Realism, Regionalism and “The Wire”

With the fifth and final Season premiering just weeks away, the idea comes to the forefront, “What does it all mean?” Every time anything ends, whether it’s an administration, a life or a television series, this is always the inevitable question. If you don’t ask it, it seems to follow that it must all be meaningless.

“The Wire” is, of course, compelling for many different reasons, but I would argue that what gives it its hypnotic quality and truly separates it from the pack is its aesthetic of unflinching realism. I’ve heard some MFA-types use the term “hyper-realism” in describing literature (perhaps Hemingway fits this bill) and I deduce that it refers to an author chronicling everything – the sound of a glass hitting the table, the crackling of a tree branch, the hue of an old building – in excruciating and unadorned detail. This description greatly corresponds to the vision for the show as laid out by Simon in the New Yorker piece. He refers to himself as an “authenticity nut” in the article in how he wants to portray the city of Baltimore on screen.

Rarely in the show are you being petitioned to empathize with a character’s situation. The show has always lacked a traditional protagonist, a hero or even a sex symbol (though at times McNulty fit these roles). What Simon/Burns are trying to do is let the story tell itself without interjecting their opinions into the mix. When there’s a climactic scene, there’s never ever any music to cue how you’re supposed to feel, there’s just action. The intent is to portray events as they unfold without infusing them with any sort of judgment.

But these are just directorial choices; the realism I’m really talking about is the way the city of Baltimore and its people are portrayed. Television is traditionally an escapist medium, and “The Wire” is its complete opposite, showing the tarnished underbelly of a beat-up American city that seems a world away from the idealized camaraderie of urban life portrayed on “Friends.” The majority of American TV shows are set in the affluent places of the country. I can’t think of too many before “The Wire” that have been set in Baltimore, Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit or St. Louis or the other American cities that have seen vast population declines in the past sixty years.

We see dirty, refuse-filled streets, broken families and drug-fueled depravity in almost every episode. Where else have we have ever seen a character like Delonda (Namond’s mom)? And of course, there’s the dialogue of the show, which is worth a whole other post by itself.

It is this meticulous chronicling of one city’s social fabric that makes the show so strong. It gives a roundness and a fullness to the language and social makeup of a city in ways that few other shows have. And it is this quality that I believe has attracted so many because it addresses how various aspects of the city commingle and exist alongside themselves (I think “Crash” tried to do this for a cinematic equivalent).

Finally, the show has made a great contribution to the aesthetic of “regionalism:” the portrayal of the mores, customs and language of a particular area. You usually hear this term to describe Flannery O’Connor and other Southern writers but its applicable to anybody who is able to capture the area they are writing about in such fullness. “The Wire” does for Baltimore what Raymond Chandler does for Los Angeles, what Dennis Lehane does for Boston, what “The Maltese Falcon” does for San Francisco: it lends the place a sense of mayhem and a sense of mystery and ends up giving it a sense of place. It makes the place come alive by lending a sense of immensity to the unique details of the particular city.

I wish there were other shows that strived to portray an area so well, that explored the “regional realism” of different areas of the country. Simon has shown that you don’t have to leave where you are to create amazing things; you don’t have to write about extraordinary events or beautiful people. You just write about the area that you are from in a plain, unadorned style and let the story tell itself. And then let the world come to you.