Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American Studies
English Language and Literature
Denis Cisár
The Narrative Structure, Corruption and
Social Class in the First Series of 'The Wire'
Master ’s Diploma Thesis
Supervisor: Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph.D.
2015
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
…………………………………………….. Author’s signature
I would like to thank my supervisor, Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph.D., for his guidance, valuable advice and especially his patience with me.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction ...... 5
2. Narrative Structure of The Wire ...... 13
2.1. Scene, Basic Unit of Analysis ...... 14
2.2. Serial Continuality and Character Development ...... 29
2.3. The City of Baltimore ...... 32
2.3. Narrative Style ...... 43
3. The Corruption and Hierarchy in The Wire ...... 50
4. Conclusion ...... 65
5. Works Cited ...... 67
6. English Résumé ...... 71
7. Czech Résumé ...... 72
1. Introduction
It is more than ten years since the HBO presented its critically acclaimed television show The Wire . At present the show has a reputation amongst the fictional television narratives, it is ranked as the first in the user rankings in the list of television series on the IMDb.com, the international movie database. Because of its complex narrative structure and incapability to accept the stereotypical forms of storytelling, the show gradually gains the popularity among the general viewers, which it deserves. The series may at first glance seem to be a typical police drama show, yet the producer of the show David Simon created a web of Baltimore characters, settings and institutions, which differ immensely from those presented in conventional television drama.
The main aim of this thesis is to discuss the issue of corruption in the context of
HBO's television drama series The Wire and its complex narrative structure. This thesis will analyse the first series of the show, which depicts the war between the drug business and law enforcement, situated mainly in (West) Baltimore. The show depicts the flawed system in which institutions demonstrate absolute power over the individuals, who are unable no matter how hard they try, to affect or change the system.
Simon in his interview for Rafael Alvarez's The Wire: Truth be Told explains that:
The Wire depicts a world in which capital has triumphed
completely, labour has been marginalized and monied interests
have pruchased enough political infrastructure to prevent reform.
It is a world in which the rules and values of the free market and
maximized profit have been mistaken for a social framework, a
world where institutions themselves are paramount and every day
human beings matter less. (Alvarez 30)
5 The show itself is cyclical in nature and compared to conventional television shows does not offer a closure, not in particular episodes or as a whole. The show ends with many arrests, yet the situation on the streets does not change and neither does the corrupt system of law enforcement that is presented in the show. The arrests do not change the situation of the drug business in general, because as one drug dealer is arrested, another takes his place immediately, in a capitalist tradition to fill the void on the market and produce capital. What the show does, is presentation of flaws of the capitalist society, reflected in the organizations and institutions of law enforcement and drug trade in a metropolitan city, such as Baltimore.
The Wire does not produce a solution or the type of change the system needs, what it does is that it critically presents these issues and emphasizes the need for the change in the system even though it does not produce a proposal on how to change it.
The show is far beyond the conventional shows in which a hero appears from out of nowhere and rises above the corrupted forces of the world he lives in. It is quite the opposite as Helena Sheehan and Shaemus Sweeney write in their study The Wire and the World: narrative and metanarrative :
The Wire is not a drama about individuals rising above institutions to triumph and achieve redemption and catharsis. It is a drama where those institutions thwart the ambitions and aspirations of those they purportedly exist to serve. It is a drama where individuals with hubris enough to challenge this dynamic are invariably mocked, marginalised or crushed by forces indifferent to their efforts or to their fates. It is a drama where truth and justice are often defeated as deceit and injustice are rewarded.
(Sheehan 4)
One of the main arguments that this thesis presents is that the show makes use of the serial format, which will be discussed in the second chapter, in order to present
6 complex and realistic developments of characters, without producing a closure to particular episodes or the series as a whole, as is typical for conventional contemporary television shows. The thesis also argues that one of the most distinctive ways the flaws and corruption of the system are depicted in the show, is in the establishment of parallels between different settings and characters of the show. These parallels which are reflected through, scenes which serve as a basic unit of analysis for this thesis, are one of the most outspoken characteristics of the show, which creates a demand on the viewer to be far more engaged with the show and its complex development, than it is with any conventional television series.
These parallel scenes are characteristic in connection to different characters, that may not even know each other, as they may have never met. The show puts these characters into contrast, by presenting them in scenes that reflect each other in its motifs such as; raising questions of social distance, race, corruption, flawed system and its hierarchy and other. Thanks to these reflective scenes the show producers are able to connect characters, which are isolated from each other by the barriers and boundaries of the city.
In order to properly discuss and analyse these circumstances it is essential for this thesis to build a framework for further analysis. To do this, the thesis will discuss the narrative structure of the show through gradual analysis of its most distinctive and original tools of narration. The thesis will give enough space to discuss the narrative structure of the show and its features in the second chapter.
It is the narrative structure that makes the show complex, as opposed to conventional contemporary television shows. The basic unit of analysis of the show will be the scene. One of the distinctive television features of the show is presentation of
7 messages and ideas in parallel scenes, a model of narrative strategy, that has been mentioned earlier.
Among other important aims of this thesis, is also to emphasize the importance of the city, as an element that arches over the whole story and is a connecting link between the characters which would otherwise, due to social borders be isolated from each other. The characters may at first glance have nothing in common but they are often linked through similar conditions, motifs, setting and stories generated by the producers of the show, which are always connected through the cityscape. The city's different districts and parts, are presented in the show against each other, with their distinctive aspects, contrasting each other and creating parallels, yet together they create a compact frame for the whole show.
The references and links between different characters may be presented in the show in a very subtle way, which creates a demand on the viewer to pay attention to detail and become very much engaged with the show. The show's narrative complexity makes it very hard for a causal viewer to enjoy it.
Among other features of narrative strategy discussed in this work, is the episodic continuality of the show, which adds to the complexity of characters presented by the show. Thanks to the continual format of the show, the producers are able to create complex characters, which may be at the beginning presented in a certain way, while throughout the series, develop and surprise the viewer by how different they appear in the end. One such character is Lester Freamon, who joins the detail led by Lieutenant
Daniels and plays no important role in the beginning of the series. It comes as a surprise that Freamon is actually a “natural police” as Bunk refers to him and becomes an indispensable member of the unit. This kind of complex character development resembles the kind of development characters go through in novels and therefore the
8 show is by many referred to as a visual novel, rather than a television drama show. This continuality enables the producers to depict the characters and events against each other, creating the parallels, that this thesis considers to be the cornerstone for the social critique of the capitalist institutions that care much more about their own profit than the
“war on drugs” which is in the show presented as war on the underclass. As Daniels correctly states in the ninth episode: ”you start to follow the money... and you don't know where the fuck it's going to take you. (“Game Day”) referring to the fact that the detail has made an economic connection between the drug business and senator Clay
Davis, when they caught his aide with the money from the projects.
The thesis discusses the role of this continuality within the works of scholars such as Jason Mittel, a professor of American studies and film and media culture at
Middlebury College, with a background in research of history of television, media and culture. He is the author of two books, Genre and Television and Television and
American Culture. This thesis uses Mittel's findings on narrative complexity of television shows to its advantage in discussing the originality of the show as opposed to conventional television shows.
The last aspect of narration, that the second chapter will discuss is the combination of narrative styles that make the show distinctive and original. The show's producers make use of combination of documentary and dramatic styles, which make the show very realistic in depiction and attractive for the viewer. The show's genre is very similar to a procedural from a police environment, even though the show is not designed to produce a closure in the form of solving a particular crime in a single episode, as is typical for detective or police procedural. The show is focused on complexity of the development of the plot rather than closure and usage of cliffhangers at the end of every episode to keep the audience excited, as is typical for the
9 conventional television show format such as CSI . The similarity between the show and a police procedural lies within the way the show presents all the procedures and mechanics of a law enforcement organization.
The show emphasizes the importance of knowledge as a source of power which enables anyone to achieve his goals and do his job effectively. One of the ways to achieve this power is through surveillance, which is in the show presented as one of the main techniques of obtaining information and at the same time is a crucial part of the style of narration of the show, as the viewer is presented by shots that are voyeuristic in their nature, such as shots made from the perspective of surveillance cameras. The show is specific in using parallels, it creates them also between different ranks of law enforcement, drug trade and the character of Omar Little, who all use surveillance to their advantage.
It is not only the content of the show, that resembles a documentary, the ways in which various shots of the show are produced are also influenced by the documentary style, that the producers use. Among the features of the documentary style used by the creators of the show that this thesis discusses are; The voyeuristic perspective of camera, 3x4 aspect ratio of the show, diegetic origin of sounds in the show and David
Simon's journalistic background. The chapter also discusses the ways the producers combine the documentary and dramatic style in their own unique way which adds to the complexity of the shows narrative structure.
The Wire is an intriguing Television series produced by HBO between 2002
2008. The show is a realistic depiction of Baltimore drug scene as well as the law enforcement. Both of these are depicted in the show and the main aim of the third chapter of this thesis is to discuss the issues of corruption and social class in the first series of the show, within the framework established in the second chapter ,which is
10 concerned with the narrative structure of the show. The show is full of contrasts between the two environments, that law enforcement and the criminal underground, yet one is able to find more similarities between the two, than could be at first expected.
