Tag Archives: the wire

Voices From the Archive: Kinukitty on Improving This Blog By 17.6%

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During out Wire roundtable way back when, Kinukitty had some depressing thoughts on the use of statistical methods in government. Thought I’d reprint it since we’re doing our democracy thing today.

I was delighted when the Wire opened with that CompStat meeting. I don’t know if many people understand the tyranny of the stat programs. Many governments and government agencies wrestle with some kind of performance measurement system, and they tend to work pretty much as you described – there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Performance measurement isn’t hopeless, exactly. There are some (probably not a lot) of governments using it right and getting good results. It takes someone special, though, to turn an organization around and create true accountability (which does not include firing people because you don’t like their stats). Especially in an enormous bureaucracy like a government. And then there are the elected officials. But as long as some organizations are doing something good with stats, it seems best not to throw out the baby with the bath water.

Because I don’t know if there are a lot of alternatives. I don’t see NGOs as helping very much. Too many obstacles, including the fact that stats can be altered just by the choices of what is measured, and how. And news coverage? I don’t think the problem there is that news outlets are only interested in sensationalizing stories to sell copies, advertising, etc. Well, it’s not the only problem. A lot of reporters and editors just don’t understand what they’re publishing, and the more sophisticated or complicated the issue is, the less likely they are to really get it. The current hysteria about state and local government pensions is a good example. Yes, they have an incentive to report that the sky is falling, since people are more likely to be interested in that than the sky not falling, but they also don’t understand the issue well enough to challenge any lies, misrepresentations, or mistakes their sources feed them. I’m not actually completely down on journalism — I more or less believe in the fourth estate thing. We’d be screwed without it. But there are problems.

Which leaves me in a Wire frame of mind, too. I appreciate it, though. I think it’s kind of important to make people understand that the problems are complicated.

 

Utilitarian Review 9/14/12

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The Wire: Now a Victorian Novel Near You

Longtime blog readers probably remember Joy DeLyria and Sean Michael Robinson’s post reimagining the Wire as a Victorian novel. Well, it’s now a book available on Amazon. Congrats to them both! (And you can read my interview with them at the Atlantic here.)

On its release, Laura Miller at Salon published an interesting piece about the Wire’s relationship to Victorian literature. I’ve reproduced my brief comment below:

Hey Laura. I like a lot of your insights in this review…but the odd thing is, most of them are also insights expressed in the book you’re reviewing. Sean and Joy spend a lot of time talking about how the Wire is *not* like Dickens, and they reference many of your points. That is, they talk about how the Wire wasn’t popular, how it’s pacing if very different form Dickens, how it treats character differently, etc. It even talks about how the visuals affect the storytelling…and suggests that, for example, illustrations at the time for readers were much more important than they are now in our reprinting/rereading.

Again, I don’t think you’re wrong. But it does seem to me that anyone who is interested in the issues raised by this essay would probably also like the book, which explores most of them in greater depth.

TCJ Gets Into Hatefest

Tim Hodler at tcj.com has some interesting thoughts about Suat’s EC comics takedown. (Part of Tim’s contractual obligations as TCJ editor include periodically expressing disdain for HU comments threads, so I was pleased to see him get the chance to do his duty. All in the spirit of hatefest, of course! UPDATE: Tim actually removed the comment about the comments from the post, which is why you won’t see it if you go over there.)

It’s interesting that Tim says he would have “happily published” Suat’s article today if it had been submitted to him. I don’t have any reason to doubt him…but at the same time, it does rather highlight the fact that Suat’s piece would I think be at least somewhat out of place at tcj.com as it seems to have developed under Tim’s tenure (and Dan Nadel’s.) I certainly haven’t read everything published at TCJ over their run, but…has there been any contrarian reassesment of any canonical or semi-canonical figures since they’ve taken the reins? My impression (not changed by Tim’s defense of EC) is that the magazine under their editorship is fairly comfortable with the comics canon, and sees its mission more as appreciation and advocacy of the greats, rather than as pushing alternate narratives.

On HU

…and finally we’ve got this week’s posts.

Our hatefest is still in full swing, and you can check out our index of posts here.

Featured Archive Post: Tom Crippen provides an archive of the work of Robert Binks.

Derik Baman on Dragonlance and the evil ochre jelly of nostalgia.

Steven Grant, on searching for bad comics and finding interesting ones.

Kim Thompson on Spirou and Fantasio, caricature, and racism (or the lack thereof.)

Jason Thompson on why Craig Thompson’s Habibi, Natsume Ono, and Osama Tezuka are all overrated.

Jason Overby presents every Johnny Ryan parody ever.

Ng Suat tong on why EC Comics aren’t so great (and R. Fiore debates him.)

Steven Grant on the crappification of comics, and why it’s still a good industry to work in for many folks.

Mahendra Singh destroys Western Civilization.

Richard Cook on how the X-Men Onslaught crossover cured him of superhero comics.

Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Atlantic I reviewed the documentary “After Porn Ends”, about what porn stars do after they leave the industry.

At the Center for Digital Ethics, of all places, I discuss the ethics of allowing anonymous comments online.

At the Chicago Reader I report on the Seminary Co-op bookstore moving its digs.

Also at the Reader I urge folks to buy Lilli Carre’s upcoming book.

And finally at the Reader I tell people to go to the upcoming Afterimage show, which looks at connections between Imagists and current Chicago artists like Paul Nudd, Edra Soto, Lilli Carre, and more.

At Splice Today I talk about rewatching Raiders of the Lost Ark with my son and discovering that it is terrible.

At Splice I argue that the Chicago teachers should have struck a long time ago.

At Splice I review Immolation’s Dawn of Possession and compare death metal to Gerard Manley Hopkins.

At Splice I talk about how the campaign has shown us what Romney is made of.
Other Links

James Romberger interviews Gary Panter.

Robert Stanley Martin with a brutal review of Drive.

Thomas Frank on Obama squandering his first term.

This Week’s Reading

I finished Thomas Hardy’s Wessex Poems, which were sort of disappointing; read Ralph Ellison’s amazing book of essays Shadow and Act, read a few Gerard Manley Hopkins poems, started rereading Jane Austen’s Persuasion, and started From the Closet to the Altar by Michael Klarman for a review.

Election vs. the Wire: Brutal Cage Match of Gritty Despair

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Where oh where do I begin in my attempt to get you to watch Election and Triad Election?  I could start in oh so many places.  I could start by telling you that Johnnie To is one of the greatest living action film directors, a man who invests his films with his peculiar thematic and aesthetic fixations while only rarely forgetting viewer pleasure. I could talk about the grace and beauty of his frequently long takes.  I could talk about his other films, like Breaking News, which begins and ends with nine-minute, single-take action sequences, one a shoot-out, one a car chase filmed from inside the lead vehicle. I could talk about the small repertory company of actors and writers he works with again and again. Or I could just talk about The Wire.
 

