This is the first in a series of essays this week about The Wire. (David Simon bless us, each and every one.)
Season one laid the framework – the main problem in Baltimore (and, by extension, all major U.S. cities) is drugs. It is a problem because people are poor, the police department is inefficient and corrupt, and the drug organizations can be pretty solid in their business practices (much more so than my office, even if my office were allowed to kill people, which would admittedly change the paradigm, perhaps for the better). Season two is an exercise in correcting any misperceptions we might have developed from season one – to whit, it isn’t just poor black people who do illegal things. It’s also working class white people. Season three expands on that to make sure we understand that business people and politicians are also corrupt.
Having made these points, The Wire pulls back in season four for the wide angle shot: inner city kids. You might have gotten through the first three seasons without feeling that everything was hopeless – depressingly, unutterably, I want to run out into traffic right now hopeless – but I guarantee you won’t finish season four with that kind of feckless optimism intact, even if you watch each episode, as I did, while flipping through bright and shiny European fashion magazines. (Kinukitty endeavors to seek balance in all things.)
Then, as you lie panting and exhausted, washed up on the shoals of abject despair by the unrelenting bleakness of season four, season five arrives to provide some respite. Everyone is still corrupt and characters are still dropping like flies – some of which is quite dismal indeed – but this time the focus is on the newspaper, and we don’t really give a damn about that.
The Wire is not as simplistic as my drive-by summary makes it sound. Its reach sometimes exceeds its grasp, but this series was remarkable in its nuanced approach. The conceptualization, writing, and acting are all consistently – sometimes very, very good. It gives a great background on how ghettos, drug organizations, unions, schools, politics, police departments, and city government really work, and one only rarely wishes they’d climb down off the soapbox and perpetrate some character development and/or plot, already. All these institutions are interconnected, and the people within them, too, and the five seasons of the Wire run down these connections in sometimes subtle and often realistic ways. The actors are believable. I sometimes found myself thinking about plot points or scenes from the Wire as I tried to fall asleep at night.
I have never seen a television show explicate a complicated situation so thoroughly. I was shocked to watch it happen. When I started watching season one, I couldn’t believe this wasn’t the most popular show that had ever been broadcast. It has everything – action, truth, a brilliant and charismatic but out-of-control alcoholic Irish detective. I finally saw the problem, though. I got something important from this show; entertainment, yes, but also understanding. But too much understanding petrifies (quoth James Merrill). I was sodden and hopeless with it. I came to the end of season five feeling like I’d had a melodramatic and rancorous love affair. I’d gotten things out of it I wouldn’t want to forget, but at the same time I was tired and bedraggled and very much ready to call it quits.
I watched the entire series in one stuttering, intermittently obsessive sweep. It took me about three months. This is an unheard-of level of commitment for me, and I felt like I’d accomplished something. And the surprising thing is, I did. I thought thinky thoughts, and I put things together thinkily. As it were. Things I hadn’t quite put together before. Sort of like when you go to several different neighborhoods in a big city, and then you unexpectedly drive on a street you’ve never taken before and find out that it goes through all those neighborhoods, and now you understand how they fit together. (This happened to me recently, by the way. You can take Roosevelt to Halsted, drive through the UIC neighborhood, and you’re in Pilsen! I had no idea.)
In the months since I’ve been parted from the Wire, I’ve been trying to figure out how I could possibly write about it. Because, like I said – all that thinking. Not necessarily thinking that would impress anyone else, but an interesting diversion for me. I was tempted to talk about the last season and the way newspapers work, because I worked at a newspaper, and while the perfectly insightful and never profane news editor was way, way too good to be true, and, as much as I hate to say it, the dumb, smug editor in chief was too dumb to be true, overall, the newspaper scenes made me writhe in an agony of painful recognition. I have also worked with city governments, and that part of the civics lesson felt pretty spot on, too. What I have settled on, though – and only about seven hundred words into the essay – is season two, and the unions.
Here’s what happens. Container shipping has changed the nature of dock work, and the harbor in Baltimore needs a major improvement to make it ideal for the way shipping works today. As a result, the stevedores – all union workers – sit around most days and wait for work. They do not sit around and wait for work in a cheerful, “Ah, I don’t need to work because I have a union job!” sort of way, either. The days are gone when these men, who have a high school education or less and no specific skills, can provide a comfortable living for their families – or much of a living at all. The union president, Frank Sobotka, is doing everything he can to get legislation passed for that harbor improvement, and most of what he’s doing is illegal or immoral. He’s bribing people, dealing with organized crime, working with lobbyists. Among other endeavors, the organized crime guys supply most of the heroin in Baltimore by smuggling it in through the harbor. This connects us neatly to the Baltimore detectives and drug community of which we grew so fond in season one.