Corruption is presented as one of the main forces that destabilizes and inhibits the ability of law enforcement to pursuit its goals in protecting the population of the city and preventing crime, as well as arresting the heads of the criminal underground. As the main aim of the thesis as a whole, is to argue the prominence of parallelism in the show, this aspect of narrative strategy will be also discussed and scenes, which produce reflection between the law enforcement and drug trade, will be used as evidence in discussing the prominence of corruption and its debilitating effect on the system in which institutions, which seek capitalist profit, have godlike powers over the fates of characters depicted by the show.
The thesis will draw the core of its evidence from the scenes of the first episode of the show. In order to produce a proper analysis of the different aspects of the show the thesis will also use secondary textual sources concerned with the production of television shows in general such as Jason Mittel's study titled "Narrative Complexity in
Contemporary American Television" and other sources concerned with the production of The Wire in particular, such as Jacob Weisberg's "The Wire on Fire: Analyzing the best show on television" in which Weisberg claims that The Wire does something no other television show has done before, it portrays:
the social, political, and economic life of an American city with
the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great
literature ... The drama repeatedly cuts from the top of Baltimoreʹs
social structure to its bottom, from political fund ‐raisers in the
11 white suburbs to the subterranean squat of a homeless junkie.
(Weisberg)
Among sources concerned with the show itself stand out those, which present great insight to the show's production such as interviews with the shows creator David Simon or
Rafael Alvarez's The Wire: Truth Be Told a work which offers a sneak peak behind the scenes of the show, as well as insight into the production of the show and all the struggles which the producers had to face.
But not only the production background of the show is essential to the
understanding of the ways it affects the audience and offers such an authentic
experience of the environements it depicts. In order to understand these one must also
produce appropriate information from outside of the context of the show. In order to do
so, this work will offer substantial amount of information from secondary textual
sources focused on several fields, concerned with the life and structure of metropolitan
American city. It is important to mention Taylor, Ralph B . Breaking Away from Broken
Windows: Baltimore Neighborhoods and the Nationwide Fight against Crime, Grime,
Fear, and Decline. His book is not only concerned with the strategies of the law
enforcement structures in fighting crime, but also discusses the political background to
the whole issue and the role of governement in the struggle to clear the streets of drugs
and crime.The thesis makes use of sources that are concerned with the law enforcement
environment, its mechanics and structure in order to find a way to understand the
motivations behind the corrupt behaviour of some of the characters depicted in the
show. Using these sources will help comprehend how different components of the
system work and what principles are essential for these mechanics and strategies
depicted by the show. One such source that is of great help in understanding such
peculiarities is the Encyclopedia of Law Enforcement edited by Larry E. Sullivan.
12 2. Narrative Structure of The Wire
In order to analyse particular patterns and features of narration, the following chapter will discuss the tools the producers use to narrate the story;, camera perspective, composition of scenes, style of narration and setting of the show, all of which help to make the show realistic and enable the producers to raise the questions of corruption, capitalism and social inequality. In this chapter these tools will be discussed in order to establish a framework for further analysis of the shows main themes and topics.
This section will discuss the form and narrative strategies that the producers of the show use in order to attract the audience and make the show different from other conventiona shows. In order to give a systematic analysis of the show itself it is important to analyse these techniques from a broader perspective as well as from a closer one.
Every narrative has to have to be organized and structured so that the viewer is able to understand it logically. Most strategies are based on a linear system in which the order of shots, scenes and episodes is presented chronologically. This way the construction of the show makes it easier for both the production and for the viewer to understand it. This is also the case of The Wire which is sequenced chronologically with only very little retrospective. Television drama shows typically present some kind of introduction to the characters and their early development with different ways to meet each other. After the introduction, the characters are presented with a single or multiple crises which construct the core of the show resulting within the finishing episodes in a climax, solution and resolution. The Wire is different in that it does not produce a closure within a given time frame of the show, it operates on a principle of circularity and maintains a sense of status quo even at the end of the series.
13 The Wire is a television show with a very complex narrative strategy, which is in many ways inovative and different from the conventional television series with a strong emphasis on character development and serial continuality. It fits Jason Mittel's category of television shows demarcating "narrative complexity”. Mittel in his article for The Velvet Light Trap "Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American
Television" writes that he believes that "American television of the past twenty years will be remembered as an era of narrative experimentation and innovation, challenging the norms of what the medium can do."(Mittel 29)
What Mittel also claims is that even though there are still more conventional television shows broadcasted by American television:
narrative complexity offers a range of creative opportunities and
palette of audience responses that are unique to the television
medium and thus should be studied and appreciated as a key
development in the history of American narrative forms. (Mittel
30)
Mittel includes The Wire in his list of contemporary complex television shows. Such complex television shows differ from the conventional ones by multiple story lines, large amount of characters presented and their complex development throughout the story, a very complex narrative and mixture of styles and forms of narration.
2.1 Scene, Basic Unit of Analysis
The basic unit of analysis throughout the whole thesis will be a scene. This thesis will use the definition of scene from Christian Metz's Film Language: A
Semiotics of the Cinema : "The scene is defined as the duration of time that contains two or more camera shots and shows action that is spatially and temporally continuous."
14 (Metz 179) The scenes analysed in this text are selected in order to establish a ground for analysing of narrative strategy, corruption, and social class in The Wire . There are two main functions that the scene selected may fulfil in relation to the story the show;
They may present an event which establishes the main course of the story or present an event or a depiction of secondary information, which may not be essential for the main course of the plot, yet are still essential for the analysis of the show as a whole. For a proper analysis of the show it is important to realize what roles different scenes have and how they affect the storyline and the setting of the show. These tools are of great help in understanding of the messages and deeper issues every show communicates through its depiction. A single scene may have more than one function and may contribute to different strata of meaning.
To discuss the story from the perspective of events that happen and affect the story it is important to divide the events that happen into two different parts. There are the events that are essential the course of the story, for the purposes of this thesis these events will be referred as major events. On the other hand there are events that do not affect the course of the show itself, but affect the way some aspects of the show are perceived by the viewer, these will be referred to as minor events. The first type, major events cannot be omitted without changing the whole story and its course. The minor events that help characterize and define different aspects and setting of the story, can be omitted or replaced without changing the course of the show. The way how the story unfolds is presented by the minor events and the core of the story itself is presented by major events.
It is usual in television that the minor events only begin later in the story after the viewer is presented with the major course of the story. M. J. Porter and his colleagues in their article titled "Re(de)Fining Narrative Events Examining Television
15 Narrative Structure" for the Journal of Popular Film and Television discuss the scenes that include minor events, they refer to them as "satellite scenes" and claim they play important roles such as:
They fill in the gaps for the reader, provide continuity between scenes,
elaborate on a character, introduce a new character, explain or clarify the
basic conflict of the series, or provide some needed relief after an intense
scene. These satellite scenes present information that elaborates on the
story without moving the story along its sequential path. If the satellite
scene were eliminated, the reader of the text would still be able to follow
the skeletal structure of the narrative. The actual story would remain
intact. (Porter 5)
It is very common for a detective narrative to begin with a murder which sets the main course of the show and later presents the viewer with different characters and settings, yet this is not the case of The Wire .
In The Wire the very first scenes of the first episode of the first series "The
Target" in many ways predicts and characterizes the setting and atmosphere of the rest of the series. The very first shots the viewer is presented with are the shots of streams of blood with police and ambulance sirens (which are ever present in the scenes set in the project environment) and the light from police beacons reflected from the surface of the blood stains on the road. These shots present the images of, not only what happens as a consequence of one's criminal behaviour, these images are much more important, because they present the ever lasting danger that the inhabitants of the less fortunate parts of Baltimore have to go through.
The social class is a major part of the show as it depicts the lives of such inhabitants, some of which are crime victims, others are crime perpetrators. The show is
16 so complex in depiction of these characters ,that one cannot simply differentiate between the two, as the categories dissolve and blend together.
The very next scene where an anonymous police officer collects the evidence, bullet casings, forecasts the painstaking work of the police force, that has to be done in order to search for and find the criminals. The show in its almost documentary style will present all the procedures and bureaucracy that the law enforcement officers have to go through, in order to apprehend their targets. What follows is the interview of one of the shows most prominent characters, detective McNulty with a friend of the victim:
McNullty: So, your boy's name is what?
Witness:Snot.
McNullty: You called the guy Snot?
Witness: Snotboogie, yeah.
McNullty: "Snotboogie." He like the name?
Witness:What?
McNullty: Snotboogie. This kid whose mama went to the trouble of christening
him Omar lsaiah Betts?You know, he forgets his jacket...so his nose starts
running, and some asshole...instead of giving him a Kleenex, he calls him
"Snot."So, he's "Snot" forever. Doesn't seem fair.
Witness: Life just be that way, I guess.
McNullty: So who shot Snot?
Witness: I ain't going to no court. Motherfucker ain't have to put no cap in him
though.
McNullty: Definitely not.
Witness: He could've just whipped his ass, like we always whip his ass.
McNullty: I agree with you.
17 Witness: He gonna kill Snot. Snot been doing the same shit since I don't know
how long. Kill a man over some bullshit. I'm saying, every Friday night...in the
alley behind the cut rate, we rolling bones, you know? All the boys from around
the way, we roll till late.
