I’m still not seeing the racism angle in the parenting - Crazy Eyes could have been the couple’s biological daughter and shown the same signs of mental instability, with similar results.
I suppose one could speculate that had she been just as crazy and white, she’d have ended up in a mental hospital rather than prison for whatever transgression she committed, but that’s a societal thing, not a parental thing. The parents evidently still care (or at least did until quite recently) so I’m not eager to look for reasons to fault them.
Well, we can guess her neighbor wasn’t black, but I think that will be the extent of the racism angle.
A white world isn’t worse than a black world either. A black child shouldn’t go crazy just because she’s immersed in a white world. White people aren’t that bad. Something else is going on here. My guess is childhood-trauma driven mental health issues, but we can’t know for sure based on the information that we have.
I’m not a fan of diagnosing fictional characters, but to me Suzanne pings as someone who is on the autism or schizophrenic spectrum. Both of which can be exacerbated by trauma and parental misjudgment. But a person can also deteriorate completely independent of these things. There are plenty of “crazy” people with great upbringings and fantastic parenting.
I don’t think the parents are at fault any more than anyone else, really. If Suzanne had just been a little shy, pushing her onto the stage to sing at graduation wouldn’t have been a major crime. Too bad Suzanne wasn’t just a little shy. But hindsight is always 20/20. And many parents do tone-deaf stuff like sending a sibling off to a party where they aren’t invited. I think the mother was wrong for making it a race issue when it so clearly wasn’t. But I don’t think this means the mother was racist. Socially inept and egotistical, maybe. But not racist.
I’m sure a lot of parents can see where they went wrong once their children end up in prison. Maybe her parents would be the first to admit that maybe they should have gotten Suzanne in therapy earlier in life, or moved to a place with more diversity.
There’s another crazy person in this show. Morello is STRAIGHT UP nuts. Is she nuts because of her chaotic living situation? I dunno. Lots of people grow up caring for sick parents and whomever those crying babies belong to, but they don’t turn into stalkers who are the stars of their own delusional movies. So…sometimes people just be crazy.
I’m fine with Suzanna being crazy because of an early traumatic happening. But it would be as equally realistic to say she’s crazy “just cuz”. Though, I do wonder if craziness landed her in her prison, or if it was something else.
You’re right, Morello is completely delusional, and that was one of the real pleasures of the second season for me, being surprised like that at what got Morello jailed. I had sort of assumed she would have been guilty of something like taking the fall for a drug bust for her boyfriend. Or that she was framed, she seemed so sweet. But nooooooooo…
Wait, I thought she was in Litchfield because of the online auction fraud. The stalker stuff would have landed her in a state prison, not a federal one, right?
The stalker stuff would be a state crime, and the online auction fraud would be federal. I wonder how something like this is handled when it comes to prison assignments?
This is riiiiiiiiiiidiccccccccullllouussssssss. In every flashback, we see Crazy Eyes as someone that is legitimately mentally disturbed. Even as a small child. Remember, she thought having a princess trapped in her room and burned to death improved a fairy tale as a 9 year old. There is literally nothing to suggest that racism played any factor in her mental illness. Everything points to her simply being mentally ill.
Anyways, like Weeds, Orange is the New Black is at it’s best when it’s a ridiculous comedy, and at it’s worst when it tries to be deep. None of the plot of season 2 made very much sense, and the character development sucks. You can’t really flip from a character being a ridiculous clown and then expect me to care about her deep emotions:
Good: SoSo saying “I’m practicing non-violent resistance”. Guard: “This is aggressive agression!”.
Bad: Red and V saying “what have we become” after trying to kill each other.
I hope Season 3 has more of former and less of the latter.
Nah, that wasn’t racism or even inept and egotistical, just a demonstration of deep, fundamental denial and cluelessness about what’s really going on with little Suzanne. I mean, who wants to admit to themselves their kid has serious, potentially un-fixable, mental issues, and those issues make people not want to be around her? It’s a lot easier and more comforting to think that if people don’t want her around it must be because she’s black, and that if she’s awkward it’s because she doesn’t get the same social opportunities as other kids and enforced socialization will fix that. Just like telling yourself that she’s just a little shy and a chance to show off her talents and shine will do her a world of good, so of course she should sing at graduation.
