“Born into this”: a review of three seasons of HBO’s “The Wire”
crime of having basically shoved one of her fellow police officers. It’s a brutal scene, that comes at the climax of an episode, and that places most of the violence off-camera such that we get the disturbing vision of the beating continuing as the credits roll in our living rooms. We’re just left with the feeling that even the show’s “good po-lice” still have their moments of relishing the violence that, it is, after all, so often part of their de facto if not de jure brief to inflict especially when it comes to one of the show’ frequent, futile ‘let’s appease the media’ with a few raids on the housing projects). Casual police violence to witnesses that would have led to a whole story arc in other shows are mainly shrugged off by even the most sensitive of characters: it’s the way things /‘battles have to be picked’ / and so on.
Last of all I suppose I should attempt some criticism of the show. The weakest character in the Wire is undoubtedly at least to my mind) its putative protagonist (despite the excellent performance by English actor Dominic West).
West’s character McNulty, though undoubtedly a likable Irish-American rogue is too much of a cop-show stereotype (hard-drinking, divorced, unable to quite make his alimony payments &c., dedicated to solving the case to the detriment of everything else in his life) to be of comparable interest to some of the other characters, despite the fact that he does have a 3-dimensionality that elevates him above his equivalents in more pedestrian programs. But even the relative blandness of McNulty is really a small flaw, because the show never seems to make the character more than a lynchpin: a familiar face that we can follow into unfamiliar parts of town with some sympathy, and some recognition. In this sense, the show is from its beginning, and ever more from its first season onwards, an ensemble piece where the ensemble recalls not only a modern Dickens but his inevitable French “version” (to say a phrase that would have me lynched in Paris) Victor Hugo.
Lastly, I should also say, at the risk of anti-climax that the show has one character, who, I’m tempted to say belongs to the literary-treasure house of the world, despite the fact that his presence in the show marks the intersection of the world of The Wire with something from a completely different genre. I am talking here about the character of Omar Little (played by Michael K. Williams).
Omar is a character, who among all of the rhythmic, poetic dialogue, has perhaps the most rhythmical delivery and poetic phrasing of any of the characters: it’s a delight to watch him saunter between one scene and the next, scattering his strange drawling in the argot of the Baltimore street like a kind of gangster Zen master whose always one step away from turning to the camera for a Shakespearean soliloquy that will have the audience in tears. Omar’s role is brilliantly, wonderfully preposterous: a scarred, openly gay, fearless, muscular, shotgun-carrying lunatic/urban-cum-avenging angel who makes his living (as he happily admits to anyone who asks) stealing drugs from other drug-dealers at shot-gun point, in between sleeping with handsome young men, and (later in the series) keeping together a tight family-like “crew” that includes gun-toting lesbian couples of a kind that might have sprung from a late night drinking session between Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino.
If you think that this seems like a strange carry-over from the graphic-novel superhero story you’d be right. And yet (the Dickensian thing again) Omar is, like Estella, or Sidney Carson or Scrooge or Jean Valjean or Eponine or Monsieur Thernadiér or Claude Frollo is completely believable as much as he is ludicrously extravagant, and present for the purpose of delighting the audience. In fact, the poignancy of what happens to his character, as the show goes on is all the greater because it’s like seeing an Immortal character from a more comic-book kind of film (Clint Eastwood’s character from a spaghetti Western, or even “Iron Man”) suddenly being forced to realise that not even the man with super-powers is immune to the toll taken by everyday life on the streets of Baltimore. (Oh, and a propos of nothing, Williams should definitely be cast as ‘Thor’ in the upcoming film of the same name.)
Thus, for all of Omar’s extravagance and charisma, we never doubt that his prototype could have really once walked the streets of the real (as opposed to fictional) Baltimore. It is interesting on this note that, even the actor who plays Omar apparently has – more than anyone else in the cast — a background most similar to that of his character. One example of this is the fact that the enormous scar that marrs Omar’s face is not the result of any labour by The Wire’s make-up department.
What this demonstrates is the