Category Archives: The Wire Roundtable

“When It’s Not Your Turn”: The Quintessentially Victorian Vision of Ogden’s “The Wire”

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By Joy DeLyria and Sean Michael Robinson

There are few works of greater scope or structural genius than the series of fiction pieces by Horatio Bucklesby Ogden, collectively known as The Wire; yet for the most part, this Victorian masterpiece has been forgotten and ignored by scholars and popular culture alike.  Like his contemporary Charles Dickens, Ogden has, due to the rough and at times lurid nature of his material, been dismissed as a hack, despite significant endorsements of literary critics of the nineteenth century.  Unlike the corpus of Dickens, The Wire failed to reach the critical mass of readers necessary to sustain interest over time, and thus runs the risk of falling into the obscurity of academia.  We come to you today to right that gross literary injustice.

The Wire began syndication in 1846, and was published in 60 installments over the course of six years.  Each installment was 30 pages, featuring covers and illustrations by Baxter “Bubz” Black, and selling for one shilling each.  After the final installment, The Wire became available in a five volume set, departing from the traditional three.

Bucklesby Ogden himself has most often been compared to Charles Dickens.  Both began as journalists, and then branched out with works such as Pickwick Papers and The Corner. While Dickens found popularity and eventual fame in his successive work, Ogden took a darker path.

Dickens’ success for the most part lies in his mastery of the serial format.  Other serialized authors were mainly writing episodic sketches linked together only loosely by plot, characters, and a uniformity of style.  With Oliver Twist, only his second volume of work, Dickens began to define an altogether new type of novel, one that was more complex, more psychologically and metaphorically contiguous.  Despite this, Dickens retained a heightened awareness of his method of publication.  Each installment contained a series of elements engineered to give the reader the satisfaction of a complete arc, giving the reader the sense of an episode, complete with a beginning, middle, and end.

One might liken The Wire, however, to the novels of the former century that were single, complete works, and only later were adapted to serial format in order to make them affordable to the public.  Yet, while cognizant of his predecessors, Ogden was not working in the paradigm of the eighteenth century.  As a Victorian novelist, serialization was the format of choice for his publishers, but rather than providing the short burst of decisively circumscribed fiction so desired by his readership, his tangled narrative unspooled at a stately, at times seemingly glacial, pace.  This method of story-telling redefined the novel in an altogether different way than both Victorian novelists and those who had come before.

The serial format did The Wire no favors at the time of its publication.  Though critics lauded it, the general public found the initial installments slow and difficult to get into, while later installments required intimate knowledge of all the pieces which had come before.  To consume this story in small bits doled out over an extended time is to view a pointillist painting by looking at the dots.

And yet, there is no other form in which The Wire could have been published other than the serial, for both economic and practical reasons.  The volume set, at 3£, was an extraordinary expense, as opposed to a shilling per month over six years.  Furthermore, while The Wire only truly received praise from scholars, it was produced for the masses, who would be more likely to browse a pamphlet than they would be to purchase a volume set.

Lastly, one might stand back from a pointillist work; whereas physically there is no other way to consume The Wire than piece by piece.  To experience the story in its entirety, without breaks between sections, would be exhausting; one would perhaps miss the essence of what makes it great: the slow build of detail, the gradual and yet inevitable churning of this massive beast of a world.

The genius of The Wire lies in its sheer size and scope, its slow layering of complexity which could not have been achieved in any other way but the serial format.  Dickens is often praised for his portrayal not merely of a set of characters and their lives, but of the setting as a character: the city itself an antagonist.  Yet in The Wire, Bodymore is a far more intricate and compelling character than London in Dickens’ hands; The Wire portrays society to such a degree of realism and intricacy that A Tale of Two Cities—or any other story—can hardly compare.

That is not to say that one did not have an influence on the other.  Oliver Twist is a searing treatment of the education system and treatment of children in Victorian society; meanwhile, The Wire’s portrayal of the Bodymore schools is a similar indictment, featuring Oliver-like orphans such as “Dookey” and the fatherless Michael, and criminal activity forced upon children with Fagin-like scheming.  Yet while Ogden no doubt took a cue from Dickens in his choice to condemn the educational institution, The Wire builds from the simplicity of Oliver Twist, complicating the subject with a nuance and attention to detail that Dickens never achieved.

