“Born into this”: a review of three seasons of HBO’s “The Wire”
well-known principle that the legend is sometimes closer to the reality – that if you leave out the more extravagant, fanciful parts of reality and only to print what seems to fit the sober law of averages and bell curves, you miss part of realit just as much as if you had told a story that featured nothing but caricatures.
And no-one, believe me could ever accuse The Wire of “Romanticism” a word which, in the endlessly evocative ‘tattoo-across-the-soul’ Baltimore’ that it presents, probably means something like “hoping that your most diligent works might make even an iota of difference to anything or anyone.” On this theme, it’s possible that the show will be (or has been) criticized in some quarters for the ostensibly ‘pacifying’ effects of its pessimism.
But I’m not at all sure that this would be justified.
While, of course, watching The Wire is, in one sense, as ‘passive’ as watching any other television show (i.e. no-one has yet found, that I know of, a way to storm the Bastille from the couch, )I see no reason to suggest that the show’s attempt to portray systematic injustice unflinchingly (as opposed to the tragedy of this or that individual soul), yet with the dramatic nous that makes it a genuine pleasure to watch should be as a sign that the show contributes to cynicism, and thus to apathy or despair. This argument would make sense only if you were prepared to argue that any focus on structural problems as opposed to simply enumerating the rich possibilities for collective action inevitably had the lesson that ‘there’s no point in doing anything’: at, any rate, by this logic Das Kapital is ‘pacifying.’
Against this, I”ll suggest that there’s always something at least potentially emancipating in a gaze that is prepared to look for the truth of something. As long as we don’t make the classic cynical mistake of taking truth for merely the absence of illusions, it’s still possible to find that a gaze that tries to, in journalistic cliché, “stare unflinchingly at reality” may succeed at the important task of making what was previously invisible, visible. And every change in the distribution of the visibile and the invisible is one more step towards changes in what we take for granted as setting the bounds of the psosible. Anymore than this, is obviously, up to us, becomes genuinely political: hard to ask more of entertainmen, especially of the kind that by its nature tends to be consumed in (at least relative) isolation.
[Original article (includes pictures, parenthetical remarks and links to other websites can be found at http://http://prettycoolforaniconodule.wordpress.com/2010/06/17/born-into-this-in-which-i-review-three-seasons-of-the-wire-and-mention-avatar-with-the-lip-curling-scorn-it-deserves/]
Maladjusted is a philosophy PhD student from Melbourne Australia whose interest include Plato, Alain Badiou, psychoanalysis, the history of political philosophy and contemporary Christian theology. His second blog ‘pretty cool (for an iconodule)” is dedicated to cultural criticism, satire and shameless auto-hagioraphy.