McNullty: Alley crap game, right?
Witness: And like every time, Snot, he'd fade a few shooters. Play it out till the
pot's deep. Then he'd snatch and run.
McNullty: Every time?
Witness: Couldn't help hisself.
McNullty: Let me understand you. You let him do that?
Witness: We catch him and beat his ass.But ain't nobody ever go past that.
McNullty: I gotta ask you. If every time Snotboogie would grab the money and
run away...why'd you even let him in the game?
Witness: What?
McNullty: If Snotboogie always stole the money, why'd you let him play?
Witness: Got to. This America, man. ("The Target")
This scene represents a minor event in the show, as neither the victim nor the witness play an important role in the course of the storyline and neither of them will occur again in the show. The whole conversation quoted above is essential for the background of the show. It basically addresses the essential issues, that are presented by the first season of the show and will be discussed in this work. The first part of the conversation concerning the name of the victim is fundamental because it expresses the notion of how unimportant the lives and identities of the poor people are, the lives of representatives of lower social classes. The nicknaming in such communities is very common, yet as McNulty states it does not seem fair, the boy died for no serious reason
18 and the people who know him, do not even know his real name. As if being called
Snotboogie was not enough, the boy was killed without a serious reason.
Killings, murders and other crimes are a part of life in the projects, it is not fair, yet as the witness claims: "Life just be that way, " ("The Target") McNullty who throughout the show demonstrates his contempt for the corrupt and broken system again and again, takes a moment to ponder upon this injustice and contrast that is depicted between how important an individual is in a flawed capitalist system and how important one can be for someone else, such as one's mother.
The flaws of the capitalist system are symbolized here through the fact, that
Snotboogie is killed for a few dollars, that everyone knew he was going to try to snatch anyway. These flaws of the system which is criticized throughout the whole show by the producers and McNulty and the contempt for the broken system is further represented in the other half of the conversation. McNulty and the witness both are unable to comprehend the fact that Snot was killed without a serious reason. That is just the way the system is set. In the projects people kill each other and they do not have to have a real reason for it. The life in projects from a certain perspective is very much as the game that the boys have been playing in the alley. It is a gamble, yet as the viewer is constantly being reminded, the game even though it is a gamble has its rules. The rules of the game and drug trade are a crucial aspect of the criminal environment as it is and will be discussed in a later chapter. It is important to point out that, when someone breaks the rules of "the Game", the consequences are very serious and any kind of cheating in "the Game" is punishable, sometimes the cheater escapes with a beating, at other times it may end up as it does with Snotboogie.
The other thing McNulty is unable to comprehend, is why does the system allow the cheaters to play even though everyone knows they cheat. The same situation occurs
19 at all levels of the law enforcement as well as politics. The problem is that the corruption is not only disregarded at many occasions, it is many times promoted behind closed doors and curtains. One of the most apparent messages of the show is, that the corruption in its broadest sense, as a depravity from ethics and morality, can be find everywhere, even character such as McNulty succumbs to temptations. McNulty is a heavy drinker and known adulterer, even one of his best friends Bunk, tells him at one point in the eight episode of the first series: "You're no good for people Jimmy"
("Lessons").
The answer to McNulty's question: Why they let Snootbogie play even though they knew he would try to steal the money eventually? Is very prosaic and characteristic for the message the show tries to convey: "Got to. This America, man.” ("The
Target")The irony of that statement is very clear. At one hand America is famous as
“the land of opportunity” therefore even though they knew about the habit that
Snotboogie had, they would not deny him the opportunity to play. Peter Calthorpe who is a San Fransisco's urban planner and designer creates a parallel between the American
Dream and American Metropolis in his book The next American Metropolis: Ecology,
Community, and the American Dream :
The American Dream is an evolving image and the American
Metropolis is its ever changing reflection. The two feed one
another in a complex, interactive cycle. (Calthorpe 15)
An American city is a place full of opportunities, and as such is a great place for everyone to follow his American Dream which is according to Glenn D. Smith the "gold standard by which we measure individual success and failure” (Smith 223) in the
American society. Of course what this means is that the notion of "the land of
20 opportunity” can be tainted by corruption too and that in America, it depends on one's own discretion, whether he would use the opportunity he gets in a just way or not.
The first scenes of the series discussed earlier are minor events, because they do not influence the storyline and course of the show, yet they are very important as they are part of the style and form in which the show is presented to the audience. It is important to point out that minor and major events play equal roles in the production and success of a television show. Both minor and major events are equally important as parts of the narrative strategy and the way the narrative is structured in a television show.
Also when watching the show chronologically, one does not realize the importance of a particular scene in the context of the whole show, therefore it is not possible for the viewer to always distinguish between a major event and a minor one right at the moment these events are presented to him. M. J. Porter and his colloeagues in their "Re(de)Fining Narrative Events Examining Television Narrative Structure." discuss this a an issue of "Initial perception versus final perception. The perceived function of a scene may change once the entire narrative has been examined." (Porter 7)
A scene may at first seem as a major scene such as the very first scene in which
McNulty investigates the murder of Snotboogie, yet the viewer later realizes, that the investigation of this particular homicide is not an essential part of the storyline, yet it is of great importance as a foreshadowing of how the shows mechanics work. Every scene has to be put within the broader perspective of the whole series, in order to be properly analysed.
Unlike minor events, the major events indicate the course of the show and the development of the plot. Major events occur in the story when important decisions are made, that can possible change the course of the story and send it in two or more
21 different directions. Such a major event would occur if, for example a criminal would have to choose between running from the police and turning himself in. Both decisions would change the course of the whole story creating two different storylines; one in which the criminal avoids being captured by the police force and the other where he struggles in a prison environment.
A scene depicting a major event in The Wire is presented in the first episode of the show "The Target" which has been already mentioned. It is a scene that sets the course of the whole first series. It begins in the Judge Phelan's office, where McNulty was summoned. Neither McNulty nor the viewer has any idea at the time, what the effect of talking to Judge Phelan about the Barksdale crew "The crew that's been running Franklin Terrace for a year" will have on his current position in the law enforcement and his career. McNulty is not aware at that moment that he is breaking certain unwritten rules of law enforcement. He is breaking the chain of command by talking to the Judge about the Barksdale crew, without first consulting it, with his direct superior, Major Rawls, which will have devastating effect on their relationship. It is interesting that even though McNulty is definitely a "natural police" he is also very ignorant in the politics of the law enforcement.
There is no telling at first glance, whether this scene depicts a major or minor event in the story of the show, as neither the viewer nor McNulty are aware of the effect that his conversation with Judge Phellan will have. The audience has to continue watching episode after episode, in order to understand the importance of seemingly unrelated events. The aspect of interconnectedness of scenes and events that only later in consequence affect each other is one of the most intriguing features of The Wire, which add to the complexity and re watchability of the show.
22 An important part of the whole issue is that by breaking the rules of chain of command. McNulty betrays the trust of his superiors and immediately loses loyalty and respect of many of his colleagues, because his actions are perceived as disloyal to the department itself. The hierarchy of the department and loyalty to direct supervisors are sacred in the law enforcement environment, even when greater good such as catching dangerous criminals is at stake. This corruptive element transcends the whole storyline and is presented as one of the fatal flaws of law enforcement that interferes with the effectivity of the police in apprehension of criminals. The show depicts a contrast between the characters who accept the flaws and those who do not. McNulty refuses to accept the inefficiency of the system. Herc on the other hand knows that: "It's the chain of command, baby, the shit always rolls downhill. " ("The Target") even though he has no idea, about the sophisticated ways of catching criminals, that McNulty is exceptionally talented in.
McNulty himself only realizes the consequences of his action, that set the course for the rest of the first season of the show, when Major Rawls summons him to his office. The setting of the office scene is one of the characteristic features, not just for the first episode, but for the whole first season, as similar scenes are repeated throughout the whole story, not only in the law enforcement department, but in the drug trade headquarters too. These scenes create a characteristic motif of the show that is reflected in a number of parallel scenes. There are patterns, which are characteristic for these scenes too, patterns such as dim light, private atmosphere with closed doors and presentation of power by character positions, meaning that the character with more power and authority is always standing, while the character with less power and authority is asked or ordered to sit down. Such situations surface when higher ranked officers, such as Deputy of Operations talks to Lieutenant Daniels, or Avon Barksdale
23 talks to his nephew D'Angelo Barksdale. The characters are able to speak freely behind the closed doors, making it possible for the viewer to observe the politics, flaws of the system and corruption in its rawest forms.
McNulty enters major's office in his blissful ignorance and is immediately informed to sit down and assume the inferior position by Rawls: "Sit the fuck down,
Detective. " During his conversation with Rawls McNulty is addressed in many different ways by Rawls, yet none of them are very flattering such "you backstabbing, smartass piece of shit" or "you insubordinate little fuck". It is a scene depicting a major event of the show, it informs the audience, where the show is heading. The scene also raises a number of issues and messages that are crucial for the understanding of how the things really work in a law enforcement organization of a metropolitan American city.