Tony Leung Ka Fai as Big D

 
It’s a cliché, of course, to recommend something to someone these days by using The Wire. “Oh, it’s like the British The Wire,” or “It’s like The Wire of theater” or “You know this guy wrote the episode where Stringer dies,” and it’s sometimes difficult to divine what we mean when we say this.  On some level, we’re just talking about quality, right? We mean that this is an exceptionally well-crafted piece of televisual entertainment. But we also mean that there’s a low level of bullshit and wish fulfillment to its unfolding, a willingness to confound audience expectations and a refusal to pander more than is necessary.  By this standard, of course, Season 5 of The Wire isn’t The Wire and neither is anything involving Bubs after Season 4, but we just let that go because, goddamnit, it’s the greatest work of narrative art created by man in the last however many years we want to use to temporally bound our judgment, right?

Okay, so The Wire-as-compliment is a cliché. But clichés become clichés because they have a certain value and in Election/Triad Election’s case, the cliché is particularly apt.

Election and its sequel Triad Election are two halves of a gangster saga set in Hong Kong a couple of years after reunification with mainland China.  The premise is not what you’d expect from a Mob Epic. It’s not about family strife, or a war between different mobs—there is one, but if you blink you’ll miss it—or control over territory. No one goes to a therapist or has domestic troubles. No. For if the American Gangster Epic is frequently about the interaction between Capitalism and Family steeped in immigration and the American Dream, the Election films are squarely about Capitalism and Democracy, with Tradition and Individuality thrown in for good measure.
 

Simon Yam as Lok

 
The first film opens on the dawn of an upcoming election, but it’s not for Mayor or Local Dog-Catcher, no, instead it’s for Chairman of one of the dozens of Triads in Hong Kong. A group of old “Uncles” meets to discuss who should be the next Chairman, the flashy and highly profitable Big D (played by Tony Leung Ka Fai) or the sturdy, dependable, quietly ambitious Lok (played by Simon Yam).  The early contrast between the two couldn’t be clearer, as Big D is shown buying flashy suits while Lok, a widower, goes to a local butcher for meat to feed his son.

The Uncles quickly settle on Lok, despite Big D’s attempts to bribe his way to the Chairmanship.  In his rage, Big D refuses to accept defeat and attempts to steal the Dragon Baton, the symbol of the Chairman’s power, without which he cannot rule. A Macguffin Hunt begins throughout Mainland China while the Uncles try to stop violence from breaking out on the streets of Hong Kong.

Louis Koo as Jimmy

I won’t spoil what happens next, as it all gets resolved in ways you wouldn’t expect and defy the western gangster conventions with which To is clearly enamored, but along the way we meet a few other key figures, including Jimmy (played by Canto-Pop idol Louis Koo), a businessman and mid-level Triad operative who just wants to make his money, Big Head (Lam Suet) a dutiful, tradition-minded dunce, Jet (Nick Cheung) a feral enforcer who obeys orders like a dog and Kun (Gordon Lam Ka Tung) an ambitious and violent soldier. Eventually, the hunt for the baton and the election dispute are resolved, paving the way for Triad Election.

In Triad Election, the same cast of characters returns, and it is two years later.  The winner of the previous film refuses to step down despite the fact that the Chairmanship is a term-limited position. Meanwhile, due to his business dealings, Jimmy is forced to run for Chairman by the Mainland Security Bureau even though he wants to quit the Triad, which he only joined for protection in the first place. If the first film is a dark but often fun romp that unfolds in unexpected ways, Triad Election is a slow and violent descent into multiple kinds of personal hell, as the various players lose all they really care for—including their humanity—as their desire to win overtakes them.

Despite having the backing of big players like Quentin Tarantino, Election only received an art-house release in the US, while Triad Election (which is incomprehensible without the first film) received a wider release and, predictably, flopped. But thanks to Netflix Streaming, that Valhalla of the Worthy and Cheap to License, both are finally available in an easy-to-obtain form, and what’s more, like The Wire, they reward rewatching, as the films are densely packed, stylistically exquisite and nearly exposition free.
 

To’s visuals often place characters in heavy shadow, here we see
several of the Uncles gathered to discuss the vote

Many pixels have been spilled documenting David Simon’s perspective on our crumbling institutions of government.  As he told The Believer, societal institutions are like the Gods in Greek Tragedy, inexorable, powerful forces that undermine individual agency.  The truth teller in a Simon piece is always the head that’s eventually going to be on the block. Attempts to improve the overall situation are doomed to succeed only on a small level, and only for a brief period of time, but are still noble and worthwhile.  Simon believes in individuals. Individuals may, in fact, be the only thing in which he’ll invest his faith. This forms a tension with his Democratic Socialist political leanings and this tension is part of what makes his work so electric and alive when it is at its best.

The perspective of the Election films inverts this equation. In To’s Universe, individuals are the problem and institutional tradition’s bulwark against individual will is the only thing standing between order and chaos. The problem in the Election films is that post-Millenial capitalism, with its empowering of individual will, embrace of selfishness, and temptations of money has eroded these institutions to the point where they are a hollow, symbolic shell.  To makes this point again and again, most vividly in the first film when the chase for the baton climaxes in one Triad brother beating another with a log while the victim recites the oaths of the Triad, hoping (incorrectly) that they will protect him.  The Hong Kong of Election is devoid of Bunny Colvins and McNultys and Daniels, it is instead a world where the sun is setting on an old guard who do not realize that their time is up, that “brotherhood” has become meaningless, that, to paraphrase one of the candidates, money is all that matters now.

The films are, then, an allegory that speaks to our present moment in America, despite being a violent realization of Reunification Anxiety. We live in a time where the series of “gentleman’s agreements” undergirding many of our institutions have completely eroded.  We now need sixty votes to pass anything or appoint anyone in the Senate due to filibuster abuse. The various financial scandals—in particular the recent LIBOR manipulation—stem in part from relying on people choosing to do the right and honorable thing. One party campaigns on Government not working and then, when elected, ensures that it doesn’t. The open politicization of the Supreme Court has eroded its credibility to such an extent that the Military is now the only widely trusted public institution.  The picture of our future painted by the Election films is a dark one.  If anything, the films seem fairly convinced that we’re all doomed, that because we do not keep to our traditions democracy is on its way out and that business, aided by a corrupt government, will win every time.

