New Day

“You’re my boys right? I’m here for ya’ll and ya’ll here for me?” – Randy
“I don’t trust him, but I trust his fear.” - Omar

At its most basic level, what “The Wire” is really about is the breakdown of American urban society – at the very least in Rust Belt cities like Baltimore that have never adjusted to the flight of blue-collar jobs. Every segment of Baltimore we see is broken, balkanized and divided. The police, the operatives of City Hall, the gangsters all backstab each other in a circular, Machiavellian, zero-sum game of survival.

The middle schoolers are the exceptions. The most uplifting and poignant aspect of this season is the loyalty they display towards each other. As they start to go on divergent paths we’ll see how Namond, Michael, Randy and Dookie treat each other but it is a sense of belonging and mutual responsibility arising out of their shared background and heritage that define their interactions towards each other right now. As we see in “New Day,” they are a wily bunch but they still abide by a basic honor code of pride that the adults have learned to avoid in the name of self-preservation. They have all followed Valchek’s advice to Herc, “Just shut up and play it up.”

The most instructive dialogue on “New Day” was the exchange Michael and Namond had in front of the jewelry shop. It builds on another of the great themes of the season – pragmatism versus idealism. “The Wire” has always been preoccupied with the idea of “How much should one stand up for one’s self and what one believes in?” You’re taught to do this instinctively for this is what heroes do, but Namond throws out his own bit of “discretion is the better part of valor” wisdom to Michael when he tells him, “It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it.” Sounding very much like the security guard that Marlo had killed, Michael explains why he stood up to Randy’s attackers, “I ain’t gonna let some chump-ass niggas think I’m took. I ain’t.” These are the sort of benevolent values that struggle so dramatically on "The Wire."

(A little frustrated that they haven’t done much with Dookie. While Namond, Michael and Randy all have strong plotlines, Dookie just plods along. Nothing has really challenged him directly. He’s just the teacher’s pet in the background of everything, sad and depressed and deprived. His character hasn’t really changed much all season. A missed opportunity if you ask me.)

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Like Michael, Carcetti is learning the price for valor. “Yummy, my first bowl of shit,” he says as he has to balance the needs of the police versus the ministers. But that’s nothing compared to what he has to do with the schools. What place does society have for idealists? Still, I like Carcetti. He seems like a pretty ideal leader, trying to balance a visionary’s idealism with the realities of the vested interests of the city. But you look at him in that room where everybody has ties to Barksdale drug money and you just wonder whether it’s a matter of time till he becomes like Royce.

It is telling that this episode was written by Ed Burns. Both he and David Simon have voiced their belief that “individuals are worth less every day.” Whereas the political culture in our country is absorbed with advancing the mantra that personal responsibility is everything, “The Wire” is very interested in showing how the individual is affected – and often crushed – by society acting as an aggregate. We’re all born good – like the middle-schoolers – but it’s the world that makes us wicked and selfish. It’s all systemic and any positive change will have to be enacted on the system not the individual. Their take is more akin to some LBJ Great Society view on the world and a complete reversal about everything you hear from the contemporary Republican Party.

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A word on Bodie. One of the comments from last week talked about him and it got me thinking. You know who he is starting to remind me of? As a lonely drug dealer, D’Angelo Barksdale, but who he really reminds of are the dockworkers from Season Two. He is the working man who is controlled by larger forces. Whether he sees members of his crew getting picked off and stuffed in a vacant by Marlo or has to hide from the police, the man has no control over his life. He’s stuck in a dead end job and without any union to protect him.

That was a nice scene with him and McNulty with the cop talking to him like they’re friends. At least McNulty knows he can be honest with him. When he’s honest with Officer Walker, “Since when is yellow paint a declaration of war?” he gets nowhere.

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Another superb ending scene. Rather than, say, “Lost” which leaves you with questions and cliffhangers, “The Wire” likes to leave you with a shot to ponder which are mysteries in themselves. The writers and directors really want to impart this whole idea of “soft eyes.” It’s softness and vision that solves murders, that teaches kids, that leads the way forward. But in a bottom-line society “obsessed with juking stats” as McNulty remarks, it is rare to find the individual that knows how to use these “soft eyes.” It’s the difference between Lester and Bunk, who can never really learn anything new it seems.


Random comments:

- Disappointed that Prez didn’t tell them anything about knowing that the bodies were in the vacants. He seems to completely not trust the police nor the schools for that matter. This is the crucial bit of information and he abstains. It wouldn’t hurt to tell them.
- Good scene with Namond in the trust-building exercise. He really responds to Bunny. He’s the strong but kind father figure he never had.
- A real Shakesperean line from Prop Joe when he talks about Omar having a shovel and Marlo a spade and "no way I'm crawling back in" to my grave.

I also would like to thank everyone who reads my blog and takes the time to write comments.

Misgivings

“They’re not learning for our world, they’re learning for theirs.” – Colvin

If you could take a pull quote from this entire season so far to say what it has been about, I would undoubtedly select the exchange between Parenti, Colvin and the school superintendent in this episode. It addresses education, how institutions function – and most importantly – how they fail.

