Orange is the New Anxiety Dream: When Is Discomfort Good? (NO SPOILERS)

Is it possible or desirable for a good story to make its audience uncomfortable?

Everyone I know has at least one or two things they can’t bear reading about or watching. For some, having to perceive sympathetic characters in certain kinds of physical or mental pain is too much. For others, particular images or situations are no-go.

For me, scenes of social awkwardness — especially misunderstandings with drastic consequences — are as unpleasant as having to sit at the dinner table with my date slurping down something slimy and writhing. To a lesser extent, so is irrational, capricious, and/or unfair power.

That’s why the first two episodes of Orange is the New Black were my perfect storm.

Without spoiling anything, the series follows the experience of Piper Chapman, an upper-middle-class young woman, who gets sent to women’s prison for 18 months. Once behind bars, Piper makes a few inconsiderate mistakes that lead to methodical punishment from the other inmates. The punishment is nothing violent  — there’s one aspect that could turn a stomach if gross-out images bother you — but it’s certainly cruel and unusual.

The scenes depicting the punishment and Piper’s attempts to make reparations work hard to make the viewer feel the same things Piper is feeling. We share her sense of injustice and despair when she’s trying her best to make it stop only to get told that her best isn’t good enough. Later, as the show gives us more information on the other characters and allows us to see more from their perspectives, we get to understand the unthinking privilege in Piper’s offenses — to see what we, just like she, have taken for granted.

I had to turn off the second episode halfway through.

Not because of the punishment itself — that wasn’t too hard to watch, and as the show points out, tongue-in-cheek, Piper has subjected herself to worse in the name of much sillier things. No, what I couldn’t stand was empathizing with Piper’s frustration.

I couldn’t watch Piper and her tormentor talking at cross-purposes over something so trivial and yet so serious. I couldn’t watch a representation of authority that can’t be reasoned with, or dealt with, or overthrown. I couldn’t stand having to be in Piper’s shoes as the seemingly rational rules of the world she knows just don’t work.

Now, part of what makes the show so uncomfortable for me is its tone: the show is written as a dark comedy, but the absurd world it shows is so painful and unfair for its inhabitants that it’s difficult to laugh. We sympathize too much with Wile E. Coyote and Sylvester — feel their hunger pangs — too be able to laugh when the Roadrunner or Tweety Pie escapes yet again. I can deal with tragedies when their represented as such: The Wire, with all its death and cruelty, didn’t bother me as much because the whole point was THE SYSTEM IS BROKEN.

The point of Orange is the New Black, as far as I can tell from the first two episodes, is similar: if there isn’t a public safety reason to keep an offender off the streets (I mean you, Dr. Hannibal Lecter), then prison is ineffective, expensive, and unjust. The point is clear pretty quickly. Orange is the New Black wants us to be uncomfortable in prison with Piper, both because she, our viewpoint character, is uncomfortable, and because the show is uncomfortable with the whole idea of this kind of “justice.” I’d go so far as to say that my squirmy, turn-off-Netflix reaction was exactly what it’s shooting for.

And narratives with a real-life point aren’t the only kind of story that deliberately elicits feelings of discomfort from its audience. There’s a whole branch of comedy (one I can’t watch) that earns laughter by teasing apart social convention to make its audience so uncomfortable they can’t do anything but laugh. Horror, of course, relies on stomach-turning imagery, keep-your-lights-on concepts, or unbearable psychological tension to give audiences the vicarious scare they pay for.

Discomfort is a tool artists can use to encourage particular reactions and lines of thought in their audiences. It’s easy to use poorly, without skill (think of gross-out horror films that have no redeeming feature apart from the quality of their special effects) and it’s also easy to use as an excuse to avoid having to confront criticism (think of “edgy” but otherwise poor comedians whose entire shtick is saying mean or offensive things). It’s easy to use accidentally, because you can’t predict the multitude of human phobias and neuroses. But to use it skillfully and deliberately alongside other elements of effective narrative requires talent and care. Ideally, the audience should feel uncomfortable enough for the feeling to register, but for obvious reasons, you probably don’t want to make the audience uncomfortable enough to stop watching before you’ve finished making your point, developing your characters, and resolving your plot.

There are also different kinds of discomfort — personally, I’d say the kind Orange is the New Black evoked in me is personal discomfort, an actual visceral feeling that makes the audience want the stimulus to stop. There’s also physical discomfort, as when theatre seats don’t have enough legroom or the image of a mangled post-Ghostface body makes viewers gag. There’s intellectual discomfort, as when you’re reading the work of a writer like Orson Scott Card who can create masterful plots but who holds political, moral, and/or philosophical beliefs that make your skin crawl. And there’s the discomfort of complicity: the discomfort of unwittingly finding yourself on the side of the bad guys, as when stories deftly strip away the mechanisms of privilege, like the scene in Cabaret when audience members laughing at the antics of the Emcee suddenly find themselves applauding anti-Semitic Nazi jokes.

So often, I think of stories as escape, transportation to more interesting world that’s ultimately emotionally safe because none of it is real. I construct stories with the idea of providing my reader with a positive experience: excitement, adventure, romance, or mystery. It’s easy to forget that negative experiences have their place in fiction too, whether it’s the catharsis of mourning the death of a sympathetic character, anger at villainous deeds, or shame at identifying with the antagonists.

Or discomfort that lets the audience inhabit the world of the main characters and feel the themes of the story vicariously instead of considering them at a distance.