This is not a worldview that I personally agree with, but then again, David Simon’s pro-individual-but-we’re-all-fucked-anyway cynicism grates on me too.  Luckily, both works also contain rich strains of ambiguity and conflict. For example, the Uncles safeguarding the traditions of the Wing-Ho society are feeble old men, many of them easily bribable, dim-witted, and lecherous.  We learn early on in a throwaway line that the last election for chairman was rigged. And, while To is oddly sentimental about Triad ways, pausing with stirring, nostalgic music to watch the old Uncles take tea together, using what were rumored to be real secret hand gestures in an initiation ceremony, some of this can simply be chalked up to To’s Michael-Mannish love of men manning up and being manly-men while also I might have mentioned doing man things, but sensitively.

To’s films frequently take place in a world that’s not-quite-ours. Exiled—a quasi-Western set in Hong Kong and Macau—replaces blood with red dust. The Mad Detective’s world is fractured, allowing fantasy and reality to spill into each other.  Sparrow posits an underground of competitive pick-pockets in an elegant, swirling city that’s equal parts Hong Kong and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Throw Down takes place in a world where everyone knows Judo.  In the Election films, there are no guns (one is held and waved around but never used). This lends the violence an excruciating visceral quality. Each assault (with rocks, logs, fists, hammers and, often, sabers) is fully felt by the viewer, even though the violence is (with two very important exceptions) visually restrained, choosing instead the tools of sound, shadow and your imagination.

Throughout, there are also little details that reveal themselves in later viewings.  The way that Jimmy, the businessman and reluctant candidate for the Chairmanship, is the only lieutenant who knows the proper way to drink wine, and is first shown looking on with dismay as his desiccated boss commands a busty prostitute to jump up and down in front of him faster and faster. The look on Lok’s face when he learns he will be chairman that lets you know early on he’s not quite the modest hard worker he seems. The subtle, matter-of-fact camera work that lends the work a lean and mean economy. The way the propulsive drum-and-guitar score of the first film becomes a sparser, darker, atonal piano-and-strings affair in the second.
 

It’s easy to miss amidst everything else how beautiful many of To’s compositions are.

There is a part of me that is concerned that, by writing two pieces of breathless enthusiasm in a row for despairing entertainments about contemporary life, I’m both revealing biases I was heretofore unaware of and cutting way too far against the Hooded Utilitarian grain, but the Election films are, taken together, a dark-hearted masterpiece. Even thought they’re imbued with a nostalgia I don’t share for a lost time that almost certainly never existed, To’s mastery and reinvention of genre tropes are on equal display, and his ability to use pulp conventions to create a sweeping autopsy of the world around him is remarkable.

Here and There and Gone Again

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What follows is self-reflective, self-indulgent, and only tangentially related to comics. Topics covered—paralysis, instant gratification, illustration, the nature of desire. Not covered—ranking, freelancing, the problems of failure versus the problems of success. Consider yourself informed!

Regular readers to this website may know that this March, an article co-authored by Joy DeLyria and myself had a round of unexpected exposure, linked to and written about on dozens of sites, and seen by an unfathomable (to me) number of people. The experience and its aftermath was surprising, gratifying, but also paralyzing, and I was left for a long time afterward with a great difficulty in drawing at all. Leading up to the article’s publication I had been drawing upwards of ten hours a day, so this was a dramatic change, to say the least.

I had only been writing at all for only a few months at that point, having been asked to contribute to the Hooded Utilitarian after arguing with editor Noah Berlatsky on various topics both educational and aesthetic. A handful of my initial articles attracted some attention, at least at the scale of the modestly-scaled comics scene. Most, however, disappeared after a few days, as quickly as they came, the reaction to them in proportion to the moment that made them.

But this one seemed different.

It’s difficult now, some months after the fact, to describe the elation, giddiness, and eventual panic that set in as our Wire article went from casual blog post to high traffic blog post to server-breaking feature article. The excitement is perhaps most understandable. The panic, however, might require some additional explanation.

The article itself was written and illustrated so quickly, so impulsively, that the reaction to it seemed impossibly outsized, exaggerated. In particular, my confidence in my own illustration skills was tenuous enough that I felt a certain pain at their exposure, despite the delight I had taken in the few brief hours of their creation.

The speed at which everything moved was its own kind of hazard. In a few strange, bewildering weeks I went from a mostly unpaid comics blog contributor and unpublished cartoonist, to a writer/illustrator with a smart, sympathetic agent, a publisher, and a book deal. The transition and all of the ensuing attention was a heady experience, but the comedown, when it finally arrived, was harsh.

In short, I found it very difficult to draw anymore.

Because of the amount and nature of the links to the article, the exact numbers are hard to arrive at, but let me just skip over the particulars and say that it is very likely that more people have seen my drawing of Omar walking down a narrow Bodymore street than will see or hear anything else that I will ever create in my life. A set of drawings I created in the span of a few hours, drawings that reflect both my strengths as an illustrator (pastiche, virtuoso ink technique) and my weaknesses (virtually everything else), will most likely be, measured in numbers, the most significant thing I’ll ever be part of. This was a slow realization for me, made over a painful few weeks that also happened to contain the break up of my marriage of five years. It was during these weeks of weakness and personal turmoil that I would be required to create about two dozen new illustrations in a similar vein, this time for print, a medium that for me feels as permanent as any ever created. We are, after all, still reading the two-thousand year old garbage of the ancient Egyptians, them having successfully captured their thoughts and feelings and business transactions on papyrus in ink. (“Don’t worry about it,” my friend Shanna told me. “I mean, what percentage of people that read the initial article will even see the book? It’s no biggie, right?”)

It’s interesting to compare today’s fractured, specialized media environment to the vast undivided audiences of the previous century’s newspaper cartoonists. The early newspaper cartoonists had tremendous audiences for their work, audiences that would be unheard of today for any similar form of entertainment. They also had the illusion, though, of impermanence, a kind of impermanence that can nurture a certain kind of risk taking and impulsivity that can be invaluable to someone’s creative development. These early cartoonists worked knowing that, no matter how flat a single installment fell, no matter how many copies made it into print, a week later a hundred thousand copies of a strip would be a few thousand folded on a few thousand night stands and bureau tops. Two weeks after initial publication, how many copies would remain? A month later and anything could be forgotten. Newsprint was the most transitory of mediums, powerful but temporary, a bright flare turning in a flash to chalk message scrawled on the sidewalk.

Up until March I’d actually felt this way about virtually everything I’d written for public consumption, which amounted to an article a month at HU and a handful of articles and interviews for the Comics Journal. All of these brief works could be changed, edited if the need arose, always the possibility of elimination or correction. But even if I had wanted to do so, there was no way possible to put Victorian Omar back in the bottle. He now wandered this Wired world on his own power, untethered from the tongue in cheek piece of criticism that spawned him.

