The Wire S1-3
I've seen up through S3 of The Wire. And fucked if it doesn't live up to the ten years of hype, and even in some ways surpassing my expectations. So have some mood music, and DON'T TELL ME ANYTHING PAST S3.
I've seen a lot of pro reviews of The Wire saying that the show is about how the drug trade steals lives, but to the show's credit, I don't think that's entirely accurate. It doesn't minimize the dangers of drug abuse, certainly, but it keeps the blame squarely on the racism and classism which effectively limit people's options to the drug trade. Guys like Stringer live and think like CEOs because they are CEOs - they just have no incentive not to play the game as ruthlessly as possible. (This is one of those rare instances where authorial intent isn't particularly difficult to divine, yet I don't expect it to change my analysis an iota, as the show is intentionally an argument for the creator's views on USian drug prohibition, on which he and I are completely sympatico. I choose to believe this article was in fact my very own birthday present.)
The other thing this means The Wire does well is tone. A few of us were talking earlier this week about the connotations of realism versus cynicism. And I think The Wire is reliably, and admirably, realistic rather than cynical. Violence is never ignored or glamorized, but it is never gratuitous or sensationalist, either. These people often are doing the best they know how, or at least, the best they’ve been convinced they can do. They have varying levels of optimism about their diverse ideas. The Wire doesn’t go for “good people” or “bad people,” so much as, “here are a lot of people, and here are the things they do in conjunction with the US government's attempt to control people through the proxy of substances.”
The seasonal structure is interesting in that it’s far more about changes in perspectives than about lapses in time or changes in conflict arcs. That’s a part of the show. Rather, the seasons focus on different institutions. The first season gives us lots of the cops and a fair amount of insight into the Barksdale Organization. The second season keeps those characters, but they’re less prominent than the unions, the organizations that traffic people as well as drugs, and the homicide cops who necessarily see only the worst parts of the narcotics detail’s work. The third season brings City Hall front and center, looking at the top brass and councilmembers who drive policy. I'm so much more interested in the social/political angles of it all that I lose sight of my appreciation of the fiction, but the writing seamlessly incorporates all these different settings and characters in a way that feels completely natural. It's amazing.
Unsurprisingly, the third season has been my favorite. And it's been like a month since I've watched the other two, so let's focus on that a little bit more. The politics of it all was very straightforward to watch electoral sausage-making. Not the most compelling, but you don' walk away from it hating the characters (unless you already did). Talking demographics looks crass and terrible, particularly when it is ACTUALLY LITTLEFINGER scheming how to be a white man beat his black buddy (and they do seem to be friendly, at least) in an election. And yet it doesn't feel disrespectful to the process.
Not only did the show give the most (if only) fair presentation of ethical harm reduction I have ever seen in a work of fiction, but by the time the issue came up in the third season, I wasn't even surprised that the show did such a good job with it. The Hamsterdam idea was a good one, though doomed, for the reasons the end of the season shows us in painful detail. In large part, more than anything, it's the extent to which everyone assumes everyone else isn't on board with it. The brass hate it because they'll come under fire from the Council, the Council and Mayor hate it because they have to distance themselves from it in order to keep their seats (on the questionable-at-best assumption that the citizens wouldn't approve) and so nobody presents a united front when the feds come in.
I've reached the point with any even vaguely political media where I just blatantly expect characters who talk sense to be discredited as ~gullible fools or actually just full of shit. And Bunny isn't. He's only as deluded as you'd have to talk yourself into being in order to think you can make any difference at all, but his plan is pretty clear-eyed about what it can achieve. He neither goes along with nor goes off the rails over Carver's tampering with Hamsterdam's first murder, because he knows what lines he's not willing to cross, but he's also aware that he's asking the officers involved to cross a lot of their own lines. His determination to legalize drugs comes in part from his personal worry of having achieved nothing in his long career, and his willingness to suck a few million other people into his midlife crisis is pretty telling, but hey, he was at the right moment and had the right set of motivations, he saw a shot to make his world a safer place, and he took it. Of course the world is the world, and he ends up punished - though demotion is hardly as bad as it could've been, but he made his choice and knew it was worth that trade-off. The Wire's not much of a show about heroes, but its world's a little better off with Bunny Colvin than it'd be without him.
This show is painfully realistic (we've yet to see a single flashback, even - we experience events as the characters do), and yet, I can't help but put one character with his more fantastic archetype: Omar Little is a trickster in the finest tradition. West Baltimore's own Robin Hood, he steals from thriving drug dealers and has folk hero status among small children in the area. Omar lives by his own code - because "a man's gotta have a code" - but isn't particularly concerned with state authority, though he'll freely cooperate with the prosecution against dealers he finds particularly reprehensible. He's a whimsical man who quirkily refers to himself as "Omar," whistles children's songs as he walks down the street, and even calls the drug trade "the game."
Outside of these two great characters, it's a lot harder to write about characters or relationships separately, except again to praise the characterization and how well it shows people in all our messiness, and it doesn't lie to us and pretend that'll make everything okay, but it doesn't lie to us and make us think that we're worse than we are, either. And giving human nature a fair hearing on a show about the human rights catastrophe that is the "War on Drugs"? That's a damn fine trick.