In fact, Dickens, in later novels—which incriminate fundamental social institutions such as government (Little Dorrit), the justice system (Bleak House), and social class (A Tale of Two Cities, among others)—seems to have been influenced by The Wire. This is evidenced by the increased complexity of Dickens’ novels, which, instead of following the rollicking adventures of one roguish but endearing protagonist, rather seek to build a complete picture of society.  Instead of driving a linear plot forward, Dickens, in A Tale of Two Cities and Bleak House, seeks to unfold the narrative outward, gradually uncovering different aspects of a socially complex world.

While Dickens is lauded for these attempts, The Wire does the same thing, with less appeal to the masses and more skill.  For one thing, The Wire’s treatment of the class system is far more nuanced than that of Dickens.  Who could forget “Bubbles”—the lovable drifter, Stringer Bell—the bourgeois merchant with pretentions to aristocracy, or Bodie—who, despite lack of education or Victorian “good breeding”, is seen reading and enjoying the likes of Jane Austen?  Yet these portrayals of the “criminal element” always maintain a certain realism.  We never descend into the divisions of “loveable rogues” and truly evil villains of which Dickens makes such effective use.  Odgen’s Bodie, an adult who uses children to perpetrate criminal activity, is not a caricature of an ethnic minority in the mode of Dickens’ Fagin the Jew.

In fact, none of The Wire’s villains have the unadulterated slimy repulsion of David Copperfield’s Uriah Heep, except for perhaps the journalist, Scott Templeton.  The final installments of The Wire were sometimes criticized for devolving into Dickensian caricature in regards to the plots surrounding Templeton and The Bodymore Sun.  (It is interesting to note first that Dickensian characterizations were Templeton’s number one crime, and second, that these critics of The Wire were for the most part journalists themselves.)

If at any time besides its treatment of Templeton The Wire flirts with caricature, it does so in the character of Omar Little.  Yet no one would ever reduce such a monumental culmination of literary tradition, satire, and basic human desire for mythos as Omar Little by defining him as mere caricature.  Little is not Dickensian.  Nor is he a character in the style of Thackeray, Eliot, Trollope, or any of the most famous serialists.  If he must be compared to characters in the Victorian times, he most closely resembles a creation of a Brontë; he could have come from Wuthering Heights.


The reason that Little so closely resembles a Brontë hero is of course that the estimable sisters were often not writing in the Victorian paradigm at all, but rather in the Gothic.  Their heroes were Byronic, and Lord Byron himself took his cue from the ancient tradition of Romance, culminating in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, but originating even further back.  Little would not be out of place in Faerie Queene, and even less so in Don Quixote: an errant knight wielding a sword, facing dragons, no man his master.  The character builds on the tradition of the quintessential Robin Hood and borrows qualities from many of the great chivalric romances of previous centuries.  Meanwhile there is an element of the fey, mirroring Robin Hood’s own predecessor—Goodfellow or Puck—and prefiguring later dashing, mysterious heroes who also play the part of the fop, as in The Scarlet Pimpernel.

As previously mentioned, Little also has the flavor of the Gothic: brooding, hell-bent on revenge.  Indeed, there is a darkness to the character that would not suit Sir Gawain, but does not seem out of place in a Don Juan or Brontë’s Heathcliffe.  Little is in fact an amalgamation of these traditions, an essential archetype.

Yet, despite all this, Little can still not be called caricature.  There is an awareness of literary canon in Omar Little, a certain level of dramatic irony.  The street children and rabble, so Dickensian in their miscellany, always announce his presence, and even as The Wire grows and expands, so does the legend of Little.  The Wire is aware of the mythic quality of its character, and allows the rest of the cast to observe it, indirectly commenting on the literary traditions from which Omar Little sprang.  Only in the Victorian Age could Romanticism, Gothicism, and poignant satire come to a head in such a trenchant examination of the way such archetype endures.  It is lamentable that our culture today, sorely devoid of new mythos, could not produce a character of such quality and social commentary.

Many characters of the age pale in comparison to The Wire, but if any other deserves explicit exploration, it is James “Jimmy” McNulty.  While McNulty is rich in his own right, he is particularly interesting in comparison to the viewpoint characters of Dickens.  As Dickens progressed from his “picaresque” adventure-style novels to his more serious explorations of society, so too did his central protagonist evolve.  And yet, instead of gaining in complexity, Dickens’ viewpoint characters dwindled—in personality, idiosyncrasy, any unique or identifying traits.

