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DVD/Video Review by John Demetry "There's no fucking place like home," narrator, commentator, and inmate Augustus Hill (Harold Perrineau) concludes the first season of HBO's prison drama Oz -- now available on DVD and VHS. The camera trucks back to reveal Augustus inside a levitating cell surrounded by darkness. It's "home" as floating signifier.
In OZ, anything goes between inmates
Oz writer-creator Tom Fontana challenges the concept of "home" by bringing that challenge into homes - through the medium of television, the modern hearth. Surely, it's not "for" the whole family. Rather, it is about the extended American family that locked doors and TV sets usually block out - however tendentiously. Fontana's first-season balls-out gambit uses the 8 hours (in 8 episodes) to detail the escalation of sexual, racial, ethnic, religious, social, and class conflicts into a full-blown prison riot in the Emerald City ward of a prison called Oz. It reveals the explicit historical inspiration for the series: the infamous Attica riots and the resulting massacre. That's an ingenious creative coup - genuine pulp friction.
Fontana's similar quest for understanding is the key to his dramatic strategy. He encourages the viewer, "safe" at "home," to empathize with the various inmates (as well as guards, prison staff, prisoner's family, and survivors alike). Spectators recognize an unequivocal bond to society's outcasts. That understanding extends to the self in extreme. "After a big bad event you only become more of the person you already were," explains Hill in a particularly trenchant - though, as usual, redundant - bit of narration.
Oz stretches "home" from house-and-TV to the channel-surfing elusiveness of society and identity. That's the key to the intensity of feeling Oz generates. Let's fast-forward to some of the most powerful moments of hardboiled melodrama: A montage memory of blood violence - replacing an unfair justice system - leads to Black drug-runner Jefferson Keane's admittance and plea to Muslim leader Kareem Said (Eamonn Walker): "I do feel the fire. Save me." That fire breeds homophobia -- a lazy pretense toward righteousness. But even that is challenged -- as is spectator condescension -- when Keane's gay brother, Billie, braids Keane's hair in his death-row cell: "I'm sorry I'm not who you want me to be. I like being Queer." Following this, Keane defends his brother against their father's claim: "He's become a fag. When he leaves, what's Billie ever gonna be?" Facing death, Keane's answer sanctifies the end of the family line: "Your son. My brother. Forever." That's feeling the fire that saves. When Italian-American Dino Ortolani, the perpetrator of a homophobic hate crime in the prison, gives a two-fingered tap on a glass screen, a "Goodbye" to his wife, Ortolani earns viewer tears and self-recognition. It prepares for Ortolani's grisly death by fire that vengeance demands. That revenge contrasts with a scene of forgiveness. The Black mother of a murdered prison guard confronts the white killer (and cannibal) on death row: "You are my neighbor and I forgive you with all my heart." Spectators' feeling marks the beginning of understanding. It responds to Attica's echo of an epochal call. Oz puts the desire to improve self and society - through faith and politics - in frustrating counterpoint with the impulse to sustain social structures along racial and sexual lines. The emotional amplitude of the above -- and other -- dramatic tête-à-têtes in Oz signify these conflicts. Less effective: the Brechtian, agit-prop conceit of Hill/Perrineau's narrations. Those, often annoying, simplifications may help guide less sophisticated viewers, but the heady mix of melodrama, exploitation tropes, and the self-referential proves far more affecting.
After accepting his new-born son as his responsibility, Hispanic prisoner Miguel Alvarez's chance at salvation seems crushed when the baby dies. That leads to the following exchange with the prison's Asian Catholic priest, Father Ray Mukada: Alvarez: "Hey Father, where was God when my son died?" Father: "Same place He was when His own died." The TV-as-prison analogy of Oz puts viewer judgment on trial. |
Alvarez in the hole 
During the run of OZ, several celebrities have served time, including Luke Perry as a fallen preacher 