The Wire

If you watch The Wire, you should read Mark Bowden’s essay on the show in the latest Atlantic. If you don’t watch the show, you should run – don’t walk! – out to buy the DVDs, watch the first four seasons, and then read Mark Bowden’s essay. Like most of what’s been written about The Wire by its myriad admirers, it’s a valentine to the show’s greatness; unlike most of what’s been written, though, it gets at the show's limits as a work of sociology, and the extent to which its much-lauded "realism" is undergirded by David Simon's ultimately unrealistic sense of near-despair over the state of American life - whether in the ghetto or in City Hall, in blue-collar neighborhoods or (this season) in the offices of your local daily newspaper.

Responding to the essay, Reihan and Matt both concur with this assessment, to varying degrees, but both make the point (which Bowden makes as well) that the show’s unrelenting - and therefore unrealistic - emphasis on tragic scenarios and the impossibility of self-help is a crucial part of its success as a work of art. "It’s by no means clear to me that a more accurate show would be a better show," Reihan comments; expanding on the same point, Matt writes:

... part of what gives The Wire such great power is its creator's conviction, wrong though it is, that his tragic vision constitutes telling it like it is. While departing from both reality and realism in any number of ways, The Wire is resolutely committed to verisimilitude in a way that almost no other show is. The result is the creation of a world -- Simon's Baltimore -- that feels eminently real, but is imbued with all the artifice of Greek tragedy.

In political terms it's a dark vision that, like Dostoevsky's, veers wildly between radical and reactionary and that exists, fundamentally, outside the lines of “normal” arguments about policy. Simon believes that we are doomed, and political progress requires us to believe that we are not. But aesthetically it's an extremely powerful conceit.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that he believes we’re “doomed,” exactly; Simon’s vision lies outside the normal lines of politics, no doubt, and I take Reihan’s point that it’s effectively “an elaborate, moving brief for despair and (ultimately) indifference.” But I’m sure Simon himself considers it a brief for radical action of some sort. He isn’t a no-hoper; he just doesn’t place any hope in the meliorist progressivism that most contemporary liberals support (or, needless to say, in Reihan’s applied neoconservatism).

Otherwise, though, I agree with my colleagues about the relationship between the show’s sociological intentions and its artistic impact. Take the show’s second season, which Simon has characterized as a "meditation on the death of work and the betrayal of the American working class.…[I]t 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." If it’s really supposed to be taken as a “deliberate argument,” then it’s bunk: I’m the last person (on the right-of-center, at least) to dispute the premise that the American working class has its share of problems, but I don’t think that the plight of the Sobotkas – a family of dockworkers pushed into criminality by the disappearance of honest blue-collar work in Baltimore's Locust Point – is particularly representative of the difficulties facing most working-class Americans; nor do I think that the decline of the Baltimore stevedores’ local, while sad in its way, constitutes quite so searing an indictment of the modern capitalist economy as David Simon thinks it.

But taken as tragedy rather than sociology, the fall of Frank Sobotka makes for immensely powerful theater, inspiring all that pity-and-terror business as effectively as anything I’ve seen on television. And so it is with other seasons and other narratives: America, whether in the inner city or elsewhere, is a less-hopeless place than Simon makes it out to be, but human beings struggling to make their way in a lost-cause world, pushing boulders up hills only to watch them roll back down, makes for awfully powerful storytelling. The Wire's Baltimore isn't quite as true-to-life as its more fervent fans make it out to be, but that doesn't detract from its power – any more than you have to accept Shakespeare as an authority on medieval Scotland to appreciate Macbeth.

My only caveat would be this: While Simon's mix of radicalism, cynicism and despair only strengthens the show's dramatic punch, his often-palpable sense of resentment occasionally weakens it. Upon repeated viewing, especially (I'm working my way through the early seasons in preparation for the new one), the persistent, self-serving venality of nearly every character with any sort of final authority grows somewhat wearying. The higher-ups in the police department - Rawls and Burrell - are the closest the show comes to caricature in its recurring characters; they’re entertaining at first, but then irritating and increasingly predictable. In them, and characters like them, you see the side of David Simon that's nursed abiding grudges against his former editors at the Baltimore Sun for the better part of a decade. Which makes me worry, along with Bowden, about how the Sun-centric final season will shape up: As a viewer, I have nothing but love for the David Simon who wants to make The Wire a cri de coeur against the brutalities of American capitalism, wrong though I think he is, but I'm more wary of the David Simon who occasionally seems to want to make The Wire a big screw-you to everyone who never recognized his genius.

