Why Dont You Blog?

David Simon wrote in the Guardian today. I hate trying to write anything about the Wire. I can’t do it justice. I just end up gushing about its genius or calling it Dickensian, a phrase that was neatly satirised in Series 5.

I also hate the way that appreciating the Wire has become a shorthand for being “hip and sensitive” in the UK, as I noticed when a fair few people interviewed in the Guardian, a couple of months ago, claimed to “only have a TV to watch the Wire….” (I find the Guardian’s Wire discussion forum too irritating to read, even though I have to admit that it’s mainly because the people who contribute so lamely and pretentiously just make me aware how lame and pretentious I sound on the same subject.)

Anyway, there’s a bit in this excellent piece where I think David Simon misunderstands the European popularity of the Wire.

But at the same time, I’m acutely aware that our dystopian depiction of Baltimore has more appeal the farther one travels from America. The Wire is, of course, dissent of a kind and it is true that there are many of my countrymen who are in fundamental disagreement with the manner in which the nation is being governed and managed. But somehow, it sounds better to my ear when it’s my own people talking trash and calling our problems out……
…But the emotion in all of that sometimes leads the overseas commentary about Baltimore and The Wire toward something that I don’t recognise as accurate.
Baltimore is not the inner circle of hell. It is not entirely devoured by a drug economy that serves as its last viable industry. It is not a place in which gangsters routinely fire clip after clip, spraying the streets in daylight ambushes. It is not unlivable, or devoid of humanity, or a reservoir of unmitigated human despair.

It may be about Baltimore but it’s not just about Baltimore. The truth of the Wire isn’t that it describes Baltimore life accurately. It clearly doesn’t. It’s a TV series not a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Artistic licence, ffs. What is true in the Wire is the truth of art, i.e. what it says about being the human condition. You’d imagine the only people who would watch it and assume it’s all literally true would be those people who follow soap story-lines as if they are reportage.

I don’t know anything about Baltimore but it’s a pretty “true” depiction of my neighbourhood and my city. Parts of my neighbourhood and parts of the life of my city, granted. Not true all the time and not true of everybody, but there’s enough reality in there for me to recognise it:

Racism; violence; gang warfare; war on drugs; wars over drugs; corruption; soul-destroying education; hopeless kids; traditional industries destroyed; gentrification, and all.

That doesn’t make my city an inner circle of hell, either, although parts of it might qualify as outer circles. Baltimore doesn’t have a monopoly on that stuff. It could be almost any city in the former industrial centres. It’s also just as true of many cities in the emerging economies. What’s amazing about the Wire is not just its accurate sociology, though.

It’s the writing, it’s the characters, it’s the acting, it’s the attention to visual detail. It’s the fact that someone managed to make a series that is really great on a standard superficial TV-watching level and still cram in a social analysis at the same time.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Popularity: 9% [?]

After mildly slagging off the Wire (that’s British for insulting, I have decided to insert idiomatic translations) I am forced to bow before it. I had forgotten that it ebbs and flows in quality. From great to genius, The episode on Monday on FX was a true work of genius.

The programme focuses on Bodie, di Angelo and Chief Daniels, each of whom is at a pivotal moment. There are so many layers of meaning that it I can’t begin to do it justice. I would be outputting exhuberantly semiotic stuff until next year. And that would be just for one episode.

So, I’ll just pick out a few points in a shamefully lame way.

On third viewing, I realised that Bodie puts on the executioner’s cap before he shoots the other child, in an episode of true horror. After this, he wears it more or less consistently. It expresses Bodie’s having become a “soldier,” a disposable cheap executioner for the Darksdales.

At the moment of the shooting, Bodie’s lieutenant is sobbing. The about-to-be-victim pisses himself. Bodie is horrified at having to shoot a boy. But he is not going to stop what he is doing either. He gets the boy to affirm that he is a man not a boy. Earlier, the about-to-be-shot boy has told Bodie that he is “a man” rather than a boy. At which point he looks about fourteen. Even the killers, despatched by Stringer Bell to do the shooting, look older. And one of the them looks 16.