Scholars believe the passivity of Dickens’ heroes was a direct result of his shift in style and subject matter: in order to portray the many aspects of society Dickens wished to explore, in order to maintain a strong supporting cast of highly individualized characters, he believed the main character must be de-individualized.  He must become a receptacle of the injustices perpetrated by society, so that the failure of social institution can be witnessed and explored as the reader identifies with the protagonist’s essential powerlessness.  This is an elegant method, used to near-perfection in David Copperfield, in which the only uninteresting character is David Copperfield himself.

The Wire charted another course.  McNulty is a challenging character; in the beginning, he is not easy to like.  Though he is our protagonist and usually our viewpoint character on our journey through The Wire, he begins and ends on a note that is extremely morally questionable, despite a redemptive arc mid-series.  We are unable to approve of his actions, unable to assimilate his qualities as our own.  Yet McNulty is powerless exactly in the way of David Copperfield.  He is used and exploited by corrupt social systems, institutions, or figures of power in exactly the way of David Copperfield or Pip from Great Expectations. He is helpless to incite real and lasting change, his passivity forced upon him as he constantly struggles against it, rather than rising from an internal lack of agency.  It is this very struggle which endears McNulty to us, in the end.

In fact, the number one way in which The Wire differs from any other Victorian novel is its bleak moral outlook.  Dickens’ works almost always had a handful of characters that were essentially likeable.  In the end, the power of love and truth is borne out and the individual triumphs over the ugliness of society by maintaining his integrity.  Trollope, Eliot, Gaskell, etc all wrote with this essentially Western—not to mention imperialist—mind-set.  Only William Makepeace Thackeray, in Vanity Fair—subtitled, A Novel Without A Hero—presents an unrelentingly bleak assessment of society.  The ending is unhappy, all of the characters flawed to varying degrees.  It is significant that critics of the time chastised Thackeray for refusing to throw his audience crumbs of moral fiber.

The other comparison one might draw in examining the moral character of The Wire is the penny dreadful, Victorian booklets which exploited sensationalist drama, horror, and Gothic tradition.  Penny dreadfuls were fiction published on pulp and could be purchased for a penny per pamphlet, often featuring monsters, vampires, highwaymen and crooks.  Usually, these publications bear little similarity to the highbrow syndications of the time, their cliché down to an art form, their treatment of hackney topics procedural in nature.

By 1846, the time The Wire first began syndication, the Victorian audience was already familiar with an underworld of crime, the systems arrayed against it, the cop-and-robber story.  But while only the penny dreadful exceeds The Wire in its depictions of violence, ugliness, and depravity of the world, these procedurals should be considered as a separate genre.  They reached for the simple thrills of  titillation.  Meanwhile, The Wire had pretenses of social commentary, exposing deeper truths, persuading its readers not only to witness a corrupt society, but also to understand it.

Morality in Art was one of the most prevailing topics in both literary criticism and philosophy of Victorian times, propounded strongly by the art critic and philosopher, John Ruskin.  Ruskin’s central argument was that one must reveal Truth in literature, but in doing so also reveal Beauty.  One must present the moral beacon to which we all must aspire.  One must not write without Hope.  It is significant also that today, Thackeray is not charged with undue cynicism or depravity; rather, he is thought to be “sentimental, even cloying.”

Literature today is no longer concerned with morality the way it was in the nineteenth century.  Unrelenting, bleak images of society are celebrated for their realism, as representations of humanity.  And yet, we have very few images, representations, or new and challenging canon that captures the essential helplessness, the inevitable corruption, the deep-lying flaws of both society and humanity in the way The Wire does.  Again, I would contend that such a feat could only be accomplished in the Victorian Age, through the serial format, which allowed for such layered complexity.  In no other way could such a richly textured tapestry of a city be constructed from ground-level up.  In no other way could the faults in the underlying foundations of society’s institutions be exposed.  In no other way could our own society be held up for our examination, and found so sadly lacking.

Yet this extraordinary feat of story-telling could not have been accomplished solely by Bucksley Ogden.  It would be a mistake to say that one creator or author was responsible for The Wire, when the illustrations played such an essential role.  Just as Sidney Paget immortalized Sherlock Holmes independently of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by giving the detective his famous deerstalker cap and cape, so too did The Wire’s illustrator, “Bubz” contribute to The Wire.

Would William “Bunk” Moreland be the same character without his cigar, ever-present but almost never mentioned?  Would Avon Barksdale be as intimidating and yet beautiful, were Bubz not able to capture his panther-like movement, his violent grace?  Could Joseph “Proposition Joe” Stewart be as memorable and endearing were he not the portly man we grew suspicious of, and somehow at last learned to love?  Certainly Omar Little would not be Omar Little without his coat, like something out of the previous century; nor would he be Omar (“Omar comin’!  It be Omar!”) without the weal running down his face, signifying past violence, a life of both heroic romance and mythic tragedy.