Comments

As a viewer, I have nothing but love for the David Simon who wants to make The Wire a cri de coeur against the brutalities of American capitalism,

I think people are letting Simon's reading of The Wire overdetermine their own. At a minimum, it's not clear to me that Ed Burns would indict the precisely the same forces for precisely the same crimes as regards the circumstances that The Wire's Baltimore finds itself in. (I thought I saw something along the lines of describing The Wire as an comment on our willingness to walk away from urban policy and investment.) Moreover, what makes The Wire great is the commitment to credibility (as distinct from accuracy); if there's a conflict between Simon's diagnosis and the credibility of the story, it seems clear which gives way.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | January 3, 2008 10:07 AM

Believing that there is little to no hope for improving things within the structural framework of American capitalism isn't the same thing as believing that there are no solutions at all; it's just that the solutions involve replacing the social and economic structures of society, not reforming them.

Of course Simon is pessimistic about the possibility of 'meliorist progressivism', as am I, for the same reason that Paul Sweezy was as derisive of the New Deal and Great Society as any right-wing conservative. From a radical point of view, meliorist reform is like repairing the windows in a collapsing building; the thing to do is to leave the building, period. That's not the same thing as cynicism or despair though, and it's not the same as locating the ultimate cause of social ills in some unchangeable feature of the human condition.

Posted by Hector | January 3, 2008 10:20 AM

What's going on with today's conservatism when its best commentators bemoan dark/pessimistic views of human nature and cynical representations of governmental authorities?

I don't think anyone would claim that the Sobotkas are "particularly" representative of working class America, but there's little doubt that many of the problems they face (machines replacing laborers) are real problems facing working class America. I don't think Ben from "Knocked Up" is representative of all single men, but that doesn't mean the movie doesn't have an "argument". These aren't policy papers from the Brookings Institution.

Posted by berger | January 3, 2008 10:27 AM

The Wire is Greek Tragedy in Baltimore, right down the the tragic crossed messanges which doom Frank Sobotka, Avon Barksdale, and Stringer Bell. But Ross, I think you and Reihan are overselling the despair. Even in the ugliest parts of W. Baltimore the show displays the poetic language, wit, charisma, and enterprise of the streets.

The Wire is fundamentally a show about the institutions which compose a city, insitutions which, thanks to to decades of underinvestment, neglect, corruption, bad management, and cutthroat economic competition, have become riddled with perverse incentives and more interested in kicking the can down the road than doing their ostensible tasks. Simon is not making some cosmic point about the hopelessness of reform, but a very specific analysis of what happens to a city when the capital (economic, political, social) leaves.

Season 2 made this the most explicit, but the Wire as a whole is fundmentally about the post-industrial city. When people without high degrees of social capital and/or held back by racism, can't make a decent living in blue collar jobs anymore, you get the dysfunction the show presents. People become superfluous, and are shoved off the margins. The Wire's political message is less about advancing some set of policies, than it is about decrying this marginalization by humanizing the people on the margins, asking viewers to imagine how their talents and humanity could function in more rational society, where potential game-changers like Bunny Colvin and Stringer Bell can actually do their thing, rather than be smacked down.

Posted by Justin K. | January 3, 2008 12:30 PM

As I pointed out on Matt's thread, The Wire is significantly less bleak than The Sopranos. In The Wire the possibility of individual redemption is never foreclosed even if institutions are doomed to fail us, it's no accident that the show is popular among many libertarians. In The Sopranos Chase seems to be telling us that all humans are essentially scumbags and hypocrites - I find that a much darker vision than Simon's. In The Wire we are asked to sympathize with the characters, in The Sopranos the audience is mocked for sympathizing with the characters.

Also I think Bowden's essay is mostly crap - it's a preemptive strike to protect his friends, who, on the evidence, are probably every bit the careerist corporate hacks Simon says they are.

Posted by vanya | January 3, 2008 12:51 PM

While good tv, the Wire is neither tragic nor a tragedy. And the reason for this points to its shortcomings as a drama. Tragedy is not about, as you put it, rolling a rock up a hill and watching it roll down. It's about the connection between something grand or great and its terrible underbelly.

What's missing from the Wire is an honest appraisal of large ambitions and high acheivements and their consequences. Take Sabotka. Yes, that kind of thing happened to blue collar guys in the 1980s and later. But the same changes that crushed his world opened up a world of opportunity for others, including his neighbors. There were also strivers who succeeded honorably; not all of the good guys self-immolated in violence or sold out. Just not in the Wire's universe. And the Wire's cynical and reductionistic view of politics is an even more two-dimensional perspective of the world.

By failing to acknowledge these possibilities, the Wire falls short of anything tragic and never rises above entertaining melodrama. It is, to a large extent, a worm's eye view of worms getting crushed. Worms that only see bottom of the boot that crushes them, to the extent they ever look up.

This is the sort of candy-coated cynicism that HBO specializes in.

