I’ll admit I stopped watching Netflix’s Orange is the New Black after a few seasons, once I accepted that the “depressing-to-entertaining” ratio for the show was, in my case, lopsidedly skewed to the former. Nevertheless, I have vivid memories of the episode in which we learn that Lorna Morello, played flawlessly by actress Yael Stone, is not the hopeless, happy-go-lucky romantic she presents herself to be, nor is her beloved fiancé Christopher waiting outside the prison walls to welcome her back with affection and acceptance. Instead, we discover Morello had been convicted and jailed for stalking and harassing Christopher following a single, unsuccessful date, after which he’d rejected her increasingly frantic advances.
It’s a twist both tragic and shocking, and one of the heavier gut punch moments in a show punctuated by solid jabs to the solar plexus. It’s also a great encapsulation of the same sort of desperate energy that seemed to radiate from South Carolina Republican Rep. Nancy Mace, after she traveled the multiple hundreds of miles from her district in the South Carolina Lowcountry to Manhattan this week. There, she filmed herself groveling outside of former President Donald Trump’s eponymous gold tower, just one day after the former president rescinded his 2020 endorsement for her, bestowing it instead upon her even-more-MAGA primary challenger Katie Arrington. While Mace’s transparent attempt to cling to the patina of Trumpism in the face of his rejection is a case of despairing professional panic, as opposed to OITNB’s depiction of criminal romantic obsession, it’s hard to watch Mace’s video and not feel the same sense of “... gee, this is pretty sad” regardless. There’s that same sense of a rich fantasy being woven here, in absurd defiance of reality’s unambiguous red flags.
