The Age of Netflix

by Cory Barker

  Binge-Viewing, Community Purging?

  Traditional television “values timeliness above all, creating a hierarchy so fundamental that it resembles natural law: New is better than old, live trumps prerecorded, original episodes always beat reruns,” notes Tim Wu, whereas “online, people are far more loyal to their interests and obsessions than an externally imposed schedule.”14 Catering to trends in contemporary viewer consumption by making series available all at once places Netflix at the vanguard of industry developments in on-demand distribution. Granted unsurpassed time-shifting capability, OITNB fans figuratively “queered” reception practices in temporally contingent ways; for example, fans’ penchant for posting episodic recaps and reflections gave way to season-long synthesizing of a sort, Kohan suggests, that is more akin to a book club than a water cooler.15 But does the fan loyalty bred by untrammeled access translate to freedom from the temporal and non-temporal dictates of television’s programming and profiteering?

  While their worldwide subscription figures are a matter of public record, Netflix refuses to divulge viewing figures. Yet media analyst Procera Networks estimates, on the basis of evaluating several broadband networks, that 2 percent of U.S. subscribers, or 660,000 people, binge-watched all 13 episodes of OITNB in the first weekend of its season one release.16 Despite the rhetoric of freedom with which Netflix (and time-shifted viewing generally) promotes itself, binge-viewing may operate not to enhance control but to reduce it; as Vernon Shetley notes, “The binge-watching viewer seeks instead an immersive experience, one in which, paradoxically, he or she is not in control, as the language of addiction so frequently mobilized around obsessive viewing indicates.”17 As foreshadowed by the teaser trailer for season two—which sets a quick succession of images to the insistent sound of a ticking clock and culminates in a voiceover proclaiming “3 … 2 … 1 … Go!”—Netflix acts as the pusher enabling binge-viewing with its 15-second countdown that encourages viewers to passively segue into the next episode. Inevitably, these aggressive appeals to binge have incited a backlash against its supposed ill effects, prompting Netflix to issue a series of tongue-in-cheek public service announcements featuring House of Cards (2013–) and OITNB stars’ entreaties against excessive viewing.

  With this shift away from the glance-flow model, television in the age of Netflix appears to depart from Michele Aaron’s positing that “television with its often more distracted, channel hopping, glancing, grazing viewer would seem to depend upon a non-monogamy of viewing [that] is potentially queer.”18 Yet, once the Netflix countdown commences, perhaps other queer potentials develop in place of the non-monogamous “cruising” that Aaron as well as Jaap Kooijman associate with remote-controlled viewership.19 Though more gazing than glancing, OITNB’s sofa spectatorship is conducted in home environments be they a hybrid of televisual/theatrical (using Roku boxes or other devices used to project content to a television screen) or personal/mobile (viewed on laptops or even smaller screens). This both figurative and literal queering of the space of television viewing provokes, Aaron proclaims, the “demystification of the home as haven, as homogenised, private space of (de-sexualised) hetero-romance.”20

  The pressing question regarding OITNB’s queer spectatorship asks whether binge-viewing serves to delimit community-formation to a near-exclusively virtual realm, a sign of the times but also a potential inhibitor to embodied and intensely affective viewership and the subcultural identity constructions that result. Unlike House of Cards or Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015–), Netflix’s other early successes with original content, OITNB had a pre-constituted and literally queer audience eagerly awaiting its July 2013 debut, primed by advance awareness of the Piper-Alex bad romance and the casting of two lesbian cult figures, comedian Lea DeLaria as diesel-dyke inmate Big Boo Brown, and But I’m a Cheerleader (1999) actress Natasha Lyonne as lesbian ex-junkie Nicole “Nicky” Nichols.21 OITNB’s first season would prove the tentpole for what would go on to be touted as “lesbians are having the best summer ever on TV.”22 But as Sasha T. Goldberg notes, its release amidst Gay Pride season drove the binge-viewing “gaze” and “gays” indoors for what notably remained a solitary activity rather than the communal viewing parties that constituted queer TV of not so very long ago (think of The L Word [2004–2009], the American version of Queer as Folk [2000–2005], the If These Walls Could Talk installments [1996, 2000], and Ellen’s coming out episode [1997]).23 Amy Villarejo raises the additional question of how time-shifting disrupts queer potential when she points to a “special double episode” of All in the Family (1971–1979) in which Edith (Jean Stapleton) reacts to female impersonator Beverly La Salle’s brutal murder:

  The time slot for both halves of “Edith’s Crisis of Faith” massively recalibrates the episode’s affective stakes: they aired on Christmas night in 1977, synchronizing the episode’s time (with Edith questioning her faith, as a result of homophobic violence, at Christmastime) with the time of its viewers. If the secularized and commodified ritual that is Christmas in America is here recoded as a time to devote to mourning queer loss, then All in the Family has achieved something significant.24

  In contrast, the final episode of OITNB’s first season (“Can’t Fix Crazy” [2013]) closes with a non-denominational holiday pageant staged by inmates and watched by their families and guards, which for the majority of non-diegetic viewers was incongruously Christmas in July and thus bereft of the critically queer significance that Villarejo locates.

  What community-building OITNB generated was dispersed, mediated, and relatively anonymous, voiced in the comments sections of critics’ blogs and in fans’ exchanges on social media. Moreover, the binge-watching model that Netflix co-opted produces a surge in audience discourse at focused intervals—namely in the lead-up to and in the immediate wake of each season’s release—that resembles the temporality of blockbusterdom’s opening weekend discourse, and some have argued that the “retro” episode-per-week release structure that newly-streaming sitcom Community (2009–2015) selected for its second life online better serves to amplify and sustain social conversation.25 Yet the news that OITNB was second only to HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–) as 2014’s “Most Talked About TV Show” on Facebook, based on frequency of mentions in posts, would seem to discredit that notion.26 Commenting on the choice between all-at-once and weekly release schedules, Kohan states, “It really is a double-edged sword. Part of me misses that sense of anticipation and I really miss the sense of community that you can build when everyone’s watching at the same pace.”27 Certainly for non-binge-viewers and series latecomers, the threat of spoilers works as a barrier to entry into the virtual conversation. Yet online viewer communities—grouped around Twitter hashtags or fan sites, for example—are easily enough avoided by spoiler-wary users, and thus may in fact be more accommodating of the unevenness of plot knowledge than real life encounters in which the vigilance one must exercise to avoid spoilers typically operates to curb conversation, as parodied in a season three Portlandia (2011–) skit titled “Spoiler Alert! It’s About Spoilers.”

  What the Netflix viewer loses in communal viewing, then, s/he seems to make up for with highly affective immersion and devotion, both in spectatorial practices of gazing, bingeing, and recapping as well as in fan-interactions aligned by shared tastes and loyalty. Phillip Maciak notes how streaming “mainstreams, to some extent, the kind of compulsive, detail-oriented mode of spectatorship we have historically associated with the cult or, heaven forbid, the nerd.”28 That association with subcultural viewers also encompasses the queer, and in its mainstreaming, queer spectatorship’s “perverse” pleasures are de-stigmatized. Still another way in which the dynamics of virtual spectatorship are invested in the queer critique of norms is evident in the divisive debates that flourish in on-line discussions of television. Cultural critic Lili Loofbourow notes how the charged conversation that resulted from a Game of Thrones episode in which female character Cersei (Lena Headey) was seen by some viewers to have
been raped despite the creators’ insistence that the act was consensual “testifies to how robust these analytical communities have become. It shows, too, how broad a role [fictional] television has come to play in our ethical conversations.”29

  Yet the loss of embodied interactions among queer viewers in more literally subcultural sites is, without doubt, regrettable. Moreover, contemporary audiences’ virtual interaction in the marketplace is cause for concern in the way it threatens to reinforce corporate profiteering in the name of expanding consumers’ agency and participation. OITNB fans’ importance for promotion of the series—and, by extension, of its corporate overseers—further fuels the millennial model of pro bono audience-supported media production and publicity. As with Kickstarter-funded filmmaking and older forms of web-based fan labor, Netflix exploits OITNB’s fervent fan base for what amounts to start-up capital sans fiscal return: fans create value for the corporation while receiving no financial compensation. Furthermore, Netflix’s all-at-once release structure also follows a feature film model of marketing that, although advertised as giving the people what they want, takes its cue less from a participatory media model and more from the aforementioned blockbuster mentality in its reliance on demographic-targeting, saturation-booking, word-of-mouth marketing, and sink-or-swim expectations to perform.

