The Wire "Well who said I did?"

The Wire  "Well who said I did?"   //line to mind 1/18/2015



http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2011/03/the-wire-roundtable-season-1-episode-1-again

// I seem to like this post.  and cmmts by its author.  Noah Berlantsky.
main pnts of cnntn in cmmt discussn are
-----re McNulty   ~ more int if played out more in line w his s1e1 cmmt "Who says I did?"  =  if just did not care (at all, not only - as is true - not caring in re a moral ideal, a hope of justice)
-----re Wallace   show d n play on any resonance btw  here s1e1 scene of Wallace participating w Bodie & Poot brutally beating Johnny on D'Angelo's orders,  and later   Wallace being broken by his role in and sight of beaten-to-death Brandon //


Noah [in post]:  Rewatching doesn’t always add layers. Sometimes it points out roads not taken which might have been better explored.
One of my favorite moments from the first episode occurs a little later, after D’Angelo Barksdale has beaten the murder rap. The judge in the case calls in McNulty to find out (a) why a key witness changed her story, and (b) why McNulty was in court, since it wasn’t his case. McNulty explains to the judge that D’Angelo is the nephew of the current West Baltimore drug kingpin. The gang has beaten a number of cases in court, including a past case of McNulty’s. The judge finally asks, “If it’s not your case, why do you care?” To which McNulty replies, “Well who said I did?”  Again, that’s one of my favorite lines of dialogue probably from the series: McNulty (Dominick West) sells it nicely, looking flat at the judge, with an expression somewhere between slightly amused and blandly unconcerned.  / even ~insouciant. / The point is emphasized later when McNulty chews out his partner Bunk for picking up the phone on a murder call when another squad was up. “This’ll teach you to give a fuck when it ain’t your turn to give a fuck!” he says.
The point here for rewatching /specifically on rewatch, that is/, of course, is that McNulty actually does give a fuck — way, way too much of a fuck as it turns out. He cares so much that, over the course of five seasons, he destroys his marriage, his career, and almost/maybe a second committed romantic relationship.  Which is all well and good as irony goes. /well, I don't know ~ don't know that th moment is ironic in retrospect or just same as on first viewing: ~ a character beat  ? that there is a sense in wh he does not care?  or could choose not to./   But the thing is, I liked it the first time through better.  David Simon on the voice over natters on incessantly about how different the Wire is from other television cop shows — and it is different in many ways. McNulty doesn’t really care about doing right, for example, as he would if he were on, say, [whtvr]. //wh is how I am thinking that line plays. "who says I care?"  d n care in the way of an idealist, about it *being wrong*; he cares that they are getting one over. that the police thus incl him are being outplayed.//  He cares about being the smartest guy in the room and about being smarter than the crooks /y./ . It’s not about good and evil for him; it’s about ego. Which is a useful corrective to a lot of cop-show nonsense, as Simon says.  But whatever he cares about, the point is that he does, and that is not especially new in a cop protagonist, on television or elsewhere.  There was something really refreshing for me about having our hero declare, boldly and apparently in earnest, that it really was nothing in particular to him if the West Baltimore drug gang beat murder number four, or twelve, or whatever. I kind of like that potential McNulty, that callous decoy McNulty, more than I like the funny, smart, but ultimately perhaps more predictable McNulty that we got.   //well so I guess seems to me not a decoy. it actually is nothing in particular to him how terrible the crimes are, and that there fails to be justice.  he does not care = enact moral idealism.   wh I take it noah agrees w, but thinks it still wld play more interestingly if he was all around uncaring about it, rather than caring competitively egoistically.  ~okay.   I may be w Simon on this, that int here for ~protagonist  to have an investment, but not a noble one. not heroic. not moral. /



-Toby: Simon is absolutely right that McNulty is different. The ego about being the smartest guy in the room rather than being Holy-er Than Thou is very important.



-Noah:    Well, I said McNulty was somewhat different from the normal tv show cop. But is he that different from Philip Marlowe? If you broaden your scope just slightly, he doesn’t look all that different.


-Jason: That’s an interesting comparison, Noah, and I’m not sure you’re entirely wrong about McNulty, but it seems to me that here you’ve broadened your scope in a way that actually excludes McNulty. Philip Marlowe is very much outside the system, not a part of it, which is a crucial element of McNulty. Put another way, cops might beat on Marlowe, but even cops that don’t like McNulty would kick the shit out of a street kid who tried to take a swing at him. I think that’s an important difference.  /y. good pnt./



-Jones:  Noah, you’re right that McNulty is ultimately something of a conventional character — the alcoholic, over-working cop who plays by his own rules! But the show needs him to care about something, at least in the first season,.. Nobody in the unit, or higher up in the dept, cares at all about this “shit detail”. So you need *someone* to push the investigation further.


-Noah:  Or to expand a little, you could have a show in which the special detail accomplishes nothing in particular, but just sort of stumbles along. That would probably be more realistic in some sense. The show has a need for drama; McNulty serves that need. There’s a suggestion there in the first episode, though, that he might not. It’s an intriguing idea; the second time through, you can see that it never pans out that way, which it seems to me is kind of a loss.


