The Wire’s Angry Dissent
BY GABRIEL RUBIN
“It’s good for froth,” David Simon says of the internet. But froth also spills from television sets, with hundreds of shows repackaging a successful formula of cheap laughs, sex, violence, and punctuating music. Simon, creator of HBO’s The Wire (among other masterpieces), has eschewed not only conventional television writing wisdom but media etiquette altogether in his grand attempt to showcase the “real America” through fictionalized drama.
The United States, in Simon’s words, has “democratic ideas and impulses, but it is strained through some very oligarchical structures.” Most TV shows, even the best written, most critically-acclaimed among them, tend to approach the American landscape without lifting that veil. For large portions of the country, certainly of advertisers’ target audiences, these shows portray the “real” America. They rarely engage with what Simon calls “the Other America,” the urban minority communities who can’t relate to the laugh-track hijinks of sitcom suburbia. Or, in the words of Public Enemy, “you’re blind from the facts of who you are cuz you’re watching that garbage.”
Simon, though, knows that blighted underbelly well. As a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, Simon covered homicide in West Baltimore for twelve years. He wrote a book about his experiences, which prompted NBC to ask him to create a show about cops and gangs in Baltimore. He obliged, writing and producing seven seasons of Homicide: Life on the Street during the 1990s. The show spawned numerous copycats and paved the way for galactically popular crime shows like the Law & Order franchise. Homicide, while watered down and dressed up for network primetime, nonetheless refined American views of crime and punishment from their Dirty Harry-delusions at a time when murder rates in American cities reached record levels. Cops, a Homicide contemporary and pioneer in reality television, performed a similar service by showing a (somewhat sensationalized) portion of America where assaults, drug busts, prostitution, and domestic abuse are a part of daily life.
Network television has its (FCC-enforced) limits, though. The gruesome images and themes of inner cities, facts of life in Simon’s previous profession, couldn’t be shown at prime time for fear of showing children (and their parents) realities that might upset their prefabricated understanding of their world. So in 2000 when HBO, a network beholden to no one but its shareholders and subscribers, asked Simon to adapt his book The Corner into a miniseries, he jumped at the offer. In six hour-long episodes, The Corner explored the people in the midst of the Drug War at the intersection of Fayette and Monroe streets in West Baltimore. But while one corner was a good start, Simon wanted a bigger canvas.
And HBO gave it to him. Simon and his co-creators had five seasons, or sixty-four hours, to introduce one America (HBO subscribers) to the Other America (West Baltimore) in The Wire. He spent whole seasons on topics other shows wouldn’t broach for ten minutes. The second season explores the intricacies of a failing longshoremen’s union, the fourth spends hours in the classroom illuminating the dire state of inner-city schools.
The theme of institutions and their systemic failures bleeds through in nearly every situation. The Wire rebukes the American ethos of individualism, countering that for a forgotten swath of the population, an individual’s will to succeed means nothing in the face of punishingly irredeemable circumstances. The form of the television series works perfectly for Simon, as viewers come in with the acknowledgement that problems cannot (and even should not) resolve themselves in a single episode, season, or possibly ever. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek praised Simon’s groundbreaking use of the form, saying that it mirrored the substance of Simon’s art: “we never arrive at a final conclusion, not only because we never discover the ultimate culprit… but also because the legal system is really striving for its own self-reproduction.”
That self-reproduction makes up much of The Wire’s underlying sociopolitical critique. Cops, politicians, and drug dealers strive to climb the career ladder, regardless of whether they deserve a promotion. Meritocracy rarely garners more than lip service. Police majors “juke” (alter) crime statistics in order to show a semblance of progress, politicians stand in front of condemned housing project high rises proclaiming the beginning of a new, brighter day, just as their predecessors had when they presided over ribbon-cuttings in the same spot. Students, regardless of actual aptitude, are pushed from grade to grade in a purposeless shuffle of educational ineptness and bureaucratic carelessness. Since no problems are ever truly solved, they perpetually recreate themselves.
Simon warns of the supreme injustice of allowing some 10-15% of our population to wallow in post-industrial misery, structurally unemployed and unemployable. This America is what Simon desperately wants to show us. He is Antigone, unwilling to let the dead go to their graves without a full accounting of who they were and why they died. The Wire, says Simon, is a dissent that says, “We no longer buy these false ideologies… the false motifs you have of American life.” For most HBO subscribers, that’s quite the jolting eye-opener.