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The Wizardry of Oz
Views & Reviews by Louis
Bayard
Nerve.com
October 2000
I never knew how sweet two
men kissing could be until I saw My Beautiful Laundrette. That
moment when Daniel Day-Lewis, sexy in his punked-out, two-toned
hair, clasped his bony hands around Gordon Warnecke's smooth brown
head and drew their mouths together. I almost expired the first time
I saw it. Not from the eroticism, but the emotion. It was the first
time I'd seen men locking lips with that kind of thirsty, delicate
ardor — I felt it in my heart before it reached any other organ.
I've waited a long time to see a same-sex kiss that tender, that
soulful, and mostly, I've waited in vain. Last season, though,
without warning, the wait ended. I watched two actors named Chris
Meloni and Lee Tergesen wrap arms, close eyes and lay down the
finest buss this side of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman.
Okay, there's a wrinkle. The actors were playing two convicts (Chris
and Toby), and their romance was the tiniest of grace notes in the
great roar of Oz, the throat-slashing, stomach-churning prison drama
that splashes across HBO screens every week. Oz is short for Oswald
Correctional Facility, and if you ever thought living in a
maximum-security prison would be kinda neat once you got the hang of
it, Oz is the show to set you straight. Watch just half an hour, and
you'll never so much as jaywalk again.
Hanging, stabbing, shooting, beating, poisoning, even a slow steady
diet of ground-up glass . . . Oz is everything you wanted to know
about hurting people but were afraid to watch. If you had seen, say,
the closing episode of the second season, you would have learned how
to crucify child molesters, separate prison guards from their eyes
and break an inmate's limbs in under thirty seconds. Hunky Chris was
the co-perpetrator of that last act, and his victim was sometime
boyfriend, Toby — not exactly an act to inspire long-term trust. But
that was a pedicure compared to the travails Toby's been through
this season. His children were kidnapped under orders of the Nazi
thug Schillinger, and when that proved insufficiently alarming, the
kidnappers sent Toby his son's hand in a brown-paper parcel. Not
surprisingly, the boy turned up dead a couple of episodes later,
prompting Toby to retaliate by putting out a Mafia hit on
Schillinger's son.
At times, there's something almost risible about the Old Testament
violence of Oz — you half expect to hear claps of thunder and see
"Special Guest Sacrifice" placards on the visiting actors. And it
does seem to me that a real-world prison with this kind of mortality
count would be shut down or, at the very least, subjected to
external inquiry. (Not in Oz-land, though: the warden gets invited
to run for lieutenant governor.) As best I can make out through the
lattice of my fingers, creator and writer Tom Fontana is trying to
create a Hobbesian-Nietschzean universe, where power is the defining
— in fact, the sole — principle, where the only pleasure comes from
watching hegemony shift from week to week. So it is that Hispanic
gang leader Hernandez can go from executioner to executed in the
course of two minutes, and African cobra Adebisi can jump from
gibbering cokehead one season to cock-of-the-walk next, complete
with curtains on his cell and a rolling stream of half-willing
fellators. It's a zero-sum existence, and Oz is, for the most part,
a zero-sum show: it's men behaving badly and still worse. You have
to squint your eyes to catch the passing signs of grace: the
affectionate by-play between Ryan O'Reily and his brain-damaged
brother, Cyri; the melancholy middle-distance gaze of longtime lifer
Rebadow and, of course, the aforementioned nookie between Chris and
Toby.
That last feature, I admit, is what keeps me watching week to week:
Oz is the only TV show where a fella can see other fellas getting it
on. And don't tell me about those split seconds of onscreen kissing
on Will and Grace and Dawson's Creek. The former was a deliberate
joke, the latter an unintentional one. And don't enumerate all the
gay men who've been popping up on network TV — they're still in
their bedroom slippers, waiting for the heroines to get back from
their dates.
No, the only men who can practice outlaw sex on TV are outlaws, and
I suppose that should piss me off, but I have to believe the
penitentiary backdrop is what lets Oz go further than other shows.
Most Americans, after all, can tolerate the idea of sodomy behind
bars. They can look at Oz and tell themselves the sex is just
another form of violence: junkyard dogs marking their territories.
But those of us who've been following Toby and Chris know that Tom
Fontana has done something more radical. He has depicted (in fits
and starts) a complex and evolving and equal sexual relationship
between two consenting men. He has made it clear that, in a setting
of deep brutality, men can find even deeper reservoirs within each
other — not simply because women are absent but because they
themselves are present to new possibilities.
It may not be Genet, but it's a start. And Toby and Chris may not be
the best gay role models in the world — one has bitten off a man's
penis and killed a prison guard, the other is a serial murderer of
gay men — but they'll do until the next thing comes along. They'll
do until gay sex can serve out its time and walk in the probational
light of mainstream TV. Until then, all hail the great and mighty
Oz.
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