  “You’ve got time”: The Prison as Counterpublic

  Even if Netflix series do not “got time” to prove themselves before relegation to the back catalog, their narratives are anything but high-concept; whether binged-on or nibbled, their slow-build stories still pay off, albeit in the non-economic sense of telling queer histories and imagining queer futures. Thinking less figuratively about the “queerness” of viewers’ time-based engagements with OITNB, I turn now to consider more literal and hopeful expressions of queerness in OITNB’s narrative transgressions of what Elizabeth Freeman terms chrononormativity, the institutionally and ideologically enforced temporal manipulations by which social-subjects are regulated for maximum productivity and conformity. Together with what Dana Luciano terms the chronobiopolitical forces that shape “‘the sexual arrangement of the time of life’ of entire populations,” this imposed timeline functions to construct lives as productive, linear, and teleological.30 Queer theory’s deconstruction of temporality reveals time as a social construct, naturalized to those whom it privileges and in its own privileging of linearity, continuity, and progression along with such attendant chronobiopolitical discourses as progressivism, reproductive futurism, and neoliberalism. Carla Freccero views this temporal turn in queer theory as yielding “possibilities for relationality or community in queer temporal reimaginings as a way out of the repro-futurism of both hetero- and … homonormative temporal schemas.”31

  As the designated fish out of water, Piper initially reacts to the dictum “you’ve got time” (as sung by Regina Spektor over each episode’s opening credits) with resolve to remain a productive, disciplined citizen. As she informs husband Larry about her plan for prison in “I Wasn’t Ready”: “I’m going to get ripped—like [fitness maven] Jackie Warner–ripped. And I’m going to read everything on my Amazon wish list. And maybe even learn a craft…. I’m going to make it count, Larry. I’m not going to throw away a year of my life.” Piper’s last request to her husband, upon surrendering at Litchfield, is “Please keep my website updated.” Out of Piper’s subsequent recognition of the assured anti-productivity that prison holds in store emerges the paradox of prison as a tool of the capitalist state that nonetheless functions in ways counterproductive to the state and its citizenry (which currently incarcerates seven million Americans at an annual cost of $74 billion) and profitable only to those with ownership stake in the prison industrial complex, the private industry our correctional system justifies and sustains. With inmates charged inflated prices for essential toiletries at commissary yet earning mere cents on the hour from their job assignments, there is no financial incentive to save or legitimate means to succeed. Some respond with extreme shows of anti-productivity and passivity (witness Nicky’s waiting out her shift in the electric shop by drilling into a concrete wall an opening she claims will serve as a glory hole), some barter for supplies through underground networks such as that controlled by chef Red, and some embrace a gift economy, as with inmate Poussey’s (Samira Wiley) circulating gratis her homemade hooch. Against these attempts to construct an alternative, less exploitative economy, two characters emerge as extreme embodiments of the capitalist ethos internalized in the role of the drug dealer: in season one, sadistic Correctional Officer (C.O.) George “Pornstache” Mendez (Pablo Schreiber); in season two, old-school inmate Vee (Lorraine Toussaint). So extreme are these characterizations that viewers point to them as the two least believable in their monstrosity, with Mendez causing a young inmate’s fatal overdose and Vee staging a vicious attack on competitor Red. Other OITNB inmates employ bartering, sharing, and non-heteroreproductive inheritance (departing inmates bequeathing certain belongings; the rest being fair game) to challenge the price gouging and labor exploiting to which they are subject. Nonetheless, OITNB’s prison work force is undeniably alienated, and moreover is compelled to contribute invisible, unaccountable labor commensurate with un(der)paid and un(der)regulated work performed on the outside by undocumented and domestic laborers.

