Once you start looking for prisons in books and movies, you find them everywhere. Obviously there are books set in prisons, like Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spiderwoman. There are books written in prison, like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. There are even books about prison written in prison, like Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis.
There are many reasons for using prison as subject and a setting but perhaps the most important is that it’s symbolic and it’s also real. And it’s real but the reality is pushed to an extreme, the power relations are more naked, the violence more open. It’s always been a way of exploring suppressed parts of our culture. Most of us have seen the portrayal of sexual fluidity on one hand and sexual violence on the other in Orange is the New Black. We may have forgotten that Leiber and Stoller’s supposedly jocular song, ‘Jailhouse Rock’, references gay sex in prison with a candor that is almost startling:
Number forty-seven said to number three,
‘You’re the cutest jailbird I ever did see.
I sure would be delighted with your company,
Come on and do the Jailhouse Rock with me.’
How did Elvis get away with singing that in 1958?
There are famous films (and books) set almost entirely in prison, like The Shawshank Redemption (which, incidentally, features the most preposterous escape in prison history: did nobody think to check behind the poster?). But you might forget that Alex in A Clockwork Orange spends almost half the film incarcerated. Kind Hearts and Coronets is narrated entirely from prison. You can play it as a game: Who hasn’t made some kind of prison movie? Steven Spielberg? Schindler’s List. Steven Soderbergh? Ocean’s Eleven.
And then there are so many kinds of prison: there are county jails, sheriffs’ lock-ups, medieval dungeons, prisoner of war camps, concentration camps, gulags. There are prison islands (like in Papillon) and there are even prison planets (like in Alien 3).
Prisons are, by definition, hidden, walled-in spaces. But all the best prison novels and movies are about the society they exist in. They’re not about them; they’re about us. Here are some examples.
The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas
This is a (very long) roller coaster of an adventure story stuffed to bursting with tales of betrayal, poison, buried treasure, devilish disguises, secret islands, and above all, revenge. It begins with its hero, Edmond Dantès, just as he is about to marry his sweetheart, being falsely accused of treason and imprisoned without trial in the grim, impregnable island fortress of Chateau d’If. Here he descends into despair until he is befriended by a learned fellow Italian prisoner, who educates him amazingly thoroughly and then dies, enabling Dantès to escape in his burial sack. He has been in prison for fourteen years, and the ghastly fortress is his university: it tests his courage, sharpens his mind, sends him out into the world hardened in heart. (Love has to save him, but that is hundreds of pages later.)
Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens
Dickens’s own father was sent to a debtors’ prison and the shame of it haunted his work. Amy Dorrit actually grows up in the Marshalsea Prison, where her father has been imprisoned for debt. The horror of the book is not just about the shame of prison but what we might now call ‘institutionalization’. Her father William Dorrit falls into a bleak dependency on prison life and can’t survive without it. The society in the prison is crazy and oppressive but, as Dickens unforgettably shows, the society outside the prison is crazy and oppressive as well.
Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler
One of the puzzles of Stalin’s show trials in the 1930s was why senior officials like Bukharin confessed to crimes against the Soviet system that they couldn’t possibly have committed. In his 1940 novel, Koestler (himself an ex-Communist) tried to account for this by narrating the interrogation of Rubashov an ex-Bolshevik modeled on Bukharin. Koestler’s account of the strange bond between prisoner and interrogator suggests that torture and threats aren’t necessary. Bukharin is so trapped by his own role as a revolutionary that he can’t turn against it even as a victim. This analysis was very influential—not least on George Orwell’s similar story in Nineteen Eighty-Four. As it happens, we now know that in reality the confessions were produced by brutal torture accompanied by threats against the victims’ families, but that’s another story.
Brute Force (1947)
After the second world, when the soldiers returned home with all they had experienced, Hollywood felt able to tackle darker, more troubling subject matter. But even by these new standards, Brute Force was a shocking portrayal of a fascist dystopia right at the heart of American life. Audiences who thought that ‘it couldn’t happen here’ must have been dismayed by Hume Cromyn’s prison guard, playing Wagner opera on the gramophone as he tortures a Jewish prisoner. Burt Lancaster is devastating in one of his earliest roles as a doomed prisoner. But there was a backlash. Within three years the director, Jules Dassin, was blacklisted and went into exile in Europe.
White Heat (1949)
James Cagney is one of the greatest of all film actors and his return to the gangster movie as the psychotic Cody Jarrett is startling even by his own standards. Only a short section of the film takes place in prison, but the scene were Jarrett learns of his mother’s death captures the madness and terror of confinement and boils it down into two volcanic minutes. Take a deep breath before you watch this.
A Man Escaped (1955)
Prisoner-of-war movies are a whole subject in themselves and there are so many good examples: Renoir’s La Grande Illusion is one kind of masterpiece and The Great Escape is another, more light-hearted kind (although a light-hearted version in which a lot of people die). But Robert Bresson’s movie is something else altogether. It begins as an arrested man is taken into a prison in Nazi-occupied France where he faces execution. The entire film consists of his attempt to escape and the terrible risks and temptations he faces while doing so. The style is ruthlessly stripped of anything irrelevant, any normal human interest. It is the most rigorously artistic of art films but it is also the most thrilling of thrillers. Existentialism has never been this exciting. Not just a great prison movie but one of the greatest movies ever made.
Kolyma Tales, by Varlam Shalamov
The greatest work of prison fiction? It might be this. The Gulag was almost its own country within the country of the Soviet Union and Shalamov, a poet, spent seventeen years there. When he was released he embarked on the almost insanely courageous process of writing about it while still living in the Soviet Union. With an entirely clear eye and a straightforward prose style, he portrayed a society of total cynicism, corruption and violence, with the tiniest moments of decency and love and even humor. The result was a devastating account of the Soviet system which had to be smuggled out of the country and published abroad in the 1970s. But his own health was broken by his years of imprisonment and his stories were only published in Russia in 1989, seven years after his death.
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, by Alan Sillitoe
By the late 1950s there was a feeling that there was something rotten in the state of the United Kingdom and both the 1958 novel and Tony Richardson’s 1962 movie capture this with bleak savagery. Tom Courtenay’s young hero is like Marlon Brando in The Wild One or James Dean in Rebel without a Cause. He doesn’t know what he’s for but he knows what he’s against, a moribund, dying system represented by the young offenders’ institution he’s sent to. In the thrillingly bleak ending (spoiler alert), Courtenay – a brilliant cross-country runner—deliberately loses a race against an inferior runner from a neighboring private school. One of the recurrent themes in prison dramas is how you can fight back against a system that has total control. In Courtenay’s case it’s by deliberately and publicly failing.
The Longest Yard
And finally a comedy, though it’s a very violent one and not to everyone’s taste. One half of Nicci French (Sean) loves this movie but has never shown it to the other half because he’s not sure she’d like it. Burt Reynolds, at his insolent commercial peak, plays Paul Crewe, a washed-up footballer who gets into a fight with his girlfriend, crashes his car, assaults some police officers and gets sent to prison. The corrupt warden blackmails him into forming a team of prisoners to play—and be humiliated by—the semi-professional guards’ team. But…well, you can guess what happens: a comic version of The Dirty Dozen played out as a football match with no holds barred. It’s good natured and—at least to some of us—irresistibly good natured. But even this broad comedy shows prison as a Hobbesian world of all against all, violent, brutish and all too long.
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