Monthly Archives: March 2011

Adolescent Power Fantasies for Adults

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A slightly edited version of this was posted earlier this week on Splice Today.
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Superman was one of those ideas that conquered the world through the sheer force of its elegant stupidity. Kids like to imagine that they’re powerful. Wouldn’t they like it even better if they could imagine that they were…superpowerful? Pulp heroes were strong and fast and handsome…why not make a pulp hero who was stronger, faster, and wore primary-colored tights? Okay, so the last bit didn’t necessarily make a ton of sense. But the rest of it? That was sound.

And eight odd decades later, it’s still sound. For evidence, you need only look to Hollywood, where every third film seems to be a superhero fantasy, with tights or without.

The latest entry in the genre is Limitless, a film whose power fantasies are almost as nakedly crass as those of Siegel and Shuster themselves. Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) is a wastoid wannabe novelist with writer’s block, one failed marriage, and a girlfriend who’s leaving him. But then…an ancient wizard gives him a magic word of power, he is bitten by a radioactive stock broker and subsequently eye-fucked by ghostly ninja warriors who pass him their skills in their ninja semen . And everything changes!

Okay; there are no ghostly ninja warriors, nor radioactive words of power. There’s just a pill, NZT-48, which increases brain capacity, because you only use 20% of the brain of your scriptwriters in coming up with some stupid pseudo-science explanation, and then, hey, you’re off to impress and then screw your landlord’s bitchy wife and write your novel in four days and then clean your apartment and get a shave. Also, extreme sports. For now you are…Superyuppie!

Or, to put it another way, Limitless demonstrates with depressing finality that the power fantasies of adults are much more banal than the power fantasies of children. Super strength, super speed, heat vision, beating the bad guys and saving the day — they’re clichés now, sure, but they still have an exuberant charm. Wanting those things doesn’t make you dumb or boring. It just makes you a kid, or somebody who used to be a kid. My seven-year-old just yesterday looked at me and said, “Daddy, I wish I could fly.” And I laughed because it’s true enough to always be a surprise. Everybody wishes they could fly.

But the power fantasies in Limitless aren’t big, reach-for-the-stars daydreams. They’re cramped and puerile; Superman curdled. As soon as that landlord’s wife appears, looking less like a typical dowdy Hollywood landlord’s wife and more like a typical Hollywood hot-young-transient-fuck, you know that Eddie is going to get some. And the rest of his successes unfold with a similar dreary predictability. He starts stock trading and makes oodles and oodles of money. He gets his old girlfriend back…and then indulges in a wild round of debauchery, canoodling (with admirable political correctness) women of varying melanin, culminating in an especially hot blonde socialite who could be in movies. Which, of course, she is.

The walk on the wild side is, we are assured, Out Of Character; it’s a side-effect of the wonder drug and not of course related to Eddie’s actual real power fantasies no no no. Besides, he is punished for his hubris and his satyrism and, one hopes, for Bradley Cooper’s smug smile, which is insufferable even by the standards of the smug smiles usually distributed to scruffy, raffish, second-tier leading men. And since it isn’t really him doing the bad things, and since he is punished with headaches and withdrawal and the threat of being tortured by the inevitable sadistic gangsters, we can forgive him and cheer him on as he lopes inevitably to chemical-powered victory. Right?

I think that’s how it’s supposed to play, anyway. Something goes rather awry in the delivery though. Maybe it’s Eddie’s utter lack of anything resembling an individual personality — even in his wry, self-deprecating voice over he doesn’t manage to say anything either witty or memorable. For that matter, when he’s on the superdrug that makes him supersmart, he comes across not as a genius but as a superbore. The movie shows landladies dropping their pants for him and stockbrokers struck with awe…but Eddie never actually inspires awe in the viewers. When a upwardly-mobile Eddie Murphy wowed the upper crust in Trading Places, you could sort of see it, because Murphy has charisma. Cooper though — all he’s got is a pretty face. One comes away from Limitless with the sneaking suspicion that maybe the NZT-48 is really just cocaine. Even when Eddie’s making a fool of himself, it lets him think he’s the most brilliant guy in the room.

The real reason it’s difficult to sympathize with Eddie, though, is not that he’s a bore. It’s that he’s kind of an evil schmuck. Blessed with superintelligence, he doesn’t try to cure cancer or develop cold fusion, or even devote his life to the art he ostensibly values. He just scrabbles for cash and then runs for political office.