I do not come at this plotline from a neutral perspective. I come from a blue-collar, pro-union background, and although I’m not from Baltimore, I knew those dock workers. There were middle-age and up men who looked older than they were from a life of working hard, real physical labor, and from not knowing how they were going to take care of their families any more now that their livelihood was drying up. And there was that generation’s progeny, idiot and otherwise – the guys I didn’t want to date in high school, partly because whatever else happened to me, I did not want to wind up married to one of those boys. I already knew how that story ended. Anyway, my point is that the Wire presented the dock workers just right. If you are a product of that kind of working class background, you will recognize it. If you are not, you can watch it and gain a more thorough understanding than you can from listening to Bruce Springsteen songs.
Unions are both magnificent and corrupt, and the Wire explains this well, even if it does kill off a dozen Russian hookers in the first episode to make the point. Which seems excessive, doesn’t it? Well, these things happen. The union president is in bed with some very bad people (I find myself talking like that when I refer to the Wire; it has a very satisfying noir-ish slang quotient), but he’s helping them smuggle their drugs and their hookers for a good cause – if he can just get this legislation passed, his family and friends a neighbors will have work again. Then they can drop this organized crime wheeze and get back to their jobs, and everyone can keep their luxuries like houses and cars and food and education and health care. Well, it doesn’t work out. None of it. And that should be good, since corruption is bad and if you drive with corruption, we all lose, or something like that. Nobody wins, though. Instead of the harbor jobs, we get another manicured patch of badly constructed luxury condos. The hookers are still dead, and the heroin is still selling. Not much of a victory.
I think this arc is generally seen as sympathetic toward the unions. At least, those are the informal findings of my highly unscientific study of the issue (to wit, asking the one other person I know who’s seen the show – that would be Noah). After all, the union boss winds up being a sympathetic character. Dying for his sins, and all – voluntarily, even – I mean, that’s a pretty high standard. I forgive him, anyway. And you do come to see the union guys as people, rather than caricatures of lazy entitlement. You see them trying to take care of their friends and family, and you see how frightened they are about what the future holds (or doesn’t), and how much they want to work. In my experience, this is in fact the way it is. Just like ’70s country radio.
I am no longer working class, though. My father’s grinding, exhausting union job made it possible for me to grow up in a small, kind of depressing but safe and well-equipped home (there was always a nice television); to attend school without having to worry about working to help support the family; and thus to have enough space to dream of something else, and enough backup to achieve it. I have never held a union job, and the sum total of physical labor I’ve done amounts to bussing tables and waitressing when I was in college. There’s a point here – bear with me. One of the most important questions thrown out in season two is when Sobotka talks to his lawyer, a man he grew up with. Frank appeals to the man on this basis, and the lawyer points out that he went to law school and made something of himself, while Frank and the rest of the union guys just clung to what they knew, ignoring the signs that it wasn’t going to last.
And when I was watching that scene, my emotional reaction was “Yeah!” Because I have some buttons, you know? Recognizing the union guys was not exactly a joyous reunion for me. And beyond the intrinsic importance of my personal reaction, there are a slew of policy initiatives about this shit. Blue-collar workers are being told to go back to school and retool, and many arguments imply (or flat out state) that these idiots should have seen the writing on the wall long ago. So, on the one hand, yeah – go to college, you intellectually lazy bastard. Become a lawyer, like the rest of us. On the other hand – seriously? How does somebody who’s never seen this “go to college and become a lawyer” stuff in action make it happen? How do you do it if you don’t know how it works and you don’t have parents, etc., who went to college and know how it all works? How do you pay for it when you’re making forty thousand a year? And how does a whole class of people do it? And if they don’t do it, what happens to them? Well, that one is pretty easy. Most of them sink from working class to working poor. Or just poor.
It is far from being an abstract question, or a dramatic exaggeration. Look at what Scott Walker is doing in Wisconsin. He sees this as the moment to start knocking down the dominos. If state workers can be stripped of their collective bargaining powers, that takes out the largest group of union workers left in the United States. And it’s not an unpopular stance – everyone has heard of the excesses perpetrated by the unions. It’s easy to take that rhetoric at face value and say, yeah, those guys have it too good. Fuck them. But if you look at the union workers as people – the way the Wire forces you to – the issue gets murky.
___________
Update by Noah: The entire Wire Roundtable is here.
