Unto Others

“It’s fascinating. I mean clinically speaking.” – Parenti

What a superb opening scene. Great pithy dialogue where the character’s body language really communicates what’s happening. The look on Omar’s face when he gets fitted with phone book armor and then the lick to his attacker’s ear – priceless. It’s scenes like this that no other TV show comes close to imitating and make “The Wire” so worth watching.

This season is billed as the season about education and what disparate factors lead to the education of youth today, but philosophically speaking, it seems to be about the merits of pragmatism versus idealism. Every group from City Hall to the middle school to the drug crews has a certain code and every group has those who successfully navigate their way through it with lies and half-lies and those who play it straight.

It’s like life is one big game, one big racket where everything operates in a certain system with rules that are tacit to its operation. These rules are in many ways irrespective of conventional morality and are thus rules that outsiders cannot understand. The successful player learns these rules, understands them, digests them and then spins them to his own advantage. All the big players, Marlo, Daniels, Omar, Rawls, Carcetti understand this. When Omar throws back the words that Bunk uttered to him last season, “A man got to have a code,” he could be talking to everybody.

Prez is probably the best example this season. He goes into teaching with the purest of intentions only to discover just how educationally unseasoned his students are and how dysfunctional the school system is. He learns that the by-the-book methods and straightforward learning that probably worked for him will not work with his students so he gets his probability lesson through with a game of dice. Like any good player, he finds out what he can get away with. You have to be infinitely resourceful in this world.

Juxtapose him with Cutty, the great idealist. In a world where everybody is trying to work the system, he’s the straight shooter, the one with the purest intentions and the greatest inability to compromise. You’re always rooting for him even if he lacks the necessary sophistication to massage people the right way and glide through the world.
He never quite understands why his kids desert him. He doesn’t know how to talk to Spider, who has quickly degenerated into the undisciplined street tough he was before he started to box. Cutty is at once the real hero of the show and also the one who seems most destined for some sort of failure of his own making.

And the project at Edward Tilghman got more interesting. Some great dialogue in those scenes. I especially liked it when the woman who moderates the class says, “Namond suffers from conduct disorders.” Bunny adds, “Yeah, he got a mouth on him.” But that’s the marriage that needs to happen for public policy to work, combining street knowledge with academic frames and tools. This plot angle is very exciting and I can’t wait to see how it plays out.

Now for some random observations:

- One little detail of notice this season. While slinging heroin has been a mainstay in all four seasons, this is the only one where the names of the products have been featured. It was “WMD” and “Pandemic” where Bodie’s crew was dealing. When Cutty confronts Spider, it’s “Brokeback” and “Darkhorse.” I don’t know about you but I don’t think “Brokeback” is a good branding choice in inner city Baltimore.

- The ex-Mayor telling Carcetti about the difficulties of being mayor and how “being a downtown lawyer and seeing my family every evening made for a fine life.” It mirrored something San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said the other day. He was talking about whether he would run for re-election (a shoe in) and said that it wasn’t any kind of life to lead, “Ordering take-out every night and bringing work home with me, that’s not how I imagined my life at 37,” he said in my own paraphrase. An interesting anecdote to those pondering a political career of public service.

- I think it’s time for Bubbles to strap himself. The guy is amazingly resourceful about everything except for self-protection. Why not?

- Greggs is still an alleycat as they called her in Season One. I didn’t like it that they panned out when she entered the house with her gun drawn. Sometimes, the show cuts its scenes too close. It couldn’t of hurt to go in a bit more and see how she would have handled herself amidst all that.

Margin of Error

“It could be a great city again.” - Carcetti

In the opening scene of “Margin of Error” – which seems more like the beginning to a film than a television episode – we witness one of the only functioning and uncorrupt communities in Baltimore: the church. It’s so virtuous that all three mayoral candidates go there to wrap themselves in it. It's the last vestige of order from the old days, and it looks glorious and healthy as we see it here.... And then there’s Carcetti dancing and clapping, looking like a goof. But he looks just like Edwards, Kerry or Gore when they visited black churches on the campaign trail.

The first time I watched this episode I thought it was amazing. The second time, I thought it was just OK. Strange huh? There aren’t too many transcendent moments in “Margin of Error.” Not too many nuggets of great, ambiguous dialogue that have defined this show and made it what it is. Is this the first episode penned by Eric Overmeyer? I Googled him, the man’s a playwright, not a crime-oriented writer like the rest of “The Wire” writing staff.