The scene demonstrates what happens when someone breaks the unwritten rules, that are interwoven in the hierarchy of law enforcement system. The show reflects a similar pattern of rules and punishment for their infringement in the drug trade business, creating parallels between the two organizations. McNulty realizes the consequences of his actions, which include worse things than the task of writing a report for the Deputy of Operations, Burrell, as he is informed by Rawls, who is sticking up both of his middle fingers to McNulty demonstrating that: "This one over here is going up your narrow fucking lrish ass. And this bad boy over here is in your fucking eye. " ("The
Target") McNulty is told that he has the undivided attention of his Major, yet he does not realize is that the major will do everything, from that moment on, to keep a close eye on everything McNulty would do. Rawls would go as far as to order some of
McNulty's associates, such as detective Santangelo to spy on McNulty. This way the show emphasizes the importance of surveillance and information acquired through it, as a powerful tool in achieving one's goals. Whether these goals are just, such as catching
24 criminals or unjust, such as spying on one's own subordinates in order to make their life miserable does not matter. The show also presents the notion of rewarded loyalty, in both environments, yet it also raises the issues of one's discretion in deciding between the characters and principles one should stay loyal to.
There is always something more to find behind every scene, that the producers put together with much care. Lester Freamon refers to a very similar aspect of police work in the sixth episode of the show titled itself providently "The Wire”: "We’ re building something here … and all the pieces matter. " The show itself is in many ways structured as a police case, where different layers of meaning seemingly unrelated create a web which together makes sense, the scenes complement each other, creating a very complex and multi layered narrative. The scenes presented in the show gain new meaning when contrasted to each other, creating parallels between them. The scene with
McNulty and Rawls is reflected later in the same episode, when D'Angelo talks to his uncle, in Avon's own office.
Decision made with good intentions may have dire consequences, especially if these decisions made by individuals endanger the organization these individuals work for. These decisions are on many occasions affected by emotion. One of the most romantic characters of the show, D'Angelo Barksdale, is known to make emotional decisions. After he shots a man, he is scolded by his uncle for not thinking more about the consequences of his actions, in a very similar way McNulty is put down by Rawls:
This ain't about him. It's about you. You can't play him out of that lobby.
You can't take a beating neither. So, the first thing you do, you get all
emotional...you pull your gun out, you do some dumb shit...that now we
got to work around. ("The Target")
25 D'Angelo realizes his own wrongdoing and admits that he did not think it through, resembling McNulty. As one can observe throughout the whole series, D'Angelo continues to make radical decisions based on emotion, which costs not only him but also people around him. The lesson that Avon is trying to teach D'Angelo is, that there is no space for emotion in "The Game". The fault does not lie in killing a man, but in the way D'Angelo performs the action. A drug dealer has to remain cool headed in order to avoid the dangers of apprehension.
Fortunately for D'Angelo he has his uncle, his family, which is one of the most important values according to Avon Barksdale as he says, "You family, all right? You know it's always love" Avon is able to bribe one of the witnesses in D'Angelo's case, setting him free, which only emphasizes the importance of money, in a capitalist institution such as drug trade enterprise, that Avon administers. D'Angelo is radical character in the show, because he tries to sever the bonds which link him to the drug business, because he is not built for the brutality of the institution and the capitalist ideals it follows. Rafael Alvarez, one of David Simon's colleagues from The Sun newspaper, who also worked on the show as a co writer and had a major influence on the second season of the show, writes in his The Wire: Truth Be Told :
D’Angelo is not the hardest soldier in his uncle’s army, and the project killing— half self defense and mostly panic—reflected such. D’Angelo is home, but he will not be returning to the high rises; he is, instead, demoted to the low rise projects, or The Pit, as it’s known. (Alvarez 56)
As was already mentioned, one of the most distinctive feature of the show is the presentation of scenes, which reflect events and characters from different environments, in this case the law enforcement organization and the drug trade enterprise ( in later seasons also education system and journalism ), sometimes occurring one after the
26 other, at other times with an interval between them. The two scenes discussed above have the same motif, the conversation between a member of a flawed capitalist system, who endangers the integrity of the system by his incompetent behavior (McNulty,
D'Angelo Barksdale) and his superior who scolds and punishes the transgressor.
These scenes are presented from the perspective of the hierarchical systems their protagonists are members of, the purpose of their presentation together in one episode is to depict the contrast and similarities between the two environments. Some scenes and events in the show seem at first unimportant within the broader perspective of the whole series, yet they achieve a great deal of prominence when contrasted and compared with similar scenes from other environments and the long term development of characters and the story itself. Xavier Dujardin in his study titled "The Wire Serial Storytelling and Institutional Criticism A Case Study of Omar Little" addresses this particular issue within the context of continuality of a complex television show as follows:
The key to characterization then lies in small moments that seem of no
great significance, but later on achieve meaning as these moments
accumulate and come to tell something about the character’s
development. In brief, the continuous serial format allows for a multitude
of storylines, without excluding profound characterization of both major
and minor characters. For one, the creators have the possibility to play
out storylines and characters against each other. (Dujardin 34 35)
These scenes play against each other the characters of McNulty and D'Angelo
Barksdale, as well as Major Rawls and Avon. The scenes create parallels between the organizations of law enforcement and drug trade enterprise and their hierarchies and mechanics. These two scenes when compared to each other, raise the issues of flawed systems based on capitalist principles with the need to produce surplus capital, without
27 any regard for the community or people. These particular scenes depict, what happens when and individual endangers the integrity of these institutions and the ways they react.
They also portray the helplessness of an individual in face of these institutions.
When compared the scenes produce more similarities between the systems than differences. The main difference is, that while D'Angelo is protected by the fact that he is family and in family "it's always love", McNulty has no one to protect him in front of
Major Rawls. Nevertheless both characters are degraded in the hierarchies they serve as a consequence of their transgressions against their organizations, McNulty is ordered to join the detail while D'Angelo gets to oversee the drug trade in the Pit instead of the high rises. This development of the plot emphasizes that the institutions have more in common, than one would expect, especially when considering that they stand on the other sides of the battlefield. Sherryl Vint, who is a professor at the University of
Alberta, Canada with specialization on popular culture and science discusses this issue from a perspective of individual characters from different environments, the similarities and contrasts between them, rather than the similarities in themes of different scenes in her book The Wire:
The Wire is careful to add as much complexity to its criminal
characters as it provides for the police, stressing the parallels
between individuals trying to accommodate themselves to the
institutions they must serve rather than highlighting their
differences as people on opposite sides of the law. Individual
characters from both contingents are shown to have families,
individual moral codes, and capacities for pettiness and for
generosity. (Vint 21)
28 2.2 Serial Continuality and Character Development
The format of television series gives the producers enough space and time to depict a great deal of development among their characters, as well as the environments they live in. The fact that the series is constructed of thirteen episodes, creates a need for continuality in the storyline, in which every episode can be presented in a different manner, yet together they have to construct a complete story with a beginning and an end which spans through the whole series. Unlike conventional police procedurals, which produce a closure in every episode by a solution to a particular crime, wire focuses on the continuality between episodes. The producers of The Wire went even further and as Vint writes in her The Wire they did not even produce a type of closure typical for conventional television shows at the end of the series:
The Wire builds its stories cumulatively, each individual episode
contributing to larger stories about these characters and this world
rather than necessarily containing within itself a climax and
resolution. The Wire pushes this convention even further,
allowing its first season case to conclude—in the sense that
arrests are made and the investigation closed—but refusing to
provide the sense of closure typical of police dramas. (Vint 9)
Alvarez in his The Wire: Truth Be Told compares this kind of complexity and structuralized depiction of characters, their developments and relationships to a literary genre of a novel:
The debut of The Wire on the first Sunday in June of 2002 introduced the
world to the first chapter of a visual novel—a singular, interlocking
narrative played out over thirteen programming hours on cable television.
(Alvarez 52)
29 The producers have to create a continuous stream in order to keep the audience excited. The producers have a unique opportunity, thanks to this kind of format, to depict the characters from the beginning, with a wide range of changes occuring throughout the series until the end of the series. The characters, which have a minor role in the show from the beginning, such as officer Prezbylewski or Lester Freamon can become very prominent throughout the series and towards the end of it, can form an irreplaceable characters in the story. M. J. Porter and his colleagues in their
"Re(de)Fining Narrative Events Examining Television Narrative Structure." for the
Journal of Popular Film and Television rightfully claim that:
While many television characters begin as two dimensional, some evolve
into well rounded, three dimensional characters with histories, flaws, and
unique personality traits. This is one of the most engaging points of
television dramas the continuous development and creation ofinteresting
characters. (Porter 7)
Porter and his associates also discuss the importance of the establishment of viewer/character relationships in order to attract the audience and retain it for future:
The regular viewer is interested in what happens to the characters how
they develop relationships, how they cope with various obstacles week
after week, season after season. The more interesting television
characters grow and change over time, creating layers of depth in heir
metamorphoses. We may even come to know these characters better than
our own coworkers. (Porter 1)
The kind of relationship between the viewer and the characters in development of the show is one of the cornerstones of The Wire . These relationships are the driving force for the viewer to continue watching a television show week after week, to see
30 what happens to his or her favourite characters, what challenges lie ahead for them to face and what problems they will have to solve. As Porter suggests these relationships between characters and viewer may evolve into a serious fandom, in which case the viewer becomes attached to his favourite characters and wants to know everything there is about them. Such fandom is probably more typical for a show such as HBO's Game
Of Thrones than The Wire which has gained popularity by viewers later and was at first mainly acclaimed by critics. One of the reasons why the show did not gain much popularity among the audience at first, is the show's complex narrative structure, which demands more engagement from the viewer than the conventional television show, such as CSI or Friends.