Bodie has made a sort of low-level Faustian deal with Stringer Bell, as Stringer has implied that he can rise in the business if he gets rid of Ritchie. So, Bodie has already prepared to kill for a slight chance of a small improvement in his circumstances.

The Wire writers are showing us that the soldiers are children, living in desperate poverty and shooting each other over crumbs, both victims and perpetrators of the social values that support the whole system.

The moral implications of this killing are played out for Bodie through later series, as Bodie begins to dissent more and more from his role and to pay a heavy price for becoming an ethical being.

One immediate moral implication is that diAngelo, who has been getting increasingly disenchanted with his part in the Barksdales and is coming to ask himself moral questions about his life, explodes with anger about the murder of the child. This sets in train a decision to betray the gang. Which will soon become an epic moral struggle for him.

Both diAngelo and Bodie find that the development of remorse and the stirring of an ethical conscience do not bring any rewards. I think the Wire breaks some ground here. There is no sense of virtue justly rewarded and villainy justly punished. It is not a simple morality tale. Characters are killed off or survive, partly as a result of their actions but mainly as a consequence of the actions of others. You can’t just step out of “the game” by repenting.

At the same that diAngelo is developing an ethical sense, Chief Daniels is doing the same. There is battle of wits, rather than guns, between Commissioner Burrell and Chief Daniels. Burrell tries to applythe blackmail leverage he’s been holding over Daniels. He is being ordered by the political machine to stop the investigation, because it had uncovered a money relationship between the Barksdale gang and some Senators.

Daniels stands up, literally and metaphorically. As does di Angelo when he challenges Stringer Bell.

Daniels reminds Burrell that others would lose more by exposing him than would Daniels. They would have already used their leverage but for the fact that the greatest fear of the political machine is publicity. They have no intention of using their information against Daniels. So he calls Burrell’s bluff.

This stuff was powerfully moving. The moral complexities are laid out brilliantly through the masterly acting.

(As well as the writing, - taken for granted as pure genius-, the direction, the costumes, the sets, the use of music and anything else you can think of. The HBO marketing is naff, but The Wire’s got to pull an audience to satisfy its paymasters. And for bringing the Sopranos and the Wire to the television, I will forgive HBO pretty well anything.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Popularity: 26% [?]

Casual, even indiscriminate, blog searching came up the news that HBO have finally given the Wire Series 5 a release date in the US at least. (wahay, w00t, etc.) It’s supposed to focus on the media.

In the UK, FX is showing all series straight through from Series 1 and is then supposed to go straight into series 5, when it runs out of previous episodes. I make that about a year in the future in the UK, which you’d expect to be at least 6 months after the US. The HBO site seemed to show no signs of having any future series on the go at all so I was getting a mite worried.

I know I shouldn’t even think this, let alone say it, but some episodes of series 1 have been pretty poor. (Strike me down now, Thor.) Series 1 will morph straight into series 2 which was generally poor for most of its run. When I say “poor”, it’s a relative term. The Wire is still so far ahead of anything else that even its poor episodes are pretty gosh-darned good.

But put yourself in the shoes of someone (for example moi) who has been sounding off about the Wire being the greatest work of art ever shown on television, etc, for so long that people I know have even started listening to me and watching it.

And then I find myself shamefacedly having to say “Well, that one wasn’t a very good episode” or “You have to watch them ALL to really get into the characters and storylines” or lame things like that, that sound like I’m covering my back over boosting something that turned out to be a bit naff.

Rewatching series 1 for the third pass, it is indeed still stuck a bit too much in a “TV crime” genre. That is good. Nothing wrong with the genre as such. But, I have to admit there is more cliche TV crime stuff in the first series than you’d expect after you’ve been acclimatised to nature of the Wire series as a whole. The whole set of programmes just slowly edges its way out of the “crime” category and turns into genius.