Along the way, incidentally, he maybe possibly kills a woman — that blonde socialite mentioned earlier. After he slept with her she shows up murdered, and Eddie can’t remember whether it was him who did it or not. With his recently acquired millions he hires a high-powered lawyer and beats the charge, but it seems quite possible that he was responsible. Nonetheless, he shows no particular remorse. He does vomit after he hears she’s dead, but this seems as related to withdrawal symptoms as to conscience, and he certainly seems to experience no long term guilt.

In the final scene Eddie, now a Senatorial candidate, outmaneuvers and humiliates ruthless tycoon Carl Van Loon, played by a text-messaging-it-in Robert De Niro. It’s the final wish-fulfillment fantasy; beating big bad daddy at his own game and taking his place. Our hero started out a hollow narcissist without the focus to achieve his boring ambitions, and he ends up a hollow narcissist with the drive to be Senator — and maybe someday even President. It’s a triumph for us all, I suppose. Still, I think I might have enjoyed the movie more if he’d, I don’t know, gone back to being a loser, or been shot in the head by gangsters. Maybe I’m just a traditionalist at heart, but if it’s going to be a dumb old superhero power fantasy, I’d prefer that the good guys win.

The Wire Roundtable: Conclusion

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I thought for a moment there we were going to have another contribution or two to our Wire roundtable, but it looks as if they didn’t pan out alas. So I thought I’d finish up by highlighting a couple of the more interesting comments.

First, Jason Michelitch has a long discussion of Pryzbylewski.

Pryzbylewski: not about temper, not about mentoring. Anger plays into it, but not in the heat-of-the-moment uncontrollable way. It’s a deeper anger, an anger of resentment and insecurity. Prez in his early days is not acting out of raw temper, or assuming a learned mode of behavior; he is lashing out from a volatile mixture of fragile ego and stark fear. In short, Prez is Ziggy.

If Ziggy’s family connection had been to police rather than stevedores, he’d have shot up his patrol car, put a slug in the wall of his unit’s office, and he damn sure would have clocked a project kid in the eye with the butt of his gun. But Ziggy wasn’t a creature of temper. Ziggy was desperate for respect in the only milieu he knew to look for it. Ziggy was terrified of being proved a failure, a fuckup, a geek, and so he formed a thick layer of humor, bravado, and rage.

A cop acquaintance of mine once said this to me about his profession, and I take it to be true. He said, “About a third of the guys out here, they’re like me. They just want to help people. All the rest of them are the kid that got picked on at school and now he’s got a gun.” When Prez takes that kid’s eye out in the projects in Season One, he’s not doing it because the kid pissed him off. He’s doing it out of anger at the world, and to prove to the world and to himself that HE’S in control now.

It’s only later, after Lester has shown him how he can be competent and respected through the wiretap, that Prez is then confronted by the kid he hurt, and he realizes that he was not in control at all.

And that isn’t the end of his journey, because while Prez finds a new well of confidence and self-respect in his work with Lester, he’s still a cop, and he still carries a gun, and he has not recognized his own flaws sufficiently to make him safe with that responsibility. And so his renewed confidence leads to overconfidence, and in the chase with McNulty, some part of him (subconscious, surely) sees an opportunity to finally achieve that original goal of respect through “manly” police work. That it goes so horribly wrong is Prez’s second wake-up call, the one that finishes the job that the kid with the eyepatch started of shocking Prez into self-awareness. At that point, Prez knows he shouldn’t have been a police, with the power of life and death.

Prez is driven to teaching primarily out of his guilt over the kid from the first season (though there is also an element of him needing to have a career that feeds his ego’s need to be in control. Cops and teachers both wield big swinging dicks, even, or maybe especially, the good ones. And Prez, like all the major characters on the show, is complex. Nothing he does has only ONE motivation).

The Prez that shows up in that classroom, though, has had two huge blows to his sense of self that have resulted in him making an absolute resolution to himself to never let something like the blinding of the kid or the shooting of the cop happen again. Prez’s arc as a teacher is not a wimp learning to be a disciplinarian. It’s someone who has seen what can happen when he lashes out getting over his fear of ever doing so again and learning how to instead exert force (either verbally or physically) in a safe, mature manner. When he disciplines the snatchpops kid in the last episode, it’s through a controlled hand on the shoulder and a stern and unwavering voice of authority.

