Salon: A classical masterpiece: Laura Miller argues for "The Wire"
'The Wire' is also not like the crime novels produced by some of its most celebrated contributing writers (George Pellecanos who writes for The Wire do you realize that Laura Miller?, Dennis Lehane, Richard Price) because, as is only proper, those books deal in questions answered and narratives resolved. Novels end, but the vast, fascinating, unspooling mess that is the Baltimore of 'The Wire' can have no conclusion. The storytellers may stop telling it, but the story itself will go on.
What "The Wire" is about is the game. The "game" is what the show's black characters call the drug business, but the smarter players know that the game's boundaries are not so finite. Although the series is scrupulously realistic , there is one improbably romantic character: the maverick stick-up artist Omar Little -- beholden to no one, afraid of nothing, resolute in his abstention from curse words and the injury of "taxpayers," and, last but not least, gay. Leave it to Omar, the show's only true outsider, to state the series' premise while pulling off a bit of prime courtroom rhetoric in a scene from Season 2. Testifying against a soldier of the dreaded Barksdale gang, accused by the gang's sanctimonious lawyer of leeching off the drug trade, Omar coolly tells the shyster: "Just like you ... I got the shotgun; you got the briefcase. It's all in the game."
But, like I said, Omar is the exception. The rest of the characters in "The Wire" are trapped, and depending upon their intelligence and insight, they are more or less at peace with that fact.
When thinking about the mood, the ethos of "The Wire," what comes to mind (rather than "War and Peace" or "For Whom the Bell Tolls") is a moment in the last book of "The Iliad" David Simon says he sees as insprtn for The Wire not Shakespeare but the Greek tragedicians when old Priam, the king of Troy, sneaks into the camp of the Greeks to plead with the Greek warrior Achilles to return the body of his son, Hektor. Priam implores Achilles to remember his own father, who hopes to see his son again someday, and who (both men realize) never will.
"A single, all-untimely child he had," Achilles replies speaking of his own father, relenting, "and I give him no care as he grows old, since far from the land of my fathers I sit here in Troy and bring nothing but sorrow to you and your children." From the hotheaded Achilles, this comes as a weary sigh. He is far from the father he loves, embroiled in a pointless war, mourning the death of his best friend and facing a grieving man whose son's corpse he has desecrated in a fit of misdirected rage. Someday he, too, will be similarly bereft. Yet how could it be otherwise? These men are warriors, born to fight; this is what the gods who control their destinies decree. yes I see, this is an ethos like The Wire. and very good Laura Miller substantiates:
The Iliad" is only one poem from a series known as the Epic Cycle ("The Odyssey" is another; the rest are lost), full of dead heroes and the fathers (and mothers and wives and children) who mourn them. This story, too, goes on and on. Death, loss, enslavement, the ruination of all their hopes and dreams, and yet in the midst of realities inevitable as the wine darkness of the sea and the rosy fingers of dawn, there can be heroism, courage, honor.
The characters in "The Wire" inhabit such a world. The gods may have different names; instead of Apollo and Juno pulling the strings, it's the bureaucracy, party politics, the free market: all equally capricious and implacable. Anyone who tries to alter the system -- be it Stringer Bell aiming to turn legit businessman right, Bunny Colvin experimenting with decriminalizing drugs in "Hamsterdam" right or Frank Sobotka struggling to save his beloved stevedores union from its inevitable demise season two? -- will be crushed. The best they can hope for is to clean up one little corner of their world; Bunny may not be able to save the neighborhood, but at the end of Season 4, he managed to save one kid. is that the kid with the shopping cart whatshis name, Bubbles? closed w his view of the world, being expressed to a kid walking with him. they stop at the pile of demolished Hamsterdam and briefly speak with Bunny who is standing there, then they walk on. To thrive, you have to learn to fly low and kiss up right, and if you're unfortunate enough to be afflicted with a sense of vocation unfortunate ~ vocation ~ ambition, you play it like that smooth operator, Bunk Moreland McNulty's partner?, not like that perennial troublemaker, Jimmy McNulty.
The characters in American popular culture are rarely shown to be subject to forces completely beyond their control. American culture is fundamentally Romantic, individualistic and Christian; when it's not exhorting you to "follow your dream" it's reassuring us that in the eleventh hour, we will be saved. We don't do doom. huh. and so, does seem American's like the Odyssey better than the Iliad maybe, at lst it gets popularized more right? bcs it's a journey, has a goal. I'm not the only one who finds in the Iliad more grandour, splendor, despair. oh Achilles, who would not live long. (Auden, The Shield of -.)
"The Wire" is not Romantic but classical: what matters most in its universe is fulfilling your duty and facing the inexorable with dignity. I can't argue that the classical view is superior to the Romantic one; to even introduce the idea that art is meant to nudge us toward moral improvement and social awareness is to concede to Romantic hope. But for some people, in some places, the classical view is more true, and in such cases, the artist's duty is to show us that these lives are no smaller for that. And it is -- as we always, always seem to forget -- not depressing but strangely exhilarating to see this truth about humanity acknowledged for once.

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this is very good. very well done Laura Miller. very of a whole: story - is the game - beholden to it - as in the Iliad - classical truth of "Death, loss, enslavement, the ruination of all their hopes and dreams." make me a syllabus: introduce with this article. watch The Wire. read The Iliad. and Rebecca Bespallof's essay (and can also read the Simone Weil essay republished with it by NYRB, pleasing me as always so specifically - the two small books had been together on my shelf since 1998 in Annapolis - this and NYRB childrens list early on republishing Charlotte Sometimes, it's as if the list is being chosen *by* me)