Lance Mannion: Dickens comes to Charm City

“I am someone who’s very angry with the political structure,” David Simon said in a long 2006 interview with Slate. “The show is written in a 21st-century city-state that is incredibly bureaucratic, and in which a legal pursuit of an unenforceable prohibition [the war on drugs] has created great absurdity.” To Simon, The Wire is about “the very simple idea that, in this postmodern world of ours, human beings—all of us—are worth less. We’re worth less every day, despite the fact that some of us are achieving more and more. It’s the triumph of capitalism. Whether you’re a corner boy in West Baltimore, or a cop who knows his beat, or an Eastern European brought here for sex, your life is worth less. It’s the triumph of capitalism over human value. This country has embraced the idea that this is a viable domestic policy. It is. It’s viable for the few. But I don’t live in Westwood, L.A., or on the Upper West Side of New York. I live in Baltimore.”

I think this is true. Kurt Vonnegut thought it was true, although he used the word "purpose-less" to describe the way capitalism has made people worth less. But Vonnegut thought this was a result of everybody's general stupidity, greed, vanity, and selfishness, and so he could be forgiving towards most of the villains of our culture. Simon, according to Bowden, thinks this is result of specific people's greed, vanity, and selfishness, and he's not forgiving because he is sure they are intelligent and know better.
..Without a comic vision, though, a tragedy is impossible. If you can't believe that there can be happy endings, then the endings of all stories are foregone conclusions. Tragedies are tragic because there is always a point in the story when things could have easily gone the other way.
All the sad and calamitous outcomes that I've seen in The Wire seem overly-determined by the writing to make the point. This is why none of what happens strikes me as tragic, simply as a crying shame.
..
The Wire looks like the news. It's easy to forget while watching it that it isn't the news, or news at all, that what we're watching is fiction and that what isn't fiction is polemic and both are the creations of one man's imagination. Bowden thinks the temptation to treat The Wired as the news isn't just the audience's. It's a temptation for Simon himself and one he may not resist often enough.

links to articles & Wire blogs...


Well-crafted update or Just because you're paranoid doesn't meant they're not out to get you update: As I said up top, I think Simon's on to something, and I really like Fred Clark's summation of one of the essential conflicts in The Wire: "In Simon's fully realized fictional world, the careerists reign and the craftsmen are, inexorably, punished. Their adherence to a different, external set of standards cannot be tolerated by the institutions that control them."