All of the preceding is why Pryzbylewski’s character arc is my absolute favorite from the show, and why I could not let stand the dismissal of his intense personal growth as mere plothammer.

Jones, One of the Jones Boys on Wallace:

The beating of Johnny Weeks, and Wallace’s role in it, is different from Brandon’s death, and his role in that, in several ways. (1) Johnny is “merely” beaten. Brandon is tortured, mutilated and murdered. (2) Wallace’s participation in the beating occurs in the heat of the moment. His decision to rat on Brandon is dispassionate and calculated. (3) Wallace doesn’t really see the long-term effects of Johnny’s beating. Brandon’s body is displayed in Wallace’s backyard. (4) Punishing cheating junkies is presumably a relatively routine event for Wallace. Participating in a murder is novel, and thus more salient. (5) Wallace’s role in the beating is not crucial; even if he didn’t participate, Johnny would still be beaten by Bodie et al. His role in Brandon’s murder *is* crucial; if Wallace didn’t make that phone call, Brandon wouldn’t be murdered–at least, not at that time. (6) The beating happens in the company of Wallace’s peers. The murder involves him with his superiors, who are adults, and serious–and scary–criminals. (7) Johnny is just a junkie, a figure of contempt. Brandon, although a homo and dope-snatcher, is at least higher in the street hierarchy. (8) Brandon seems closer in age to Wallace. Johnny is indisputably an adult; when Wallace spots Brandon, he is playing pinball at a local hangout. (9) Wallace beats on Johnny. He (kind of) snitches on Brandon. Snitching is worse than beating (exhibit A: Randy Wagstaff). (10) Finally, doesn’t DeAngelo express some qualms about Brandon’s vicious treatment? Boadie couldn’t give a shit, but Wallace takes his moral cues from DeAngelo, to some extent.

Given all these differences, Wallace’s different reactions seem not at all inconsistent. Could the show have made these differences, or Wallace’s thinking about them, more explicit? Sure. But if the show made everything explicit, each season would have been one thousand episodes long.

And Jog on Zach Snyder’s translations of Alan Moore’s epic poetry.

Ugh, the hell with Zach Snyder… not only does he constantly favor flowery look-at-me phrasing at the expense of the text, his Moore translation seemed flatly ignorant the critical aspect of DIALOGUE with the oral tradition Noah mentions. Specifically, Moore’s liberal, detailed quotations from Steve Ditko are so bowdlerized as to render them mere surface decoration, despite being utterly fucking central to the work, down to seemingly tiny sections — Dr. Manhattan’s disastrous encounter with the scribes — referring directly to crucial verses from Ditko’s Captain Atom. And yes yes, the Kalermites will tell you that attribution is difficult in antiquity — where would our classics departments be without “Bob Kane”? — but Ditko, remember, commonly operated with an intent of conversion, to deliberately replace earlier, pagan narratives with substitutes derived from that unfashionable monotheistic bedrock, Mr. A, himself (of course!) parodied in the form of Rorschach, despite the protestations of “Sunday Catholics” with no appreciation of tradition, duly aided and abetted by Mr. Snyder… you see why I’m pissed??

Although, I’ll even read Snyder’s shitty-looking novel this weekend before I sit through one more second of Ayn Rand, the enduring (if limited) popularity of whom can only properly be analogized to the embrace of Tommy Wiseau among particular Victorians… contrary to one million posts online, I found it a relief when she just plopped that dude in front of the camera and had him talk, because she cannot frame a shot to save her life…!

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This has been a kind of amazing week here, as Joy Delyria and Sean Michael Robinson turned into a meme, linked by everyone from boingboing on down. My statcounter says we had 70,000 hits plus over the course of Thursday and Friday, which is the amount of traffic we usually get in two months. Things have calmed down a little (we only got as much traffic as we usually get in a week and a half yesterday) and our bandwidth has dropped to levels that allow the blog to function again.

So, I wanted to give a big thank you again to Derik Badman, who’s been fighting to keep the blog working and available to readers. Thanks also to Bill Randall and Caroline Small for helping out on the technical level. And thanks to all our contributors, commenters, and readers. It’s been a blast.

