“No! I tell you! The way is
to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your
hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up. So if you ask
me—how to be.” Lord Jim, Joseph
Conrad
Wentworth is the
popular Australian series set in a women’s prison that has run for six seasons
and will soon begin a seventh. I started watching because I saw that Danielle
Cormack played Bea Smith, the central character, and I remembered her as Ephiny,
an Amazon on Xena: Warrior Princess.
I was hooked from the beginning. Besides extraordinary writing and acting, the
series also portrays two of the finest lesbian love stories that I have ever
watched.
Bea Smith is sent to Wentworth for attempting to kill her
abusive husband. She arrives woefully unprepared for a milieu in which violence
and corruption are rife on both sides of the bars. Subplots accumulate but
Bea’s story dominates, and in the first season Bea stumbles toward calamity
through accident and choice with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. Staff
are nominally in charge, however Wentworth’s prisoners are actually ruled by a
top dog whose tyranny is ameliorated only by the character of the top dog
herself. Several women will take on the crown throughout the series but the first
one Bea encounters is Jacs, wife of a drug kingpin. Bea’s naïve mistake is to
believe that she can touch the softer side of Jacs only to learn that there is
none. By the end of Season One, Bea has lost much more than her naïveté.
I think of Season Two as demonstrating the theme from Joseph
Conrad’s Lord Jim: “The way is to the destructive element
submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water
make the deep, deep sea keep you up.” Prison itself is a destructive
element, largely through violence—sudden, shattering, ubiquitous, ever imminent
violence. The top dog of this season is Franky, openly gay, played by Nicole da
Silva. The prison also has a new governor, Joan Ferguson, surely descended from
Nurse Ratched, who intends to solidify her position by playing Bea and Franky
against one another. Bea initially has no ambition to unseat Franky, but Franky
knows her power cannot be maintained by ignoring even unintentional threats.
Single-mindedly pursuing her own agenda, Bea sinks deeper
into the prison’s moral quagmire. Her rise through the inmate hierarchy
corresponds to her personal deterioration as she hardens her heart, losing her
aversion to violence and to using people. “You’re a natural,” Franky tells her by
the third season. “You think it’s all for a good cause. Your type’s the worst
of all.” Throughout the series, Bea’s struggle to hold onto power battles her
broken moral compass. In one scene she instructs Maxine to watch carefully lest
a third woman hurt herself and be moved out of reach into medical. Maxine
replies that there’s another reason: the woman just might hurt herself. Another
chilling theme of Wentworth is that an offer of protection almost always
portends disaster, or as Franky tells Bea: “You’re not the great protector,
you’re the grim fucking reaper.”
The third season begins the first of the two outstanding
love stories. As Bea falls further into Wentworth’s morass, Franky begins a
struggle toward personal accountability and parole. Her ally is the prison
psychologist, Bridget Westfall, played by Libby Tanner. Their burgeoning
attraction avoids becoming a cliché and, throughout the series, Bridget and
Franky’s courageous struggle to love in spite of the separation imposed by legal
rules and iron bars is portrayed with pathos and heart. The story also reveals
how the world of the inmates may occupy the same space as that of the staff,
but living as a prisoner requires radically different codes, strategies, and
behavior. Despite extraordinary empathy, Bridget has only the least inkling of
how being a survivor requires compromise and self-distortion. “You do what you
got to do to survive,” Franky tells her, “because if you don’t you have shit
done to you.”
The violence in Wentworth has taken me to some interesting
reflection. The aversion that Bea exemplifies at the beginning rests on class
privilege maintained by the state’s insistence it has a monopoly on
violence—the rationale justifying prisons in the first place—and on the
gendered presumption that the fair sex needs others, i.e., men, to protect
them. A subtler class struggle occurs
between Franky and Bridget and is not resolved until Bridget crosses the last
line where she is allied to the system that separates her from Franky.
In the fourth season, the story of Bea and Allie comes to
the foreground. Bea’s hardened heart has begun to show cracks even before it’s
touched by Allie, but that is far from opening to trust another person. Played
by Kate Jenkinson, Allie’s attraction to Bea steadily deepens. “I’m not gay,”
Bea tells her to which Allie replies, “I don’t care what you are.” In an
interview in Curve, Jenkinson says, “So in my mind I always imagined Allie,
it sounds silly, but I imagined her as this big warm blanket. You know when
you’re being held by someone that you love, it’s like all of the worries in the
world just magically disappear?” Initially put off, I quickly realized how
patriarchally prejudiced I was in not recognizing that offering comfort, love,
and support is active, is a choice, is to be valued.
It would be possible to compare other stories of lesbian
love awakening amid difficulty – among others I’m thinking of “Aimee and
Jaguar.” Love overcoming obstacles resonates strongly with lesbian experience
particularly because the world’s homophobia may be residual in some places but
there is plenty left. What makes the stories of Bridget and Franky, of Bea and
Allie, so special is the affirmation of connection, the insistence on caring and
loving and loyalty, an elevation of affection. This is what makes love stories
so persistent. We understand beyond words that love is the only thing that can ever
save any of us in a broken world.
I’m prone to finding meaning in shows I like very much, and
it would be easy to consider Wentworth
as a parable of the larger world. The series has its share of melodrama and
coincidental moments that make you shake your head, but then wait a moment or
two and there’ll be another moment of brilliance. I’ll just end by saying that
Wentworth rewards watching by thoughtful, intelligent, superior quality
storytelling and wonderful characters. Oh, and that the best thing about a
women’s prison drama is that it has lots and lots of women in lots and lots of
juicy roles.
Gems: Turquoise and obsidian
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