Not for Attribution

“He doesn’t get to win, we get to win.” – McNulty

It’s hard to think that things will end well for McNulty. The way he mocks Bunk to his face in the office, his overbearing petulance… he’s a model of self-destruction, of a man who has completely succumbed to his id. He used to be the hero of the show, committed to solid police work and now he just looks like a man in moral free fall.

In the scene in the bar where he hooks up with the blond, he catches a glance of himself in the mirror. It’s subtle but he can’t quite keep his own gaze. There’s a consciousness below, but he’s too deep into what he’s doing to get in touch with it. He is surrounded by people who don’t take pride in their work, who perform at the bare minimum to get through the day and he just can’t accept it. Despite all the things of ill repute he does, there’s something inspiring about his determination, his drive to win.

I have ambivalent feelings about the “red ribbon” murderer plot thread. As I said about it last week, something about it feels forced. Through the last four seasons we’ve seen McNulty and Freamon wait patiently for cases to hatch, sitting on rooftops for hours. For them to suddenly create this serial killer to make a point and get the money to take down Marlo just doesn’t feel plausible given the pace and deliberation we’ve gotten used to on this show.

Particularly from Lester: He’s always been the calm one. It doesn’t seem a part of his nature to do anything rash. I’m crossing my fingers, but if “The Wire” will prove to have a “Jump the Shark” moment, the scene where Jimmy creates a murder scene at the end of “Unconfirmed Reports” could be it.

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We’ve seen it a million times on this show: people don’t control their own destinies. Still, it was at no time more powerfully shown than in the layoff scene at the Sun. The decision about a case, about what your job will be always comes from above. It’s not the Sun editors making the layoff decisions: it’s Chicago. According to Carcetti, it’s not him cutting the police budget to the bone, it’s the mean Republican governor in Annapolis who’s responsible for not giving him the money to get the city in shape.

Watching this show doesn’t make you exactly want to go out and work in a bureaucracy, or at a large corporation. But that’s what the show is documenting, how these large institutions, which (in theory) used to provide a measure of comfort and security for its members can’t promise that anymore. There’s just too much bottom-line pressure.

(I could talk about this much more but “Supercapitialism” by Robert Reich is a great non-fiction companion piece to this show. Many of the between the show and the book are perfectly congruent. It’s a great, highly readable and original work that I highly recommend it).

By the way, it doesn’t always happen this way. The editor at the LA Times was just forced out because he refused to make newsroom cuts. And the guy he replaced refused to do the same. And maybe that’s why the LA Times is a much better paper than the real Baltimore Sun.

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If there’s a weakness to “The Wire” – one that has held constant in every season – it is a propensity to nostalgize about the past. There’s often this sort of “Greatest Generation” subtext to the show, as if the characters are saying, “Man, things used to be great around here. What happened?”

True, Baltimore has lost a lot of its population over the last four decades, has one of the highest murder rates in the nation and is no longer a big player on the national scene. However, Simon and Burns never point to a new direction. They never seem to point to a new way of being, a second act, for the city. Instead we receive an endless solemnity about the “lost” Baltimore, for the blue-collar work ethic, for pride in one’s work. We have all these illusions to how great everything was in the past.

The conversation between Haynes and Twigg brought this to light. They have so much pride in what they do, but it’s that brutish force of capitalism to “make more with less” and serve the bottom line that shortchanges them. They talk about all the things that made them become journalists. And then Twigg quotes the finest journalist Baltimore has ever known, the famous H.L. Mencken. But Haynes says, “Fuck Henry Mencken.” I didn’t get that, why he would say that.

Mencken and Simon’s lives both have some parallel to each other but I’ll leave that for another post.


And short comments:

- I believe that this was the first episode penned by Chris Collins, who according to the New Yorker article, is the youngest writer for the show. He always appears as “Staff Writer” in the credits. However, in the New Yorker piece, Simon claims to rewrite much of the episodes himself so it’s difficult to know how much of the script originated with the writer itself.

- In a season that has been devoted to the process and effects of public manipulation, the scenes with Clay Davis have a different tint to them. There are no lies in these scenes, no sense of irony, no greater agendas that are being advanced. You just have the slow process of justice. Of course, you could say that Pearlman is trying to manipulate the jury, but at least she's using the truth.

- The Marlo scenes didn’t provide me with any new windows into his character. He doesn’t seem to change too much. We already now how unsocialized he is, how he doesn’t trust anybody, how ruthless he is, how his weakness is pride. At least we got to see the hottest woman ever on this show (the bank teller in the Carribean).

We’ll see what Omar going after him does though. Omar is back. What more do you need to say?!? Interesting to see how he and McNulty fare considering they have the same agenda.