The illustrations are yet another essential element lacking from the story-telling of today.  For one thing, we would not allow our cast to be represented by the “others” in our society Bubz renders so lovingly. Bubz gave us reality, and he made it beautiful.  The standards of art today are no longer concerned with reality, while our fiction demands nothing but.  Movies, television, the internet have all morphed our expectations, twisted and changed our visions, until we only wish to see Ruskin’s ideal: a pristine, white, purer version of ourselves.

In our age, we can never experience a modern equivalent of The Wire. We would be unwilling to portray the lower classes and criminal element with the patience or consideration of Horatio Bucksley Ogden or of Baxter “Bubz” Black.  We would be unwilling to give a work like The Wire the kind of time and attention it deserves, which is why it has faded away, instead of being held up as the literary triumph it truly is.  If popular culture does not open its eyes, works like The Wire will only continue their slow slide into obscurity.

Ms DeLyria and Mr Robinson are grateful to the Special Collections department of the University of Washington for generous access to their Ogden collection, including the two 1863 editions from which these illustrations were digitally scanned. Those wishing for access to more of “Bubz” Black’s illustrations may contact Mr Robinson at seanmichaelrobinson at gmail &c. Joy DeLyria can be contacted at joydelyria at gmail &c.

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Update by Noah: The entire Wire Roundtable is here.

Update by Noah: A sort of sequel to this post is here.

Update by Noah: Joy and Sean have written an entire book about H.B. Ogden and the Wire, entitled Down in the Hole: the unWired World of H.B. Ogden— it’s out now.

This Blog Has Improved by 13.6%

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Around the end of the 19th century, Progressives celebrated the dawn of rational government. Public policy was to become a social science, and like all sciences it was to be based on quantitative facts. Every aspect of humanity and all possible outcomes would be assigned a numerical value, and then these numbers could be crunched into a thousand equations that would give us perfect governance. No more trial-and-error, no more dishonesty, no more messy emotions getting in the way of sound policy. It was salvation through statistics.

The faith in scientific government may seem absurd today, but much of our public policy is still built around the statistics game. Partly, this is because quantitative measures are generally easy to analyze and explain. If the police report that crime rates rose by 5%, we all understand what that means, and we can draw general conclusions on how to respond. Plus, statistics just seem so damn rational and authoritative, not like those touchy-feely qualitative observations. Decision-makers, bureaucrats, and the public all crave certainty, or at least a close facsimile.

But numbers can be wrong. Or to be more precise, people are lying liars who make up numbers to “prove” whatever they want to prove. In “The Wire,” the public institutions of Baltimore are constantly “juking the stats,” a term referring to various methods by which they falsify statistical data to show progress where there is none, all while the city continues to crumble around them.

While the series creators have plenty of bile for every aspect of Baltimore’s government, none of the institutions are criticized as thoroughly as the Police Department. The Department is portrayed as the apotheosis of public sector dysfunction, and juking the stats is hardwired into its institutional DNA. On several occasions, Commissioner Burrell alters statistical data so as to gloss over the embarrassingly high rates of violent crime. The simplest way that police departments juke the stats is by re-classifying reported crimes as less serious offenses (as an example, aggravated assaults become assaults). The only crime that can’t be downgraded in this manner is homicide, for obvious reasons. This was why Burrell and Rawls were obsessed with the “clearance rate” (the number of murders solved), and homicide detectives concerned about their clearance numbers looked for ways to avoid investigating a (potentially unsolvable) murder, such as by dumping the bodies on another jurisdiction (as with the bodies of the dead prostitutes in season 2).

Baltimore’s school system does not escape scrutiny either, especially during season 4. The public schools are dependent on federal funding,  and juking the stats is necessary to show improvement on the standardized tests administered under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (there are unpleasant consequences for a school and its faculty should their students repeatedly under-perform on the tests). As shown on “The Wire,” one common method of improving the scores is to teach to the test. Students are given rote lessons on how to answer specific questions. This can lead to modest improvements in aggregate test scores, but the students are not really learning anything except how to take a test, and so the scores do not accurately measure the students’ mastery of basic academic skills.