The characters in the show are viewed and perceived as real persons, from a real world, thanks to the authenticity and style the show is produced in, they are not just tools for the plot to continue. Anthony Smith in his "The Sopranos and Contemporary
Episode Architecture " claims that this kind of continuality and variety in plots can work as "a structuring device that, […] both permits contrast and resonance between distinct storylines, and has the potential to enrich character complexity" (Smith 46) This kind of focus on a character development, intertwined relationships between them and the various ways they affect each other's fate is a defining characteristic of a complex narrative strategy of television show such as The Wire .
The continuality of a story throughout several episodes is by M. J. Porter and his associates described as a "story arc, which means the story may be introduced in one episode, developed in a following episode, and brought to a climax in a later episode. "
(Porter 2) They also claim that:
Character development and continuous storylines are the two elements
that make TELEVISION unique as a narrative system. Although
31 narrative theory acknowledges the role of character in the development
of the story, there is a need to elaborate on the character and the role
character development plays in the unique context of television's stories.
It is the recurring television characters that add to the "pleasure of the
text", because they are familiar, and familiarity draws viewers to a series,
week after week. (Porter 3)
2.3 The City of Baltimore
The city is an element that links every aspect of the show together and is changeless in its nature. Its importance is emphasized by David Simon himself:
The Wire is not about Jimmy McNulty. Or Avon Barksdale. Or crime. Or
punishment. Or drugs. Or violence. Or even race. It is about The
City.(Alvarez 7)
The show keeps focus on the environment that the characters live in and how their lives are affected by the environment. Most of the characters from the projects never even left the environment they grew up in and it is the only setting they know.
They identify themselves with the part of the city they live in (West Baltimore/ East
Baltimore) and grew up in. The show depicts the inner life of the characters in relation to the setting of the story which is changeless and at many occasions foreshadows the fate of the characters. Peter Clandfield in his article "' We ain't got no yard:' Crime,
Development, and Urban environment" states that "Baltimore is not just setting and backdrop, but subject and fabric for The Wire " (Clandfield 41)
The show presents all the characters in their native environment. The variety of environments and characters is quite miscellaneous, it presents characters from different ranks of both law enforcement and drug trade, common people, working class, addicts,
32 and high politicians alike. All of these characters are linked together by one distinctive element of the show that transcends all the classes, vocations and race and that is the city of Balitomore. The city of Baltimore plays a crucial role in the depiction of how unjust and oppressive the life of those who do not hold political or economic power is, focusing on the representatives of lower classes of the urban society. Baltimore is at many occasions referred to by characters of the show as a place where the corrupt have the control.
Baltimore is presented as a place of inequality between those who hold the power in their hands and the common people, who put the power in those hands. One such situation occurs in the first episode, when McNulty discusses the effect of Stringer
Bell's presence in the courtroom with judge Phelan:
Judge: Stringer Bell?
McNulty: That was him in court with the legal pad and the
glasses...scaring the living shit out of every witness. Him and the rest of
his crew, Wee Bey, Savino, Stinkum. I saw them. You think about
clearing the court?
Judge: On what basis? It's an open court in a free nation of laws.
McNulty: I thought it was Baltimore. ("The Target")
The city of Baltimore itself is a complex system which consists of parts that reflect and contrast each other and the show builds parallels between these parts.
Good example of a contrast between two different worlds that both can be found in a metropolitan city such as Baltimore, is the contrast that is presented in the fourth episode of the first series "Old Cases". McNulty takes Bubbles who has never been out of the projects, to a soccer match in which McNulty's son takes part. Bubbles is astonished, when he sees what the suburbs of Baltimore look like in contrast to the
33 projects. The scenes are unlike those from the low rises environment, full of light and green colors, with trees and freshly mowed lawns the neighborhood in the background.
Bubbles refers to this environment in his own funny way as "the Beaver land" because of the amount of flora around. After McNulty and Bubbles arrive at the match, one can see the uneasiness in Bubbles's posture while he stays by the car. The impression that he does not belong there is even more emphasized when he tries to shake the hand of
McNulty's ex wife who does not accept his handshake which induces an expression of uneasiness and shame on Bubbles' face. The show reflects two different environments and contrasts them emphasizing the social difference between the two and their representative, Bubbles and McNulty's wife.
The show is masterful in using reflective pairs of scenes as was already mentioned in relation to characters, who deal with similar issues, and one such scene is presented when McNulty drops Bubbles back in the low rises. The scene is much more dim and sinister, as is characteristic for the scenes from this particular environment.
What the scene reflects is the laughter and playing of little kids, yet the kids in the low rises have no ball and play on the streets, even though it is already dark. More characteristic features of scenes from projects include the sounds of sirens and barking dogs, which do not only reinforce the authenticity of the depiction of such environment, these sounds also suggest that there is always something happening in the projects, which causes police or ambulance to take action.
The first thing that comes to one's mind is that there is a crime underway somewhere or someone is injured and needs help. A barking dog works as an alarm for the underprivileged and a security guard at the same time, therefore the barking sounds may imply that there is always someone creeping around a stranger with evil intentions that sets the alarm of again and again. It is interesting that despite such implications the
34 children are still playing in the streets and no one is looking after them. That is the sad reality of life in the low rises. The dangers that the life in such environment are so common that they do not have the effect on the inhabitants of projects that one would expect. All of these are contrasted with the audiovisual sign produced in the previous scenes, where light is bright, the background is full of vegetation and green color and there are no sirens wailing or dogs barking. The producers once again emphasize the contrast between different environments emphasizing both similarities (playing children) as well as differences in social status in the flawed and segregated society in an American metropolis.
This is the way the show critically addresses the issues of social class and race in the show as most of the inhabitants of projects are black. After this experience which contrasts the two different social and racial environments Bubbles pertinently remarks:
"It’s a thin line between heaven and here." ("Old Cases”) This kind of irony is used many times in relation to the negative aspects of social inferiority of the working class people, who live in the projects, in relation to how the majority of white population lives. The show represents characters within their backgrounds as well as outside the environment they know and are used to.
The characters who conduct experiences outside their native environment have to face the challenges put before them, by the new environment and the viewer witnesses the struggles the characters have to go through in the foreign environment, such as D'Angelo and his girlfriend, when they decide to visit a fancy restaurant in the fifth episode of the first series "The Pager". One can see that they are terribly unprepared as they did not make any reservations and are unaware of the formalities and decorum of such places. D'Angelo is the one who addresses the elephant in the room by asking: "You think they know?" What D'Angelo wants to know, is whether the
35 other people in the restaurant realize that D'Angelo is from the other side of town and how he makes his living. His girlfriend emphasizes the power of money, but D'Angelo knows that money does not buy one everything and that both of them are only acting like they belong there ("The Pager").
The city as a linking element is always present, even in this scene. The part of the city one comes from plays a huge role in shaping one's identity and that is what
D'Angelo means, when he says in response to his girlfriend: "I feel like some shit just stay with you...you know what I'm saying, like, hard as you try...you still can't go nowhere, you know what I'm saying?" ("The Target") One of the most influential urban sociologists of the first half of the twentieth century Robert E. Park discusses the mutual effect of man and the city he lives in in his book On Social Control and Collective
Behaviour as follows:
if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which
he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without
any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man
has remade himself. (Park 1967: 51)
The city and its inhabitants are one, the concept of a city without its inhabitants is nonsensical and as a part of the city the population is part of the cities identity and as such every member of that population influences and shapes the city he or she lives in.
Sherryl Vint in her The Wire pertinently points out that:
The most prominent visual trademark within the series is the slow
zoom: either in to a character’s face to show reaction or out from
a scene to establish its relationship to the larger context of the
city. (Vint 18)
36 This way the image of the city is permanently repeated and as a result the viewer may even perceive the city as one of the characters that has its own face and has the power to affect other characters, while creating a link between them, allowing the creators of the show to produce parallels between them, raising questions of social and racial inequality in a capitalist society and the flaws of the system of such society, where institutions have power over individuals and can "stick a finger in one's eye" whenever they please.
The parts of the cities the characters originate from are always present as a part of the identity of the characters, as D'Angelo points out, "some shit just stay with you".
The characters may even leave these places, yet the viewer is constantly reminded of where the characters come from and the importance of the setting. One can observe this not only in the characters that come from the projects but in the ranks of police officers too, Detective Carver who is originally from East Baltimore expresses pride, when he sees the East Baltimore's basketball team winning over West Baltimore. Wallace on the other hand tries to get out of "The Game" and hides at his grandmother's house in the county, but once he gets there he feels alienated by the place and even the air, which is supposed to be much better than the air of Baltimore does not feel right, he tells Poot on the phone:
The air down here all sticky. Worse than Baltimore. And these
crickets, louder than a motherfucker. I can't get no sleep. I don't
think I'm cut out to be no country ass nigger, man. ("The Hunt")
West Baltimore plays a huge part in shaping one's identity in the show and that is why
Wallace cannot stay at his grandmother's even though it costs him his life in consequence. The notion of the city's influence over the identities of its inhabitants is explicitly addressed by Poot in reply to Wallace's statement: "You can take a nigger out the Westside. But you can't take " ("The Hunt") while the phone line is disconnected in
37 the middle of Poot’s sentence, one can easily predict that what he was going to say is that "you can't take the Westside out of the nigger". Once Wallace gets back he admits to D'Angelo, while pointing at the neighborhood behind him that "this shit...this is me, yo, right here. " defining himself as a part of the Baltimore which has been his home all his life, with its virtues and vices alike.
