New York Times Wire

Via Unfogged, NYTimes Modern Love does The Wire. I guess it's a pretty good show on which to meditate about Life and Death; Love and War... I can also conclude that there are some bigger fans of the show than I am as I probably wouldn't choose to watch episodes of The Wire on my deathbed.

The NYTimes also published a brief story on moving the NYC cop beat reporter's office from Police Headquarters to an offsite location. While this doesn't theoretically damage the quality of reporting, it's just more evidence of the diminishing position of the media in places were it's needed most, local government. David Simon agrees. Besides the potentially diminished oversight capability (clearly reporters cover institutions better in closer proximity or they wouldn't always desire such conditions), closing the "The Shack" will destroy a lot of history for an ambiguous "command center."

It wasn't that good back then

One issue I've had with The Wire (and The Corner) is the sense of nostalgia about a past urban golden age in which jobs were plentiful, drugs were just business, people settled fights without murder, and neighborhoods supported each other.

Various historical texts have supported my thoughts. In the defacto and dejure segregated ghettos, life was different from today's urban environment, but life was plenty hard. The Times has an interesting article about a man shot in fifties who recently died. He became the oldest reclassified murder in NYC history. Just something I like to point out when various characters try to describe a brighter, shinier past.

Westerns

Ok. Anyone who has read my blog previously knows that I'm big on comparing the Wire to Western "classics" and other aspects of this genre. I guess it makes sense that I'll continue doing so in an episode by episode format.

One aspect of The Wire which I enjoy immensely, and I think this is something I appreciate in all creative outputs, is messing with genre conventions. Casting Brad Pitt in a role where no one can understand a word he says (Snatch). Brilliant.When Salvador Dali creates the perfect replica of the Venus De Milo, but as a dresser- I dig that. When Ray Charles played all the biggest hits of Country and Western music- as straight country as Hank Williams ever did, but coming from Ray... Yeah!

I think David Simon digs this streak of individuality as well. In the commentary to the first episode, and in a letter he wrote to HBO begging to give The Wire a chance, Simon sees the show as going beyond "the cop show." This genre was the networks' bread and butter, but TW was HBO's chance to stick it to the big boys. If Simon and his team could create a better show than CSI or Law and Order- well, then "it's not TV. It's HBO."

However, Simon did this by going so far outside of the cop show genre that he was not so much playing against this genre as creating his own by the fifth season.

But genre does mean something. In certain ways we could substitute the word genre for "commodification." If genre is a set of conventions that a creative work reflects or organizes itself around- then genre often translates into how a work of art is consumed. Think of movies (I like comedies, I hate horror) or music (Jazz sucks! Soul rules!). Stores sell art in these packages so people know a little about what they're buying into. Artists often use genre because it's sometimes easier to create a Sonnet than throw a bunch of words together.

Of course The Wire is organized vaguely around season long investigations into drugs, politics, schools, the docks, and the media. But it rejects many of the genre conventions. They "renounced the theme of good and evil," which is the heart of a cop show, because it bored them. In fact, people didn't really live or die based on their good or evil- just how they interacted with institutions. Commercial success is not Simon's primary goal (though I imagine he's doing just fine).

But Simon did play off many other genres- The Western being my favorite to discuss and one of the most prominent (um, also the Greek Tragedy I guess). The Western is such an interesting choice because it represents the two competing myths from my last post. Namely that if you're smart, do it better, work hard, and sacrifice, you can "win." If you don't there's still a place for you. The West symbolized this world of opportunity, individuality, ruggedness, and promise of the "pursuit of happiness." According to Frederick Jackson Turner, it was the frontier- this moving line of settlement- that brought about America's unique democracy without resulting to class or ethnic wars like those of Europe. (It turns out that Turner wasn't quite right about the lack of class/ethnic conflict in the West or really the whole frontier bit, but that's for a blog on another genre, History).