Or maybe it’s just that I don’t like McNulty, who is the central character in the first series. His character is a bit too irritating. It’s rooted in the cliche lone-wolf Philip Marlowe “flawed investigator with integrity” mould. Series 1 was just finding its feet, so it too often took the easy way out. Someone decided that McNulty’s character was supposed to bring bad to all those around him as a result of his arrogance, or something. So the cast have to keep saying that, in case you haven’t picked up on it. I can’t say that I would have picked up on it, to be honest, but that doesn’t mean that repeatedly telling me that’s what I’m supposed to see constitutes character development.

Sadly, last night’s rerun milked the whole “officer-down” scenario to death. The corrupt and manipulative Commissioner Burrell turned out to be a tower of non-judgemental sympathy to Kima’s partner. Even the repellent Rawls was there to give out sensitive heartfelt manly consolation to a McNulty whose guilt was expressed by his hands being covered with Kima’s blood. Come on. Out damned spot and all that? He wasn’t even remotely to blame. (He even threw up in a bin because she’d been shot, which seemed a bit out of character for a homicide detective.)

When a TV cop show presents someone drenched to the elbow in someone else’s blood, followed by them doing a symbolic handwashing Pilate-thing, it’s time to start putting extra notches on your cliche gun.

(I guess this blog post must be an example of what is the Americans call “tough love”, by the way. I adore the Wire but I’m not letting it get away with self-indulgence……..)

If you have started watching the Wire reruns and don’t think it’s so groundbreaking, stick with it. Because it gets more and more subtle and complex and goes deeper and deeper into the way society works.

Plus, the McNulty character is barely in it after series 1 and a bit of the series 2. He must have been too busy being a digitally-remastered Spartan, for which much thanks.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Popularity: 21% [?]

In case you think that this series of the Wire is straying a bit from the central strands of Wire, here’s your half-time peptalk (a couple of episodes too soon, granted.) If you are getting a bit bored with the politics, I’d have to agree. The election has been dragged out too long, with the same (albeit crucial) points about the corruption being made too often, for my taste. I suppose it’s important, in terms of the overall meaning of the series. I agree with the points, I think it’s very well done. I’m not really complaining….. It’s just that the nature of American politics is both too familiar to us from many other films and tv series and, to be honest, a little boring if you’re not a Yank.

The four lads are the central focus throughout this series and they’ll continue to be so. The first programmes should have already established their characters but there are some surprises in the way they develop, although the clues to where they are going are pretty deftly placed already (with the benefit of whatever the opposite of hindsight is, given I’ve already seen the rest of the series.)

Other strands worth paying attention to, because of how they’ll develop include Marlo’s setting up of Omar; Rawls’ shameless doubledealing with Carcetti and the Mayor; Bubs getting battered because of his nephew’s involvement with the corners; the exposure of the impact of race in the political system, exemplified by the white cop who is increasingly adopting the language of the corner and who is actively campaigning for the Mayor, (largely because his luck in catching the mayor in flagrante has got him made sergeant); the ineptly hidden camera, which will have repercussions for the same cop; the kid who breaks into Prez’s car when he locks his keys inside..

Extra-good things in tonight’s episode were Naimond’s visit to his dad in jail. The conversations between Naimond, his mother and his father were brilliant. His dad expresses the male “soldier” values that he is convincing Naimond underpin the street trade. Naimond listens avidly, trying to learn the male role, both impressed and fearful that he won’t be able to live up to his father’s expectations. The fact that these values are demented propaganda doesn’t occur to any of them. The mother is busy manipulating Naimond to start working for her benefit. She is the most uncompromising advocate of the successful street dealer “soldier” and “family” values, being in the advantaged position of profiting from them without putting herself at any risk. This stuff is just brilliant, so subtly written, with great depth so well conveyed through what appears to be completely natural speech. Of course the writing is brilliant, but the acting is superb as well. (plus the costume design, the sets, and everything else, but one thing at a time here, hey.)

