Category Archives: The Wire Roundtable

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.

The Wire Roundtable: Cherchez la femme

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The Wire may or may not be the Greatest TV Show Of All Time, Now And Forever, In Any Language And Genre, In The Whole World, And Throughout The Whole Extent Of Spacetime — but one thing’s for sure. It’s definitely The Most Praised Show Of All etc. Time, Entertainment Weekly and the Guardian have all labelled it the greatest, as have lots of other folks with and without column space. Metacritic.com assigned the fourth season an aggregate score of 98%, which is higher than the rating for God Himself; more strikingly, it’s even four points higher than the score for Kanye West’s most recent album.

The Wire‘s legion of enthusiasts regularly point to a couple of features that merit especial praise: the show’s realism; its panorama of an entire society at every level; its giving voice to the marginalised and disempowered. Realism: swearing! Panorama: Drugs! Unions! Politicians! Schoolkids! Settling old grudges Journalists! The marginalised: Black people! Gay people! Gay black people!

In interviews during and after the show, creator David Simon consistently claimed the highest ambition for the show and its themes. In particular, the show would

with each season, slice off another piece of the American city, so that by the end of the run, a simulated Baltimore would stand in for urban America, and the fundamental problems of urbanity would be fully addressed.

First season: the dysfunction of the drug war and the general continuing theme of self-sustaining postmodern institutions devouring the individuals they are supposed to serve or who serve them. Second season: the death of work and the destruction of the American working class in the postindustrial era, for which we added the port of Baltimore. Third season: the political process and the possibility of reform, for which we added the City Hall component. Fourth season: equal opportunity, for which we added the public-education system. The fifth and final season will be about the media and our capacity to recognize and address our own realities, for which we will add the city’s daily newspaper and television components.

Throughout the whole show, however, there’s one group of marginalised and disempowered that is not given proper representation; one type of individual that gets eaten by institutions but is not explored; one group which has historically faced, and continues to face, massive inequalities of opportunity.

That’s right: I’m talking about the ladies.

Simon identifies The Wire‘s great theme as “institutions devouring the individuals they are supposed to serve or who serve them”. And throughout all five seasons, the show develops this theme in detail, in a variety of institutional contexts and with a variety of individual players. Institutions fuck over McNulty, Daniels, Bubs, Wallace, D’Angelo, the Sobotkas, Bunny, Randy, Bodie and plenty more besides.

But, from Snot Boogie’s sad demise at the very start to the much-exploited homeless guy at the end, The Wire is singularly unconcerned with how women fare in these institutions, the fates they face, the options open to them.

Consider: by my count, over the course of five seasons, thirty-seven cast names appear in the opening credits. Of these, four are women. These are the actors playing Beadie, Kima, Pearlman, and (!) Alma Gutierrez. Beadie is in the credits only for season 2, despite playing a sizable role in the final season too. Shardene and Snoop never make the credits. By contrast, Burrell, Rawls, Sydnor, Clay Davis, Clarence Royce, Maurice Levy and Chris Partlow do.

Chris Partlow makes the cut and Snoop doesn’t.

(This gender imbalance is presumably, totally unrelated, in any way whatsoever, to the fact that ten out of the eleven writing credits throughout the show are men)

Or consider: of those thirty-seven cast members, the relationship status of three of the women are plot points. Pearlman fucks McNulty and then Daniels; Beadie fucks McNulty; Kima struggles with her (de facto) wife and child. Alma gets nothing, but that’s only because she has no internal life to speak of or, really, any kind of life to speak of, beyond learning at the feet of the great David Simon Gus Haynes.

Sure, much is made of who the guys are fucking, too — McNulty and Omar in particular. (And, of course, if Pearlman is fucking Daniels, then Daniels is fucking Pearlman too). But, for a lot of the male characters, it’s simply not an issue. They may be married or have a girlfriend, but it doesn’t matter much to their character. Prez has a wife onscreen for all of one scene, as I recall; Bodie, Herc and Carv take dates to the movies and that’s about it; Marlo and Avon are mostly asexual; Rawls’ sexuality is a throw-away gag (well, two gags, if you include the graffiti in the homicide toilets); and who the hell knows about Royce, Davis, Burrell, Levy, Sydnor et al. The point isn’t that the show isn’t interested in who the guys are fucking; it’s that the show is much more interested in who the women are fucking.

