There are these people with the remarkable predilection, after having discovered a television show that they like, to get all the DVDs and to make their way through the whole series crazy fast. I’m not one of these people. Two people I follow on Twitter who reported starting on The Wire long after I had finished the first season have now finished the series while I’m still in the middle of Season Four. I have no doubt that it is among the best shows in the history of television, and perhaps it is the very best. And I own the complete set of DVDs. I’m just lousy at regular DVD watching. A dog-eared book on the coffee table or night stand? No problem. Magazine that imposes itself on me, presenting its most recent installment into my mailbox each week or month? I’m scanning the table of contents before making it back up my driveway. The unending flow of blogs regenerating in Google Reader? To the point of distraction and unfortunately beyond, I’m on them. But I just can’t figure out this serial DVD watching. I’d probably do better if I were trying to catch its weekly television broadcast—or even aware of a growing Tivo queue to prune. But it’s always there, neither growing nor diminishing, no urgency at all, tucked away on a shelf. Maybe I should set it out in a more obvious place to get my attention.
I’ve got a few weeks away from school, so maybe I’ll finally finish. I would like to go back to the beginning, but maybe that’ll have to wait awhile.
Thoughts on seasons two and three:
(1) Most intriguing and perhaps most unlikely character: Brother Mouzone. Where can such a man come from, and can he even be? A neatly-dressed, bow-tied and jacketed, eloquent Muslim killer-for-hire who reads all the same magazines I do. The allusion seems to be, at least superficially, to the Nation of Islam (or perhaps their paramilitary wing), but no such affiliation is ever mentioned by name; and his showing up to provide muscle for a drug operation doesn’t seem to be a good fit. I immediately wondered about his background, about the world that could have produced a Brother Mouzone, and hoped the series would be up to exploring it, but it seems not to be.
Ah, but they do say where he is from: New York. Of course. And he is thus one more facet (maybe the plainest, actually) of the nebulous but recurring role of New York City on the periphery of The Wire (and of Baltimore?). In Brokeback Mountain—I don’t remember whether the movie or the short story or both—either Jack or Ennis wonders exasperatedly what people do who find themselves in their situation, and the other says he doesn’t know, they must go to Denver or something. Denver might be Athens or Babylon, it’s fairly close but strangely far away, quite like here and full of people from here but bigger than here and more complicated and mysterious and maybe frightening, and just as much of the rest of the world as of here, or maybe where the rest of the world and here meet, so really not like here at all. This might be something like the relation people have with nearby cities everywhere; but Baltimore is itself a city, its inhabitants not rural people, and yet something like this relation seems to be what the hazy presence of New York City on the horizon means in The Wire. And of course Brother Mouzone is from there. I want to know about his world, but The Wire just places it in New York and doesn’t have the audacity to go there. I suppose he stands in for the bigness of the world, and for the non-exhaustiveness of The Wire‘s depiction of it—that the Barksdale empire should have connections all the way to NYC and to people like Brother Mouzone!—but I’m not sure whether to think his mysteriousness is a strength of the show, or if its inability to account for him is a weakness and its appeal to him a gimmick. I do want to like him, in either case.
(2) After my growing excitement and awe over the first season, my first impression of the second, taken together, is that it seems to be less of a whole. This is one reason I want to go back to the beginning, since I’m not sure whether this impression is accurate or an artifact of viewing the first season without many expectations and then placing the second into the context of the first. But it seemed to me that the show could have finished after the first season and been a complete entity, and an admirable work of art, while the second season had a different rhythm and sent out more narrative threads. It occurred to me that the first season, at least in outline, might have been made without expectation of continued funding, but that the second season was anticipating the continuation of the series. I don’t know whether it happened that way, but that’s how it felt to me. At the end of the first season, the second might never have come, or it could have come and done anything; at the end of the second, I thought I could tell basically how the third would have to start.
(3) The feds are generally presented as being hyper-competent, having unlimited money and resources, and being utterly uninterested in what’s going on locally. Their distance, their powerful but transient influence, their mysterious depths and mostly superficial depiction, make their role not entirely unlike that of New York. (If ever there is anything like a deus ex machina in The Wire, it will be connected either to New York or the feds.)
The way the feds deflate the local investigation into The Greek was maddening, and though it’s not hard to believe that this is often quite how it works in such a vast web of bureaucracies and competing interests, I want to believe there’s a better way. So this guy is helping you with information in your investigation into international terrorism, and he’s under investigation for unrelated crimes by another agency. Tip him off and spoil their investigation, or communicate with that agency? I suppose if you’re dealing with very sensitive stuff you don’t want to create any new possibility for leaks. Also a possibility is that you don’t give a shit about that agency or their investigation. But really? Is this how it has to be? Can there be no better way? (That may be a fairly characteristic reaction to the show in general, I guess.)
