taking. In fact, her skills as a businesswoman seem to rival only those of Red, the Russian cook with the unresolved shady mafia background. Red, however, is the terrifying matriarch and head of the prison family whereas Vause is a loner who sticks up only for herself and occasionally for her ex-girlfriend.

In a socially critical show, Vause’s criminality is attributed to her impoverished social background: “No mulla, I no schoolah,” is her explanation for lack of education. She is obviously a gifted businesswoman and very intelligent, but in order to gain the power and wealth that she needed, there was no other way for her to go but the drug ring.


Vause, a supporting character (though an extremely popular one) in an ensemble cast, has a story that almost resembles that of a main protagonist of a male-driven plot. Hers recalls iconic figures whose American Dream leads into an abysmal lonely nightmare.

Her background of abundant party-throwing and wealth, her desperation to win over the whimsical blonde square Chapman/Daisy Buchanan, even her lack of non-narrated screen time (that is not in flashback) in the first eight episodes of the season draws parallels with a character like “Jay Gatsby” (others have written about this).

A lot of Vause’s popularity stems from her snarky, scoundrel humor – her lone ranger ways, disdain for bullshit and pursuit of a princess make her a kind of “Han Solo” of the OitNB franchise.

Like Mad Men’s “Don Draper”, Vause is a bastard in childhood, raised by a single mother and bullied at school. She is talented and fiercely driven to make something of herself, become the envy of others, and gain power over them. Vause’s “coolness” is inherited as though it were in her bloodline: her father is an iconic rock star while her mother was his groupie. The idea that her father is a rock star – despite the fact that he is a washout and a drug addict, as we learn from Vause’s own tragicomic flashback – is part of her self-mythologyzation and self-glamorization (see Vause’s self-inflicted glamour: her tattoos, all bizarrely inconsistent yet nevertheless desirable, her rockabilly-librarian attire which also seems weirdly outdated.)

Like Draper, Vause is a womanizer and almost something of a lesbian chauvinist. Apart from flirtations, there is actually very little evidence of Vause’s sex drive for any other woman than Chapman, but the viewer just takes it as a given. There seems to be no end to her foul mouth and overall kinkiness – her replies or remarks are mostly sexual in nature. She visibly leers, stares, and checks out other inmates and prison staff (especially Chapman); her glasses only seem to double the potency of her gaze. She manages to turn everything she touches into a sexual attempt or innuendo of some kind. (“Want to play doctor instead?” Vause says to Chapman at a party she is hosting in a flashback scene. When Vause reluctantly confesses her love to Chapman in prison, she quickly diverts by chuckling: “say Pussy again.” Pressing Chapman into a conversation by means of a sexual assault, Vause mutters “the great thing about sex in an industrial kitchen is that there’s a ton of margarine in there,” leaving us with nothing but screaming questions.)

  Lesbian gaze: in a flashback sequence Vause (Laura Prepon), surrounded by objects fetishizing the female form, watches her girlfriend Chapman (Taylor Schilling) strip.


In a glimpse of Vause’s former life, we get to see some of her taste in interior decoration, which is ridiculously potent: her bedside lamps, for instance, are shaped like a female torso. A burlesque pin up is tattooed onto her upper arm. In this way, Vause asserts herself as the lover of women par excellence. No male character could express such a fetish of the female body; it would code their character as absurd or even horrific. Vause and her corny taste and ardor sometimes remind me of a reverse version of R.W. Fassbinder’s last film Querelle (1982): sailors are replaced by inmates while the phallic structures of the harbor are replaced by the feminine architecture that Vause surrounded herself with in her former life. Her shady, tragic story, her sexual aggression, her drag-queen antiques and dressing style, her obsession with a younger woman and close attachment to her mother all give her a Fassbinder-esque bone structure where her storyline is concerned. Querelle’s Oscar Wilde-ean theme song “each man kills the thing he loves” might just as well apply to Vause. When Vause’s Season 1 back-story is concluded, we know that her drug smuggling business had bereft her of Chapman as well as her mother, and that she faded into a drug addiction which eventually got her incarcerated. “I used to have grand plans,” she tells another inmate that she’d rather stay in prison than escape, “now I can’t even get past the swirling darkness in my brain long enough to land on anything.”
Vause, having lost it all, has no clear life motivations. While Chapman has an apparent life to go back to – remodeling her bathroom and having babies – Vause can only come up with doing “X on a beach in Cambodia with three strangers in drag.”


Though she seems to want to, Vause seems incapable of building close relationships within the prison system. She degrades other inmates with her callous humor, yet still shows up to be part of their socializing as if believing they will somehow validate her coolness – “Baby, High School is High School,” an inmate reminds her when Vause’s pathetic plea for a social life becomes too obvious.