And once you get beyond the “main” cast — even if you include a couple of extra characters not in the opening credits, such as Shardene, Snoop, Prop Joe, Jay Landsman and the like — it gets even worse. Most of the tertiary female characters are WAGs, would-be WAGs, one-night stands, or mothers. Going down the cast list, if we skip the few women who actually do appear in the opening credits, we get: Snoop; Marla Daniels, who’s fucking Daniels at first and then she’s not; Cheryl (you know, the one with her coupons); Theresa D’Agostino, who fucks McNulty and then tries to fuck Carcetti; Grace Sampson, who used to fuck Cutty; Donette, who fucked D’Angelo and then Stringer; Elena McNulty — look, it’s too depressing to go on.

The biggest missed opportunities comes in season four, with the introduction of the school. Here you have an environment with a lot of women and a lot of girls, the powerful and powerless. Maybe they couldn’t fit in a new major character as a teacher, given that they already had Prez undergoing his learning journey and growing into his new role. Maybe there wasn’t any need. But surely — surely — they could have made one of the four kids that we track a girl?

For the point of season four is, in part, to show the options available to black children in marginal environments. Randy, the budding entrepreneur who ends up traumatised by his glancing contact with crime. Michael, the child of abuse, who’s recruited to crime by way of protecting his family. Namond, who’s too weak for the streets and lucks into a way out. And Dukie, poor Dukie whose fate seems sealed from the moment we see him.

We see what the boys can do, what can become of them, what few roles are offered by the system — the systems — that surround them. But what are the fates for girls? Do they become dealers, junkies, citizens? What specific options do they have that the boys don’t have? Questions not answered by the show; worse, they’re not even asked.

The show isn’t altogether clueless on gender. There’s a nice bit in season four when all the neighbourhood mothers converge on Cutty, as one of the few eligible bachelors going. Or the bit in season one when D’Angelo lets his casual misogyny slip to Shardene. And the instigating incident of season two — the dead sex slaves — suggests a show not entirely uninterested in how women are used by power. But is that enough for a show that aims to reveal an entire society, and how that society grinds down its members? Is that enough for the Greatest TV Show Of All Time?

Or, to quote the great Bunk Moreland: Happy now, bitch?
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The entire Wire roundtable is here.

The Wire Roundtable: Conclusion

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I thought for a moment there we were going to have another contribution or two to our Wire roundtable, but it looks as if they didn’t pan out alas. So I thought I’d finish up by highlighting a couple of the more interesting comments.

First, Jason Michelitch has a long discussion of Pryzbylewski.

Pryzbylewski: not about temper, not about mentoring. Anger plays into it, but not in the heat-of-the-moment uncontrollable way. It’s a deeper anger, an anger of resentment and insecurity. Prez in his early days is not acting out of raw temper, or assuming a learned mode of behavior; he is lashing out from a volatile mixture of fragile ego and stark fear. In short, Prez is Ziggy.

If Ziggy’s family connection had been to police rather than stevedores, he’d have shot up his patrol car, put a slug in the wall of his unit’s office, and he damn sure would have clocked a project kid in the eye with the butt of his gun. But Ziggy wasn’t a creature of temper. Ziggy was desperate for respect in the only milieu he knew to look for it. Ziggy was terrified of being proved a failure, a fuckup, a geek, and so he formed a thick layer of humor, bravado, and rage.

A cop acquaintance of mine once said this to me about his profession, and I take it to be true. He said, “About a third of the guys out here, they’re like me. They just want to help people. All the rest of them are the kid that got picked on at school and now he’s got a gun.” When Prez takes that kid’s eye out in the projects in Season One, he’s not doing it because the kid pissed him off. He’s doing it out of anger at the world, and to prove to the world and to himself that HE’S in control now.

