newcritics

Mark Bowden’s profile of David Simon, The Angriest Man in Television, in this month’s Atlantic seems to confirm what I’ve suspected about The Wire:  that it’s the product of a brilliant mind made paranoid by the owner of that mind’s certainty that he has figured out the very simple answer to all that’s wrong with the world and for some nefarious reason nobody with the power to act on it wants to hear it.

That’s not a knock on Simon, because as far as I can tell he may very well have figured out the answer.  At any rate, he seems to be on to something I can agree with here:

“I am someone who’s very angry with the political structure,” he said in a long 2006 interview with Slate.
“The show is written in a 21st-century city-state that is incredibly bureaucratic, and in which a legal pursuit of an unenforceableprohibition [the war on drugs] has created great absurdity.” To Simon, The Wire is about “the very simple idea that, in this postmodern world of ours, human beings—all of us—are worth less. We’re worth less every day, despite the fact that some of us are achieving more and more. It’s the triumph of capitalism. Whether you’re a corner boy in West Baltimore, or a cop who knows his beat, or an Eastern European brought here for sex, your life is worth less. It’s the triumph of capitalism over human value. This country has embraced the idea that this is a viable domestic policy. It is. It’s viable for the few. But I don’t live in Westwood, L.A., or on the Upper West Side of New York. I live in Baltimore.”

I think this is true.  Kurt Vonnegut thought it was true, although he used the word "purpose-less" to describe the way capitalism has made people worth less.  But Vonnegut thought this was a result of everybody’s general stupidity, greed, vanity, and selfishness, and so he could be forgiving towards most of the villains of our culture.  Simon, according to Bowden, thinks this is result of specific people’s greed, vanity, and selfishness, and he’s not forgiving because he is sure they are intelligent and know better.

Bowden writes:

One measure of the complexity of Simon’s vision is that the powerful obstructionists in The Wire aren’t simply evil people, the way they might have been in a standard Hollywood movie. While some are just inept or corrupt, most are smart and ambitious, sometimes even interested in doing good, but concerned first and foremost with their next promotion or a bigger paycheck.

I’m not sure that leads to "complexity" as much as it leads to just a tangling up of the somewhat simplistic motivations of a number of characters, but it does seem to me to be the root of The Wire’s paranoid vision.  If these people are smart enough to know better, are even at heart decent enough to at least want to do better, why don’t they act on it?  Why don’t they do the right thing when it’s so fucking obvious what the right thing is????

Simon isn’t certain, but he suspects that it has to be that powerful people somewhere don’t want the mess cleaned up or the problems that created it fixed.

Bowden compares what Simon’s accomplished in The Wire to the work of Charles Dickens.  The comparison is apt but not perfect, although Bowden picks the right one of Dickens’ novels.

“Wire-world,” as Simon calls it, does for turn-of-the- millennium Baltimore what Dickens’s Bleak House does for mid-19th-century London. Dickens takes the byzantine bureaucracy of the law and the petty corruptions of the legal profession, borrows from the neighborhoods, manners, dress, and language of the Chancery courts
and the Holborn district, and builds from them a world that breathes. Similarly, The Wire creates a vision of official Baltimore as a heavy, self-justified bureaucracy, gripped by its own byzantine logic and criminally unconcerned about the lives of ordinary people, who
enter it at their own risk.

The Wire’s Baltimore sounds very much like the London of Bleak House, with side trips to the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit.

But Dickens’ opinion of human beings has more in common with Vonnegut’s than it does with Simon’s.  Dickens was more inclined to see people as behaving foolishly, blind to their own vanities and to their own best interests.  Simon tends to see them as acting at least semi-intelligently in that they are conscious of pursuing their own self-interests.  And Dickens had a better sense of humor and a comic vision of life.  People made him laugh at least as often as they made him angry and he could see how things could sometimes turn out all right in the end.  There’s humor in The Wire, but not much in Simon himself, and he cannot see how things can turn out all right by themselves.  Somebody has to do something, and since nobody who matters is doing something, there can be no happy endings in Simon’s world.

Without a comic vision, though, a tragedy is impossible.  If you can’t believe that there can be happy endings, then the endings of all stories are foregone conclusions.  Tragedies are tragic because there is always a point in the story when things could have easily gone the other way.

All the sad and calamitous outcomes that I’ve seen in The Wire seem overly-determined by the writing to make the point.  This is why none of what happens strikes me as tragic, simply as a crying shame.

Again, that’s not a criticism of Simon or The Wire.  It’s just an implicit statement of preference on my part and a dilineation of an essential difference between what Dickens is up to and what Simon’s accomplished.

But there’s another difference besides, a difference not of conception but of medium and its effects.

That is is the difference between what goes on in the readers’ heads when they are reading a book and an audience’s heads when they are watching a TV show.

Bowden says that The Wired’s Baltimore is just as much a caricature of the actual city as Bleak House’s London.

But we enter Bleak House’s London in an imaginatively active way.  Dickens hands us the words.  We have to turn them into pictures.  To the degree that we already know what that London looks like it’s because we have looked at Phiz’s drawings and seen the movie and TV adaptations that have taken their design cues from Phiz.

Consequently, there’s going to be something phantasmagoric, dream-like, and cartoonish about our vision of Dickens’ London and we’re not likely to mistake it for the real deal.

But The Wired’s Baltimore is presented to us through realistically designed photographic imagery and presented to us through the same medium that a little later on a different channel will present us more realistic photographic imagery from cities that look very much like The Wired’s Baltimore but this time presented as real life.

The Wire looks like the news. It’s easy to forget while watching it that it isn’t the news, or news at all, that what we’re watching is fiction and that what isn’t fiction is polemic and both are the creations of one man’s imagination and start arguing as if what happens in Wire-World is real life.

Bowden thinks the temptation to treat The Wired as the news isn’t just the audience’s. It’s a temptation for Simon himself and one he may not resist often enough, especially in this new season in which Simon appears to be more interested in settling old scores than in continuing his story.

How Simon does resist the temptation and how that resistance is a mainspring of Simon’s art, how he has transformed himself from a journalist into a writer, is the subject of Bowden’s article. Even if you’re not a fan of the show, it’s a good piece, the first half especially—the second half focuses on the old feuds that are the basis of this season’s main story arc and that’s been too well covered in the newspapers recently. Unfortunately, you have to subscribe to the magazine to read the article online…

Unless…!

Unless you happen to be a reader of a blog written by a subscriber who will email you the article if you send him a note asking him to, which as luck would have it, you are.

Subscribers can get to The Angriest Man In Television by clicking on the link. The rest of you who’d like to read it can just drop me a line at lance(atsign)lancemannion(thebigolddot)com.

Related, with envy: Maud Newton attended the season premiere down in Charm City, where she hobnobbed, conversed, and took pictures with stars and writers of The Wire.

Quick catch-up: For those of you who haven’t been following The Wire through its first four seasons, Susie Madrak has posted a four-minute recap. Four seasons of The Wire in four minutes!

Cross-posted at my place.