 When former junkie Nicky Nichols (Natasha Lyonne), sharing a raunchy sense of humor and ease with Vause, approaches her in friendship, Vause at first shows her vulnerability and depression. Their friendship eventually leads to both inmates jokingly pointing out their true former association to each other: “demand and supply”. Nichols was the drug addict, Vause the dealer. Nichols comes from an affluent background; Vause abused girls like Nichols for her drug ring. At one point in the series, Vause even explains the details of her business to Nichols, built on “sniffing out girls like [Nichols] and turning them into mules”.

In their final sequence in Season 1, Nichols initiates sexual contact with Vause in a similar fashion – Nichols demands and Vause provides, clearly marking her need for dominance, even in friendship.


Even Vause’s love-hate rapport with Chapman has a shady, sadomasochistic edge to it. Though Vause believably claims heartbreak and love for Chapman, there is an uncomfortable power-struggle lining the relationship that might have little to do with Chapman and all to do with Vause’s troubled past and insecurities. As we learn from flashbacks, Vause spent her school years bullied by “rich bitches” – girls who most likely grew up to become WASPy women like Chapman. “They’re getting boring-ass lives,” Vause’s mother consoles her, “you are cool.”

Vause later points out to Chapman that their affair was only built on Chapman’s attempt at trying to be cool: “you were just this boring little girl from Connecticut…” – as if knowing that literally fucking Chapman is simply doing what her dear mother told her to do (after admitting to being bullied by other girls, prepubescent Vause’s mother snorts “so fuck ‘em!”)

Though haunted by her past, Vause is a painfully tough survivor. When her prison affair with Chapman twists and flounders, Vause quickly cuts her out of her life.

“I can’t survive another spin on her merry-go-round and clearly you’re still on it,” she later spitefully tells Chapman’s fiancé, knowing the impression will only break off Chapman’s engagement and blast Chapman off the edge.


There is something cinematically iconic about the troubled lesbian rapport between a blonde and a brunette. Traditionally, hair color is linked to stereotypical female personality traits, and in literature history, a blonde and a brunette are often set against each other in a quarrel over a man who usually passes up the alluring brunette for the wholesome blonde. Film history – or, say, the vocalization of a “queer” reading – eventually eliminates the man, leaving us with the blonde and the brunette in an intense and sexually loaded power struggle (take, for instance, the titillating moments between Grace Kelly and Ava Gardner in Mogambo, 1953). There’s also the fusion of the blonde and the brunette into one character, as seen in Vertigo (1958), or, as seen in my favorite example, Mulholland Dr. (2001), a complex splitting as well as a fusion of the blonde/brunette pairing. In a final scene of this film, Diane Selwyn, the scorned protagonist, names her fickle ex-lover Camilla Rhodes to a hit man (in an act of cold-turkey desperation, the way Vause might have named Chapman). The women’s romance is recounted as a luxurious power struggle between observer and object of desire. It becomes a metaphor of the very essence of cinema. The object of desire and the tension oscillate; a character that is archetypically female and sweet (“Betty”, played by Naomi Watts) becomes the agent, obsessive anti-hero (“Diane Selwyn”); she cannot get over her seductress – the enigmatic amnesiac “Rita” (played by Laura Harring) who, in her helpless, suggestive “silence” is also all-powerful (the movie star, the silver screen, “Camilla Rhodes”). 
 Laura Harring and Naomi Watts in David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. (2001)

OitNB’s Alex Vause is a troubled “loser”; stuck in her own mind like Diane Selwyn, who seems literally imprisoned in her own corpse. Vause is haunted by her former glory days as a character that mirrors Camilla Rhodes – potent, sexual, overly confident: a brunette that can do with the blonde however she wants, who can supply her with “jobs” (mediocre film roles in Mulholland Dr., illicit drug smuggling in OitNB) and come to for sex.

Of course, OitNB in the end is simply a fine TV-show: it isn’t “meta” or a Film noir and it aptly uses comedy to address what is particularly dark.


On the advent of OitNB's Season 2 I can’t help but wonder how the writers of OitNB will resolve the conflict of Vause’s character. Hopefully they will draw her idiosyncrasies out instead of molding her according to “what we want”– if Vause doesn’t get back with Chapman, it will anguish thousands of crazed Vauseman fans (including myself), if she does, the wonderfully multi-layered, troubled, loveable and seedy aspect of her character might fade. I’m hoping for neither.

(Well, of course I’m hoping for Vauseman. I can’t help it. But whatever, y’know? Let’s throw some pie for them) 

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