So by making West Baltimore into the new Monument Valley (where John Ford filmed most of his Westerns), Simon creates an anti-Western. By making the good bandit into a short, homosexual, African American- Omar- we get an anti-Western hero. By turning the inner city into a world where the law exists only tangentially, where men carry guns and the will to use them, where you need your wits to survive- well, it ain't Dodge City, but you see where I'm going here. Of course, the whole thing is not one big Western- as much as I seem to think it is. So as I review the episodes, the theme will wax and wane, and how Simon uses it- either the "anti-western" or homage to the Western. I will discuss certain facets of this theme in greater depth:

Trains: I've mentioned this here, but Trains are particularly important to Westerns. The Wire likes (hates) Trains. Trains are also important to industrialization. The Wire loves industrialization (hates de-industrialization).

"Law and Order"- ok, obviously this is more in the cop show genre, but I think Westerns use it a little differently. Because in the West- law and order are just a bit more ambiguous. Not unlike Bill Rawls sexuality.

Guns- specifically how people talk about guns, fetishize guns, etc. My "six shooter" has become my "nine."

The Establishment vs. "the real people"- in Westerns people hated all of those back east. In the Wire, people hate those in DC or NY (or, in an ironic switch, the "county".

Nostalgia- in the West, everyone is always resisting the coming of civilization. It always "used to be better." Civilization could be represented by trains, towns, or people in suits. In the Wire, civilization could be represented by Johns Hopkins, condos, or people in suits.

Characterization- Omar is one such western characterization, Brother Mouzone is another one (the outlaw who is a member of the Nation of Islam and reads Harpers, right). Is Marlo The Wire's railroad baron?

Ok- that's good enough for now. We'll see how it actually plays out and get a read on which seasons featured more or fewer homages to the western.

The Wire as Muckraker?

I've touched on the feelings of Nostalgia in some of my other posts, but here I'm thinking about an older style of journalism for which which David Simon yearns. Much of his critique of The Media revolves around its ambivalence toward "the stories that matter" (as highlighted in Simon's interview here). The subplots of plagiarism, capitalization, buyouts, etc. are not the main story as articulated by Simon. Rather the biggest journalistic crimes are:

"the corrupt mayor asking for cooked crime stats, the elementary school test scores spawned from students being taught the tests, the deaths of Prop Joe and Omar -- all indicators of the city's real problems that never appeared in the Sun's pages"

I would hasten to add the failures and successes of hamsterdam, social services, and witness protection to the list. In fact, in almost every character there is a story missed by Sun in some way. If the institutions of Baltimore run the characters' lives, why doesn't the Sun report on these issues/institutions in a substantive way?

This style of reporting, muckraking, has actually been around for a hundred of years. For Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, it's the meat-packing industry as a metaphor on the failure of capitalism's promises. In Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives, the reader gets an expose of the New York City slums through a photoessay (an experiment in new media of its day). The muckrakers were related to the Progressive movement, whose figurehead was Teddy Roosevelt. Busting trusts, fighting for those without a voice, and being masculine, Roosevelt and the Progressives were determined to halt capitalism's largest crimes against humanity (and participate in a few of their own). Although their targets were powerful people in powerful places, the muckrakers were very much a part of mainstream journalism.

One can trace a similar vein of journalism to the 1930s (well, sorta). The consumer movement, symbolized by Stuart Chase and F.J. Schlink's Consumer Research group also critiqued capitalism. Though outside mainstream journalism, CR's newsletter and later Consumer Union's newsletter, Consumer Reports (which broke off of CR after a strike and personality issues, just read this to learn more). One of the more famous books to come out of this movement was F.J. Schlink and Arthur Kallet's 10,000 Guinea Pigs.

In the 1960s, Consumer Reports became famous from a different writer, current Presidential candidate Ralph Nader. His work on automobile safety, and what became Unsafe at Any Speed also critiqued the institution of capitalism. Another journalist/writer of this period included Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring, which described the dangers of pesticides and lead to the outlaw of DDT. Carson also contributed articles to the Baltimore Sun.

Though my examples may be a little ahistorical, (and all you Media Studies and Mass Comm. experts out there can right my wrongs on the history of the media) I do think Simon sees this style of investigative journalism disappearing as a result of "doing more with less." I also think one could place The Wire in the same category as fictional versions of muckraking (like Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt). In fact, I think one of the reasons why The Wire is so popular with those of a more academic persuasion (even though it pokes fun at academics in season 3&4), is because of its muckraker roots. There are many strains of social science but many of us try to examine the lives of those who do not have a voice (or who's voice has not been heard). It's a goal the muckrakers would recognize.