Before They Were Famous

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Joy and Sean’s bricolage Victorian Wire piece has netted us many new readers,most of whom probably have not yet realized that this blog is usually less about Omar and clever homage/parody and more about comics and post-structuralism and flame wars.

But! I am hoping to fool them at least a little longer, so I thought I’d reprint this piece which ran in Poor Mojo’s Almanac a little while back. It reimagines famous people in different eras/situations. It’s not about the Wire, but it’s what I’ve got.

What Were They Like Before They Were Famous?

1. Franz Josef

For the science fair, Franz Josef Haydn constructed a working castrato. No one expected it because the school was underfunded. So he had to use an abacus instead of a Bunsen burner, plus it was made out of rusty glass condom wrappers. But he tried hard and learned important lessons broadcast on television like “don’t be poor” and the Western cultural tradition. His teacher, Ms. Friedrich Nietzsche, gave him stickers with assertive slogans. She had a cave to go into for the Jedi Mind Trick, but when she came out she was just Aquaman, which doesn’t usually help.

Haydn didn’t understand what he had done wrong. “Doesn’t anybody like beautiful music?” He kept shouting that. The judges were stupid movie stars and people like that. First prize would go to growing bean sprouts like always. And all he wanted was to be able to look at his college pictures sometimes without being sad forever.

I think the problem is that there is too much creativity in the world. It means rich people can feel good about themselves too easily. Also everybody talks and nobody shoots them. If we really want to stop floods and starvation, a better way would be a lot of robots doing math in the dark. Without Oprah.

2. Christina

So it was in the car and we said who has the best memories? So the Little Mermaid was in the Holocaust and learned important lessons about personal growth, and Buffy had a sad marriage to Raymond Carver but with moments of real quirkiness. And everyone else was Asian. But Christina Aguilera kept saying, gee I don’t have any memories, isn’t that funny? They told her to make some up but she wasn’t inventive in that way, so they felt bad for her but wouldn’t talk to her anyway.

She tried to tell people about a dream where she met herself and was different. Buffy said, “Oh, right, you must be a creative writing major.” I guess that’s a memory, Christina thought. I’ll just listen to this song for the rest of my life.

Luckily there’s happiness and you’re more famous than some people. If you have cheerful slogans and make others say them then they will be depressed and you win. Even if that doesn’t work, someday high school will just be a place you read porn about.

3. Duke

It is underwater and the guidance counselors are puffy and fat like some kinds of fish. Duke Ellington is sort of a savior so he comes through security and down, down, down. It is pretty because it is green and no one has any clothes or penises.

The littlest teachers have lights in their tails. You are never more than fifteen feet from one and you accidentally eat them while you sleep. That happens to Duke Ellington too, which is why he ended up so creative just like most people. If you shut your eyes you can see their skulls because they glow and bob where the water is dark. That is all the teachers people swallowed making that possible and I think we should thank them for it.

Duke Ellington’s cell phone rings. It is Hollywood and they want him to be in a movie where he will listen to music and then be inspired to listen to better music. “When I do as they wish, even the eels sing of love.” He would cry a single tear but nobody would notice underwater. There are a lot of beautiful things and terrifying things where you can’t see them here, but if you really study them closely they become boring.

The Wire Roundtable: What’s Missing From This Picture?

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Others have already pointed out that The Wire isn’t as realistic as it seems. Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), for instance, is the hero of the American Monomyth. Here’s how the latter is summarized in the link above:

A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil; normal institutions fail to contend with this threat; a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task; aided by fate, his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisiacal condition; the superhero then recedes into obscurity.

The Wire revises the myth thus: a community in hell (Bubbles – Andre Royo: “it’s a thin line between heaven and here.”) is threatened by some of hell’s inhabitants; normal institutions, paralyzed by red tape, political agendas, and business as usual, fail to contend with this threat; a self-aggrandizing supercop emerges to be afflicted by temptations and fails to carry out the redemptive task; bumping his head against the system the supercop recedes into obscurity.

That’s quite good. It revises the myth until it lies there, almost unrecognizable. Here’s my version though: in its mythology of being the only possible system (in the best of all possible worlds as Pangloss would say; at the end of history as Fukuyama would add), and in its sanctification of profit (the market will provide), global capitalism transferred labor to developing countries where the wages are low (Walden Bello):

The extreme international mobility of corporate capital coupled with the largely self-imposed national limits on labor organizing by the Northern labor unions (except when this served Washington’s Cold War political objectives) was a deadly formula that brought organized labor to its knees as corporate capital, virtually unopposed, transferred manufacturing jobs from the North to cheap-labor sites in the Third World.