The last crucial bit I have to mention is the kids finding out that the bodies are just dead people not transmuted zombies. The “If animal trapped, call…” message stencilled on the door of the empty building that serve as tombs for Marlo’s enemies has infinite resonance. The whole incident is really subtle. Duquon shows much greater adult understanding of the difference between real bodies and fantasy tales. He introduces the more naive kid to the reality in really gentle way. When the naive lad realises that these are just bodies, he expresses an awareness of the ubiquity of violent death in their surroundings which seems so world-weary, when set against his previous insistence that the people were being transformed into zombies. It’s a big growing-up moment for him, soon to be followed by a very adult realisation that the killers know that he’s the one they got to trick Lex to going to his death.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Popularity: 22% [?]

This is just a link to a clip from The Wire on YouTube There are thousands more. I suspect you could watch half of all 4 series if you look at the clips in the right order. Not recommended.

I only picked this particular clip because
A) it like the way the actors get across the characters of Bunny, Naimond and his evil Mom with a few words and expressions.
B) it has the weirdest comments on YouTube. I really really hope that these people are joking:

earmuffs420 (2 months ago)
naymonds a little bitch. i hate that fuckin kid. his mom has more heart than him naymonds a little bitch. i hate that fuckin kid. his mom has more heart than him
pimpsxycute (2 months ago)
put yourself in his postion . he just a bpy whp grew up in money . he doesnt want to live that life . he mayt be soft . but thats all he knows how to be . i still love namond . and the rest of the cast

Popularity: 26% [?]

Popularity: 26% [?]

The Wire series 4 will be shown on British TV from Tuesday. (On Sky FX, which you should also have if you get cable.) There is almost no way to express how good it is, if you haven’t seen it. In which case, get the DVDs or something and watch the previous 3 series first or you’ve already missed 36 hours of tv genius and you won’t understand the back-stories. You should still enjoy it though. Series 4 is the one with the kids.

The Guardian’s TV Guide introduces the new series with a few pages of the obligatory paeans of praise and with pictures of some of the characters from series 1 to 3. I can’t help feeling the writer has missed the point a bit but that’s all part of the Wire’s magic - you’re alwys going to miss whole levels of meaning because it’s so multi-layered. In fact the TV Guide brought home a huge point that I had missed - Series 3 opens with the blowing up of two towers that is followed by “a dumb and protracted war” (quoting David Simon.) “..Is there a metaphor there? Well what the fuck do you think?…American power and American weakness is the subject. Well one of the subjects.”

The review says that the Wire is “so rich in character and nuance, and so powerful in its anger and painful with its humour that is has been compared to the darkest classics of literature.” The Guardian writer quotes from the New York Times “If Charles Dickens was alive today, he would watch the Wire, unless that is, he was already writing for it.”

He says that the difference between the Wire and Dickens is the absence of a kindly old gentleman to set things right. There is indeed a kindly old gentleman, Bunny, the retired police chief, who has never put a foot wrong and becomes even more virtuous throughout series 4. I am unsure whether this is a weakness - having a truly good man in a world of infinite moral complexity. At first, I was a bit irritated that there was a character who was a genuine hero, in a series in which there is no clear right and wrong. In fact series 4 is much better at engaging one’s sympathies for the innocents - firstly by focusing on the kids, you come to feel more empathy with the adults. Bubs, Prez, Bunk, the boxer and Bodie are all playng “nice guy” roles, as well, all doing their best to follow some codes of decency. (And what about di Angelo in the first series?)

In the end, I feel that having “good” people isn’t a weakness but a narrative imperative - Bunny consistently shows how a single person of character can bring about small positive changes. He stops the Wire from being infernally pessimistic and shows how rationality and goodwill can be maintained in a sea of crap. That is, despite its darkness, the Wire always holds out the possibility that things could change. If it didn’t do this, it would lose a lot of its brilliantly expressed anger at the way things are now.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Popularity: 21% [?]