As for the actual problem of drawing all those illustrations through my own insecurity, I was greatly helped in this task by that old friend of the newspaper strip cartoonists—the regular deadline. Having five weeks to complete thirty illustrations and my portion of the text, I was forced to set concrete, daily completion goals, and these goals enabled me to power through my restlessness and difficulty and actually complete the drawings required. If I hadn’t had such a hard (and, now, seemingly arbitrary) deadline, I have no doubt that I would still be fussing with the details of the illustrations, re-imagining and re-evaluating, redrawing, planning…anything to avoid that dreaded sense of disappointed completion.

Finishing the book, however, didn’t make my desire to draw come back, nor did my eventual satisfaction with the illustrations. Something inside me seemed to have been switched off, some key part of me that was capable of self-satisfaction and confidence. I wondered if I would ever draw again on my own impetus.


Months went by. I drew, always through necessity or obligation. Illustrations for friends’ wedding invitations, contributions to round tables or one-off art shows, fulfilling promises made before my great freeze. But about a month ago, something changed again, something that seemed unrelated to drawing at the time. I met an extremely skilled fiddle player at a party of a mutual acquaintance, and after briefly getting to know each other, she invited me to busk with her at the local market. We had our first rehearsal on a Sunday afternoon in her backyard, putting together ten songs in about an hour and a half. We were performing the next day.

Busking, it seems, was the cure for my debilitation. When you’re playing in public, train wreck or triumph are equally fleeting, both erased minutes after the moment is over. No safety net, but no lasting impression, no pressure to be worth it; to be worth the lives of the trees that died to bring your drawings to life, to be worth the twenty dollars someone impulsively plunked down for your strange piece of cultural critical pastiche. In short, no pressure at all.

It’s not just the transitory nature of the performance that’s so appealing—it’s also the immediacy, and literal representation of the audience’s reaction. Joy and I worked all of May to write and illustrate a book that won’t be read by its intended audience for several months still. Even this informal blog post was composed over the course of a few days, and any reaction to it will necessarily follow that period of composition. How can this compare to the instant feedback, and judgment, of a crowd? When Rachel and I play at the market, we know when someone’s not interested, or actively dislikes what we’re playing–they pass right by. Someone that’s enjoying themselves stays, listens, puts money in our case or buys a CD. There’s a kind of cleanliness to it, art or entertainment made transactional again, unabashedly so, no confusion of role or purpose. We place Rachel’s fiddle case in front of us, open, as we play, a little bit of seed money at the bottom to function as change, grey-green on faded red velvet. In some ways, it’s the promise of those utopian Internet prognosticators of last decade made flesh–a perfect meritocracy where the best survive and thrive and the rest go home with empty cases. I grasp, stab at a comics comparison, desperate for justification for this article’s existence– witness the meteoric rise of Kate Beaton, which seems to be due solely to her making some really, really funny comics.

But of course, it’s not as simple as that–it’s not necessarily the best players that succeed, but the flashiest, the loudest, those most suited to the noise and bustle of the environment. One of the best buskers in the market, a man famous in Seattle while remaining virtually unknown by name, isn’t known for his unarguably charming songs, but because he has the unusual ability to hula hoop while playing the guitar, singing, playing percussion with his feet and balancing a second guitar on his chin. The parallel holds–the main breakout successes in web comics have primarily been gag strips, short punchy and easily digestible, able with sheer volume and verve to cut through the noise of the crowded environment.

When we are actually playing, though, the mechanics of the act itself, the social analogies and all the other possibilities, are the last thing on my mind. Virtually all of my attention is occupied by the moment, in sharing music and time with a person I am delighted by, and sharing that happiness with the people around us. And maybe this is ultimately what had been missing for me from drawing–creation without obligation, a sensual engagement with the world, the glorious moment of sticking your face in the dirt and remembering that you’re alive and doing the things that you want to be doing solely because it is what you desire. I might get tired of busking in a month or two–I might keep doing it for years. But either way, I know for sure that when it feels like an obligation, it will be time to change things again.

I’ve been sketching again, in brush, bolder and quicker than I’ve worked in the past. I don’t know if anything will come of it, and I don’t seem to care if it does.

from the forthcoming Down in the Hole

Addendum-

I filled Rachel in on the general premise of this article a few days ago, and she had a good laugh. “You can think about it being that way if you want,” she told me, “but it isn’t temporary like you’re describing. You just think that because you haven’t being doing it very long.” Video cameras and phones are everywhere, she explained. People are filming us all of the time. People take our picture hundreds of times a day. We don’t have any way of knowing where or when any of those things will show up.

She continued. “If you Google my full name one of the first things that shows up is this stupid article about the Seattle busking program that appeared in a million different places.” She can’t escape it, she says, nor the photo depicting her and another busker in an awkward high-five.

Me? I’m still choosing ignorance, and the gratification of the moment. It seems like the only sound strategy available.

Of Wires and Weeds

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I’ve been obsessed recently with the Showtime series Weeds, about soccer-mom-turned-pot-dealer Nancy Botwin. I’ve compulsively watched the first three and a half seasons in the last couple of weeks. Thanks a lot, Netflix instant.

Anyway, I had Weeds on the brain when I read this post by Alyssa Rosenberg about how the dealers on the Wire don’t get to have any romance.

But with the exception of D’Angelo Barksdale (who ends up as more of a neutral character), the main members of the drug crews either don’t have long-term relationships or those relationships aren’t a major way of exploring who they are as people (there are exceptions for minor characters, like Bernard, whose girlfriend Squeak leads him into trouble). Avon Barksdale has an ex-girlfriend who Wee-Bay kills, but we don’t see him in any sort of relationship with a woman — probably the most important woman in his life is his mother. Wee-Bay is explicitly non-monogamous, and what relationship he has with his son Namond’s mother mostly concerns Namond’s well-being. Chris Partlow and Michael Lee are both victims of sexual abuse, which motivates murders they commit, but isn’t something we see them work out in intimate relationships. There are interesting possibilities in Snoop’s gender expression, but the show only really explores her as a soldier. I don’t even want to think how Marlo Stanfield would treat a woman he actually dated, much less had sex with and then executed after she turned out to be a spy.

I’m not sure what this disparity means. Does running a drug crew mean folks have less time or inclination to pursue steady relationships? Is it commentary on the crews, suggesting that as they’re peddling one means of social dissolution, they’re engaging in others? Whatever Simon’s intentions, weighting relationship questions and subplots to the police means we get a smaller part of the human spectrum when we look at the crews.

I think Alyssa’s point is correct — the drug dealers are not granted romantic sub-plots. I think the reason is because, for Simon, drug-dealing is an intensely male world. There are some women involved, like Brianna and Snoop, but they’re obviously exceptions, and both have something of an asterix beside them (Brianna is involved because she’s Avon’s sister; Snoop is deviant in multiple ways, not least in her gender presentation.)

