“Born into this”: a review of three seasons of HBO’s “The Wire”
audiences’ eyeballs in scene after scene of the previous two seasons: I’m talking here about the soul-destroying, ruthless, reign of numbers (not only money, but of particular pre-delineated ways of counting what is and isn’t reality) to which the show continually testifies. By the reign of number, I’m talking about the classic bureaucratic ‘if it’s on the page it’s fine, if it’s not on the page it doesn’t exist’ (No hole in the symbolic, in other words,: reality is what can be measured/counted accoridng to the ways we’ve counted, c.f. my Middlesex post). This, we all know is how institutions work whose bureaucracies have been infected with management and marketing principles that now serve as the only legitimation discourse of the instiutiton.
Baltimore, we see, is run, not only by a modern version of the Benthamite philosophy that forms the basis of Dickens’ Hard Times, but by that familiar-to-everyone-these-days combination of corporate Newspeak acting as the basis for legislation that pays no attention to reality, and that uses numbers and spreadsheet data (“is the murder rate up or down…if it’s too high we’ll have to pretend that a few of those murders didn’t really happen/or that we solved them, by arresting someone random from the streets who no-one will care about”): as the only guage for reality. Everything is subordinated to giving the higher echelons of the bureaucracy the ‘numbers’ they need, given that these numbers have now become the only legitimate way of finding out what counts as reality: all else is subjective psychosis.
Thus, some of what I found to be the hardest scenes to watch in the whole show (thus far) occur in the third season. These are not brutal gun fights that leave the streets bloodied (although this season in particular certainly has its share of such things). Instead, the really unwatchable scenes, for me, are the ones that involve smug, smarmy, insouciant, and cautiously corrupt higher-ranking policeman publically humiliating their subordinates for not making their ‘policing data’ turn out the way they’re supposed to and, in the process, being awarded with ever more promotions for their exemplary ‘management’. The worst thing about this, is that we know, from our own experience in considerably less desperate and tragic worlds than that of The Wire that the same kind of principles run the world at large: the university, the public service, and other once last bastions of a different logic, a different way of counting reality, are of course, no exception to this.
In essence: I’ve never seen anything to match The Wire for portraying corruption as so embedded in the heart of a city (and a social system) so capable of completely resisting the efforts of the few remaining honest men and women. At the same time, it’s important to note the way that this pervasive, systematic ‘corruption’ is portrayed.
Essentially, the show tackles corruption in a way that multiplies moral ambiguities at epidemic speed: it’s not just the usual “oh, we get to see the light and dark sides of both dealers and of cops thus humanizing them both” blather: instead, the audience is constantly being given unpleasant forced choices between varying degrees of corruption. Thus a character whom we have seen commit some act of unmitigated bastardry suddenly looks like a crusading hero when he’s moved for complex reasons to oppose the machinations of another character who will himself look like the lesser of two evils in a different situation in which he is not a power-broker.
This focus on systematic corruption means that there’s no evil in the show in the sense of a metaphysical (or naturalized) property attached to certain individuals: there’s no Joker figure continually motivated only by an obscure desire to cause mayhem. Instead, everyone is alternately decent and a monster according to the logic of different situations and how these characters perceive the extent to which their interests can be advanced or threatened. Obviously, the point here is not to deny the existence of human freedom, nor of the mind’s capacity for transcendence: the show -does- portray characters who nobly sacrifice themselves in adherence to principles and who refrain from letting their principles be dictated by the exigencies of a situation: but although these characters are (for certain obvious reasons) protagonists they are never 1) never portrayed as White Knights and more importantly 2) we get, very often, to see these good-guy through the eyes of their colleagues and superiors: i.e. as lunatics who are hubristically setting themselves up for disaster.
To give you a sense of how much this theme of all pervasive and yet graded corruption permeates the show, early in the first season we see one of the show’s most consistently sympathetic characters beating an adolescent with a night-stick, for the minor