It’s only later, after Lester has shown him how he can be competent and respected through the wiretap, that Prez is then confronted by the kid he hurt, and he realizes that he was not in control at all.

And that isn’t the end of his journey, because while Prez finds a new well of confidence and self-respect in his work with Lester, he’s still a cop, and he still carries a gun, and he has not recognized his own flaws sufficiently to make him safe with that responsibility. And so his renewed confidence leads to overconfidence, and in the chase with McNulty, some part of him (subconscious, surely) sees an opportunity to finally achieve that original goal of respect through “manly” police work. That it goes so horribly wrong is Prez’s second wake-up call, the one that finishes the job that the kid with the eyepatch started of shocking Prez into self-awareness. At that point, Prez knows he shouldn’t have been a police, with the power of life and death.

Prez is driven to teaching primarily out of his guilt over the kid from the first season (though there is also an element of him needing to have a career that feeds his ego’s need to be in control. Cops and teachers both wield big swinging dicks, even, or maybe especially, the good ones. And Prez, like all the major characters on the show, is complex. Nothing he does has only ONE motivation).

The Prez that shows up in that classroom, though, has had two huge blows to his sense of self that have resulted in him making an absolute resolution to himself to never let something like the blinding of the kid or the shooting of the cop happen again. Prez’s arc as a teacher is not a wimp learning to be a disciplinarian. It’s someone who has seen what can happen when he lashes out getting over his fear of ever doing so again and learning how to instead exert force (either verbally or physically) in a safe, mature manner. When he disciplines the snatchpops kid in the last episode, it’s through a controlled hand on the shoulder and a stern and unwavering voice of authority.

All of the preceding is why Pryzbylewski’s character arc is my absolute favorite from the show, and why I could not let stand the dismissal of his intense personal growth as mere plothammer.

Jones, One of the Jones Boys on Wallace:

The beating of Johnny Weeks, and Wallace’s role in it, is different from Brandon’s death, and his role in that, in several ways. (1) Johnny is “merely” beaten. Brandon is tortured, mutilated and murdered. (2) Wallace’s participation in the beating occurs in the heat of the moment. His decision to rat on Brandon is dispassionate and calculated. (3) Wallace doesn’t really see the long-term effects of Johnny’s beating. Brandon’s body is displayed in Wallace’s backyard. (4) Punishing cheating junkies is presumably a relatively routine event for Wallace. Participating in a murder is novel, and thus more salient. (5) Wallace’s role in the beating is not crucial; even if he didn’t participate, Johnny would still be beaten by Bodie et al. His role in Brandon’s murder *is* crucial; if Wallace didn’t make that phone call, Brandon wouldn’t be murdered–at least, not at that time. (6) The beating happens in the company of Wallace’s peers. The murder involves him with his superiors, who are adults, and serious–and scary–criminals. (7) Johnny is just a junkie, a figure of contempt. Brandon, although a homo and dope-snatcher, is at least higher in the street hierarchy. (8) Brandon seems closer in age to Wallace. Johnny is indisputably an adult; when Wallace spots Brandon, he is playing pinball at a local hangout. (9) Wallace beats on Johnny. He (kind of) snitches on Brandon. Snitching is worse than beating (exhibit A: Randy Wagstaff). (10) Finally, doesn’t DeAngelo express some qualms about Brandon’s vicious treatment? Boadie couldn’t give a shit, but Wallace takes his moral cues from DeAngelo, to some extent.

Given all these differences, Wallace’s different reactions seem not at all inconsistent. Could the show have made these differences, or Wallace’s thinking about them, more explicit? Sure. But if the show made everything explicit, each season would have been one thousand episodes long.

And Jog on Zach Snyder’s translations of Alan Moore’s epic poetry.