The city itself is not the negative power, that the protagonists of the show have to face, because they are a part of the city. It is the institutions that have the most power in the city, yet are detached from the problems that need solving in the city. The show depicts capitalist society with its institutions which are corrupt and in a capitalist tradition seek to enrich themselves through the abusement of their authority, rather than producing radical solutions to the problems presented in the show.
Robert E. Park in his magnum opus The City which even though it was first published in
1925 is still very influential, since it addresses issues that are still discussed in the contemporary context, claims that:
It is probably the breaking down of local attachments and the
weakening of the restraints and inhibitions of the primary group,
under the influence of the urban environment, which are largely
responsible for the increase of vice and crime in great cities. (Park
1925:24)
By primary groups, Park means the groups which are essential in forming of the social nature and ideals of the individual. These groups are the natives of the particular district of the city, and are characterized by intimate "face to face association and cooperation."
(Park 22) What Park mentions is the dissolution of attachments and relationships between individuals and groups, that are typical for compact neighborhoods and resemble the communal features of towns, while these groups are being at the same time
38 isolated from each other, creating tension and suppressing interaction between the groups. This kind of development is typical during the growth of cities into great metropolises.
Le Corbusier in his work The City of To-morrow and Its Planning claims that cities on the are a grand concept, thanks to their complexity Le Corbusier claims, are a great creation: ”A city ! It is the grip of man upon nature. It is a human operation directed against nature, a human organism both for protection and for work. It is a creation.” while towns are only "ineffectual tools". (Le Corbusier 19) And he is rigth in his claims about the city, as it is a great creation of mankind and a reflection of the society man lives in, as Calthorpe, who in his study uses the ideas of one of the most influential urban planners of the twentieth century Jane Jacobs also claims that
"Settlement patterns are the physical foundations of our society and, like our society, they are becoming more and more fractured." (Calthorpe 16) This fracture is the cause of many problems in the city environment. As the society divides itself into different groups , it creates boundaries and isolates the groups from each other, creating an environment of a segregated system in a city. This system is highly ineffective, as it suppresses what are the most positive features of a town life such as; the importance of community, solidarity, openness and variety created by the interaction of different groups. The cities are shaped in a capitalist tradition to produce profit and therefore interest groups tend to replace citizens in the political government of the cities, shaping the city in their own capitalist interest, rather than focusing on community and the problems of everyday people who live in the city.
Characters from different parts of Baltimore and from different classes are depicted against each other in their own environments as well as alien environments in order to emphasize the boundaries created by the corrupted system between them.
39 Richard Sennet in his newspaper essay titled "The Open City" discusses the notions of
“Closed Cities” with defined boundaries as opposed to “Open Cities” which are defined by borders. Sennet uses examples from ecology, where boundaries are edges where things end, unlike borders which are edges where different organisms interact. Sennet applies these models in the discourse concerned with urban planning and states that:
The urban habitat is cut up into segregated parts by streams of
traffic, by functional isolation between zones for work,
commerce, family, and the public realm. The most popular form
of new residential development internationally, the gated
community, takes to an extreme the idea of the boundary wall.
The result is that exchange between different racial, ethnic, or
calss communities diminishes. So we should want to build the
border/membrane. (Sennet 9)
The residents of projects and other parts of the city are isolated and therefore unable to interact with each other, which creates not only distance in social class but also in identities, Sennet understands this as one of the main problems caused by closed cities and their development. The establishment of boundaries between different parts of a city based on race or social class is the stumbling point in coming to terms with each other, presented by both Sennet and the show's producers. The boundaries that Sennet mentions are presented in the show as based on race and social class. These boundaries create as Robert E. Park calls them in the first chapter of his book titled The City , “cities within cities” which are seemingly isolated from each other, yet are still able to affect each other through economic and political relationships, as one can see from the relationships that are exposed in the show when a senatorial aide is caught with drug money, which stirs a lot of trouble in the higher ranks of the law enforcement. Frederic
40 Jameson discusses the issue of these cities within cities in the context of race in his study of the show titled "Realism and Utopia in The Wire " :
We have already seen that the drug scene, run by Barksdale, is not only
black, but exists like a foreign city within the official one: it is a whole
other world, into which you do not go unless you have business there
(“you” here standing for the officially dominant white culture) (Jameson
370)
Jameson compares the white and black populations in his text to the populations of West and East Berlin, who were even after the fall of the Berlin Wall reluctant to travel between each other parts of the city, because of the great different experiences they had to go through.( Jameson 370)
According to Jacob Weisberg in his article for a web magazine The Slate “The
Wire on Fire: Analyzing the Best Show on Television” the show's ”fundamental concern is the isolation and degradation of the black underclass, a subject that has, with the exception of a blip after Hurricane Katrina, disappeared from the political radar screen.” (Weisberg)
And as David Harvey correctly assumes in his Spaces of Hope :
(t)he accumulation of capital has always been a profoundly geographical
affair. Without the possibilities inherent in geographical expansion,
spatial reorganization, and uneven geographical development, capitalism
would long ago have ceased to function as a political economic system”
(Harvey 2000: 23)
Harvey makes a great point, because if the capital that the city's institutions operate with, was evenly divided and effectively spent in all the parts of the city, instead of its accumulation by the corrupt institutions, the situation in the projects would be different.
41 The city is a huge mechanism which is in many ways controlled by its institutions, these institutions are presented through the political figures in the show,
(DOP Burrel, Senator Clay Davis, Major Rawls) who because of their isolation from the less unfortunate parts of the city and corruption are unable to actually solve the problems the city, its people and communities have to face as a whole. It is the city institutions, “the Greek Gods” as Simon himself calls them, which have the most power to affect the lives of characters in the show and it is one of the purposes of the show to illustrate how these institutions work in reality.
It is the distribution of power which causes the problem as those who hold the power are disconnected from those who put it into their hands. The show portrays the indifference between those in power and those with none, at many occasions, one such occasion is when Major Rawls argues with McNulty in the first episode of the show and refers to a black murder victim as some project nigger he never heard of. This way the show not only portrays the fatal flaws of the system in which a high ranking officer such as Major Rawls expresses indifference towards a murder victim but it also emphasizes the inequality based mainly on race related to the social class. The show points out the way those with power close their eyes when facing the tragedies of those, who they do not feel to be racially and socially equal with. The lack of social solidarity and compassion is by Robert E. Park in his The City described as a lack of social wholeness:
Perhaps the simplest way of describing this wholeness is by the usage of the inclusive “we” rather than exclusive “they”, when referring to the citizens of a particular city:
it involves the sort of sympathy and mutual identification for
which 'we' is the natural expression. One lives in the feeling of the
42 whole and finds the chief aims of his will in that feeling. . . .
."(Park, 1967 , 593)
David Harvey in his article "The Right to the City" for the International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research claims that it is easy to “enumerate all manner of urban discontents and anxieties in the midst of even more rapid urban transformation”(Harvey 2003:2) yet there is lack of systemic critique of the system .
The Wire produces this kind of systemic critique as it depicts all the different layers of the system with its flaws and virtues alike. Harvey calls for a democratic redistribution of the power vested in the hands of the institutions presented by the show:
The democratization of the right to the city and the construction
of a broad social movement to enforce its will is imperative, if the
dispossessed are to take back control of the city from which they
have for so long been excluded and if new modes of controlling
capital surpluses as they work through urbanization processes are
to be instituted. ( Harvey 2003:14 15)
The characters are frequently framed by the camera against the great structures and buildings of the city in the background, illustrating that the city is an the element that arches over the whole story and connects the characters through its cityscape, in which all the characters are equal in that sense they all have to face the challenges the city has prepared for them.
2.4 Narrative Style
Producers of modern television series often combine different styles of narration in their works in order to present a variety which attracts the audience. The producers of
43 The Wire do so too. They combine dramatic style with a very sophisticated documentary style which allows the viewer to perceive the story from a very unique perspective and supports the authenticity of the show. The documentary style provides the perspective, which is ideal to analyse and understand the everyday actions of both police officers and drug dealers and produces great insight into the lives of inhabitants of a metropolitan American city. The style of narration of The Wire is very similar to a documentary style with features of dramatic style making it very realistic, authentic and attractive for the audience all at the same time. The show is very naturalistic in its depiction of social environment of the projects of Baltimore as well as the hierarchy of law enforcement of the city.
During his time within the Baltimore's police department Simon as a crime journalist gained great amount of experience. He was able to use this experience to create a fictional work The Wire with many feature of a documentary style, because as he claims: ”The journalism of film is documentary.”(Alvarez 24) The show is produced with the minimal amount of scenes, which would depict the inner psychological world of the characters. It makes use with as few deviations from the linearity of the plot in terms of it chronological order as possible. The first series presents only one such flashback at the end of the series to help the audience remember, who the William Gant was (a witness in the shooting in which D'Angelo is involved).