Posted by whoarethey | January 3, 2008 12:51 PM

Yikes, what a lot of overanalysis! Like all art, "The Wire" needs to be evaluated independently of the artist who creates it and his personal opinions, loudmouth or otherwise. One can admire "The Wire" as a good "show" for numerous reasons and not agree that Simon in his personal statements is correct about much of anything - the program "works," which everyone here seems to agree upon.

No doubt, Simon's personal views and prejudices inform the work - but I doubt it would be as successful a program as it is (successful in terms of its artistic and dramatic accomplishments, not ratings) if Simon's jaundiced views of life were really so rampant in the show. But do his prejudices really shine through in the finished product? I think if they did, and the show were more pedantic or preachy, it would be obviously clunky and would fail as art, ala current Hollywood anti-war pictures like the Tom Cruise clunker "Lions for Lambs." But it does not fail - it rings true despite Simon's world-view (which we may as well call liberal). I think this is because the work itself allows for contradiction, even if Simon's personal statements in interviews are angry or rigid or one-sided. Here's a summary of "The Wire" - The criminals are not all bad; the cops are not all good; things often don't work in the system. What's so objectionable or false about that?

I find it also somewhat revealing that this subject so confounds certain pundits who I will call "conservatively-oriented" (i.e. Messrs. Douthat and Salam). It often seems to me that conservatives want their artists to pass some sort of ideological purity test - they cannot, for example, appreciate Jane Fonda's acting because of her "Hanoi Jane" views - in order for them to fully embrace a work of art. Similarly, something must be wrong with "The Wire" because David Simon says it's about the failures of capitalism. But who cares what the artist thinks if the art actually "works"? Lou Reed's album "New York" is full of half-baked angry liberal/artist viewpoints - but it rocks, and that's what matters.

Posted by BHCorc | January 3, 2008 3:23 PM

It's a TV show! We understand that "The Wire" is fiction and presents an over dramatic view of life in Baltimore, and at times has an almost soap opera feel like many other HBO dramas. But who cares? Is it an artistic sin to be entertaining, I think not. What "The Wire" really speaks to are two persistent American problems, race and class. These are issues that other television shows, and even policy makers, rarely touch.

The fictionalized west side of Baltimore in "The Wire" is presented as a place that has been abandoned by many working class peoples and has slipped into social and physical disrepair that is inhabited predominantly by African-Americans. After watching "The Wire" one can not help but ask,” do places like this exist?" Of course! The answers to why they exist are much more complex, than the answers our society usually comes up with and "The Wire" presents those complexities beautifully.

No more astutely than in season four when we are introduced to the next generation of "hoppers." We are forced to feel compassion for them but we quickly see there is little hope of them escaping the inevitable pull of the streets. We see that they do have a few positive figures in their lives from school to social services to parents but in aggregate they lack the support to free themselves from the desperation. We are forced to conclude that the typical argument of system failure versus individual failure is overly simplistic. The failure has true depth and width and responsibility for the failure is almost impossible to pinpoint, which is the primary dilemma in attacking issues of race and class in the US today.

These characters represent the American underclass; they are not dust bowl refugees, or European immigrants working in unsafe meat packing facilities, or sharecroppers working in the cotton fields of the Delta, or any other romanticized underclass of the past. They are people who as children have been neglected and victimized, been a witness to violence and substance abuse, and at a minimum have not been served by the social institutions. Some succeed in spite of this but many more do not. And unlike the "bleak" (as Mark Bowden argues in the article) portrayal of Baltimore where we have compassion and hope for these characters, the reality is much more stark. We rarely have any compassion for people that are similar to those characters we love in "The Wire". And we as a society are perfectly content in isolating these people in forgotten corners of our cities or warehousing them in our prisons. Doesn't "The Wire" at least force us to ask relevant questions? A quality that is rare in popular culture and something that should be celebrated.

Posted by Clayton | January 12, 2008 2:03 PM

In recognizing the overall loss of such a great show, I started seeking out any videos I could find about The Wire. I found a great one where David Simon talks about the affections he feels for Baltimore and how the city has influenced his work.

Check out the video

http://www.visitmybaltimore.com/video/449/

OR

See More Baltimore Videos at www.visitmybaltimore.com

Posted by Anna | March 7, 2008 11:21 AM

The Baltimore Museum of Industry presents an exhibit of original artifacts, objects and behind-the-scenes footage from HBO's The Wire and other television and movie productions filmed in Baltimore. The exhibit Local Scenes on the Silver Screen: "Featuring the Wire," will run from April 30, 2008 through December 30, 2008. Check out David Simon talking about the wire at http://www.visitmybaltimore.com/video/449/.

Posted by Anna | July 17, 2008 2:14 PM