Ugh, the hell with Zach Snyder… not only does he constantly favor flowery look-at-me phrasing at the expense of the text, his Moore translation seemed flatly ignorant the critical aspect of DIALOGUE with the oral tradition Noah mentions. Specifically, Moore’s liberal, detailed quotations from Steve Ditko are so bowdlerized as to render them mere surface decoration, despite being utterly fucking central to the work, down to seemingly tiny sections — Dr. Manhattan’s disastrous encounter with the scribes — referring directly to crucial verses from Ditko’s Captain Atom. And yes yes, the Kalermites will tell you that attribution is difficult in antiquity — where would our classics departments be without “Bob Kane”? — but Ditko, remember, commonly operated with an intent of conversion, to deliberately replace earlier, pagan narratives with substitutes derived from that unfashionable monotheistic bedrock, Mr. A, himself (of course!) parodied in the form of Rorschach, despite the protestations of “Sunday Catholics” with no appreciation of tradition, duly aided and abetted by Mr. Snyder… you see why I’m pissed??

Although, I’ll even read Snyder’s shitty-looking novel this weekend before I sit through one more second of Ayn Rand, the enduring (if limited) popularity of whom can only properly be analogized to the embrace of Tommy Wiseau among particular Victorians… contrary to one million posts online, I found it a relief when she just plopped that dude in front of the camera and had him talk, because she cannot frame a shot to save her life…!

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This has been a kind of amazing week here, as Joy Delyria and Sean Michael Robinson turned into a meme, linked by everyone from boingboing on down. My statcounter says we had 70,000 hits plus over the course of Thursday and Friday, which is the amount of traffic we usually get in two months. Things have calmed down a little (we only got as much traffic as we usually get in a week and a half yesterday) and our bandwidth has dropped to levels that allow the blog to function again.

So, I wanted to give a big thank you again to Derik Badman, who’s been fighting to keep the blog working and available to readers. Thanks also to Bill Randall and Caroline Small for helping out on the technical level. And thanks to all our contributors, commenters, and readers. It’s been a blast.

The Wire Roundtable: What’s Missing From This Picture?

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Others have already pointed out that The Wire isn’t as realistic as it seems. Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), for instance, is the hero of the American Monomyth. Here’s how the latter is summarized in the link above:

A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil; normal institutions fail to contend with this threat; a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task; aided by fate, his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisiacal condition; the superhero then recedes into obscurity.

The Wire revises the myth thus: a community in hell (Bubbles – Andre Royo: “it’s a thin line between heaven and here.”) is threatened by some of hell’s inhabitants; normal institutions, paralyzed by red tape, political agendas, and business as usual, fail to contend with this threat; a self-aggrandizing supercop emerges to be afflicted by temptations and fails to carry out the redemptive task; bumping his head against the system the supercop recedes into obscurity.

That’s quite good. It revises the myth until it lies there, almost unrecognizable. Here’s my version though: in its mythology of being the only possible system (in the best of all possible worlds as Pangloss would say; at the end of history as Fukuyama would add), and in its sanctification of profit (the market will provide), global capitalism transferred labor to developing countries where the wages are low (Walden Bello):

The extreme international mobility of corporate capital coupled with the largely self-imposed national limits on labor organizing by the Northern labor unions (except when this served Washington’s Cold War political objectives) was a deadly formula that brought organized labor to its knees as corporate capital, virtually unopposed, transferred manufacturing jobs from the North to cheap-labor sites in the Third World.

Under these conditions a parallel economy thrives (mimicking the mainstream economy with its power struggles, cut-throat wars and iron clad hierarchies); those who are unprepared and uneducated, the poor, have no other option than to go underground; everything becomes simulacra in order to keep up appearances.

Hostage to the worlds of finance and economics politics is reduced to being a sport (I love the scene in which Carcetti campaigns in an elderly home: we can hear the crickets chirping because the seniors in there couldn’t care less for this kind of sport); the police are a political tool; the education system is a dead end (and the students know it – Howard “Bunny” Colvin – Robert Wisdom: “I mean, they’re not fools these kids. […] [T]hey see right through us.”). That’s why Marcia Donnelly (Tootsie Duvall), the Assistant Principal of Edward J. Tilghman Middle School says to Bubbles that Sherrod (Rashad Orange) is going to be “socially promoted” after missing school for three years. In the end, everybody knows that it doesn’t matter (those who do matter aren’t in that kind of school). Everybody has some reason to pretend that it does though. I’ll give the last word to David Simon:

Baltimore’s dying port unions, is a meditation on the death of work and the betrayal of the American working class, it is a deliberate argument that unencumbered capitalism is not a substitute for social policy, that on its own, without a social compact, raw capitalism is destined to serve the few at the expense of the many.

