“Born into this”: a review of three seasons of HBO’s “The Wire”
life, like the vengeful ghost of every promise of liberty, equality and fraternity once made by the founders of the Republic that now lies ostentatiously bleeding to death on an unregarded housing project corner. But, you know, take heart: the little calling card is still enough to tie some kind of subjectivity together into a mish-mash of affects sutured to actions by fantasies resilient enough to live as if it were not inevitable that the former should be distorted into psychosis and the latter crushed under the heels of the city of Baltimore like another of those ubiquitous discarded drug drug-vials that cake the shoes of anyone who visits the many depressed and posthumous parts of the city (East or West). And, I mean sure, you can even feel, on the odd night, your possibility of redemption, that you might be getting closer to the goal, that the cash, the girls, the house, and even the rap star ‘lifestyle’ isn’t far behind you:: you’re part of a good crew now after all, your star’s rising, people treat you with respect/ Bang/Huh? What was that?/Nothing. Just your pointless death. You’re a statistic now. It’s like fame only crunchy. And don’t worry it’s bad for “5-0” (as in “Hawaii” or what the show’s characters call ‘po-lice’) as well – they’re ruled by numbers and quotas and corruption so all-pervasive that it’s as if the vestiges of civic virtue and government ‘by the people, for the people’ seem like the irritating parasite on the host organism of the corruption.”
Alternatively, I could have just summarised the above by taking a line from the first season:
Drug dealer (being dragged away in a police van and beaten en route) “You can’t f*!#ing do this, man: this is America!”
Random Police Officer: [laughing] “This is.West.Baltimore.”
But, as I say, you don’t need me to tell you that The Wire is to television what a cigar-chomping, gun-toting, Hegel-reading reincarnation of H.W. Fowler would be to the obscenely self-regarding Australian Press — no matter how much I just did this.
Also, given that I do agree with the prevailing excited consensus on the greatness of the show, I can’t attempt to offer you any shiny faux-contrarianism to take away the bad taste that’s left by so great an oxymoron as a “critical consensus.
So, instead of talking about the sheer ambition and daring of The Wire, its extraordinary writing, its frequently hilarious, frequently poignant vignettes coloured by those almost constant “I can’t believe this is happening” moments that will make you cover your eyes, and groan out loud to the gods even after you’ve watched seasons of the stuff and mistakenly think you’ve become desensitized to the show’s implacable “corruption squashes virtue” logic (a kind of scissors, paper, rock, without the paper and in which one side always uses the rock.)
And yet, if you’re a natural sceptic, you might still think that all of this nicely-packaged excellence is basically the familiar stock-standard “quality television” that can be found in almost any HBO show and that The Wire might be nothing more than The Sopranos with a little more incomprehensible Baltimore street argot thrown in to fulfill its ‘life on the streets’ authenticity quotient.
But, no.
Let me explain this by way of a remark that will also allow me to opportunistically explain something that I said in a previous post:
I recently made a video that went by the name, the Australian Middle Class Saves the World”. After I posted this video on Youtube and elsewhere, I started to squirm guiltily at the number of times the word ‘racism’ came out of the mouth of my idiot-hipster character ‘Maddie’ (who says this word — as she says everything — as if it meant ‘general badness which I oppose every time I go into a trendy bar as opposed to somewhere less hip.’)
Now, this squirming on my part, was and is, of course, stupid and pathetic, not to mention revelatory of any number of equally pathetic neuroses of the “oh, maybe I’ve said something that will lead to my beautiful soul being tragically misrepresented, thus leading to situation where I won’t get invited to all those parties that… I…er…don’t go to.” (Hmm. So, everbody wins after all…)
At any rate, at the time, I was worried that by making Maddie constantly invoke the term in her stilted, Xtranormal (and indeed “extranormal”) speech, some censorious and easily offended mythical reader of mine might somehow break through the ‘why would she give a shit?’ barrier and publically censure me for implying that racism exists only as a chimera in the mind of self-important morons. Now, of course: a) I never meant to say anything of the kind and b) no-one’s actually made such an accusation because well, you know, www.whywoudlanyonecare.com. But, to clarify this anyway, for narcissistic