The maleness of the drug world means that romantic male-female relationships play a secondary role; the most intense focus of interest for the men is homosocial. For instance, we never see Bodie with a girlfriend — but we do see that he has a big old crush on Stringer Bell. The crush is tied up in Bodie’s ambition and in his desire to be a man; it’s composed of part admiration, part envy, part lust (for power, for money), and it’s the lever that impels Bodie to kill his friend Wallace. I don’t think it’s an accident either that Poot, who is defined in part by his interest in women, eventually gets out of the game.

The main focus of homosocial tension in the Wire, though, is between Avon and Stringer Bell. For both, their partnership is the defining relationship of their lives, and at several points that relationship is explored not just through business, but through sex. The clearest instance of this is when Avon gets out of jail. He’s interested in making time with an attractive woman at his coming home party, but Stringer keeps cornering him with business talk. Finally, Stringer drops a frustrated Avon in a luxury apartment. Avon stands and fumes for a couple of seconds…and then Stringer reappears, the attractive woman and a bonus attractive woman in tow. The whole sequence is a sexual tease, and the teaser is Stringer. He uses the women he’s bought for Avon to seal their partnership and friendship with sex.

The homosocial possibilities of Avon/Stringer slash are contrasted in the Wire with Omar’s much-more-than-possible homosexual relationships. Alyssa doesn’t mention Omar — but he’s a striking exception to her discussion of drug dealers and romance. Which is to say, Omar is very much defined by his serially monogamous romantic relationships. These relationships are all with men — and the suspicion is that they are possible because they are with men. Romance with women is not possible in this world; but men are a different story.

The parallels between Omar’s relationships and the other drug dealers’ relationships calls into question the heterosexuality of the entire milieu, a fact of which the other drug dealers seem nervously aware. Both Avon and Stringer initially want to kill Omar because he robbed them — but what really pisses them off is that he’s gay. Avon ups the bounty on Omar when he learns that he’s a “cock sucker”. And as for Stringer, while it’s never made explicit, it seems clear that part of the reason he uncharacteristically participates in the torture of Brandon, Omar’s lover, is because Brandon is gay. The killing of Brandon, and Omar’s reaction to it, ultimately ends in Stringer’s own murder. Male-male love is the only kind on offer in the world of the gangs — but it’s a love steeped in disavowal, which ultimately leads to tragedy and death.

Weeds presents a very different view of the drug trade. Where the Wire’s dealers are manly men thinking about other manly men with whom not to have sex, the world of Weeds is decidedly matriarchal and up to its orifices in intergender fornication. There are certainly a lot of men involved in dealing, from Nancy’s drop-out son Silas to the agressively psychotic thug U-turn to the more quietly psychotic DEA agent and thug Peter, to the quietly honorable grower Conrad. But they one and all — tough or weak, dumb or competent — drop to their knees if a pretty girl points at her bits. In this show, it’s the women who wear the phallus — sometimes literally, as when Nancy’s brother Andy finds himself unexpectedly sodomized with a large black dildo by one of his girlfriends.

Women make dumb choices out of lust in Weeds too — dealer Heylia James lets her iron competence slip for a few episodes when she falls for a Nation of Islam minister, for example, and Nancy’s increasingly compulsive sluttishness get her into trouble on more than one occasion (most flagrantly in the first couple of seasons when she mistakes scumbag Peter for a nice guy.) But overall, the women on the show are the ones who display a modicum of responsibility and resourcefulness, and who manage to use their sexuality rather than letting it use them. Heylia’s Nation of Islam minister helps her escape a drug bust; Nancy gets Peter to use his DEA office to protect her…and eventually it’s Peter who gets killed (set up by Heylia) not Nancy.

One of the more emblematic moments of Weeds occurs when Alejandro, a rival, violent pot dealer, demands to meet with Nancy after threatening her and her children. Nancy drives out to confront him in an alley, the two get in each other’s faces…and next moment Alejandro is (consensually) fucking Nancy on the hood of a car. Post-coitally, Nancy informs him that he was a good lay, and then sticks a B.B. gun to his dick and tells him to stay away from her or she’ll castrate him. Afterwards, Nancy is extremely upset (“What are you doing?” she asks herself)…but Alejandro turns into a puppy dog, sending her gifts and cheerfully becoming her minion in the drug business even though she tells him she’s not screwing him again.

It’s not entirely clear whether Nancy slept with Alejandro to get the upper hand or whether it was just a case of rampaging hormones. She does tell Alejandro the rutting was unexpected, but she’s certainly capable of lying, to others and to herself. In any case,the point, reiterated throughout the series is clear — men think with their dicks, and their dicks are a lot stupider than women’s cunts.

There’s a tendency to assume that because the Wire’s a gritty serial it must be more realistic than a situation comedy like Weeds. The Wire shows the drug business as a male world, so that’s the way it must be. I’m not so sure though. Weeds seems to get other things closer to right than the Wire does; for example, it’s more on target about police corruption. Moreover, in the freakonomics series where drug dealers commented on the Wire, one argued that the maleness of the show was one of its least convincing features.

“Women,” said Tony-T. “Where I come from, women run most of the things [that the show] talks about. It’s the women that have the power in the ghetto. This show totally got it wrong when they made it all about men. Women are the politicians; they can get you a gun, they got the cash, they can get you land to build something on.”

What’s perhaps more interesting than which is more true to life, though, is the fact that both the Wire and Weeds share the broad assumption that women in control is odd, unusual…or, in other words, funny. When Stringer Bell says something is “just business,” it’s chilling — a sign of his cold, calculating lack of emotion. When Nancy says that a relationship is just business (as when she declares that her relationship with Peter is just a business relationship) it’s generally at least half a joke — she’s covering her ass, or lying to herself, or otherwise shucking and jiving. Because, presumably, nothing with women is just business.

You can see this idea played through in the one woman in the Wire who tries to run a drug business: De’Londa. De’Londa is a controlling, castrating, shallow bitch, who treats her child with unfeeling ruthlessness. She’s a lot like Weeds’ Celia, in other words…and like Celia, the ruthless woman in control is played much more for laughs than are the ruthless men in control. De’Londa is wrong and ridiculed not because she’s evil (lots of people on the Wire are evil) but because she’s a woman and a mother.

In other words, Weeds is a comedy because it’s a matriarchy and a matriarchy because it’s a comedy, just as the Wire is a tragedy because it’s homosocial, and homosocial because it’s a tragedy. Man’s world is serious and scary; woman’s world is funny and sexy. Stringer Bell can no more fall in love than Nancy Botwin can be a tragic Shakespearean hero. Their genders put limits on their genres.
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Update: Alyssa points out that she did mention Omar; she attributes his romance to his neutrality, or as she says: “Characters who aren’t affiliated with the crews like Omar Little, who has multiple long-term relationships throughout the series, or Cutty Wise, who eventually begins dating a nurse, are allowed significant romantic attachments.” Sorry Alyssa!