  OITNB makes a point of establishing that life on the outside is just as financially fraught, and its professional transactions equally exploitative. Agreeing not to borrow any additional funds from their parents, Piper and Larry are like many middle-class millennials in remaining financially dependent on their families. Though Alex (and her kingpin boss) readily turn out Piper as a drug money mule, Larry also makes the unconscionable move to sell out Piper and her fellow inmates to advance his career as a writer when he appears on a public radio talk show hosted by the wiry and bespectacled Maury Kind (Robert Stanton) in “Tall Men with Feelings” (2013). Given this narrowly disguised allusion to This American Life and its host Ira Glass, Larry’s actions seem intended as OITNB creator Kohan’s meta-commentary, distinguishing herself and her series from Larry’s and other white males’ appropriation of the stories and experiences of Others (women, people of color, queer individuals) for their own profit and for consumers’ entertainment. As a silent reprimand, a voiceless and bodiless image of an unidentified young blonde woman resembling Piper, powerless in absentia, hovers over the scene of Larry and Maury recording the interview. This scene finds its converse in one that demonstrates the radically more difficult challenge put to inmates lacking Piper’s cultural capital, privileged background, and support system: that of the Philip Morris–sponsored mock job fair at which inmate Taystee (Danielle Brooks) shines, but finds the rewards awaiting her non-existent (“Looks Blue, Tastes Red” [2014]). Still more infuriatingly poignant is Taystee’s actual release and return soon thereafter on a parole infraction, recidivism proving preferable to life on the outside, as she explains to prison pal Poussey in “Fool Me Once” (2013):

  When you get out, they gonna be up your ass like the KGB. Curfew every night. Piss in a cup whenever they say. You’ve got to go do three job interviews in a week for jobs you never gonna get. Probation officer calling every minute checkin’ up. Man, at least in jail you get dinner…. Minimum wage is some kind of joke. I got part-time work at Pizza Hut and still owe the prison $900 in fees I gotta pay back. I ain’t got no place to stay. Everyone I know is poor, in jail, or gone.

  With its depiction of post-prison life as equally if not more fraught than doing time, and showing the two to be mutually reinforcing the ongoing disenfranchisement of America’s underclass, OITNB unmasks what Lauren Berlant, in Cruel Optimism, calls “heterotopias of sovereignty”: the means whereby “the good life” gets defined according to individual “freedoms” presented as a right to all but available only to the privileged few, “a fantasy that sustains liberty’s normative as political idiom.”32

  As dire a description as this is of life on the outside fo
r those abandoned by the system, it may well still seem impossible to imagine prison—the ultimate regulatory regime that dictates prisoners’ movements in space and time—as a site for the disruption of chrononormativity and chronobiopolitics. The fear that OITNB strikes in viewers is not an echo of the famous Richard Pryor routine, “Thank God we got penitentiaries,” but rather of the assessment made by OITNB’s avenging investigative journalist, in his appeal to Piper for inside information for his planned exposé, that our prison system constitutes “the single greatest stain on the American collective conscience since slavery” (“Comic Sans” [2014]).33 Litchfield’s officiating hierarchy features lecherous C.O.s, ruthless assistant warden Natalie Figueroa (Alysia Reiner), and most panoptical of all, her never-seen but often-invoked superior, the Big Daddy warden himself. The single gesture appearing to give inmates voice, the “Women’s Advisory Committee” (WAC) for which they campaign in a season one episode, is revealed as a ruse in which those “elected” didn’t actually run and are powerless to change policy (“WAC Pack” [2013]). Perhaps the most literalized symbol of prison-as-hegemony is the practice in 32 states of shackling female inmates to their maternity bed while giving birth, a threat we hear C.O. Joe Caputo (Nick Sandow) make to his subordinate officer John Bennett (Matt McGorry) to keep quiet about having impregnated Latina inmate Daya Diaz (Dascha Polanco), lest she end up “delivering [their] child with her hands and feet cuffed to the bed.”34 One also can see this power differential as simply an exaggeration of life on the outside, where pregnancy and parenting unfairly burden women, and even more unfairly those who are lower-income women of color. Painfully aware, as Daya tells Bennett in “Comic Sans,” that “you have a choice, you have the power. I’m an inmate; I have nothing,” she confers to him an authority already in his possession, and powerful enough to effectively undo the past, when she relinquishes him from “baby daddy” responsibility: “You got a chance right now to go back in time” (“It Was the Change” [2014]).