New Ed Burns Interview

There's a fantastic and lengthy Ed Burns interview up at the British-based lovefilm.com. Incidentally, The Wire is now on the BBC. Burns discusses Generation Kill, The Wire, and even divulges that he's submitted a movie proposal to HBO called "Jakarta." His pitch: "The Wire is today, Jakarta is tomorrow." Go on...

The more reticent of the Burns-Simon creative team, Burns has done fewer interviews than David Simon, but has a lot of great information on the philosophy and work behind the shows. Ed Burns essentially "lived" The Wire's Cops-Drug World, Baltimore Schools, and Generation Kill's soldiering while Simon was the more creative voice. Definitely a great team. Burns even discusses my favorite Wire theme- The Wire as urban anti-western. Burns' take on GK is equally enlightening. I really need to read Evan Wright's book.

My favorite one-liner take on President Obama's love for Omar:

LF: Going back to Obama, he said that Omar was his favourite TV character…

EB: Well, I think he said it and then, realising what he said, he backed away from that. As If they thought he were a homosexual black stick-up guy. [Laughs]

[Note the sweet British-ized British-ised spelling]

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.

Authenticity in the Wire: A Parallel with Westerns?

David Simon went to great length's to make The Wire's Baltimore of as true to life as he could. His team did extensive research, drawing from years of experience in the very institutions they depicted (from Ed Burns' time in homicide and public schools to Simon's newspaper days to Bill Zorzi's political insight). This push to achieve authenticity had many goals. For one, we can look at The Wire as journalism (of the type which tells stories the 'real' newspaper world misses in the fifth season). We can also see The Wire as a type of ethnography, much like Simon's books, The Corner (or the miniseries) or Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.

But if the use of authenticity was to promote these aims, well, Simon's work for the Sun (like his piece on Melvin Williams) does better as real journalism, and the books work better as ethnography. The Wire uses its authenticity for another reason. Only through exhaustive attention to presenting an 'authentic' Baltimore does Simon derive authority for the themes he presents. Only by rendering the computer technology of wiretaps in the most accurate details does Simon have the authority to criticize the Police Department.

But authenticity works two ways. To arrive at authenticity, both the objective history (which is always up to interpretation), and how the consumer shapes that reality with their pre-conceived notions come into play. What popular culture 'knows' of Baltimore (crabs, inner harbor), contrasts with the 'reality' Simon creates.

Westerns also derived their thematic authority from authenticity. With the release of The Great Train Robbery in 1908, the Western film genre was born. In fact, the movie came only three years after the event on which it was based.(1) In the thousands of Westerns since, urban viewers have fantasized about the mythical West and the romance, independence, freedom, violence, and opportunity it represented. As Richard Slotkin writes in Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America,

Cultural Tradition defined "the West" as both an actual place with a real history and as a mythic space populated by projective fantasies. Expectations about Western stories were therefore contradictory: they had to seem in some way realistic or "authentic" while at the same time conforming to ideas of setting, costume, and heroic behavior derived from literary fantasy. (2)

By using "real" Indians (often white actors in "red face"), "real" clothing (often very inaccurate historical clothing), and "real" settings (spaghetti westerns?), Westerns evoked the West of opportunity. I kid about the poor attempts, but Westerns really did go to great lengths for authenticity's sake.

In the same way, The Wire creates images of Baltimore which represent a reality, but also literary constructions. The idealized, bling of popular culture drug dealers does exist to a degree in The Wire, but Simon molds it to his own designs. Namond uses the "fashion" of drug dealing and bling (compensating for his not so dealer sensibilities), but a real player like Barksdale downplays it so as not to draw attention to himself. The cop world has its own stock characters, The Irish Cop (McNulty), the quiet but brilliant investigator(Freamon), the straight shooter boss(Daniels), but Simon adds to it, the closeted (maybe) department politics warrior (Rawls), the ultimate middle manager (Landsman), the man with the code (Bunk). It is reality behind the images which lend them power.

It can be argued that authenticity is an important part of any dramatic situation. But few genre's focus on authenticity like the Western (and the Wire). While The Wire's cop show genre cousins, CSI and Law and Order, try to portray reality, they put a bare minimum of effort into it. Most cop shows also put little effort into authenticity outside of maybe costuming and weapons. In many other television genres, authenticity plays a minor role. The type of toaster used in a suburban situational comedy does not matter. Some other HBO shows have also been praised for their authenticity, namely, The Sopranos. While it may indeed be a good look at mob life in New Jersey, other accounts disagree. However, the Wire and Westerns both go to lengths to create a reality based on a real place and myth. The old story is that when a group of Indian actors performed a stunt chase particularly well, the director congratulated them on such an authentic chase. Their response: "we tried to do it realistically, just like in the movies!"


What connects the uses of authenticity is a desire to show a life unlike the viewer's own. More importantly, authenticity supports the themes of the Western or The Wire. By showing the promise of the frontier (and by extension, America) in all its historical accuracy, urban viewers could imagine themselves personally, and America as a nation, progressing to greatness and wealth. In the Wire, the use of authenticity reinforces the failures of American democracy/institutions and by extension, America itself.








(1) Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 231.
(2) Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 234.