“It’s not about you or us, or the test or the system,” Colvin, the show’s Great Communicator, tells the naïve superintendent. “It’s about what they expect of themselves. We pretend to teach them, they pretend to learn.” Later, when he drops off Namond to his wretched mother he sees all the proof he needs. How can someone like Namond function and be expected to thrive and care about permutations and subject-verb agreements when you come from a home like that?

Bill Gates once called American high schools “irrelevant” and you see the irrelevance on display in “The Wire.” Donnelly and the administrators work hard and have good intentions, but the education fails the kids cause it just isn’t relevant to their world. The one-size-fits-all, “No Child Left Behind” logic towards education currently in vogue is well debunked on this show. Like Colvin’s Hamsterdam experiment last season, Colvin and Parenti are trying a much more practical approach to education that is based not on ideology but on the social reality they encounter. But unfortunately, they can’t get others onto their side.

For schools to be effective they have to be a tool of education and socialization. At Edward Tilghman, they unfortunately seem to be just socializing them. But you can hardly blame this on the teachers – these kids are damaged.

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Usually when I watch “The Wire,” I am mostly aware of the writing, but for “Misgivings,” I was really aware of the direction. Ernest Dickerson did a great job. He let the camera give pan on certain characters that flushed them out better.

Before this episode, Chris was just a thug – a calm, ruthless, articulate one – but still a thug. But that long shot on him as he’s gauging what Bug’s Dad did to Michael was great. He looks scary and frightening but also intelligent and understanding. He does seem to smart to be Marlo’s enforcer. “We’ll take care of it boss,” he tells Michael. The long shot of Michael as he’s watching TV as Chris mercilessly beats that man to death is also instructive.

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We’ve seen throughout this season how following through on noble intentions gets you in trouble. The security guard who stepped up to Marlo didn’t live to tell about it. Colvin putting the cuffs on the guy who beat up the prostitute and gets fired. And now Little Kevin pays the price. He thought he was being upfront, being “in front of it” and now he’s dead. Bubbles wanted protection from Herc for police work and betrays the knucklehead sergeant when he doesn’t keep up his end of the bargain.

“The Wire” is preoccupied with how institutions function but also with what fills the void when institutions fail. What steps in its place? We saw this last episode when Michael approached Marlo. And we saw it with Officer Edwards assault on Donut, and Herc’s bungling of Bubble’s predicament yet again.

It is all an absence of leadership. No one is taking responsibility. When Namond is sitting in jail you beg the question, “Where are all the adults?” There is no substitute for poor governance. And there are too many ill forces that are all too willing to step in should governance fail.

And, in no particular order:

- Never really understood Slim Charles. He was one of Barksdale’s boys and now he’s a major player. But you’ve never known what his role is exactly. He’s with Prop Joe and then he talks to Marlo. Not sure what his deal is. If he got killed off, it would save me a few headaches.
- What is Omar planning? His character’s motivation is a little unclear to me right now. He swore off dropping bodies to Bunk but he can’t seem to change his nature. He’s like Greggs – just an alleycat by nature.
- A great scene between Poot and Bodie. That “World going one way, people going another” line was just genius. I’ll remember that line for a long time.
- Carcetti and Daniels. Another scene with good dialogue. Eric Ovemyer did a fantastic job with this script.

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.

Corner Boys

“How honest should I be?” - Daniels

(Sorry this was so late. I got wrapped up in the election. But hey, I helped defeat Pombo so I'm happy)

This was easily one of the best episodes of what has already proven to be an incredible season. The last few episodes had a bit of a slow pace to them, but this one was very meaty and heightened a lot of the existing plot lines.

The scenes where Bunny is talking to the class of corner kids were the most memorable. I think the writers have done a remarkable job contrasting the more academic and clinical approaches of Parenti and the teacher with the street smarts of Colvin to the dilemmas of kids like Namond. It’s art and sociology all rolled into one.

They both need each other. Colvin knows how to communicate with them, he speaks to Namond and Zenobia and company in a vernacular they can understand but Parenti and the teacher are cognizant of other educational approaches and the big picture. They seem to recognize that in order to be successful there’s got to be an educational approach that speaks to the kids within the context of their own lives. One New York Times Sunday magazine article last year about contemporary missionaries in Africa calls this sort of communication “contextualism” which I think is a perfect phrase to describe it. It’s all about speaking to people in a language that they can understand.

It was interesting how, like other Americans, how many of the kids expected to be successful in life. Even though a few expected to be dead, they still expected to rise within the ghetto hierarchy. This mirrors studies of college kids who all expect to be wealthy and successful in their lives. I can’t decide whether it’s comforting or not that the myth of the American dream and perpetual social advancement seems to be well-embedded in low-income urban youth who have all the decks stacked against them.

Funny how Carcetti, the next Mayor of Baltimore, often looks out of place. Whether he’s dancing and clapping at a black church or strolling through the homicide department, he looks like he doesn’t belong. He’s only looked natural in his campaign office or in Royce’s leather chair.