Know Your Place

"Everybody's safe in the end, right?" – Dookie

I believe that the last scene where Michael approaches Marlo was nothing short of brilliant. This season has had so many superb ending scenes – the juxtaposition of Randy and Carcetti staring out into the night, the boys looking at the dead body in the vacant, Carcetti rejecting the sexual advances of his campaign manager – but this one wins the prize.

In my estimation, what has long distinguished HBO shows from network television (and I just mean HBO – Showtime’s “Weeds” and “The L Word” don’t do this either) is how it is able to convey so much without dialogue. On network shows, there’s always a direct camera shot on the character in question followed by some sort of verbalizing of their emotions. “Six Feet Under,” “The Sopranos,” “Deadwood” and “The Wire” don’t do this. They rely on expert acting and directing and communicating emotions through facial expressions and body language to convey a character’s emotional state. And characters don’t always mean what they say. This is much more effective and real. After all, we usually gauge how others feel around us intuitively not through their direct statements.

In this scene, there is almost dialogue. You don’t know what Michael says to Marlo after the initial few words or what Michael said to Dookie before on their walk over here. Dookie escorts Michael to Omar’s court as if he’s giving him away at an altar. The way he looks at Michael as he walks in there - it’s like he knows they’ll never be the same again. And then Omar staring down at the scene below trying to figure out what’s going on.

One thing I can’t understand is why Omar and Chris want this guy so much. They treat him like a first round draft pick for slinging, like he’s the Reggie Bush of West Baltimore. Omar is right, “He’s just a kid.” But as we’re seeing, no one stays young and innocent for long in their world - even little, prepubescent Canard, who gets handled like a grocery bag by Carver’s boys.

Another telling scene was when the kids were searching for an adult they could trust. The social worker? A drunk. Mr. Prezbo? Maybe. Cutty. “He too friendly,” says Michael, who displays lots of the signs of a child who was abused. Where are the responsible, upstanding men in their world? Marlo is the real power broker, the ring-giver in their busted community. It is he who steps in when institutions fail as miserably as they have for the middle schoolers. People like Marlo fill the vacuum of power, just like people like al-Sadr currently fill that vacuum in Iraq for example. While these scenes have a great emotional resonance to them, you look at them and realize how important good governance is and what forces are all too eager to fill it when it is absent.

Was this the first Wire episode ever penned by a woman? It could be.
Kia Corthron, a dramatist and native of Cumberland, Maryland, did a superb job on the dialogue with “Know Your Place.” I just wonder how Simon and Burns and rotate writers like Price, Pelecanos, Corthron and Overmeyer into writing this show. How can they keep up with a show this nuanced and complex if you’re working on your own stuff? Price, Pelecanos and Lehane are all crime novelists while Overmeyer and Corthron are dramatists. I’d love to know how this works.

And in no particular order, random comments:


- Like to see how the bitchy, power-mad “Madame President” will serve as Carcetti’s new foil. After walking the streets with the police, where he looked akin to Michael Dukakis riding a tank in the 1988 election, it’s nice to see him back in his element among wood-paneled rooms and leather chairs. He’s confident here.

- Herc’s bumbling stupidity. Will there be ramifications for his tacit giving up of Randy?

- The scene with Rawls and Carcetti was telling. When Carcetti tells Rawls he’s promoting Valchek, Rawls goes, “Valchek is a good man.” “He’s a hack,” Carcetti replies. Rawls keeps parroting the “tell them what they want to hear” ethos of bureaucracy, but Carcetti sees right through it.

- Everything is a racket, even homicide. Check out this article on the Baltimore police department: http://www.thewbalchannel.com/news/10255729/detail.html. According to the article the budget for overtime work is five times over budget. It also states that the police force has 150 vacant positions – an interesting fact not alluded to by the show’s writers. More evidence that “The Wire” ain’t just fiction.

- Great scene with Prop Joe and Andre. Using the allegory of the broken television set to tell him to get out of town but Andre is too stupid to listen - and winds up covered in quick lime in a vacant. That Prop Joe has a good way with language.

- Those middle schoolers at the steak house. It was a telling scene even if we’ve seen that fish-out-of-water one before. It reminded me of the scene in Season One when D’Angelo takes his girl out. Both parties leave feeling very out of place.