My favorite moment was of Namond sitting there on his bed staring at the package he got from Bodie. He wears a burdened, horrified look on his face - the face of lost youth. With choices like the ones he has, it’s no wonder he likes video games so much. Video games are the comic books of our day – a primary vehicle of adolescent escapism. But he’s been living in hypocrisy for so long – dressing like a tough young dealer and enjoying the splendor of the drug trade while avoiding its brutal realties – that it’s hard to feel entirely sorry for him. He had to know at some point that this was going to happen. “I’m counting on you Nay,” his Mom says. Sure. To keep her supplied with Jack Daniels and fish food.

One of the pretexts of “The Wire” is who understands that the systems everyone operates in is a game and who doesn’t. You can’t just wear your intentions on your sleeve and get ahead. You’ve got to be wily and crafty and endlessly resourceful. “Better to be clever than to be good,” Bunk bemoans at one point.

The most successful players, Rawls, Marlo, Carcetti, Prez even, understand this. They make compromises with the system and make deals with unsavory players and elements in favor of the greater good. They're skeptical, they're not idealists but they know how to work it. They know how to hold their nose and act nice with people like Clay Davis and Burrell. And they not only survive, they get ahead and thrive. It’s not a purely Machiavellian world, but it’s close.

And then there are those who don’t get it. Cutty never understands why kids don’t show up to his gym or why people may resent him for his womanizing ways. Randy gets played by his friends. He lets his buddies get in on all the walkaround money and then has to do all the work. Is he clever enough to survive? I don’t like his chances in a Darwinian world like West Baltimore. But I like how he asked for Lake Trout when Dookie was buying for him. A good echo to Bunk and McNulty’s dialogue from a few episodes back. He is real. His foster Mom is a chip of the old block, very unlike any of the other characters so far.

I liked the last scene. You can see how Carcetti is waging an open war against his own lust. He likes the ladies, and now that he’ll soon be mayor, they’ll certainly like him and he’ll have to be even stronger. But it’s refreshing to see how his character has changed even over this season as he rejects his sexually insatiable campaign manager. Her last line, which closes the episode, was very on-point for her: "Just write me a check."

And it isn’t that much a surprise that Carcetti won. The actual mayor of Baltimore, Martin J. O’Malley, is white and originally from the Third District on the Northeastern side of the city.

Alliances

“No special dead, just dead.” - Dookie

I liked this episode quite a bit. It was written by one of the show’s big guns, Ed Burns, and it really flushed out the personalities of the kids. They seem more age-appropriate, more innocent than in the past. In a word, more believable.

Another solid opening scene, a clever send-up on the classic teens-sitting-around-the-campfire-telling-zombie-stories routine. These kids aren’t at some well-supervised summer camp, they’re in a derelict alleyway sitting on crates and discarded lawn chairs guessing the caliber of the guns that produce shots in the distance, wondering the fate of real (not imagined) bodies that they’ve seen disappear. It’s a scene very familiar and yet almost incomprehensibly foreign at the same time. And very sad when you think about it.

Their personalities are coming more into focus: Namond the loud-mouth trouble-maker who’s force of character makes him the apparent leader; Randy who’s wiliness hides his immense fear; Dookie appears to have low self-esteem but he’s the most even-headed and self-controlled of the group and would be my odds-on favorite to grow up the least scathed.

Michael is still a bit of a mystery. He obviously has issues with authority but we don’t know quite why – the show’s writers haven’t given us a reason for why he is so mistrustful. Whether it’s Cutty, Marlo, Monk or Prez, he just doesn’t want to deal with anyone. He cares about his friends and his little brother and boxing. He’s got a certain sensitivity about him, patting Randy as they see the dead body. But what’s his story? He doesn't seem to evolve episode-to-episode like his three buddies.

The scene with Namond talking to Wee-Bey would have been funny if it weren’t so sad. It’s amazing how acceptance of the criminal lifestyle is so ingrained in this community. Selling drugs and being a cold-hearted gangster is not looked at as a way to make a living and win respect, it’s looked at as THE WAY. The nostalgia in which Wee-bey speaks to his son about the glory of gang-banging in the old days and the ways in which Namond wants his father’s approval are something to behold. It’s all over before it starts. You can blame the schools, but the problem here is more societal: no viable sustainable lifestyle is presented to these kids as an alternative to a life of crime. Namond will follow his Dad, it seems to be foreshadowed, because... what else will he do?