Except for a few professional women, (police, DA, nurse, teacher)  the women in The Wire and The Corner are almost all basically evil - malignly manipulative - like the mothers of Di Angelo’s  baby and the kid who gets adopted by the saintly Bunny - or psychopathically murderous for fun -  Snoop

I should take some exception to this. It is certainly an example of the stereotyping of women as exemplifying pure good - nurturing -  or (im)pure viciousness - destroying or providing seriously bad nurturing. I also take exception to the fact that the Wire’s central female police officer is gay and acting as a male in relation to her “child” . Yes, it’s good to have positive gay characters. But couldn’t there have been an equally brave and intelligent  female police officer who was straight? Do all the “good” women have to be involved in caring? (Bloody hell, Cagney and Lacey were ahead on this one - thirty years ago.)

I’ll not press this point too far though. Because:

• Most of the evil females are fantastically evil - Lady-Macbeth style evil.
• They are truly manipulative and really forceful at using social expectations to get their own way, twisting “family values” to their own ends, using women’s people skills - promises, threats, violence, emotional blackmail and whatever it takes.  We all know people like that, which is a bit scary.
• They have some great lines.
• They are really funny.
• Thay are much watchable than the relatively pallid good characters.
• Snoop is in a class of her own, completely without any motivation except the pleasure of the killl and she seems only moderately uninterested in that. The banter between her and Method Man’s character is like a more true-to life version of the conversations of Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta, in Pulp Fiction . She has a magnificent but totally chilling contempt for human life -  shown best when she shoots someone more or less at random in an unfounded belief he is from New York. (Someone claims in a  Youtube  comment to know the real one. Argh)

Fran in The Corner has her own episode. It is her fault her husband has fallen from success (a good job, a house, a family) to the corners, according to her son. She is doing her best to send him down the same path, despite also wanting him to do better. She steals from everyone, including her son, then subtly tries to drop him in it when he brings the  owner of the monety to her - criticising him for saying it was her. The problem with this character is that the writesr have tried to give her some complexity - she wants to  better herself and tries to get into rehab - but there  is no character development. She swings from one approach to the other. You can’t care about her whether she is being  unscrupulous or seeking to improve. Which is a pity beacuse the actress is good and some of the things she does and says are very funny.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Popularity: 21% [?]

After three episodes of The Corner (I am trying to ration them a bit) I can report that it’s pretty good.

For The Wire fanatics, it’s the undeveloped low-budget version. It would probably seem really good if The Wire didn’t exist. This series allowed us to get The Wire in its full glory, so even if it was rubbish it would be worth watching.

Each episode in the series takes a Baltimore individual and shows his or her story, with a focus on the dissolution of the neighbourhoods. The actions and the dialogue can be as witty as parts of The Wire. Central concerns are the same, with a focus on how the family reproduces the fractured relationships of the neighbourhood, similar to the focus on the kids in Wire Series 4. The street shots are the same neighbourhoods used in the Wire. Lots of the action takes place in the Series 3 Hamsterdam area. Many of the same production team were also involved, and some stylistic marks of the Wire, such as the introductory quote and the good credits music are present in embryonic form

Most of the cast are the actors who appear in The Wire, often cast in diametrically opposed roles. Several Central Wire police are street addicts or dealers in The Corner. The Series 4 headmistress is a clam shop supervisor. Avon Barksdale is hustling for scrap to sell, and so on. This adds another level of entertainment value that can not have been foreseen by the original team. You can watch it, picking out actors and trying to remember who they were. For instance, I think I saw Method Man in there. I have a suspicion that one character is an unfeasibly young version of the main female police officer from the original team - the one who gets moved to Homicide in Series 5, as part of the first Mayor’s plan to sink the expanding investigation in the period leading up to an election.

The focus on individuals builds up into a composite picture, with each person forming a part of the others’ stories and each instalment sheds more light on the previous episodes.

