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)