The producers make effort to be as realistic as possible in depiction of its settings and environments. And often use a long shot of characters with real urban environment of Baltimore in the background. Most of the sounds that the viewer is presented by the show, are diegetic sounds, produced by objects in the world presented in the show. Simon declared himself on more than one occasion a follower of the documentary tradition of one of the most prominent representatives of modern day
44 documentary genre Frederick Wiseman.(Weisberg) Wiseman has won numerous film awards and he was also awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 71 st
Venice International Film Festival in 2014. His style is by many considered as observational, even though he does not like the term. Wiseman perceives his films as an personal experience and as such he conveys a personal message through them which is based on his subjective point of view. He is known to collect a great amount of raw footage in order to produce a work which only runs for a very little fraction of the amount of the footage accumulated. In his interview for Frank Spotnitz's "Dialogue on film" he states that:
All aspects of documentary filmmaking involve choice and are
therefore manipulative. But the ethical ... aspect of it is that you
have to ... try to make [a film that] is true to the spirit of your
sense of what was going on. ... My view is that these films are
biased, prejudiced, condensed, compressed but fair. I think what I
do is make movies that are not accurate in any objective sense,
but accurate in the sense that I think they're a fair account of the
experience I've had in making the movie. (Spotnitz 18)
The show is loosely based on Simon's experience within the police department and yet it is not a documentary, even though it uses many documentary tools and some aspects of the show imitate a documentary style of filmmaking. Simon as well as
Wiseman make important decisions on how to present their work in order for it to be as realistic and authentic as possible, with dramatical features that would keep the audience excited. Both of them are trying to create a dramatical work with a documentary features or vice versa. Their work does not have to be filled with action scenes and explosions, it is the art of the style through which the story, message or an
45 event are presented that enables them to achieve a dramatic effect. Wiseman in his interview for Gerald Peary openly confesses that he is manipulating with the material in order to produce a dramatic work:
I'm trying to make a movie. A movie has to have dramatic
sequence and structure. I don't have a very precise definition
about what constitutes drama but I'm gambling that I'm going to
get dramatic episodes. Otherwise, it becomes Empire . ... I am
looking for drama, though I'm not necessarily looking for people
beating each other up, shooting each other. There's a lot of drama
in ordinary experiences. In Public Housing , there was drama in
that old man being evicted from his apartment by the police.
There was a lot of drama in that old woman at her kitchen table
peeling a cabbage. (Peary 5)
Wiseman in his interview for Peary refers to “Empire” which is a 1964 film made by Andy Warhol the leading figure of pop art, the visual art movement. The film itself consists of eight hours of slow motion footage of the Empire State Building in the city of New York. Wiseman claims that he is looking for drama, not a film such as
“Empire” which is known for its ultimate realism leading to its unwatchability which it is best known for. Wiseman is known to be a representative of what is known as
Cinéma Vérité (truthful cinema) or observational cinema which was inspired by Kino
Pravda ("Film Truth") a project created by Russian filmmakers and documentarists
Dziga Vertov his Elizaveta Svitova and his brother Mikhail Kaufman. The concept of
Kino Pravda was promoted mainly during the 1920's and the main purpose of it was to capture the pieces of reality, which when put together would show what lies behind the
46 actual reality, only through their combination the truth which is normally concealed would manifest itself.
Cinéma Vérité uses similar concepts in order to shine some light on the truth behind the crude reality. In order to do so Cinéma Vérité uses improvisation and in order to produce authentic shots and images indulges in methods that ensure that the subject and audience both are unaware of the presence of the camera. These methods of observation are referred to by an American theoretician and historian in the field of documentary films Bill Nichols in his Introducing the Documentary as the
"observational mode" or “fly on the wall” (Nichols 134) . This kind of camera is unobtrusive and does not show its presence in any way. It is able to observe the actions and dialogue of characters from perspectives a real person would not, it truly is the perspective of a fly on the wall. The documentary style is not only enhanced by this kind of perspective of camera, but by its behaviour as well.
Simon during his stay at the police department had to stay invisible in order to become a perfect observer of the police background. This aspect of documentary concealment from the ones the documentarist observes is felt throughout the whole series of the show in various ways. What the camera does on many occasions in the show is that it establishes a scene by creeping up on the characters and their dialogue from behind an opaque object in the front of the frame which is out of focus, the object may be a wall, a desk or another opaque object such as a door. These are the so called horizontal dolly shots, a dolly is a platform, with camera on it, which is pushed on a set of rails in order to move with the camera for various reasons, in this particular case the dolly is pushed from behind the barrier in order to give the shot the calculated effect of a voyeuristic spectator creeping up on the characters. This kind of establishment of the scene presents a perspective of an observer who does not wish to be spotted by the
47 subjects of his observation. This kind of camera is very common throughout the whole series and offers a voyeuristic point of view at the events presented in the scenes.
According to the director of photography of the show Dave Insley: "The reason the show has stayed 4x3 is because David Simon thinks that 4x3 feels more like real life and real television and not like a movie."(Griffin) This may be true as the widescreen ratio of 16:9 is in reality typical for feature films. Yet it is interesting that this focus on being realistic in the depiction of the show, is many times disrupted by the producers' decision to shoot scenes with long lenses, with a horizontal object in the foreground which is out of focus, yet creates a barrier in the image which artificially widens the image, resulting in a widescreen image, which according to Simon's opinion feels unreal. Thanks to this strategy the scenes shot in a 4x3 aspect ratio becomes widened and acquires more dramatic features, while the object in the foreground reinforces the voyeuristic perspective of observation from behind an object.
The show is very precise in its establishment of different scenes, the drama in the show does not originate in quick cuts, gunfights and explosions. The drama in the show originates through the combination of the dramatic and documentary style which the producers use to their advantage. The producers use middle and long shots, that take their time focusing from different characters and objects to others in order to present hidden meaning behind them. Even though the show is not full of action and fighting as one could expect from a drama that depicts the war on drugs between police and criminal organization, it has its own pace and gradually works through to action scenes, which include raids and gunfights between criminals, but these are not in the focus of the show.
The show keeps a balance between the dramatic, artistic, and documentary in order to stay realistic in its depiction at all times. The show penetrates trough different
48 styles being artful, when producing shots of characters' faces in their rear view mirror on their stakeout. They are being observed, while observing their own targets during surveillance. Such shots are in conflict with the documentary style as the framing of the shot is too precise to be considered a spontaneous documentary shot. Yet shots like these do not have an intrusive effect in the show, their effect is much more subtle and supplements the whole impression.
David Simon in his interview for BBC2's The Culture Show in 2008 says:
Fuck the casual viewer, if you're a writer you want a casual reader? I
don't want those people, don't want 'em, throwing them back, the're like
small fish on the hook, throw 'em back. I want the guy who wants to be
told a story, the story has a beginning, a middle and an end. (Simon,
BBC)
That is why the narrative strategy and its style in the show is so complex and may have not been so successful with the general audience, but it adds to its artistic value, rewatchability and originality. What Simon is looking for is a viewer who does not wish to see a cliffhanger ending in every episode. Simon is looking for a viewer, who wants to engage in the story and its development even though the characters do not face the end of the world or death at the end of every episode. The engaged viewer is not impressed with action scenes and CGI, this kind of viewer demands complexity in details, development and depth of characters and authentic and realistic presentation of things, that also in real life affect the lives of everyday people. It is a demanding type of viewer who has an eye for detail and is ready to watch the episodes more than once in order to understand the different layers of meaning behind different scenes and events of the show in order to achieve the understanding of the complexity of the show in its wholeness.
49 3. Corruption and Hierarchy in The Wire
The nature of law enforcement and policing depends very much on one's own discretion as some of the activities it includes are usually practiced behind closed doors, in private, without supervisors present and before witnesses that can be described as unreliable.
This kind of environment is a fertile ground for all types of misconduct, including corruption. Corruption can be defined as a type of misconduct, which includes self enrichment based on the abuse of power and authority. Of course the definition is much more complicated than that, as the nature of the misconduct as well as the gain can vary from case to case. The misconduct may be done in order to benefit an individual or a group, and as Encyclopedia of Law Enforcement edited by Larry E. Sullivan claims:
”One may perform a service for which one receives an unauthorized reward but does so without distorting that service or the manner of its delivery." (Sullivan 101) Despite its complicated definition, one has to keep in mind the two main concepts of the term's meaning, which are self enrichment and abusement of authority or power.
There are also other types of misconduct, that one can observe in the law enforcement system such as brutality or incompetence, which may or may not be connected to corruption. Corruption in its broader meaning is related to the meaning of the term depravity, which is defined as impairment of integrity, virtue, or moral principle by the Meriam-Webster Dictionary . This thesis does not only discuss corruption in its narrow meaning, but elaborates also on the concept in its broader sense with relation to ethics, integrity and morality of one's actions. For the purposes of this thesis a morally or ethically impaired action, which does not consequently lead to personal gain or is conducted by characters without authority, will be also considered corrupt in its nature.