The Truth Is Out There

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Considering they’re both serial TV dramas, Twin Peaks and the Wire couldn’t have much less in common. Twin Peaks explores the quirky surrealism of a small town; the Wire looks at the intricate realism of a city. Creator David Lynch uses the improvisational rhythm of dreams; creator David Simon relies on the layered narrative of investigative reporting. And where the Wire is one of the most multi-racial shows ever to appear on television, Twin Peaks is, insistently, not.

Yet, on closer inspection, the two shows had in common. In particular, both Twin Peaks and the Wire are obsessed with the real.

In part, this obsession is a function of genre. For all their differences, both shows are at heart police shows, and both are built around investigations and the ferreting out of secrets. In both, the techniques and expertise of the protagonists are leant to the viewer, who is enabled to approach nearer and nearer to a provocatively concealed heart of corruption. The famous scene in the Wire, where McNulty and Bunk deduce how a murder was committed while communicating solely by using the word “fuck” is analogous, in its flamboyant hermeticism, to the scene in Twin Peaks where Dale Cooper identifies likely suspects by referencing Tibet and throwing stones at bottles.

Whether through a triumph of earthy procedure or through semi-mystical intuition, the results are the same — the knowing expert shines light into the heart of darkness.

“Heart of darkness” has racial connotations of course — and that’s apropos for both shows. The connection between race and reality is most obvious in the Wire, a show immersed in the vibrancy, and despair of Baltimore’s African-American community. Omar’s transcendent cool, Kima’s understated integrity, D’angelo’s tragedy, and Snoop’s brutality are all manifestations of intertwined authenticity and blackness. The white characters, too, draw their grit in large part from the show’s integration. Thus Entertainment Weekly praises McNulty for his funk, which it links to his “easy rapport with his African-American work partners.”

Race at first appears to be almost entirely absent from Twin Peaks…but the absence speaks loudly. The show is set in the perfect American small town, with people who are all friendly, all decent, all blessed with movie star good looks, and, oh yes, (with the exception of a stereotypically untrustworthy Asian woman and a stereotypically spiritual Native American) virtually all white.

That whiteness — the trusting small town, the blonde homecoming queen cheerleader — is part and parcel of the perfection. And as the town’s secrets are revealed, it is not just the perfection, but the whiteness, which is shown to be a facade above a swirling pit of jealousy, greed, and deformation. Laura Palmer, that blonde homecoming queen, is addicted to cocaine just like all those black junkies on the Wire. Her father, Leland, is, in the depths of his twisted soul, not white at all, but rather the demonic spirit BOB played by Native American actor Frank Silva.

Moreover, the whiteness in Twin Peaks is undercut and doubled by its own queerness. The show is an extended meditation on the campiness of whiteness; the perfect exterior concealing melodrama and lust. When Laura’s best friend Donna wears her friend’s sunglasses, she turns into a teen femme fatale, exterior transforming interior. More pointedly, after Laura’s death, her murderer/rapist father, Leland, begins to compulsively dance to show tunes, his dark sexual secret finding expression through his response to stereotypically gay cultural responsiveness.

The truth in Twin Peaks is ultimately Freudian; the revelation of the ogre father and the primal scene. In the prequel, Fire Walk With Me, we learn that Leland has been raping her daughter since she was 12; in the series itself, another father almost sleeps with his daughter. In The Wire, on the other hand, the revelations are less psychological and more pragmatic, focusing on the overwhelming, crushing, and corrupting power of institutions.

There are many other cop shows built around investigation, of course. But where something like Bones or the Mentalist lets the knowing detective tie up the truth in a pretty bow at the end of (at least most) episodes, the Wire and Twin Peaks treat truth as an overwhelming excess, which expertise can provisionally master but not contain. The resulting tragedy is is in many ways the guarantor of the reality. The real does not have a happy ending. The Wire concludes by establishing that life in Baltimore will go on as before; while some individual characters may escape to provisionally bright futures, the city as a whole is no closer to escaping its pathologies than it was at the beginning of the series. Twin Peaks effectively ends with the death of Leland and the escape of BOB. The culprit is dead, but his spirit lives on…and to the extent that the series abandoned that grim insight in its later part, it became virtually unwatchable (or, at least, I couldn’t watch it.)

I love both Twin Peaks and The Wire. I think they both deserve their reputations as the greatest television show ever. I do wonder though how much that reputation is about their mutual obsessions with the real. Television has often been seen as uniquely irrelevant bone-headed escapism. The Wire and Twin Peaks both, in quite different ways, present themselves as windows onto unpleasant truths. They’re serious because they show us what is, and provide no escape. Laura’s ascent to heaven in Fire Walk With Me seems more a dream to emphasize the tragedy than an actual cause for optimism, while McNulty’s final attainment of peace seems like an instance of accepting what he can’t change rather than a broader assertion of hope. Evil is fixed; experts know but can’t save us, or even themselves. It’s a grim vision so critically embraced that one starts to wonder if it could be, at times, self-fulfilling.
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Coincidentally, I just watched Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, which has a very different take on the real. Stalker is ostensibly a science fiction tale set in the Zone, a mysterious, dangerous realm where your deepest wish may be granted. Tarkovsky, though, makes no use of special effects of any kind, and so the Zone appears as simply any other piece of countryside. The three men wandering through it, casting nervous glances this way and that, seem like children playing a not-very-convincing game of make-believe — a sensation only emphasized by Tarkovsky’s long takes and excruciatingly slow pacing. The camera frames a long shot of a field, the men in the distance move across it…and still move across it…and still move across it…giving your attention a chance to wander to the trees, and the sky, and then back and yep, the men are still crossing the field…and you’ve got plenty of time to think about how silly the actors must have felt, and wonder whether they were thinking about their motivation, or how silly the script is, or just about whether they were ever going to get to stop walking across the field and go to the bathroom, for the love of God.

Eventually the guide (Stalker) leads his two followers (Writer and Professor) to the wish-granting center of the Zone, called the Room. But at the last minute both of the followers, perhaps fed up with the transparently ersatz nature of the whole endeavor, refuse to participate in the silliness anymore and balk at going in. One of the film’s last scenes shows Stalker back in his beautifully grungy hovel, lying down into his bed as if reclining in an Old Master painting, bewailing the intelligentia’s lack of faith. “Can people like that believe in anything!” he moans. “And nobody believes! Not just those two. Nobody!” After comforting him, his long-suffering wife breaks the fourth wall and directly addresses the camera, insisting that despite all her troubles, she has never regretted her life with the Stalker. “It’s better to have a bitter happiness” she says, “than a gray, dull life.”