I’m so glad someone tackled Season Two, especially from a vantage point of having lived among union workers, as I think this season and its focus on the working class white folks of Baltimore is seriously underrated by all the white hipsters who get panic attacks watching the burly, douchey guys they hated in high school. Nice one, kinukitty!
I’m from a blue collar background, too, but I still hated season 2. The actors playing the dockworkers were uniformly terrible: the weaselly son straight out of acting school, the speechifying leader who’s seen On the Waterfront too many times and the defective Ben Affleck clone of a nephew. Gah!
Hah! I was hoping to find someone who didn’t like the wire somewhere out there.
Did you dislike the whole series, Charles, or just season 2?
The speechifying leader is maybe a problem; I can see that. I thought the weaselly son was actually quite good, though….a nice mix of hapless and unhinged.
I, unfortunately for you, can’t hate the whole series. I do think it’s overrated, though, particularly when considered as “realism.” The last season covered a similar theme as The Dark Knight (Omar-Joker, McNulty-Batman, etc.), for instance, but wasn’t quite as good.
Oh dear. I liked it much better than the Dark Knight. Though season 5 definitely had its problems.
I do have a friend who hates it…but as a result he didn’t want to write about it, unfortunately.
I’m not much of a fan of season 2 either, although it does play a lot better in a short, concentrated viewing than it did week to week. (I moved down to Nashville in the middle of the season and didn’t bother to get the cable hooked up for a couple of weeks–that would have been unthinkable a year before or a year later.) Mostly it was the slow build that bothered me: it took several weeks for the series to reassemble its major crimes unit and get back to its basic narrative hook, which is a long time to string your audience along.
The acting didn’t bother me so much–Horseface is there to look authentic, not to move me to tears–with the unignorable exception of Ziggy. It’s one thing to have a character who tries too hard to be clever and funny (a duck?) but when the actor and script are straining along with him (a duck?) it’s just embarrassing for everyone involved. The less said of this character the better, but unfortunately he seems to be a Simon type. James Ransone shows up again as one of the Marines in Generation Kill and Steve Zahn nearly sinks Treme until his character finally moves in a different direction.
Kinukitty, I didn’t think The Wire ever argued that the main problem in Baltimore was drugs. It’s the transformations in postindustrial capitalism and post-Great Society government that are really sinking Baltimore; the proliferation of drugs is just a symptom (and a symptom that happens to operate on the same logic as the systems and institutions that are wrecking the city on macroeconomic and political levels). But it doesn’t even approach the larger economic problems until season 2, which is one reason I tend to think well of the season despite its narrative and casting problems.
Charles: it’s funny, I’ve also had a Dark Knight/Wire comparison brewing for years now, but I would never claim to like The Dark Knight better and I link the two up a little differently. (For starters, the Joker is clearly Marlo…)
My love for Ziggy and his improbable penis will never die.
I don’t really see the comparison thematically from Season 5 to The Dark Knight, but I hate The Dark Knight and think that its themes are cartoonish and simplistic, so maybe I need to open my mind more. Or less.
Maybe it’s the becoming the enemy kind of thing, where the good guys have to become the thing they hate in order to defeat it? Dark Knight makes that into a huge gothic moral dilemma, whereas season 5 treats it as kind of puerile and banal — more about the cop’s egos and professional frustration than about fighting evil or staring into the abyss.
I liked that about season 5, though in other respects it definitely tried too hard.
I’m the friend who hates this show.
I think there are some worthwhile points about libertarianism, only because this country is never going to put up with socialism. But you can’t just get rid of the public sector and let the private sector remain structured in this evil stupid way. You don’t like socialized health care, fine, get rid of insurance companies so people can buy their medical care on the open market. Or are you (libertarians) just working out some knee-jerk stuff you haven’t really thought through?
And yet I’m in a union (I’m a teacher), chances are all the cops in Baltimore are in unions too, and I went to grad school– Lord knows the Board would like me to take insulting professional development until I start crapping scantrons. And the Wire is kind of like that– time-wasting propaganda to prove you’re worthy of inclusion in the anxious white middle class.
I don’t mind if everyone wants to watch this kind of overrated grandstanding posing as gritty reality (“go ahead… make my day.”), but I’ll take the explicit nightmare surrealism of the Dark Knight any day.
It’s really not a “go ahead…make my day” kind of show I don’t think. Like I said, the thing I like about it is that it manages to often be smaller than life in various ways; the big moral choices often don’t really seem to matter, even to the people who make them. People are venal in small ways.
I think I prefer that to the poorly done gothic nightmare surrealism with styrofoam muscles.
Maybe I will get a post out of you after all!
“REALISM, n. The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring-worm.”