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/300043.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.
Click to viewI've seen a lot of pro reviews of The Wire saying that the show is about how the drug trade steals lives, but to the show's credit, I don't think that's entirely accurate. It doesn't minimize the dangers of drug abuse, certainly, but it keeps the blame squarely on the racism and classism which effectively limit people's options to the drug trade. Guys like Stringer live and think like CEOs because they are CEOs - they just have no incentive not to play the game as ruthlessly as possible. (This is one of those rare instances where authorial intent isn't particularly difficult to divine, yet I don't expect it to change my analysis an iota, as the show is intentionally an argument for the creator's views on USian drug prohibition, on which he and I are completely sympatico. I choose to believe this article was in fact my very own birthday present.)
The other thing this means The Wire does well is tone. A few of us were talking earlier this week about the connotations of realism versus cynicism. And I think The Wire is reliably, and admirably, realistic rather than cynical. Violence is never ignored or glamorized, but it is never gratuitous or sensationalist, either. These people often are doing the best they know how, or at least, the best they’ve been convinced they can do. They have varying levels of optimism about their diverse ideas. The Wire doesn’t go for “good people” or “bad people,” so much as, “here are a lot of people, and here are the things they do in conjunction with the US government's attempt to control people through the proxy of substances.”
The seasonal structure is interesting in that it’s far more about changes in perspectives than about lapses in time or changes in conflict arcs. That’s a part of the show. Rather, the seasons focus on different institutions. The first season gives us lots of the cops and a fair amount of insight into the Barksdale Organization. The second season keeps those characters, but they’re less prominent than the unions, the organizations that traffic people as well as drugs, and the homicide cops who necessarily see only the worst parts of the narcotics detail’s work. The third season brings City Hall front and center, looking at the top brass and councilmembers who drive policy. I'm so much more interested in the social/political angles of it all that I lose sight of my appreciation of the fiction, but the writing seamlessly incorporates all these different settings and characters in a way that feels completely natural. It's amazing.
Unsurprisingly, the third season has been my favorite. And it's been like a month since I've watched the other two, so let's focus on that a little bit more. The politics of it all was very straightforward to watch electoral sausage-making. Not the most compelling, but you don' walk away from it hating the characters (unless you already did). Talking demographics looks crass and terrible, particularly when it is ACTUALLY LITTLEFINGER scheming how to be a white man beat his black buddy (and they do seem to be friendly, at least) in an election. And yet it doesn't feel disrespectful to the process.
Not only did the show give the most (if only) fair presentation of ethical harm reduction I have ever seen in a work of fiction, but by the time the issue came up in the third season, I wasn't even surprised that the show did such a good job with it. The Hamsterdam idea was a good one, though doomed, for the reasons the end of the season shows us in painful detail. In large part, more than anything, it's the extent to which everyone assumes everyone else isn't on board with it. The brass hate it because they'll come under fire from the Council, the Council and Mayor hate it because they have to distance themselves from it in order to keep their seats (on the questionable-at-best assumption that the citizens wouldn't approve) and so nobody presents a united front when the feds come in.
I've reached the point with any even vaguely political media where I just blatantly expect characters who talk sense to be discredited as ~gullible fools or actually just full of shit. And Bunny isn't. He's only as deluded as you'd have to talk yourself into being in order to think you can make any difference at all, but his plan is pretty clear-eyed about what it can achieve. He neither goes along with nor goes off the rails over Carver's tampering with Hamsterdam's first murder, because he knows what lines he's not willing to cross, but he's also aware that he's asking the officers involved to cross a lot of their own lines. His determination to legalize drugs comes in part from his personal worry of having achieved nothing in his long career, and his willingness to suck a few million other people into his midlife crisis is pretty telling, but hey, he was at the right moment and had the right set of motivations, he saw a shot to make his world a safer place, and he took it. Of course the world is the world, and he ends up punished - though demotion is hardly as bad as it could've been, but he made his choice and knew it was worth that trade-off. The Wire's not much of a show about heroes, but its world's a little better off with Bunny Colvin than it'd be without him.
This show is painfully realistic (we've yet to see a single flashback, even - we experience events as the characters do), and yet, I can't help but put one character with his more fantastic archetype: Omar Little is a trickster in the finest tradition. West Baltimore's own Robin Hood, he steals from thriving drug dealers and has folk hero status among small children in the area. Omar lives by his own code - because "a man's gotta have a code" - but isn't particularly concerned with state authority, though he'll freely cooperate with the prosecution against dealers he finds particularly reprehensible. He's a whimsical man who quirkily refers to himself as "Omar," whistles children's songs as he walks down the street, and even calls the drug trade "the game."
Outside of these two great characters, it's a lot harder to write about characters or relationships separately, except again to praise the characterization and how well it shows people in all our messiness, and it doesn't lie to us and pretend that'll make everything okay, but it doesn't lie to us and make us think that we're worse than we are, either. And giving human nature a fair hearing on a show about the human rights catastrophe that is the "War on Drugs"? That's a damn fine trick.
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/300043.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.