For both the police and the schools, much of the problem arises from a conflict of interest: the institutions responsible for reporting the stats are the same institutions that will be judged on them. Few people are willing to admit failure, especially when the consequences include losing your job. Thus, Police Commissioners have every incentive to paint a rosy picture of the city’s crime rates. Nor does auditing by an outside agency solve the problem. An agency tasked with analyzing statistics from the police department would still be dependent on the department for crime data, which means they would likely get the same juked stats. The only alternative would be an independent means of detecting crimes and collating the data, which would be prohibitively expensive, especially for a cash-strapped city such as Baltimore.

Statistics were supposed to give us scientific government, one where the ideal public policy would be crafted in accordance with hard data. This was implausible even in the best case scenario, but when data is falsified, statistics actually grant further authority to the lies of public officials. And without trustworthy stats, how is the public supposed to the judge the performance of public institutions? How are voters supposed to hold their elected officials accountable when we can’t be sure if their policies succeeded or failed miserably?

“The Wire” doesn’t offer any solutions to this dilemma. Rather, it suggests that the nature of our political system, particularly the never-ending electoral cycle, creates irresistible incentives to lie. Mayor Carcetti, for example, initially forces Burrell to resign when he lies one too many times about the crime rates. But when Carcetti begins his gubernatorial campaign, his staff pressures incoming Commissioner Daniels to juke the stats so that Carcetti can claim that crime rates fell during his term as mayor. When Daniels refuses to compromise his morals any further, he’s forced out of office and replaced with a more compliant lackey. The public, by and large, is ignorant of the mayor’s deceit, because the city government controls most of the data collection and analysis.

So how should the public deal with juked stats? One alternative would be to provide more resources to non-governmental organizations that compile and analyze their own data, but NGOs have their own agendas and are equally capable of lying. Or we could abandon our stat-based approach to public policy entirely, and rely more on qualitative observations, such as in-depth news articles. For many reasons, this is highly unlikely to happen, but even if it did, qualitative accounts can also be fraudulent, and they are more often anecdotal rather than reflective of larger social trends.

I was hoping to end my post on an upbeat note. But this is a roundtable on “The Wire,” so maybe it’s appropriate that I throw my hands up in frustration.

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Update by Noah: The entire Wire Roundtable is here.

The Wire Roundtable: Season 1, Episode 1, Again

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At the end of the first episode of The Wire, the homicide detectives turn over a dead body. As we see the victim’s face, there’s a flashback to an earlier scene. The writers are letting us know that this body with a hole in the head is what’s left of a witness who testified against the Barksdale drug gang at the beginning of the episode.

This sequence is semi-infamous because it is the only flashback in the entire five-year run of the Wire. It was, according to David Simon’s commentary, urged upon the creators by HBO, who were concerned that viewers wouldn’t be able to follow the story without the extra nudge. Simon admits it might have been the right thing to do for the first episode, where they were still setting the stage and trying to hook an audience. After that though…never again. The Wire went forward, and if you missed a plot point, you were stuck until it got reshown or you bought the DVD with its miraculous rewind technology.

The Wire, with its labyrinthine plot and characters piled on characters, is definitely meant for rewatching. That first courthouse scene, for example, is almost entirely different the second or fifth time through, when all the players —nervous D’Angelo Barksdale, the oleaginous lawyer Maurice Levy, the cheerfully dangerous Wee-Bay, the not-at-all cheerfully dangerous Stringer Bell — are known quantities. The first go round you watch a bunch of unknowns; the second it’s all old friends.

The increased familiarity allows for some new surprises. For example, the first time we see Stringer, always the businessman, he’s making notes on a pad. Detective McNulty tries to see what he’s writing. Stringer looks up at him over his glasses and turns the pad around…revealing that he’s been drawing a superhero with what appears to be Africa on his chest insignia. The superhero in the drawing raises his fist and declares “Fuck You Detective”.

Stringer the smart-ass project kid isn’t a Stringer we get to see much — not least because Stringer himself tries to bury that kid more and more thoroughly as the show progresses. In the second season, Stringer probably would have been too cautious to have a note pad; by the third, he wouldn’t have been anywhere near that courtroom. We never see any of Stringer’s drawing again, either. So the second time through, that scene seems more like an end than a beginning.