You know this one. And if anyone was acting at all unlike a robot, or if I didn’t interact with real cops and drug-dealing teenagers all the time, the actual authenticity would certainly make a deep impression on me.
Bert, I’m not entirely clear on how your comments on libertarianism (which I suspect I have about as much use for as you do) pertain to the show. The Wire deplores the destruction of the public sector; it shows that destruction from inside public institutions as they are gutted and replaced by an unregulated capitalism and a militant mode of policing that the creators despise. Honestly, I think it’s coming from the same angle you are, which makes the vitriol towards the show and its fans kind of puzzling.
My sense (from watching a smattering of episodes in the first three seasons) was that the public institutions were clearly rotting from within. Lousy bureaucrats and paper-pushers seemed to be the ones to blame for everything. Cause, you know, they just care about procedures.
I got too impatient with the show to give it scrupulous attention, I admit. You will certainly be able to remember more than I.
Was there a outside-the-box cop named McMurray? Or was he in One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest?
Was there a thug named Stringer Bell? Seriously?
Anyway, feel free to cite me examples of the defense of public sector institutions, and I will fold.
Hey Bert. Yes, it’s Ambrose Bierce, and he’s lovely. But…toads can be pretty entertaining at times too; no rule in art applies universally. And unreality as seen from inside styrofoam isn’t necessarily especially awesome either.
As Marc says, I think the charge of libertarianism doesn’t quite connect. It’s true that institutions come off badly…but that’s because they’re institutions, not because they’re public. The drug gangs are perhaps less dysfunctional in some ways than the police…but they’re also much more vicious and ruthless, and I don’t think at all that Simon thinks that’s a good trade off. The corporate takeover of the newspaper in the fifth season is seen as a disaster, not as salvation. And as kinukitty says, unions are definitely treated with some sympathy (not unwavering sympathy or anything, but some.)
So…it’s not so much that there’s enthusiasm for public sector institutions as that the private sector is hated at least as much; probably more.
McNulty is an outside the box cop — but his outside-the-boxness isn’t seen as simply honorable and good, which is nice. And there are more inside-the-box cops who are actually more sympathetic in many ways. (Though I agree that McNulty is stereotypical in some unfortunate aspects; I’ll talk about that in my essay tomorrow.)
Re: Stringer Bell, wikipedia says: “Stringer’s name is a composite of two real Baltimore drug lords, Stringer Reed and Roland Bell.” For what that’s worth.
Bert,
Far be it for me to tell you that you need to watch the show — life is too short to inflict entertainments you find boring on yourself just for the sake of discussion — but the show isn’t against public institution and for private institutions. I think the very clear message is that complex problems require holistic solutions that are insanely difficult to achieve when we are all individuals with only partial understanding of the system which we live in, a system which has an awful lot of malignant inertia to overcome before any change can be instated. Granted, I’d make an argument that the show’s ultimate moral is that these problems can only be managed and/or escaped, never solved outright, but I don’t see any way to really read the show as an indictment of public institutions IN FAVOR of private institutions. Everyone’s fucked on The Wire.
I’ve been meaning to see if Simon has commented anywhere on McNulty’s genesis as a character…he seems to have grown out of the same real-world cop that inspired Andre Braugher’s character on Homicide. In the book, Homicide, the cop (who was black, if I remember correctly) spent a bunch of time away from the Homicide unit working surveillance with an FBI agent (who I think was Ed Burns, who ended up becoming a teacher and then Simon’s writing partner for the series) and got a real taste for it. This is all from memory, so I might be getting some of this wrong…
What I like most about The Wire is that it has a POV, and it’s proud of it. It’s not afraid of having what certain people like to call a “bias” or an “agenda,” and it’s not necessary for me to agree with this POV to appreciate the show.
Jason: your memory is spot on. I wrote a little bit about McNulty as a corrective to the Frank Pembleton myth of the maverick supercop here back when I was blogging about The Wire.
Bert: the public institutions certainly are rotting in The Wire, but not for the Dirty Harry reasons you suggest–and the mavericks are as potentially corrosive as the bureaucrats they kick against. Careerist politicians are to blame, but so are profit-minded executives, corrupt middle managers, a fickle public, and above all a larger economic shift that’s made the drug trade the only growth industry in certain sections of Baltimore. The series argues the need for a strong public sector by showing the consequences of its erosion. And it defends plenty of individual public servants, usually those “on the ground” who are most dedicated to doing their jobs and serving the public interest. Not by bucking the system so much as by finding ways to work within it.