But the “Stand By Me” moment at the end where the boys journey to see the body was the show stealer. The way they reacted to it shows their personalities: Randy scared, Michael comforting and unabashed, and Dookie the great realist making sense of it for everybody. If unknowingly sending Lex to his death riled Randy, what will seeing a body do? He seems the most fragile of the bunch.

Walking up to the house in the rain, the first signs of winter all around them, it all felt like a Poe story. Perhaps it is a Poe story, “The Cask of Amantarillo(?)” but this time the body is not in the crypt of a decaying aristocrat’s house but covered in tarp in a long vacant home in a long suffering part of the city. Just a gruesome scene but very, very powerful and instructive. What's amazing about it is all the things that aren't said, that are showed on the faces of the children (and, remember, that's what they are, children).

Two tidbits:

Marlo and Chris continue to prove that they’re smarter and more cunning than Barksdale. True, he breaks the rules as Wee-Bey says, but his cold-hearted approach to business and the streets seems to be working.

One disappointment to me is Daniels. He had a great presence in the first three seasons. Principled about police work and yet always calibrating the best way he could work around the incompetent do-nothing leaders at City Hall to give his unit what he needs. Now as the number two at the Western he’s been relegated to an office. It seems strange to me why he doesn’t stand up to Marimont. He could couldn’t he?

And yes, I waited to post this till Wednesday afternoon. Unacceptable. Last time.

Refugees

“You want it to be one way, but it’s the other way.” - Marlo

Another fine episode – though I have to say, my least favorite of the four to date. There were some great scenes in “Refugees” (written by “Mystic River” author Dennis Lehane) – no doubt –but there was a slight touch of pedantry to it. The episode had a bit of a didactic tinge as if the writers we’re saying, “ We want you to know how bad it is in Baltimore.” The scenes with Ms. Donnelly, Cutty with the truant van, as well as Michael taking care of his brother all possessed this in small, though tangible amounts. Don’t get me wrong, “Refugees” was fantastic, but by the end I thought it was trying to teach me a lesson. Haven’t gotten that feeling too much with this show.



Poker. The Mayor bilks his business connections in Texas Hold ‘em while Marlo gets schooled in Omaha. I saw on some website that Omaha is gaining in popularity. I wonder if Omaha is randomly placed here or if that’s really the game of choice for the Marlos of the world. Will it be another fad that started in the inner city?

The dialogue in the poker game is instructive on the importance of material tastes and the subtle distinctions that are made about what a certain car says about you in this world. The genial older gentleman lauds Town Cars. “A man look quiet and content in one,” he says just as he cleans out Marlo for all he’s got. “You youngins all into Lexus and Hum-V-Fucking-eight shit.” Yeah, but Town Cars ain’t what the game is about, though I’d see Marlo in one before Barksdale. Imagine a Town Car with $10,000 dollar rims….

If “Refugees” advanced the plot in one important way it was witnessing Marlo descend into the greed and tit-for-tat violence that he previously managed to be above. So far, he’s been the model of restraint and effective brutal leadership. He keeps his troops in order, doesn’t get caught up in messy reprisals and can smell out a trap miles away. Swiping the two lollipops and provoking the security guard who is later doused in quick lime, initially seems out of character. You see that his weakness is pride.

“I ain’t one for sentiment,” he says later. True. He’s never been showy and petulant the way Barksdale was; he’s always been a big picture guy. He’s a bit like Meryl Streep’s character in “The Devil Wears Prada.” He’s so powerful, he knows he’s the king of the underworld that he doesn’t have to raise his voice to make a point. He’s icy and confident and appears to never drop his guard. And he’s got plenty of people to do his dirty work.
In ten episodes, “Refugees” could be looked at as the one where Marlo started to become undone.

I did like the scene where Prop Joe is trying to woo him to the co-op using the allegory of the pigeons. “They always got a place to fly back to where they know food is at,” Joe says. “But no one fucks with me now right,” Marlo says correctly.

The two best scenes were Andre with Marlo in the rim shop and Omar and Marlo getting acquainted over a .45 at the poker game. Great, great dialogue in that one. Really brilliant. If I were teaching a screenwriting class I’d show those two scenes over and over again. “Omar ain’t no terrorist,” Marlo quips, “he’s just another nigger with a gun.”

Lastly, if it’s Sunday morning why is Prez watching college football? Was it too hard to get the copyright to broadcast a snippet from a Ravens game? This scene kinda reminded me of that one in “Slackers” where a guy wants to stay inside all day while his girlfriend begs him to go on a walk with him. “It’s a beautiful day,” she says. Prez doesn’t quite say, “Fuck that nature shit,” but comes close.