On the one hand, Stalker is like the Wire; it fetishizes grit. The first part of the film, before the protagonists make it into The Zone, is set in an urban landscape which is run down even by the standards of the Wire’s Baltimore. On the other hand, Stalker shares characteristics with Twin Peaks. Both fetishize a secret, dangerous realm just out of sight.

But where the Wire and Twin Peaks figure the physical and spiritual as truths for genre to reveal, in Stalker both function more as consciously framed tropes. The Stalker’s hovel is so ravishingly shot and carefully composed that it becomes a quotation about grit rather than a direct apprehension of it. The intimations of otherworldliness in the Zone are so stubbornly unrealized that they become quotations about surrealism rather than an actual apprehension of subterranean dangers.

Stalker loves these genre references, but not because they show reality. Rather, it loves them as genre — as the imaginary. And if there’s a real in Stalker, it’s not in these pulp gestures, but in the process of film itself; the shots of grassland or a wall or a face held so long that narrative drains away, and you’re left looking at grassland or a wall or a face. The real is not the end result of a process of meaning, but the beginning of a process in which meaning must be added. The wall can be poverty; the grassland can be an ominous psychological truth; but the viewer must make it so. Art does not strip away to an essence, but adds to a blank. The Wire is worthwhile not because it is true to Simon’s Baltimore experience, but because of the energy of its narrative entanglements; the energetic metaphoricity of D’Angelo at the chess board or the profaner-than-life dreamed-of universal signification of “fuck”. Twin Peaks is profound not because it shows the real corruption of small town America, but because of its hollow flamboyance, haunted by specters of irony and dread. The shows are great not because they’re real, but because they’re imagined.

The very last scene of Tarkovsky’s film shows the Stalker’s crippled child sitting at a table, staring at glasses, and apparently moving them (slowwwwly) with her mind. After she stops, we hear a train pass, and the glasses shake. The telekinesis is, of course, just a special effect…and it emphasizes the fact that the train shaking the house is probably a special effect too. Tarkovsky seems to be almost taunting us, daring us to accept the shaking but not the telekinesis — or rather, to accept both. For Stalker, film is not about gaining expertise and seeking truth. It’s a way to practice faith.

The Wire Roundtable: Not Anti-Cop

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It takes a complex and nuanced piece of storytelling to firstly provoke, and then sustain thoughtful, prolonged consideration of its themes, its characters, its flaws and failings, its ambitions and their execution. The Wire, repays such close attention. Even its imperfections are interesting, as demonstrated in the honest and robust assessment of its absent women or the analysis of the story arc of Prez.

When TV drama claims to represent reality it offers itself up for close scrutiny. Over at Freakonomics the real “thugz” have been roundtabling The Wire. Here at The Hooded Utilitarian, I’d like to share some thoughts on The Wire from the point of view of an ex-cop and current crime writer.

From where I stand, The Wire got some very important things about cops right – but left one very important thing out.

Firstly to what worked.

Although I was in The Job on the other side of the planet, I recognised these cops. A discussion with a family member, who’d found Landsman’s foul language and porn mags a bit of a stereotype, reminded me just how real they were. Landsman could have been one of any number of sergeants I’d worked with –their filthy mouths, filthy minds and “stick” books stuffed in their bottom drawers.

But it’s McNulty who struck me as the genuine article. The discussion of McNulty as hero – or anti-hero – of the American Monomyth touched on some of the ways that McNulty subverted the role.

Dramatically McNulty is the protagonist. He gives us many of the inciting incidents that propel the narrative arcs of The Wire. In drama, most heroic characters are motivated by external factors; their quests are the pursuit of justice, the righting of wrongs, the defence of the powerless. But McNulty is motivated by internal factors; he knew he was smarter than Avon Barksdale and his crew and he knew how to manipulate a judge to get a chance to prove it.
McNulty was no hero, but he was a lot like a lot of cops I knew. They see The Job as a cross between a game and a business, and they play to win. They believe they are the smartest person in the room, and they’ll bend and break a lot of rules to guarantee they come out on top.
As well as being a proud bastard, McNulty was one hell of a shit stirrer. He was not, could not, be naïve about the consequences of getting a judge to put a rocket up police management – for McNulty causing Rawls and the hierarchy grief was the cream on top.

It’s hard to see any noble motives in all those hours of work on charts and tides that McNulty puts in to prove those bodies were in the jurisdiction of his old nemesis Rawls. Even riding the boat, McNulty was still a murder police. He seized the chance to show he was smart enough to use the very position he had been sent to as punishment in order to outwit Rawls. McNulty is like the smartest kid in class, easily bored, happiest when causing trouble and not much bothered by the fact that he (not for the last time) royally screws his old pals Bunk and Lester in the process.

There’s never any real sense that McNulty feels too deeply about any of the dead victims in the container case, which is again unlike the standard response of most heroic TV cops. In fact his behaviour when he goes “undercover” in the brothel in S2, and is found deshabille when it is raided, rather adds to his unheroic but realistic status.

When Rawls refuses to allow McNulty in on the container case, the bored troublemaker’s attention shifts to the “suicide” of D’Angelo Barksdale. Yet, even his interest in D’s death becomes just another twist in the long game. He sees it as a way to Stringer Bell, straight through Brianna Barksdale’s grief.

More likely candidates for hero-cop in The Wire are Carver and Freamon. Carver’s journey from street rip narco cop to wise street cop who knows his young offenders by name and offers them one break, who goes out of his way to try and “save” Namond from Juvenile Hall, who tries and fails to save Randy, goes to emotional places McNulty does not seem to possess.

Beadie Russell’s tears as Frank Sobotka is pulled from the water; Freamon’s obsessive desire to “follow the money” which seems to stem from an understated yet driving sense of justice, are all characters and behaviours that echo our expectations of what “good” cops ought to be.

For McNulty, though, a wire is a way to do good police work, to show he’s good police, to keep him occupied and interested, and give him the space to shine.

It’s worth considering McNulty’s reaction after Omar’s “heroic” speech to Levy, where the criminal tells the truth and exposes the permeability of the barrier between good and bad, legal and illegal. As the cop who has orchestrated this perjury, McNulty’s delight in it is summed up in the moment outside the courtroom where he alerts everyone to watch out for the “eyefuck” as Omar and Bird exchange looks.

Yet again, McNulty shows that he knows exactly how to play the game to get the result he wants. He’s smarter than the Barksdales, he’s smarter than the system. It’s a foreshadowing of his final and epic play of the game in S5.

So, McNulty is no hero, but damn, he plays like a real cop. In him I hear the echoes of so many of the cops I’ve worked with along the way, smart, selfish and in thrall to their own egos.

So many things in most TV cop shows drive anyone with a passing acquaintance with real life policing batshit crazy. For me, the standard scene where the hard working, dedicated cop takes home the brief, all the files, the photos, and spreads them out across his/her Spartan apartment, then after staring and re-reading and drinking alone through the night there’s the Eureka moment. The truth was there all along! Everyone else had just missed it!