(4) In the way that the first season is clearly about the drug trade and the Barksdale empire, and the second is clearly about the longshoremen, the third season is not so clearly about anything. From what I had heard, I anticipated its being similarly focused, but on city politics. It seemed instead to be more like a return to the first season, but with a newly expanded scope. Is this because local politics is by itself less whole and delimited than the drug trade or the docks? Because, quite the contrary, it is too isolated, and would too much change the character of the show? Because the one-season-one-setting paradigm is wrong?
(5) Perhaps the most obvious foray into concrete public policy debate is the “Hamsterdam” plotline. They make it unambiguous several times, someone or other saying in disbelief to Major Colvin, “You legalized drugs.” And despite the unsubtlety of that repeated assertion, I appreciated the subtlety in their depiction. The “legalization” does have immediate and obvious beneficial effects, but they don’t shy away from the ugliness, either, which makes for a more fair-minded look at the problem of drugs and the law than most.
I’m now working my way slowly through Season Four. The understanding of the public school system is remarkable, and not just of the classroom, which movies and television are notoriously bad at. The look of the school, the meetings. Oh, the meetings. Watching the school scenes, after trial-by-fire in Mississippi, is unspeakably bizarre. It manifests physically. I feel dazed and slightly giddy, utterly enthralled. Mary goes noticeably pale and sweaty, and wants to turn it off.
Notes:
Baltimore feels itself to be the country, partly because it had a huge influx over the latter half of the 20th Century of rural southerners, and partly because it knows of New York and Washington and will always and forever be a backwater compared to them. Cf. “The Streets of Baltimore” (a great song), the fact that “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” (not a great song at all) is played at Orioles games, David Simon’s explanation of poor whites in Baltimore and how they can from WV, TN, and other parts of the South.
I think your explanation about the second season’s lack of wholeness has to be largely right.
I think the feds are a useful counterpoint to Brother Mouzone, and I think that they both illustrate that the Wire’s scope is purely to tell the story of Baltimore. It’s not there to illustrate the broader problems and stories of America: not only would that be impossible and ruin the show’s other excellences, but the writers don’t have that knowledge and thus, wisely, I think, don’t fall victim to hubris in trying to explore those other topics. I think New York and the feds do feel like the deus ex machina to Baltimore, just other Greek gods of the system swooping in for their own purposes and heedless of the mere mortal country boys who live in New York.
I think you’re on the right track about with the third season appears to be about no one thing by noting that local politics just doesn’t rise to the level to become interesting in its own right. City hall is not the U.S. Capitol or the Statehouse: it has to remain responsible for and victimized by the actions of rogue cops such as Colvin simply because the city politicians don’t really have that much more power than their citizens and certainly don’t have enough distance from them to develop their own invincible auras. They live in the same city, after all, and thus have no fancy capital to retreat to and by whose crazy machinations to insulate themselves from the voters. I think of the local police officers trying to answer to the angry crowd of mothers sick of violence; he loses to them a fair percentage of the time.
I think I know what you mean about the physicality of your reaction to the schools depicted in Season 1. I went to a middle school that has portions its classes be as Mr. Prezbo’s was, and for the first semester of 6th grade was placed in such a one. My parents (and the teachers, frankly) finally got me out of it and into the polite and more suburban (though not majority white) other traveling section. But I had forgotten about that old fear and paralysis, that requirement of holding yourself a certain way in the halls, where every passing juvenile male could and would just yell at you and bang a locker (if you were lucky) as they do to Bunny and then his academic compatriot. I hate to sound trite, and to compare small sufferings to great, but I think it was trauma in a very real sense to go to that building every day, and so I believe I can sympathize at least in some way with Mary’s sickened reaction in remembering this pain. I’ll say this, however: a teacher who could control her classroom had the ability very quickly to turn rowdiness into at least partly discipline. That I was taught math by the incompetent teacher and social studies, language arts, and science by competent teachers may have played a large role in convincing me (without warrant) that I was not good at the one subject and good at the others. And I’m the lucky one in this story!
Errata:
“…mere mortal country boys who don’t live in New York.”
“…schools depicted in Season 1.” Of course I meant 4.
“…turn rowdiness into at least partly useful discipline.”
LOVE season four.