In what easily could be the most libertarian storyline in the series, but isn’t quite, the police officer in charge of the “Hamsterdam” experiment in drug legalization initially adopts a laissez-faire approach of simply ignoring drug prohibitions in select blocks. This approach falters pretty quickly when subordinates and confidants make him see the hell he’s created by gathering all the junkies in one place while cutting the dealers loose from the industry that has sustained them. Pretty soon he and his subordinates are building social institutions in Hamsterdam, including a rudimentary taxation system. It’s a plotline about the necessity of the welfare state, and one official who realizes he has to create the public sector anew in the places where it’s most been pulled back.
This isn’t offered in some attempt to get you to “fold,” though, just to suggest that Simon and company are coming at these problems from a similar angle to yours. The Wire is much more critical of both laissez-faire capitalism and the conventions of police dramas than a scattered viewing will let on; I find the show works best in large chunks myself. But like Jason says, that’s no reason to force yourself to watch something you don’t enjoy.
Thanks, Jason! And I agree — everyone’s fucked on the Wire. No easy answers, and maybe just no answers at all. I find that sort of thing comforting, in the face of all the stupid answers that get thrown out all the time. Just bust the unions. Just kill all the welfare programs and make those people get jobs. Just replace all the teachers with new, better teachers. Just let all those people who can’t keep up eat catfood and die in the streets.
Charles, I disagree with you about the weaselly son straight out of acting school and the speechifying leader who’s seen On the Waterfront too many times. (Not the Ben Affleck clone quality of the nephew, which is obviously problematic; although I wouldn’t call him a defective clone, but rather too spot on.) Other people had trouble with Ziggy and saw him as unrealistic, but he actually really resonated with me. The first time I saw him I was queasy because he reminded me so much of my cousin, who came to a similar end, except what my cousin did was even worse, and for less reason. As for Saint Sobotka and his speechifying, I’m willing to give that some slack. It’s a drama, and they’re trying to be dramatic.
Or entertaining, which would explain what they thought they were doing with the duck (my cousin didn’t have a duck, by the way). The duck was obviously bad news. The show wasn’t perfect. Anyway, Marc, I see your point about the timing. I felt that somewhat, even watching several episodes at a go.
A lot of things have covered the themes of the last season, by the way. Various great works of literature. I wouldn’t have headed straight for Batman, myself, but then, this is a comics blog.
By the way, does anybody know if that was supposed to be Horseface under the bridge in season five, or if it was just the same actor, playing random homeless guy number 32?
So there’s no love for the duck?
I kind of liked the duck.
Hey– just didn’t want to let Noah down by not kvetching. I’m happy to fold. Happy plot dissections, all!
Thank you! I appreciate the kvetching! Don’t want too much positivity damn it….
Noah,
I love the duck. But I seriously love the whole season, and I’ve yet to hear a criticism that resonates with me. Even the St. Sobotka one — he’s too clearly flawed and his fate is too much the result of his own NEGATIVE actions (as opposed to one who is crucified for positive, rebellious actions) for me to feel iffy about the character.
Kinukitty — I don’t remember seeing Horseface with the other homeless in S5, but I do remember seeing another ex-wharfie there. The fattish bloke with the beard, in, I guess, his late 20s (?). IIRC, he was one of the dispatch guys, working on the computers, but I can’t remember his name.
In any case, whichever of the wharfies it was, I reckon he was probably put there deliberately. It would fit with the theme of S2 for some of the workers to become homeless. Plus, you know, “all the pieces matter”.
…according to wikipedia, it was Johnny “Fifty” Spamanto, played by Jeffrey Pratt Gordon.
I’d love to have a discussion with someone who says he hates The Wire, because his reasons for doing so would have to be completely alien to anything that would ever occur to me.
I do have to say that I find that the point-of-view of the show generally follows the journalistic notion of neutrality as it dissects the America we live in, one social structure at a time. The show observes that the only way to be successful in society is to ‘juke the stats’ in your favor as much as you possibly can while showing how this juking by individuals trickles up and down the class ladder. Nobody is off the hook and no method for attacking the problem of survival is glorified any more than an alternative method. Though, I suppose that if the goal is survival, the characters who stumble in to death have proven a flaw in their own method.
The rich bleakness of season 4 followed by the run-away merry-go-round of season 5 definitely illuminated a deep anger and disgust coming from the creators – creators who had previously held their point-of-view pretty consistently tight to the chest. To me, this anger is the true passion behind the very personal charting of society that runs through the show; it’s the fist-shaking at the heavens. Overwhelmingly involved questions, eloquently stated, are far more interesting than any answers ever could be.
Pingback: links for 2011-04-26 « Embololalia