Under these conditions a parallel economy thrives (mimicking the mainstream economy with its power struggles, cut-throat wars and iron clad hierarchies); those who are unprepared and uneducated, the poor, have no other option than to go underground; everything becomes simulacra in order to keep up appearances.

Hostage to the worlds of finance and economics politics is reduced to being a sport (I love the scene in which Carcetti campaigns in an elderly home: we can hear the crickets chirping because the seniors in there couldn’t care less for this kind of sport); the police are a political tool; the education system is a dead end (and the students know it – Howard “Bunny” Colvin – Robert Wisdom: “I mean, they’re not fools these kids. […] [T]hey see right through us.”). That’s why Marcia Donnelly (Tootsie Duvall), the Assistant Principal of Edward J. Tilghman Middle School says to Bubbles that Sherrod (Rashad Orange) is going to be “socially promoted” after missing school for three years. In the end, everybody knows that it doesn’t matter (those who do matter aren’t in that kind of school). Everybody has some reason to pretend that it does though. I’ll give the last word to David Simon:

Baltimore’s dying port unions, is a meditation on the death of work and the betrayal of the American working class, it 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.

My problem with this statement is that David Simon should be saying it about the series as a whole. Why just season two? I hope that there isn’t a hint somewhere suggesting that, given the chance, black people would still prefer the world of the corners instead of being part of the mainstream economy.

Another instance where the creators of the series juggle dangerously with cliché is in season four (my favorite, pardon the personal note). The aforementioned season includes a kind of Teacher Movie. It’s true that, again, the writers do a good job of transcending the pernicious genre (the teacher, Roland “Mr. Prezbo” Pryzbylewski – Jim True-Frost – doesn’t win the trust of his most difficult students completely alone). But he also conveys what I call the flawed Sesame Street Syndrome (or SSS). That is, students can learn while playing. In the link above, the reporter, Nicholas Buglione, wrote:

Dr. Robert Helfenbein, an education professor at Indiana University who specializes in urban education issues, believes these films trivialize the learning process and present an erroneously simple solution to what’s really a far more complex problem: Closing the achievement gap in inner-city schools.

That goal can’t be achieved by any superhero teacher or caped crusader. It can only be achieved by closing the parallel gap between the wealthy and the poor.

The image above shows Bubbles pushing his peripatetic business. The original is a print on a t-shirt. I chose it because it is semiotically fascinating. On one end it’s the perfect symbol of the parallel economy I talked about above. On the other end it shows the absolute base of the social pyramid, the junkie that is everybody’s victim (I’m aware that Bubbles is a fictional character, mind). And yet… it’s in a t-shirt… for sale! Grammar mistakes and all!… Capitalism appropriates everything by selling everything.

What’s missing above is the real one.

In conclusion, the use of parallel montage gives the impression of a kaleidoscopic and complex view of the city. That’s not untrue, but it just gives us the street level (in today’s world of virtual politics, even the temples of infotainment and city hall are at street level). What really affects these people’s lives is happening elsewhere.

Stan the Man

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I should probably introduce myself. I’m not just some random guy who popped up in the comments section and started running his mouth when the Wire roundtable began (though I certainly am that). I used to blog about The Wire during seasons 4 and 5. In an attempt to get a handle on the show, and a desperate bid to fill content from week to week, I spent a lot of time tracking the various characters’ political manipulations. And it was then that I discovered my admiration for southeastern district commander (and later commissioner) Stan Valchek.

The creators play Valchek as a joke. He gets punched out by Prez, possibly the least macho character this side of Shardene or Namond Brice. In his most indelible image he sits hunched over his desk, gazing through an oversized magnifying glass, dusting for pointless fingerprints on a humiliating photograph—a Sherlock Holmes parody of police work that leads nowhere and accomplishes nothing. Even his beneficiary and patron, Tommy Carcetti, calls him a hack and asks Rawls to keep him from doing any lasting damage in his new sinecure. In the final episode, Sydnor tells Judge Phelan that Valchek doesn’t have any idea what police work is.