My problem with this statement is that David Simon should be saying it about the series as a whole. Why just season two? I hope that there isn’t a hint somewhere suggesting that, given the chance, black people would still prefer the world of the corners instead of being part of the mainstream economy.

Another instance where the creators of the series juggle dangerously with cliché is in season four (my favorite, pardon the personal note). The aforementioned season includes a kind of Teacher Movie. It’s true that, again, the writers do a good job of transcending the pernicious genre (the teacher, Roland “Mr. Prezbo” Pryzbylewski – Jim True-Frost – doesn’t win the trust of his most difficult students completely alone). But he also conveys what I call the flawed Sesame Street Syndrome (or SSS). That is, students can learn while playing. In the link above, the reporter, Nicholas Buglione, wrote:

Dr. Robert Helfenbein, an education professor at Indiana University who specializes in urban education issues, believes these films trivialize the learning process and present an erroneously simple solution to what’s really a far more complex problem: Closing the achievement gap in inner-city schools.

That goal can’t be achieved by any superhero teacher or caped crusader. It can only be achieved by closing the parallel gap between the wealthy and the poor.

The image above shows Bubbles pushing his peripatetic business. The original is a print on a t-shirt. I chose it because it is semiotically fascinating. On one end it’s the perfect symbol of the parallel economy I talked about above. On the other end it shows the absolute base of the social pyramid, the junkie that is everybody’s victim (I’m aware that Bubbles is a fictional character, mind). And yet… it’s in a t-shirt… for sale! Grammar mistakes and all!… Capitalism appropriates everything by selling everything.

What’s missing above is the real one.

In conclusion, the use of parallel montage gives the impression of a kaleidoscopic and complex view of the city. That’s not untrue, but it just gives us the street level (in today’s world of virtual politics, even the temples of infotainment and city hall are at street level). What really affects these people’s lives is happening elsewhere.

Stan the Man

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I should probably introduce myself. I’m not just some random guy who popped up in the comments section and started running his mouth when the Wire roundtable began (though I certainly am that). I used to blog about The Wire during seasons 4 and 5. In an attempt to get a handle on the show, and a desperate bid to fill content from week to week, I spent a lot of time tracking the various characters’ political manipulations. And it was then that I discovered my admiration for southeastern district commander (and later commissioner) Stan Valchek.

The creators play Valchek as a joke. He gets punched out by Prez, possibly the least macho character this side of Shardene or Namond Brice. In his most indelible image he sits hunched over his desk, gazing through an oversized magnifying glass, dusting for pointless fingerprints on a humiliating photograph—a Sherlock Holmes parody of police work that leads nowhere and accomplishes nothing. Even his beneficiary and patron, Tommy Carcetti, calls him a hack and asks Rawls to keep him from doing any lasting damage in his new sinecure. In the final episode, Sydnor tells Judge Phelan that Valchek doesn’t have any idea what police work is.

Other traits aren’t so comical. Valchek negotiates the power structures of a black-led police department in a majority-black city with consummate skill, but he can’t quite conceal his ingrained racism. The big tell, communicated with perfect subtlety and perfect clarity, comes in that scene in season 5 when he says his goodbyes to Mayor Carcetti but can’t bring himself to do more than nod at Norman Wilson. (In retrospect, Prez’s tragic history of being quick on the draw with black suspects makes a lot more sense after this moment; Valchek’s inability to acknowledge Norman tells us a lot about the culture he and Prez come from.)