They were blind to her mental illness and tried to treat her like a mentally healthy person who had some problems that could be worked through. In other words, they treated her like the kid they wished she was instead of the kid she actually was, and it’s not like they’re the only people to ever have that particular failing. All parents do that to some extent, near as I can tell.
I actually thought that was pretty clever : Red is, at heart, a big Russian softie who pretends to be a hardass as a survival method, and never really thinks ahead. She wanted to get in with the mob, but balked at the idea that they needed her shop to stash dead bodies. She’s clever enough to organize prison smuggling for the power it gives her, but doesn’t want it to bring drugs, weapons or anything harsher than neon nail polish in. She’s OK with sabotaging the kitchen to take it back, but the idea that people she didn’t hate got hurt by the sabotage kills her.
So it’s perfectly in character for her to both try the most direct method to solve her immediate safety problem (i.e. killing V), and to stop short of actually doing it because deep down, she’s no murderer and while V has managed to push her into her deepest and darkest, she still desperately hopes there’s another way somehow.
Which V knows, which is why she goaded her on initially, “go on, kill a person so you can smuggle *mascara *!”. Then immediately flipped to “good ol’ times” mode to make sure Red wasn’t going to try and jump her again in the short term. Then jumped her herself. V is a sociopath.
Playing nice when they don’t have the upper hand, then flipping the script with exactly zero moral qualms is exactly what they do, and what makes them scary. It’s certainly been V’s M.O. throughout every conflict of hers we’ve seen.
Nope. Not ridiculous. What is ridiculous is the notion that these parents are just neglectful enough NOT to get their child help. If you’re a little girl talking about death why aren’t your parents alarmed? We see no evidence that Suzanne was ever treated for mental illness, just that she was given nice clothes to wear and was expected to thrive in a white community because they took her away from her terrible ghetto life. Suzanne to them is just a product of her black circumstance, and thus damaged goods. And that is racism.
To plop a girl with mental health issues into an environment that continues to highlight what is “different” about her rather than try to get her help is neglectful and racist.
Shortsighted, yes. Neglectful, oh yes. But racist? Nope, not seeing it. Presuming that your child is unable to fit in with white society simply because she is black, now that’s racist.
I’ve wondered about Litchfield myself. As I understand it, if you freed prisoners convicted for prostitution and drug use/sales, you’d have a lot of very empty women’s prison in the US. The inmates at Litchfield seem to have committed a very wide swath of crimes. Virtually no prostitutes, relatively few drug smugglers/users. Could be because it’s a federal prison – I don’t think prostitution is a federal crime unless you cross state lines to do it, and low level drug users might wind up in state prison, too. We can presume Piper is at Litchfield because she did international drug smuggling.
We don’t know if her parents didn’t try to get her help. I mean, we can guess they didn’t since she landed behind bars. But then again, there are plenty of crazy people in jail (and in mental hospitals) who received all the early interventions and therapies. Sometimes people just end up deteriorating no matter what you do for them.
(And for all we know, Suzanne may be doing better than expected given her mental issues. She’s very intelligent and finds cool ways to entertain herself, for the most part. And she has managed to avoid the SHU, something Piper hasn’t been able to do. Yes, Suzanne beat up Poussey and punched Piper in the face a couple of times. But Piper beat up Pennsatuckey. She fucked that girl up. So Suzanne isn’t all that bad, comparatively speaking.)
And as far as a kid talking about death and dragons goes, these are not signs of a mental illness. If a little boy had told the same story that Suzanne had, it wouldn’t have been that unusual. But Suzanne was a 10-year-old at a six-year-old’s slumber party. Little girls like fairy princess stuff. Suzanne was at the age when kids get into Harry Potter and the macabre. That was a typical “fish out of water” scene.
When V got her girls moved to custodial, Red went to the Latinas and furiously told them they didn’t know what they had done.
Red’s said on several occasions that people don’t change.
When oldie tried to kill V, Red said that V was going to get revenge. She made her family stick together, and ordered them never to be alone.
Essentially, there’s no way that Red would ever think that attempting to murder V would put them at peace. It’s against everything we’ve seem from Red as a person, and against everything we’ve seen in the relationship between Red and V.