Other traits aren’t so comical. Valchek negotiates the power structures of a black-led police department in a majority-black city with consummate skill, but he can’t quite conceal his ingrained racism. The big tell, communicated with perfect subtlety and perfect clarity, comes in that scene in season 5 when he says his goodbyes to Mayor Carcetti but can’t bring himself to do more than nod at Norman Wilson. (In retrospect, Prez’s tragic history of being quick on the draw with black suspects makes a lot more sense after this moment; Valchek’s inability to acknowledge Norman tells us a lot about the culture he and Prez come from.)

In a show where loyalty is both a cherished value and a fatal Achilles heel, Valchek displays not a trace. Daniels saves his son-in-law three times, once talking him down from a murder charge and a possible suicide, and yet when Cedric begins his rapid ascent through the brass it’s Stan who warns Rawls that the young colonel is being groomed for something higher. Of course, by that point Valchek has more than severed his family ties to Prez, cutting him loose and making him Daniels’s problem. This utter lack of loyalty makes Valchek both a despicable character (I once called him “the old, white, Polish police version of De’Londa Brice”) and one of the most adept players of institutional politics on The Wire—two qualities that are hardly inconsistent.

On its largest scale, The Wire is about the erosion of the postwar industrial economy and the welfare state and their replacement by a globalized, postindustrial, postmodern capitalism that runs on no logic other than unrestrained self-interest. Valchek comes from one of the urban white ethnic constituencies that both built the welfare state and initiated its slow demolition: the guy is the very picture of a Reagan Democrat. He continues to advance his constituency’s political power, promoting Tommy Carcetti in an act of racial as well as district solidarity, but he destroys the last remnants of the southeastern district’s old economic base. (And opens the granary pier for development by his political ally Andy Krawcyzk.)

He turns his back on his family, his allies, and his community as he advances higher and higher in the police hierarchy. And yet I can’t help but like the guy.

Part of it is no doubt the accent. My extensive research on Wikipedia and Google hasn’t revealed much about the mysterious origins of actor Al Brown, but given that IMDB lists his first role as an uncredited spot on Homicide I’m willing to bet he’s a Baltimore local. He certainly sounds the part—his Bawlmer accent is better than any other white character’s, with the possible exception of Marine Unit officer Claude Diggins. In a show that prizes the local in the face of encroaching globalization, Stan Valchek is as local as it gets, and his accent exemplies everything that sets The Wire apart from the innumerable fantasyland versions of New York and Los Angeles that fill the airwaves.

But it’s not just the actor. Contrary to what every other character says about Stan’s competence, beneath the layers upon layers of vanity, self-promotion, and spite there beats the heart of a real police. He opens the investigation of the stevedores union and reopens the major crimes unit, salvaging the entire premise for the series after the scorched-earth ending of season 1. While he does so for the pettiest of reasons—destroying the union because he’s jealous over a chuch window—his initial hunch that something’s wrong is rooted in the kind of local knowledge The Wire characterizes as the foundation of all good police work. Stan is basically right: there’s no way in hell the stevedores should have the money to pay for that window.

His political instincts aren’t so bad for the city, either. He leaks the information that allows Carcetti to unseat Clarence Royce—a major improvement for Baltimore, no matter what we think of Carcetti’s failings. In his one and only scene in season 5, he again leaks the information that sinks Burrell and opens the door, albeit temporarily, for Daniels to institute some real reforms as deputy commissioner and later commissioner. If Stan Valchek fails upwards, he generally does so to the benefit of the police department and city hall (if not to the docks).

Unfortunately, the post of commissioner is likely to be a grade or two above Stan’s already questionable competence. Presumably he only gets the job because he’s willing to play along with the directive to juke the stats in advance of Carcetti’s gubernatorial campaign. (And because the city’s black constituency will be mollified with Nerese Campbell as the next mayor.) He might have given the major crimes unit a new lease on life when it served his purposes, but now that he has nowhere left to rise to he’s blocking Sydnor from doing real police work. He’ll basically be Ervin Burrell with a short temper and a beautiful ugly accent.

But on a show where people literally live and die on how they play the game of institutional politics, nobody plays it better than Stan Valchek.

Technical Difficulties

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As you may have noticed we’re really very slow here. Sean and Joy’s article has been linked by boingboing, the HBO twitter account, Jezebel….everybody basically. It has trashed our server.

