Favorite Characters: Suzanne Warren (Orange is the New Black)

When this character is first introduced on Orange is the New Black, she’s a character!, a highly-entertaining archetype with outrageous antics and hilariously-bizarre non sequiturs.  Over time, though she retains much of her comic potential, she grows into a much more fully-drawn person with demons, struggles, and private tragedies.  Just as Piper has to learn to recognize the individuals behind her uninformed first impressions, we discover Suzanne’s full range and soon regret that we ever used her prison moniker Crazy Eyes.  (Some character-specific spoilers.)

That’s who we first meet:  Crazy Eyes, the unstable inmate who takes a shine to the horrified Piper.  Piper tries to calmly, rationally explain that she’s not interested in becoming anyone’s wife, but her diplomatic brush-off is met with pie-throwing and peeing on the floor.  Crazy Eyes is the whacky loon, the loose cannon, and she provides endless laughs.  Whether she’s showing off her “mad epiglottal skills,” joining the Scared Straight program for an acting outlet (her dream roles include Desdemona and Claire Huxtable,) or humping her fellow inmates, her sheer unpredictability is one of the show’s comedic highlights.

But then, late in season 1, a chance encounter with Piper offers insight into, not Crazy Eyes the character, but Suzanne the person.  She confesses that her job on the cleaning crew helps her manage her mental and emotional struggles, she shares about her time in psych, and she points out how much Piper’s rejection hurt her feelings.  Suddenly, we see a woman with mental health issues who’s just trying to get by in prison.  She seeks friendship and looks for someone she can love and protect, and she loses control when her feelings overwhelm her.  Because she’s so high-octane and all-over-the-place, she’s thought of as a joke, not quite real, and people can fool themselves into thinking that her emotions and experiences don’t “count” that way other people’s do, but this is the scene that starts turning the tide.

Season 2 delves much further into Suzanne.  It shows her troubled past as the adopted daughter of wealthy white parents who, though well-intentioned, seemed ill-equipped to handle her mental health difficulties or meet her cultural needs as a Black child.  The flashbacks offer a lot of insight into who she is, but more significantly, they show how susceptible she is to the machinations of Vee, season 2’s major baddie.  She’s so lonely, so starved for love and friendship, and at such mercy to her feelings that she’s easy pickings for a modern-day Fagin whispering in her ear.  It’s painfully simple to manipulate Suzanne by giving her the barest shred of affection, and Vee quickly fosters an environment in which Suzanne is so desperate for Vee’s continued approval that she’ll do anything the older woman wants her to.  Vee takes advantage of her volatile emotions and explosive tendencies, feeding on her devotion until she can use Suzanne like her personal attack dog.  It’s heartrending to watch, and it’s awful to think of someone so vulnerable being preyed on this way.  She had a rough time of it last season, and I really hope that season 3 brings something good her way, something to help her heal from some her harrowing experiences last year.

One last bit of kudos.  Orange is the New Black often does a nice job with intersectionality, and that’s especially true with Suzanne.  She’s a queer woman of color with a disability, and the show examines her sexuality, race, and mental illness – separately and together – in thoughtful, honest ways.  I wouldn’t have dreamed that after her first appearance, but it’s definitely true.

More thoughts on Orange is the New Black

 

Season 2 of Orange is the New Black offers up plenty of twists, revelations, and conflicts to keep fans busy, but it also provides some nice narrative food for thought.  Today, I want to examine two characters and how race and culture are at play to create different results in similar scenarios.  (Again, a disclaimer:  I’ll be getting into season 2 stuff, especially flashback info from episodes 2 and 3.)

 

We found out last season that Suzanne (a.k.a. Crazy Eyes) is the daughter of two well-to-do-looking white parents, with the obvious implication that she was adopted.  Similarly, Taystee has a line in season 1 about having been a ward of the state until adolescence.  The new episodes give us more information about both of their backgrounds, paying special attention to their experience with adoption or lack thereof.

 

Taystee’s story is sad but undeniably familiar.  It’s unclear how old she was when she was first put up for adoption, but at some point she clearly aged out of a desirably adoptable age.  The smart, spirited girl grows up in group homes, being passed over for those younger, lighter-skinned, straighter-haired, and less forceful.  Her yearning for a “forever family” makes her a prime target for Vee, an opportunistic drug dealer.  Like Fagin before her, Vee preys on cast-off children, grooming them to work for her and offering them the parental figure they’re missing in their lives. 

 

Superficially, Suzanne’s situation appears far better than Taystee’s.  She’s adopted into a well-off, loving family at a young age, raised in suburban comfort.  However, Suzanne’s upbringing has left scars as well.  Her well-intentioned mother loves her dearly and fights tooth and nail for her happiness and inclusion, but Suzanne remains an outsider in her own community.  She grows up among white people (probably exclusively, or nearly so,) where no one quite understands her.  Even something as simple as her hair – when she’s young, her parents leave it large and wild, presumably because they don’t really know what to do with a black girl’s hair.  It’s not until her baby sister is born that it’s first styled, a treat from a black nurse who manages Suzanne with an ease her own mother never achieves.

 

So, in a way, Suzanne is looking for family, too.  Taystee makes friends in prison easily; there’s a common vernacular and cultural bond, and she fits in seamlessly.  Meanwhile, Suzanne struggles to find her place.  In Litchfield, prisoners live according to a “tribal” system in which they mainly associate with members of their own race.  Granted, we don’t know much about what her adult pre-prison life was like, but it seems Suzanne has had limited time socializing with other black people.  I wonder if she was excited when she first discovered a black community at Litchfield, if she finally felt like she belonged somewhere. 

 

But here, too, Suzanne is out of place.  With her Standard American English diction, privileged background, and love of Shakespeare and figure skating, she doesn’t have the shared experience that binds together many of the black inmates, and they tolerate her without really accepting her.  (Note:  Suzanne’s clear but unspecified mental health issues definitely have something to do with it as well – the others tend to treat her more like a “special” mascot than anything else.)  When Vee returns to Litchfield, it’s no wonder she quickly recognizes Suzanne as an easy mark.