In a show where loyalty is both a cherished value and a fatal Achilles heel, Valchek displays not a trace. Daniels saves his son-in-law three times, once talking him down from a murder charge and a possible suicide, and yet when Cedric begins his rapid ascent through the brass it’s Stan who warns Rawls that the young colonel is being groomed for something higher. Of course, by that point Valchek has more than severed his family ties to Prez, cutting him loose and making him Daniels’s problem. This utter lack of loyalty makes Valchek both a despicable character (I once called him “the old, white, Polish police version of De’Londa Brice”) and one of the most adept players of institutional politics on The Wire—two qualities that are hardly inconsistent.

On its largest scale, The Wire is about the erosion of the postwar industrial economy and the welfare state and their replacement by a globalized, postindustrial, postmodern capitalism that runs on no logic other than unrestrained self-interest. Valchek comes from one of the urban white ethnic constituencies that both built the welfare state and initiated its slow demolition: the guy is the very picture of a Reagan Democrat. He continues to advance his constituency’s political power, promoting Tommy Carcetti in an act of racial as well as district solidarity, but he destroys the last remnants of the southeastern district’s old economic base. (And opens the granary pier for development by his political ally Andy Krawcyzk.)

He turns his back on his family, his allies, and his community as he advances higher and higher in the police hierarchy. And yet I can’t help but like the guy.

Part of it is no doubt the accent. My extensive research on Wikipedia and Google hasn’t revealed much about the mysterious origins of actor Al Brown, but given that IMDB lists his first role as an uncredited spot on Homicide I’m willing to bet he’s a Baltimore local. He certainly sounds the part—his Bawlmer accent is better than any other white character’s, with the possible exception of Marine Unit officer Claude Diggins. In a show that prizes the local in the face of encroaching globalization, Stan Valchek is as local as it gets, and his accent exemplies everything that sets The Wire apart from the innumerable fantasyland versions of New York and Los Angeles that fill the airwaves.

But it’s not just the actor. Contrary to what every other character says about Stan’s competence, beneath the layers upon layers of vanity, self-promotion, and spite there beats the heart of a real police. He opens the investigation of the stevedores union and reopens the major crimes unit, salvaging the entire premise for the series after the scorched-earth ending of season 1. While he does so for the pettiest of reasons—destroying the union because he’s jealous over a chuch window—his initial hunch that something’s wrong is rooted in the kind of local knowledge The Wire characterizes as the foundation of all good police work. Stan is basically right: there’s no way in hell the stevedores should have the money to pay for that window.

His political instincts aren’t so bad for the city, either. He leaks the information that allows Carcetti to unseat Clarence Royce—a major improvement for Baltimore, no matter what we think of Carcetti’s failings. In his one and only scene in season 5, he again leaks the information that sinks Burrell and opens the door, albeit temporarily, for Daniels to institute some real reforms as deputy commissioner and later commissioner. If Stan Valchek fails upwards, he generally does so to the benefit of the police department and city hall (if not to the docks).

Unfortunately, the post of commissioner is likely to be a grade or two above Stan’s already questionable competence. Presumably he only gets the job because he’s willing to play along with the directive to juke the stats in advance of Carcetti’s gubernatorial campaign. (And because the city’s black constituency will be mollified with Nerese Campbell as the next mayor.) He might have given the major crimes unit a new lease on life when it served his purposes, but now that he has nowhere left to rise to he’s blocking Sydnor from doing real police work. He’ll basically be Ervin Burrell with a short temper and a beautiful ugly accent.

But on a show where people literally live and die on how they play the game of institutional politics, nobody plays it better than Stan Valchek.

Technical Difficulties

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As you may have noticed we’re really very slow here. Sean and Joy’s article has been linked by boingboing, the HBO twitter account, Jezebel….everybody basically. It has trashed our server.

We’ve redirected people to the google cache version of the article, but the site is still only semi-functional. We’ll see if we can resume regular service tomorrow.

Congratulations to Sean and Joy. This is the latter’s first publicly published piece I believe, and it has become a meme. I’m thrilled to have published it, even if it did crash my little blog.

