The Wire: Seasons 4&5

Social realism is a tricky genre to deal with because it makes a claim to reality while necessarily constructing a world and obeying the laws of drama. Compared to more moralizing works, The Wire achieves the aim that its genre aspires to, perhaps because its creator comes from a journalistic background.

I came late to The Wire and have watched only the final two seasons, but they were full enough appreciate on their own terms. The show uses Baltimore as a case study in how a dysfunctional system continues to operate -- or, rather, how an unhealthy system continues to function. Each season focuses on a particular aspect of the city, setting it against the backdrop of the overall fight against street crime and drug trade. Season 4 examines the school system and questions at what point troubled students can be saved from becoming "corner kids" -- the first position within a career in the drug trade. Season 5 centers on the Baltimore Sun, a manufactured serial killer case, and an illegal wiretap run by vigilante cops. Both were intertwined with plot threads about a reformist governor compromising his campaign promises once in office, a street thug's rise to power in defiance of the established drug kingpins, and the surveillance case against that particularly ruthless thug (among other myriad subplots).

I appreciated Season 4 more perhaps because it showed the world of children who must face the dangers of home, street, and school life with very little assurance that things will work out. More than with the adult characters, you pitied the kids because they didn't have many paths open to them -- they could only choose survival, and being good isn't always the best way to survive. Season 5 perhaps would have been more effective for me if it had used the newspaper as an opportunity to question why or how certain stories are covered and given more attention, which they did touch on, but they wanted to demonstrate a different point. With the level of intricacy and views of the city from every angle, the show made me consider the modern meaning of the polis -- whether we are all part of a community even if we do not interact with people outside of our sphere and what the meaning is behind a those divisions.

Every world that the show explores has its old guard and new guard. The new jacks are usually ambitious and must deal with the established rules of the game in some way. The street thug spills blood, the politician appeases the established city figures, the reporter fabricates his stories. Each world also carries its own language -- the politico's back room deals, the gangster's slang, the policeman's crime scene shorthand -- and the series never offers a decoder or interpreter, but makes you catch the gist of who has been betrayed, deceived, or saved in each scene. Each world also operates by numbers -- the drug dealer needs to gain more corners, the schools need to score on the standardized tests, and the police need to make crime go down (or cook the books to make it look like it did) in order to make the mayor's approval go up. One particularly poignant theme is the distance between poverty and a middle-class success. At more than one point, characters from the street find themselves in a situation that they had looked forward to -- out to a fancy dinner, meeting legit business contacts -- and find themselves uncomfortable, stripped of their confidence. They don't know how to play by those rules. Their families didn't train them, the schools didn't train them, and the corners taught them very different ways to succeed.

These cycles and parallels imply that nothing fundamentally changes in this society. Individuals will succeed or fail, but the city keeps on grinding. If the American Empire is indeed nearing its fall, I think this show will serve as a document of our deteriorating infrastructure.