Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis) and Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) “do not exist.” However, to the informed, this message could be understood as an ironic, if ambiguous, rejoinder to Italy’s families minister, Lorenzo Fontana, who, earlier that month, had responded to a question regarding the rights of families with same-sex parents by saying, “per la legge non esistono”: under the law, they do not exist.
To a visitor unacquainted with Italian politics, this statement declaring that various queer characters on Netflix no longer exist may have been considered abstruse or even sinister. These posters included the names of the characters followed by the words “non esistono.” For example, OITNB characters, Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) and Alex Vause (Laura Prepon), were shown accompanied with large black letters on a white background declaring, “Piper e Alex non esistono”: Piper and Alex do not exist. Other posters in Milan’s Porta Venezia metro station featured same-sex couples who had appeared in a variety of Netflix original series, such as Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis) and Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) from the episode “San Junipero” in Black Mirror (Channel 4, 2011-2014 and Netflix, 2016 onwards) and Lito (Miguel Ángel Silvestre) and Hernando (Alfonso Herrera) from Sense8 (Netflix, 2015-2018). It is worth noting both campaigns were displayed in stations situated in their respective city’s gay village however, unlike Madrid, Milan’s campaign explicitly engaged with the contemporary politics of its host nation. Two years earlier, Madrid’s Chueca metro station was similarly adorned with rainbow decals and posters sporting the slogan “Rainbow is the new black” during that city’s pride celebrations.
In the sections reserved for advertising on the platforms’ walls, posters proclaimed, in large black letters on a white background, that “Rainbow is the new black.” With the Netflix logo visible in the bottom, right-hand corner of each of the posters, this statement was a playful reworking of Orange Is the New Black (2013-2019), the title of the streaming service’s second self-commissioned original content series. This was not, as might have been perceived, an underground act of guerrilla graffiti, nor was it a civic endorsement of the festivities that were about to take place above rather it was a marketing campaign, created by the US-based international media service provider Netflix, directly engaging with Italy’s contemporary political climate, Milan’s public sphere, and a local LGBT community’s imminent pride celebration in an advertising campaign distinct from those of Netflix’s increasing number of competitors. In anticipation of the city’s pride celebrations on the 30 th of June 2018, citizens awoke to find the walls of the Porta Venezia metro station in Milan decorated with the colors of the rainbow.
Netflix’s posters for the “Rainbow Is the New Black” campaign adorn the Porta Venezia metro station walls.Ī new front has emerged in the battle for our attention the streaming wars have moved underground.