Never seen it happen.

Ever.

Cops get breakthroughs by talking to people. Not nice people, because nice people don’t know very much about drugs, and dealers, and guns, and murder. Cops need to get close to crooks. Crooks tell you things about other crooks, and for all sorts of reasons, usually to screw up the competition or to save their own skins. They tell you things when they’re arrested and have no other options. They tell you things like Bubbles, as a career, being a professional gig, or like Omar, in order to extract revenge, or like Stringer Bell, as a strategic move in a long game, but often the very best things are told to you by people who don’t know you’re listening.

The Wire got this exactly right. Wordplay, not gunplay, and paperwork, lots and lots of paperwork, and many, many, many mostly boring hours watching, listening, waiting for something to happen, is how most real policing happens.

But, there was one area of real policing where The Wire’s normally unflinching gaze pulled back.
Yup, I’m talking about corruption. Police corruption.

Not the juking of stats corruption but the real down and dirty on the street, ripping off and robbing dealers, offering protection to criminals, taking bribes, putting money and drugs in the pocket, type of corruption.

It is alluded to in the case of Daniels.

His “past” was a constant shadow, lurking, just waiting to pounce and puncture his career – which it eventually did. The specifics of it were never delineated, though it is strongly suggested that his nice house and the fine lifestyle he enjoyed with his wife is the result of corruption.
But it is also very much implied that what had happened was in the past. And that it was localised, in the unseen “The Eastern District.”

When Herc and Carver discuss pocketing a stash of cash, just a small portion of one day’s takings, during the Barksdale operation in S1, I thought, “Ah ha! So, now we’re going to get down to it.”

Only, we didn’t.

Carver, talks Herc out of it, pretty much because he believes that the wire might discuss figures, so they’d be caught. It’s a fairly ambiguous moral decision, based on the risk factors rather than moral ones, though it is justified by what happens next. Part of the money goes missing (innocently lost) and it’s Daniels who concludes they have stolen it. His reaction implies that in his experience that that is exactly what usually happens and that he – nowadays – disapproves of it.

Anyone who has spent anytime involved in working drugs will tell you, the volume of money, hard cash, that can turn up, unexpectedly, in the course of a search warrant, an arrest, a car stop – is mind-boggling.

This is shown graphically during the simultaneous raids ordered in response to Griggs’ shooting: money, drugs and guns fall out of fridges, chairs, and bedding. This time Herc and Carver seize the moment and the cash. No discussion. Their eyes meet and they stuff a bundle into their vests, confirmation perhaps that Carver’s previous caution was risk-based, rather than morality-based.

It’s shown as a spontaneous action. Understandable even, in their anger over a colleague’s shooting, over the police management’s decision to waste all their hard work by demanding “drugs on the table” in time for the evening news, in the face of the obscene wealth of those they have been fruitlessly chasing.

The amount of cash lying around waiting to be found and pocketed by an opportunistic cop is shown to be considerable. But in reality, that is loose change, compared to the amounts of cash that can be made by a cop actively looking for it, a cop who is prepared to do business.

The Wire’s thesis that the prohibition on drugs has been a pernicious failure that causes infinitely more damage than it averts, did not fully explore the corrosive effect it has in corrupting the police, and not just the institution of police but the individual street police.

That little glimpse of Herc and Carver is, in reality, exactly what a lot of police do, every day. Most times there isn’t a wire. There’s no one looking, there’s just a couple of cops, a stash of money and a crook happy to get a pass. No biggie. They can make the cash back again, easy.

The Wire is, in so many respects, courageous and admirable in examining the fallout of the war on drugs that it comes as a surprise when they avert their gaze from the pervasive and poisonous affect of drug money in generating and sustaining systemic police corruption.

The Wire is prepared to throw a lot of punches. It certainly doesn’t miss the Law, as represented by Levy, or the political classes, both are shown as irredeemably corrupt. It is shown, explicitly, when Levy pays off a Grand Jury Prosecutor in order to secure court documents. Ill gotten cash swirls around the characters of Levy and Clay Davis, it is handed over, intercepted, referred to as “donations”, but the links between the illegal drug economy and politics and the law is shown unflinchingly.

Yet the police corruption that is emphasised is “juking the stats”, not ripping off dealers for their money, drugs and guns, or in the reselling of those drugs and guns, not in taking bribes to lose cases, or, like the Grand Jury Prosector leak court briefs, or information.

McNulty’s capers in encouraging a witness to perjure himself (Omar), or creating a serial killer, are examples of the so-called “noble cause” corruption, where the rules are bent for the greater good. (Though as I’ve suggested in these cases the greater good is Jimmy McNulty’s ego).

Interestingly, McNulty is seen taking a bribe, at the beginning of S2, when he accepts some cash from the party boat. Again, this was an “Ah hah!” moment for me as a viewer. It fit. Were the writers indicating that McNulty was used to taking bribes as a detective and merely carrying on when the opportunity presented itself in his new lowly job? Or was this going to be how losing his status as a detective leads him down a path of corruption?

Neither apparently.

Rather like Rawls in a gay bar, and Herc and Carver’s quick handful of bills, the moment passes and is never really followed up. These incidents of personal corruption stand as opportunistic, spontaneous events, rather than as part of something larger and systemic.

In fact, there is no further reference to corrupt behaviour again until S4 and the evil Officer Walker appears. However, he’s presented more as a bully than a seriously corrupt policeman, stealing as he does from kids, breaking the fingers of Donut when he causes him paperwork.

Most of the police we see have, for the most part, no contact with corruption. We don’t see them resisting it; they just have no contact with it.

It’s not as if there were no police corruption scandals happening in Baltimore during the making of The Wire.

Two Baltimore cops, William King and Antonio Murray, were arrested in 2005, for stealing and re-selling heroin from street dealers. This is not the petty theft and casual sadism of Officer Walker. These guys were doing business.

Police corruption is no secret. The famous Knapp Commission in New York in the 1970s inspired the Serpico movie, and led to a permanent body being set up in 1995, The Commission to Combat Police Corruption. Look at most police forces in western democracies and corruption scandals and commissions litter the landscape: in Australia there have been The Wood Royal Commission in NSW and The Fitzgerald Inquiry in Queensland.

The presence of Ed Norris in The Wire, a controversial figure, convicted of corruption, flags that the issue was not unknown to the writers but that they, perhaps, rather like an embedded reporter, had chosen not gaze too intently at it.

David Simon proudly calls The Wire an anti-cop show, and in so very many fine ways it is – but in choosing not to fully follow through the consequences of the corrupting influence of the war on drugs on the police, The Wire is clearly not anti-cop.