Rewatching though doesn’t always add layers. Sometimes it points out holes, or roads not taken which might have been better explored. One of my favorite moments from the first episode occurs a little later, after D’Angelo Barksdale has beaten the murder rap. The judge in the case calls in McNulty to find out (a) why a key witness changed her story, and (b) why McNulty was in court, since it wasn’t his case. McNulty explains to the judge that D’Angelo is the nephew of the current West Baltimore drug kingpin,. The gang has beaten a number of cases in court, including a past case of McNulty’s. The judge finally asks, “If it’s not your case, why do you care?” To which McNulty replies, “Well who said I did?”

Again, that’s one of my favorite lines of dialogue probably from the series: McNulty (Dominick West) sells it nicely, looking flat at the judge, with an expression somewhere between slightly amused and blandly unconcerned. The point is emphasized later when McNulty chews out his partner Bunk for picking up the phone on a murder call when another squad was up. “This’ll teach you to give a fuck when it ain’t your turn to give a fuck!” he says.

The point here for rewatching is, of course, that McNulty actually does give a fuck — way, way too much of a fuck as it turns out. He cares so much that, over the course of five seasons, he destroys his marriage, his career, and almost/maybe a second committed romantic relationship.

Which is all well and good as irony goes. But the thing is…I liked it the first time through better. David Simon on the voice over natters on incessantly about how different the Wire is from other television cop shows — and it is different in many ways. McNulty doesn’t really care about doing right, for example, as he would if he were on, say, Bones. He cares about being the smartest guy in the room and about being smarter than the crooks. It’s not about good and evil for him; it’s about ego. Which is a useful corrective to a lot of cop-show nonsense, as Simon says.

But whatever he cares about, the point is that he does…and that is not especially new in a cop protagonist, on television or elsewhere. There was something really refreshing for me about having our hero declare, boldly and apparently in earnest, that it really was nothing in particular to him if the West Baltimore drug gang beat murder number four, or twelve, or whatever. I kind of like that potential McNulty, that callous decoy McNulty, more than I like the funny, smart, but ultimately perhaps more predictable McNulty that we got.

So we have revealed depths, roads not taken…and finally, maybe a dropped ball. Two thirds of the way through the episode, D’Angelo Barksdale’s crew catches an addict, Johnny, who’s been trying to buy drugs using counterfeit money. The scene is presented as a dilemma for D’Angelo, who (as Simon says in commentary) is not a brutal man, and clearly doesn’t want to order Johnny beaten. But the boy’s ripped him off and there’s little choice; he turns away saying nothing, and walks into the camera, his face held still. Over his shoulder, and from a distance, we see Bodie, Wallace, and Poot start to beat Johnny. We learn later that they hurt him so badly he ends up in the hospital, where he had to undergo a colostomy operation.

The reason this is a missed opportunity is because of Wallace. Later in the season, the D’Angelo crew is robbed; 16-year-old Wallace provides information that leads to the brutal torture and death of one of the robbers. Seeing the torture victim upsets Wallace so badly that he falls apart. His disintegration eventually leads to his own murder at the hands of his friends, Poot and Bodie.

Wallace’s execution is perhaps the grimmest, most emotionally wrenching moment of the entire season. In retrospect, his character is almost as important as D’Angelo’s. And, as a result, the second time through this scene of the beating should be telling us something, not only about D’Angelo, but also about Wallace. The Wallace we know later is so upset by brutality that he first becomes an addict and then turns his crew in to the police. The Wallace here, on the other hand, is so comfortable with brutality that he enthusiastically joins in beating a young man almost to death.

The point isn’t that the characterization is inconsistent. People are capable of different levels of brutality at different times, and there is, after all, a line between “beaten almost to death” and “beaten to death.” Still, if you’re going to talk about that line, you probably do in fact need to talk about it, and the Wire doesn’t. For that matter, Simon doesn’t mention it in his voice over. Rewatching here doesn’t so much add resonance as reveal that there isn’t any. The creators didn’t link what Wallace does here to what Wallace does later. As a result the the possible connections just sit there, looking a little lost.

People often argue that the sign of great art is that you can go back to it again and again and find new depths and meanings. I’m not entirely sure I agree with that. First impressions have their own aesthetic worth; a song that sounds amazing the first time you hear it has achieved something, even if it doesn’t bear up to repeat lisening.

The Wire doesn’t collapse under repeat viewings. Still, seeing that first episode again and again was not entirely beneficial. When I finished watching this episode the first go round I think I was ready to call it great. After seeing it a few more times, I still like it, but I’ve got more reservations.

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Update: The entire Wire Roundtable is here.

The Wire Roundtable: Every Man a King

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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.

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Update by Noah: The entire Wire Roundtable is here.