-Jones:  Well, by the end of the first season, the special detail *hasn’t* actually accomplished anything except to shuffle around some of the drug players, get Wallace killed, and (at least temporarily) torpedo the careers of McNulty and Daniels. (Am I forgetting anything?)
The same goes for pretty much all the seasons. A couple of people go to jail, a couple of people get killed, careers go up or down but the game remains the same.
-Plus, it’s important that the unit seem to make progress early on, for two reasons:
(1) the show’s overall critique of law enforcement policy overall, and drug enforcement in particular, would have less bite if policing were shown to be (practically) useless right from the start.  ..
The endings of seasons 1-3 are so bitter precisely because there’s been a lot of *good* policework done, and it still hasn’t made much of a difference.. Having the unit be more hapless would remove some of the sting, I think and leave the viewer in complacent assumption that actual good policework could do more, without the need for institutional change.
2) The show was a hard enough sell already:   Why is the dialogue so opaque?  Why is the plot so complicated? Why are there so many important characters?  Framing the show as a somewhat conventional police procedural, where cops tie together clues to solve mysteries, at least gives viewers some kind of hook at the start. Over the first season, you realise that it’s not really a procedural — not primarily at any rate — but by then you’re probably already interested enough to stick with it. If it had been a Beckettian display of futility right from the start, no one would have watched it.  As opposed to almost no one.


-Noah: .. I actually enjoy McNulty’s performance overall. The cop I never believed was Freamon. He just seemed too good to be true.  and I never believed the acting.  I just realized that it’s a part you could imagine Morgan Freeman playing, which is not good.   /heh, int, right, bcs means ~ too  well  too what?  d n only play good guys.  but plays ~ archtypes?/   I really liked Stringer as a character though. And I thought it was pretty interesting that Stringer participates in Brandon’s murder, the one murder he does directly participate in, right? I think that’s pretty clearly linked to homophobia — which works nicely against the fact that his most intense personal relationship is with Avon.  /int, v good cnnxn.




/ .. few int cmmts re Lester  w &  Shardene .. /
-Noah:  Jeez, everybody hates Shardene. The Freamon/Shardene romance was the thing about his character I liked the best. I don’t really buy that it’s an abuse of power; she’s grown up and seems pretty much able to take care of herself. He’s solicitous and sweet; why shouldn’t she find him appealing? It’s one of the few relationships on the show that isn’t fucked up.
And her info actually was quite important; she told them where the office was, which allowed them to put it under observation, which allowed them to bust D’Angelo and Avon as well



________________________________________________

Noah [in post]:  
Wallace’s execution is perhaps the grimmest, most emotionally wrenching moment of the entire season. In retrospect, his character is almost as important as D’Angelo’s. And, as a result, the second time through this scene of the beating should be telling us something, not only about D’Angelo, but also about Wallace. The Wallace we know later is so upset by brutality that he first becomes an addict and then turns his crew in to the police. /y./ The Wallace here, on the other hand, is so comfortable with brutality that he enthusiastically joins in beating a young man almost to death.
The point isn’t that the characterization is inconsistent. People are capable of different levels of brutality at different times, and there is, after all, a line between “beaten almost to death” and “beaten to death.” /y./  Still, if you’re going to talk about that line, you probably do in fact need to talk about it, and the Wire doesn’t. For that matter, Simon doesn’t mention it in his voice over. Rewatching here doesn’t so much add resonance as reveal that there isn’t any. The creators didn’t link what Wallace does here to what Wallace does later. As a result the the possible connections just sit there, looking a little lost.

- Alex: Isn’t this, though, the original sin of all popular episodic art– making it up as one goes along, and having to reconcile past and present in retrospect?   ... The same applies, of course, to serialised comics. Though a few cartoonists, notably Chris Ware and Chester Brown, are willing to redact their once-serialised stuff...

-Noah:  Yes, it’s definitely the result of serialization — and probably inevitable. At the same time, I think there’s a tendency with The Wire (promoted by Simon) since it is so complicated and much is thought through, to presume that everything is thought through. It’s worth pointing out that there are holes, I think.  /yes. does seem Sion promotes that tendency, and so invites us noticing where show does not live up to being so fully evidently thought through. playing out the resonances./


-Jones: Still on Wallace:  .. The show doesn’t explicitly link the two reactions, but  .. (4) I don’t know what it would mean for a show to “think about” the difference, or to think about anything, for that matter.

-Noah:  A work thinking about its themes is a fairly common metaphor. It just means that it thematizes material, or addresses it, or does something with it. The show does nothing [with] .. and doesn’t appear to be aware that there should /could/  be a link between what Wallace does in that first episode and the kind of person he’s shown to be later. You can fill in all sorts of reasons or explanations for why that’s so, or for what the differences might be, or for why Wallace behaves one way in the first situation and another in the second. ...There’s nothing wrong with that; thinking about why the first situation is different from the second and why Wallace’s reactions were different is interesting.  But it’s not something that the show spends any time on.  It prefers to hammer home the much less interesting, and repeatedly hammered home point, that D’Angelo is uncomfortable with the street.  /y I see that./  In other words, it spends time belaboring the obvious characterization without thinking about (there it is again) the more subtle and complicated one.  I find that disappointing.
I suspect the reason is, hey, it’s a tv show. Which is fine. But doesn’t make it less disappointing, really.


-Noah:  I don’t think that there’s no way you can make the character consistent. I just don’t think that the show does much with that first incident. It isn’t referenced again; it’s not discussed in the voice over; it’s just not integrated into the character by the show (though you can obviously do the work yourself).







~
-Jen: You may not like something they did, but it is all based on 100% reality. That is why the show works. If they started making shit up somewhere it would stop being realistic. Calling someone unrealistic in The Wire, is not understanding reality.
-Noah: Oh, come on. The show is fiction; it’s not reported. There are many things on the show that are heightened or tweaked. People involved in the drug trade have said the show gets various things wrong — from the level of insubordination allowed to the number of women involved (too few.) I’ve talked to people who have worked as cops who find things about the cops dicey; I’ve talked to people who have worked in inner city schools who find those portrayals dicey.  The idea that the Wire is some kind of unmediated Truth is an insult to all the actors and creators who made a really quite wonderful piece of fiction.
-Jen, this is silly. If you think the Wire is perfect in every way, that’s cool. Go with God.



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