Plus, there’s no way in hell V would be emptying the piss bucket. She makes people let her cut in the lunch line and kicks people out of the lunch tables. There’s no way her character would empty the piss bucket. She’d make someone else do it.
Red says a lot of shit she doesn’t necessarily believe deep down, though. And we’ve also seen that she’s prepared to believe irrational crapola **if **her own emotional well-being requires it, like “oh, they totally turned the little market around, no biggie, they’re just sooo busy they can’t call you”
Rationally, no. But she’s just tried to kill a person with a plastic bag, and found out she didn’t have it in her. She’s high on adrenaline and fear and, as I said, at this point, in the dark, under the rain, she’s desperate to find that there’s another way. Desperate enough to let herself be fooled.
I daresay in the sober light of morning she probably regretted it, or maybe V clocked her before she could come to her senses.
But speaking of clocking, and considering lock-in-a-sock seems like a go-to weapon in Lichfield… who the hell still lets the inmate have heavy metal locks ?! They seem to not even have hard soap, presumably to avoid the soap-on-a-rope trick.
That one I might buy, although the wardens did say “whoever fills the bucket empties it” which presumably doesn’t involve a choice, as they’re probably supervised when they go take a piss.
Also emptying the piss bucket means getting outside for a bit of fresh air. Gotta be hot as hell and smelly as an army barracks’ armpit in that room. Soosoo is singing pop rock badly, too :).
Nobody saw Suzanne sucker punch Piper so there’s that. if a kid has a preoccupation with death then parents should be alarmed. We can infer that either Suzanne is not a typical kid by the way the family treats her, or she’s a typical kid who is not being given a fair chance at life by her family. if her parents are proud of the fact that they adopted a black child the least they can do is not neglect possible signs of illness.
There have been a lot of theories about “crazy eyes” but ranging all over the map. But, for me at least, they don’t hit upon what I believe happened.
Suzanne’s parents adopted her for reasons we don’t yet know. My guess? Her parents had a maid who died and suzanne was left without parents, so they felt guilty and took her in. It felt good of them to do so. It made them feel noble and like they were doing their part to help save the world. Besides, they couldn’t have kids themselves, so it was perfect! But then, miracle baby came along and Suzanne had a sister.
Suzanne’s parents were people who adamantly, fiercely, refused to see race and how dare anyone else do so? She was their daughter and every bit as equal as they were. And they accepted Suzanne for exactly who she was.
But while they accepted, they never, ever, understood. They never understood black culture. They never exposed her to it or gave her the resources to learn about it on her own. To learn about “black culture” would mean teaching suzanne that races can different and they clearly can’t because we are all equal. So her being “different” simply could not be because of her race.
So Suzanne grew up where she looked different, she felt different, she acted different, and she was treated different from everyone else she was ever exposed to. But it was constantly reinforced that, no! She isn’t different and those that think such things are ignorant and wrong.
Yeah, that would be a mindfuck. Is the entire world crazy? Or am I?
We finally finished watching the season last night. The bizarre thing was that on our TV, there was a several second offset between sound and video - sound first, matching picture later. But on the computers, it was sync’d, so we watched on the laptop. The picture was fine, but the sound sucked - I may rewatch it on my PC since the speakers are better. I may have missed some stuff.
My thoughts on the series - I loved all the backstories. I hated V. I thought bringing Larry and Polly together was way too contrived as was Piper ratting out Alex and Mr. Fig being gay. I liked the way they had the “family” turn against V - all along, I kept hoping they’d see her for who she was. I was glad to see Tastee and P renew their friendship. And Caputo’s second day on the job had me cracking up!! Be careful what you wish for, young man…
One thing that I can’t figure - the escape tunnel from the greenhouse. It looked like it was a drain, but it was a pretty big drain for such a small building. And it led to a hatch in the woods?? If it had been dug as an escape tunnel, then discovered, which led to the grate being welded down, why hadn’t it been filled in? And if it was municipal plumbing, why would it go to a hatch in the woods? And how did Red’s son find the hatch in the woods?? I guess we’re just supposed to accept it all at face value.
I still don’t like Piper - I feel like the character has been written inconsistently. I’m looking forward to season 3 - so many other stories to tell. I really want to see how they resolve Daya’s baby. And then there are the drugs in the vent…