I finished up Season 2 of Orange is the New Black, and its super good. It hit me a few episodes ago, the song at the beginning of the show is soooo insightful and brilliant. (lyrics available here: rock.rapgenius/Regina-spektor-youve-got-time-lyrics) It starts by saying The animals, the animals. Trapped, trapped, trapped till the cage is full. Though it includes a reference to waiting on you that refers to the inmates, the song doesnt include any direct reference to the inmates as people - only to them as animals. In fact, the one humanizing concept in the whole song is Remember all their faces. Remember all their voices. Thus, the only entities that have faces and voices, that have human aspects, are the people *outside* of the cages. Inside the cages, the prisoners dont have voices or faces worth remembering, they dont have lives, they dont have human characteristics. But thats not to say they have nothing. They do, in fact, have something: they have time. They have so much time, and time is so significant to their prison sentences, that the title of the song is Youve Got Time. This reminds me of a fascinating insight that Rose Wilder Lane makes in her book the Discovery of Freedom. When walking around Europe, she notices that: You recognized an American as far as you could see him, by the way he walked. Chin up, head high, briskly going somewhere, with an unconscious mastery of the earth he trod. No European moved like that. Europeans walked prudently, slowly. Their every gesture consumed time in merely letting time pass. That made their lives and their countries seem so restful, to Americans. And you can see precisely that same way of walking, that same sense of useless time, in the prisoners in any American prison-yard. In light of this idea, the song accurately captures the essence of prisons: prisons remove peoples agency and dehumanize them to the point that all they have left is useless time. For real people, time is the one scarce resource that essentially nobody seems to have enough of. By removing everything else and leaving inmates only with time, prisons deprive inmates of a really essential aspect of their humanity. They make them realize, as the song says, that Taking steps is easy. Standing still is hard. The really cool part of the song is how it incorporates this idea into the very presentation. If youre like me watching the show, then you watched the song once, maybe twice, maybe a third time, but you realized its just soooo long and repetitive at the beginning of every episode with each face blurring together into something worth overlooking. Thus, if youre like me, then youve been fast forwarding past it rather than watching it every time. Youve been exercising agency and allocating your time effectively rather than feeling like a prisoner struck moving forward in real time in the painful, long-winded way that others require of you In contrast, if you actually sit through it over and over and over again, it gives you the painful, repetitive feeling of what its like to be a prisoner grinding through prison, making the songs structure much being in a cage and having your time pointlessly tick by.
Posted on: Sat, 05 Jul 2014 02:09:45 +0000