Polleta, OITNB

Polleta Quote

"Certainly, one can challenge the conventions of narrative performance. Survivors could have told stories of anger on talk shows and could have recounted moving from shame to pride in courtroom hearings; but doing so would have been risky. Culture shapes strategy in the sense that abiding by the rules of cultural expression yields more calculable consequences than challenging them." Pg. 498

I wanted to highlight this quote because I think it is very relevant to what we have been talking about recently of why we relate to characters in films. Is it because we all have a little Darth in us, or a little Hitler? Maybe. But it's also because, as Nina said, the narratives we hear have been written and planned accordingly to their audiences. "Culture shapes strategy..." I wanted to specifically highlight this line of the quote because this is where stock characters come in. Different genres have different stock characters because each genre has its own conventions and its own culture that it must fit into. We it be okay to be laughing during a documentary about the concentration camps of Nazi Germany? No. Would it be okay to be screaming in horror during a RomCom? No.

Orange is the New Black

This scene seemed to pop at me due to the very controlling and dominating language that was being used by the Officer Mendez but Burset doesn't let him have this moment; instead she takes control with her line "I don't do sausage in my breakfast sandwich." There is a conflict here between good and evil, as in any melodrama, the trick here though is figuring out who is good and who is evil. The black versus white contrast is very strong here so the first assumption we could make would be that Officer Mendez is the good and Burset is the evil- but then this scene shows us that maybe this isn't the case.