We’ve redirected people to the google cache version of the article, but the site is still only semi-functional. We’ll see if we can resume regular service tomorrow.

Congratulations to Sean and Joy. This is the latter’s first publicly published piece I believe, and it has become a meme. I’m thrilled to have published it, even if it did crash my little blog.

 

The Wire Roundtable: Getting Away From It All

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The roundtable isn’t over for another day or so, but let’s go ahead and talk about endings.

Watching The Wire the first time through, I came away with the belief that it had ended on a suitably even-handed emotional note.  The systemic problems in Baltimore were far from fixed, but most of the main characters had personal happy endings.  McNulty may have lost his job, but he got a heartfelt speech from Landsman, he’s back to sobriety, and he’s salvaging his relationship with Beadie.  Pearlman is a judge and Daniels is a practicing attorney and they’re just so cute together.  Lester’s retired and making doll furniture with Shardene.  Carver, Kima, and The Bunk are all comporting themselves expertly and ethically in their successful professional lives.  The heartbreak of Duquan becoming a junkie is counter-balanced by Bubbles pulling himself out of the same hole — sure, it could be read as “for everyone who’s saved, there’s more heading down the same road,” but it also implies that Duquan might someday come out the other side, just like Bubbles.  The tragedy of Randy in the group home is counterbalanced by Namon becoming a success under the care of Mr. and Mrs. Bunny Colvin.  And even though Michael is surely doomed to a short life of violence and pain much like Omar’s, for the time being his final scene is as badass as any of Omar’s first scenes, and Omar was always everyone’s favorite character.

The final montage round-up of everyone’s status, bookended by McNulty on the overpass, is wistful but celebratory.  The audience is invited to their own sort of detective’s wake, where instead of another round of “Body of an American” we all join in the chorus of “Way Down in the Hole,” the “original” version from the opening of the first season (though the actual original recording is used for the second season) for maximum nostalgic value.  It’s a gesture for the people who stuck with the show for the entire run, and as one of those people, I actually appreciate the gesture.  While I could criticize it for self-satisfaction or something similar, I think it’s actually one of the nice things about serial television that you can take an audience through so much with a number of characters that a montage of “where are they now?” is more than just informative closure.  I like a certain amount of ritual and observance, cheesy or conventional as it may be, and so the ending of The Wire left me feeling satisfied and pleased.

The ending(s) of The Wire are actually much more depressing, and since I’m a little bit stupid, I didn’t key into that until the second go-round with the series.  All of the happy endings are, actually, escapes.  Every character that we see smiling in the ending montage has gotten the fuck out of the drug war in Baltimore (or, in the case of Herc, decided to profit unethically from it).  McNulty, Lester, Daniels, Prezbo, all of them have left the police force to happier lives.  Bunk and Kima are minding business as usual in the Homicide unit, working their cases and not fighting to try and tackle the bigger problems.  Bubbles has escaped in a literal and immediate way.  And Pearlman may still technically be in the system, but as a judge, she sits apart from the fray.  Every single one of the beloved characters we’ve followed since the beginning have abandoned the mission, because that’s the only way they can achieve fulfilling, happy lives as people.

The importance of this is compounded by the fact that David Simon did the same thing.  “I got out of journalism because some sons of bitches bought my newspaper and it stopped being fun.”  That’s a quote from Simon that tends to make the rounds (I found it on Wikipedia, but it’s orginally from an interview in the Baltimore City Paper).  Simon was once a part of the system, working as a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, someone in a position to strive and fail to change things just like all the characters on The Wire. Simon got his own happy ending, though: he escaped reporting to become a book author and TV creator.  In a way, the entirety of The Wire is David Simon reveling in his escape, and showing us what he escaped from.  Not the streets, or the day-to-day of the drug trade, but the system as a whole.  He’s now outside of it, looking back in.  And while The Wire may be a multi-faceted, complex show full of characters and viewpoints that contradict one another, the end of the show and the life of its creator point to a single, unmistakable message:  You better get while the getting’s good.

I’m not sure if it’s a compliment or criticism of the show, but I can’t think of a more depressing or terrifyingly bleak moral than that.  It might be the truest sentiment ever expressed on television — but I don’t like to think about that any more than I absolutely have to.  I’d much rather escape.

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Update by Noah: The entire Wire roundtable is here.