When compared to the Wire, it is less than satisfying. The stories (so far) are unremittingly dismal, focusing only on those at the bottom of the heap, the moralising is too overt and the characters aren’t consistently strong enough to carry so much interest. The Wire has such an incredible array of fascinating morally complex characters from all social levels that this series can’t compete with its scope and complexity. However, it is brilliantly experimental televsion in itself.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Popularity: 18% [?]

Now that a fair bit of the latest Wire series has been on, it’s due for another fanatic reassessment. This series has been less immediately engaging but demanding immediate engagement from the Wire seems oddly immoral, given its depth.

Hence, this will be the start of a more serious appraisal of the Wire. Basically, it is magical in the way it looks at every level of an American city with perfect clarity, while still being totally successful as standard tv narrative. It’s not exactly escapist, though. You have to have a clear head to watch it. You’ll still miss half the things it’s saying. Or more, in my case, as I feel the need for subtitles in some parts.

One of the themes of the Wire has always been the way formal and informal societies mirror each other. For instance, Stringer Bell had a sales conference for his street dealers with a tedious presentation and yes men asking flattering questions. (If you’ve ever worked anywhere, you’ve been there.) In Series 4, they are making these points (maybe a little too obviously) in terms of education and politics.

The opening titles always turn out to have surprising resonances in any case, but, in this series, the opening titles scream circularity - with a circular image in almost every scene. There are lots of circular themes, among them, the way that culture is transmitted across generations. The school is a focus of a few well meaning attempts to rescue the kids. This is achieved partly by the University project fronted by the legalising ex-police chief - which is building on the knowledge that the corner kids have - and partly by the teacher - who was a crazed nerd policeman - providing food and clothes and interesting maths lessons. The ex-con with a boxing gym is trying to become a good role model as well as save some of the kids from trouble. Their small successes are trapped in a context of test-driven educational policies that run counter to real education, lack of resources and the overwhelmingly sordeid environment.

The efforts of the good police chief and the ex-policeman teacher and the ex-con boxer are mirrored in the lessons in killing that are provided by Marlowe’s minions to kids barely old enough to tie their own shoelaces. Marlowe’s two sidekicks are an apparently himocidal little girl and an older cold and psychopathic man. They make the Barksdales seem like choirboys. Omar clearly has the high moral ground, not least when Marlowe fits him up by killing a shop assistant (collateral damage in pursuit of a goal) and threatening the shop owner to claim he wittnessed Omar.

(In the most recent episode, they have been instructed to kill the would-be New York intruders on the Baltimore turf and leave bodies, contrary to their current success in disappearing any signs of their murders. They devise a bizarre test, based on intimate knowledge of local music, that even one of them is unable to pass. The first person in the street who refuses to provide the right answer is shot, seemingly at random, with his body left to be discovered and supposedly send a message to the New York gangs. The utter pointlessness and stupidity of this typifies Marlowe’s rule.)

The political stuff is very good, but less interesting as narrative than the street stuff, partly because it has telegraphed its message too much. Throughout his journey to becoming Mayor-elect, Carcetti has been as slimy as he always appeared. however, he seems to be about to do something right, for once, by choosing the old Wire boss as a Colonel. But, of course, he is putting the truly evil Rawls in as the police chief. The circularity theme suggests that it will be no time before the former levels of corruption and political manoeuvring are restored with a new cast in power.

The titles are themselves worthy of a fair bit of study. Each series has the same song sung in a different style (are you getting the resonance, here?) There is always a collection of images that crop up in the series and are both beautifully shot and subtly significant to the story lines. Each is followed by a quote from a character in the episode, which gathers resonance when you finally hear it and understand the concept.

In fact, the Wire is a true masterwork of television. US tv is getting better and better, while British tv is descending ever deeper into a reality celebrity home improvement swamp that is so far beneath the lowest common denominator that you would need an IQ in single digits to watch it some nights. If any tv series ever gets better than the Wire, there should really be a nobel prize for it.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Popularity: 13% [?]