 

The Wire Roundtable: Getting Away From It All

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The roundtable isn’t over for another day or so, but let’s go ahead and talk about endings.

Watching The Wire the first time through, I came away with the belief that it had ended on a suitably even-handed emotional note.  The systemic problems in Baltimore were far from fixed, but most of the main characters had personal happy endings.  McNulty may have lost his job, but he got a heartfelt speech from Landsman, he’s back to sobriety, and he’s salvaging his relationship with Beadie.  Pearlman is a judge and Daniels is a practicing attorney and they’re just so cute together.  Lester’s retired and making doll furniture with Shardene.  Carver, Kima, and The Bunk are all comporting themselves expertly and ethically in their successful professional lives.  The heartbreak of Duquan becoming a junkie is counter-balanced by Bubbles pulling himself out of the same hole — sure, it could be read as “for everyone who’s saved, there’s more heading down the same road,” but it also implies that Duquan might someday come out the other side, just like Bubbles.  The tragedy of Randy in the group home is counterbalanced by Namon becoming a success under the care of Mr. and Mrs. Bunny Colvin.  And even though Michael is surely doomed to a short life of violence and pain much like Omar’s, for the time being his final scene is as badass as any of Omar’s first scenes, and Omar was always everyone’s favorite character.

The final montage round-up of everyone’s status, bookended by McNulty on the overpass, is wistful but celebratory.  The audience is invited to their own sort of detective’s wake, where instead of another round of “Body of an American” we all join in the chorus of “Way Down in the Hole,” the “original” version from the opening of the first season (though the actual original recording is used for the second season) for maximum nostalgic value.  It’s a gesture for the people who stuck with the show for the entire run, and as one of those people, I actually appreciate the gesture.  While I could criticize it for self-satisfaction or something similar, I think it’s actually one of the nice things about serial television that you can take an audience through so much with a number of characters that a montage of “where are they now?” is more than just informative closure.  I like a certain amount of ritual and observance, cheesy or conventional as it may be, and so the ending of The Wire left me feeling satisfied and pleased.

The ending(s) of The Wire are actually much more depressing, and since I’m a little bit stupid, I didn’t key into that until the second go-round with the series.  All of the happy endings are, actually, escapes.  Every character that we see smiling in the ending montage has gotten the fuck out of the drug war in Baltimore (or, in the case of Herc, decided to profit unethically from it).  McNulty, Lester, Daniels, Prezbo, all of them have left the police force to happier lives.  Bunk and Kima are minding business as usual in the Homicide unit, working their cases and not fighting to try and tackle the bigger problems.  Bubbles has escaped in a literal and immediate way.  And Pearlman may still technically be in the system, but as a judge, she sits apart from the fray.  Every single one of the beloved characters we’ve followed since the beginning have abandoned the mission, because that’s the only way they can achieve fulfilling, happy lives as people.

The importance of this is compounded by the fact that David Simon did the same thing.  “I got out of journalism because some sons of bitches bought my newspaper and it stopped being fun.”  That’s a quote from Simon that tends to make the rounds (I found it on Wikipedia, but it’s orginally from an interview in the Baltimore City Paper).  Simon was once a part of the system, working as a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, someone in a position to strive and fail to change things just like all the characters on The Wire. Simon got his own happy ending, though: he escaped reporting to become a book author and TV creator.  In a way, the entirety of The Wire is David Simon reveling in his escape, and showing us what he escaped from.  Not the streets, or the day-to-day of the drug trade, but the system as a whole.  He’s now outside of it, looking back in.  And while The Wire may be a multi-faceted, complex show full of characters and viewpoints that contradict one another, the end of the show and the life of its creator point to a single, unmistakable message:  You better get while the getting’s good.

I’m not sure if it’s a compliment or criticism of the show, but I can’t think of a more depressing or terrifyingly bleak moral than that.  It might be the truest sentiment ever expressed on television — but I don’t like to think about that any more than I absolutely have to.  I’d much rather escape.

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Update by Noah: The entire Wire roundtable is here.