50 Another difficulty with the concept of corruption is that it is very complicated to measure and control corruption, because as was already mentioned the circumstances under which corrupt actions are performed are difficult to discover. The difficulty with control of corruption lies in the reluctance of law enforcement officers to peach against their associates. Similar problems are presented in the show when Daniels decides not to report, that Herc and Carver misplaced certain amount of the drug money they have seized. This is generally referred to as the Code of Silence, which is a way to protect colleagues and reinforce loyalty and solidarity between the law enforcement officers.
One can see that corruption even though it has negative connotations, can serve a positive purpose too. The question is, how can one measure the amount of corruption that is acceptable and when is the corruption so serious that one has to betray his colleagues, friends and superiors and become a snitch, which in most cases means becoming a pariah at the department.
What makes it difficult to control corruption in addition to The Code of Silence and the secretive circumstances under which it is performed is that the ones who are blamed for the corruption are the individuals, however the corruption stems from the way system is adjusted as default. The concept of blaming particular individuals of corruption is by scholars known universally as the theory of “Bad Apple” (Sullivan
102). This theory promotes the idea, that the corruption is rooted in the nature of individuals and that they are personally responsible for their behavior of misconduct. Of course every individual has different predispositions and some may be more attracted by the opportunity to abuse authority and enrich themselves as the probability of corruptive behaviour depends heavily on individual sense of discretion, ethics and morality.
51 Yet this theory has been discredited by many in recent years, in the light of new discoveries. The contemporary perspective points out, that the problem does not lie so much in the individual's morals, but rather in the role of the system one finds himself in.
This point of view emphasizes the need for the organization to create and enforce such rules and restrictions, as to effectively detect, investigate and uproot corruption on all levels of the system's hierarchy. The administration of the police enforcement has the responsibility, to create such a background to the organization, that the environment itself would be intolerant of corruption. One of the ways to do this is to enhance integrity in all the members and representatives of the organization. Integrity as a set of values of an individual should be encouraged among the members of organization in order to resist the temptation of using authority and power in an unethical way, seeking self enrichment. This strategy changes the emphasis from avoiding corruption to achieving a positive goal which is enhancing integrity and values it embodies.
Corruption is a crucial feature of the show as it links both environments that the show focuses on; The law enforcement and drug trade. Corruption is always present in the show and is very hard to avoid by any character. The characters as it is in real life are presented in situations in which they have to make decisions ,that depend solely on their own discretion and are tempted to abuse their position of power. Carver and Herc get themselves into such situations often in the show, and one can see that they abuse their authority in order to enrich themselves when they have the chance, such as during the police raid in the twelfth episode, “The Hunt”, during which they both take some of the drug money for themselves.
The system heavily relies on the discretion of its police officers, when dealing with criminals, arrests, interrogations, they are tempted to take bribes and many other
52 situations raise ethical questions. Robert I. Rotberg in his book Corruption, Global
Security, and World Order argues that:
Once it becomes known that certain kinds or all kinds of corrupt
behavior are acceptable, then all self interested maximizers
(nearly all of us) will hardly want to miss good opportunities to
secure and then to employ official positions for private
gain.(Rotberg 341)
Rotberg claims that the lower and middle officials learn the strategies of self enrichment from their superiors and they “look to their heads of state and cabinet ministers to see what they can “get away with.”(Rotberg 341) One way the show produces an answer to these issues of corruption, is the depiction of ethical characters, who are capable of inspiring the corrupt ones. Ethics is what separates the good cops from the bad cops in the show. McNulty for example helps his fellow detective
Santangelo in solving one of his cases, which boosts his clearance rates. Santangelo who is Major's spy on McNulty realizes his own wrongdoing and tells McNulty of
Rawls' plan of getting rid of him. As one can see the corruption does, not have to be presented as unlawful in the show, but immoral.
What is intriguing, is that in the system in which corruption is overlooked, the characters do not have to be alltogether evil, as one can see that neither Carver nor Herc are presented as inherently evil, yet they are still very much tempted by the vision of self enrichment. The show contradicts the simplistic Manichean perception of people as good or bad, as Jane Gibb and Roger Sabin rightly claim in their newspaper article
“Who Loves Ya, David Simon? Notes towards placing The Wire ’s depiction of
African Americans in the context of American TELEVISION crime drama.”:
53 it self consciously utilizes the idea of the TELEVISION police
drama as method of drawing in the viewer, but disrupts any
expectations that this will provide access to the familiar
Manichean universe of TELEVISION law and order discourses
on good versus evil. (Gibb, Sabin)
McNulty may be at one point presented as an ethical and moral touchstone of the society, yet the viewer is also witness to many of his vices, such as adultery and alcoholism. What the show depicts is people who are neither inherently evil nor good.
The fact that the show does not use this dualistic perspective on people and their behavior, makes it more authentic and realistic, the characters are depicted with both their virtues and vices alike.
The show does not find the difficulty in the characters themselves, it criticizes the system for being flawed. The show is a realistic depiction of Baltimore drug scene as well as the law enforcement. The show is full of contrasts between the two environments, yet one is able to find more similarities between the two, than could be at first expected. Because of these shared features among which is for this thesis one of the most prominent, the all transcending corruption rooted in the model of capitalist society, it will be the main aim of this chapter to search for and argue the mirroring aspects of corruption in both environments and their hierarchies which in many aspects resemble each other. Alasdair McMillan supports this claim in his chapter for the The Wire:
Urban Decay and American Television titled “Heroism, Institutions, and the Police
Procedural” where he writes: “[t]he police department and criminal organizations are depicted as structurally similar and highly interconnected” (McMillan 53).
These political, social and racial environments have their own structures, hierarchies, their own functional systems and tools of trade. The viewer is presented
54 with both; the authentic ways in which these affect each other and the ways different intrinsic elements of these systems affect the ways they work.
The concept of hierarchy of these systems is presented in the show in the scene from the third episode “The Buys” in which D'Angelo teaches Bodie and Wallace the mechanics of the game of chess. D'Angelo explains the rules of chess through an allegory to “the Game”, the crime scene of Baltimore and its hierarchy. The king is the kingpin, on the streets, everyone understands that it means Avon Barksdale. The other figures are his immediate subordinates, such as Wee bey and Stinkum, while the queen would be Stringer Bell, “She's smart and she's fierce”(“The Buys”).
It is Bodie, who quickly understands the mechanics of the game, even though he did not want to learn them at first. He also understands that he and Wallace are just pawns. But pawns can become the queen, which for Bodie is the ultimate goal in “the
Game”, “if I make it to the other end, I win?”(“The Buys”). There is a similarity between Bodie and Stringer Bell, as one can see Bodie is set to become “the top dog” and is ready to learn all the necessary things in order to achieve his goal. He has proven himself to be a fierce contender in “The Game” time and again in the show, by fighting other gangs on the streets and taking responsibility when asked to. He has proven his coldbloodedness and killer instinct when he killed his friend Wallace. He is definitely to be considered a “smart ass pawn”. Bodie is looking for an opportunity to improve his position in the hierarchy because as Arnold Tannenbaum accurately claims in his
Hierarchy in Organizations; an International Comparison :
Hierarchy also serves a motivational function, providing
incentives for individuals to try to ascend to higher positions in
their groups and organizations because higher rank affords greater
55 material and psychological rewards and comfort. (Tannenbaum
54)
The game of chess is presented in the show in contrast to the game of checkers, where all the figures have an equal position and power on the checkerboard., Paul Allen
Anderson compares the two games in his ""The Game Is the Game": Tautology and
Allegory in The Wire ." :
The formal simplicity of checkers makes it less challenging and
less true to life: all the checker pieces begin with equal value and
equal power. The game evokes a social fantasy about the equality
of opportunity as an achieved original position from which all
players on the board begin their working lives. By contrast, an
explicit and hierarchical division of labor defines the war game of
chess (Anderson 377)
D'Angelo asks Wallace and Bodie: “Why're y'all playing checkers on a chess set?”
(“The Buys”) It is nonsensical in the same way it is nonsensical to to think people are equal in the city of Baltimore.
There is a hierarchy in all the parts of the city, as it is the nature of human societies to create these hierarchies. According to Alan P. Fiske and his "The Four
Elementary Forms of Sociality: Framework for a Unified Theory of Social Relations.": hierarchy is present across all the diverse forms that populate the world of organizations. Even when hierarchy is minimized by different models of organizing.
(Fisk 695) In the game of chess different members of these systems are not equal. It becomes problematic, when the ones higher up the hierarchy become independent of those in its base and there is nothing that would stop them from becoming corrupted by the power invested in their hands.
56 A very similar visual metaphor is used in the sixth episode of the show titled
“The Wire” in a scene in which characters McNulty, Bunk, Greggs and Freamon learn that orders had been given to charge a murder, even though the case is unlikely to hold up in the court, simply to boost the clearance rates. These are the rules of the game, the aim is to improve the statistics by all means even though it does not produce real results.
The higher rank representatives of law enforcement such as Burrel and Rawls abuse their authority in order to enhance the statistics which ultimately results in their self enrichment as they get the credited for the decline in crime on paper. Ryan Raynolds addresses this issue of making a spectacle out of improving statistics without any actual effect on the drug institution itself in his “The Narrative Production of 'Real Police'” where he claims that the show is actually about ”a set of tactics that are, or have developed into, ineffective spectacle” (Brooks 72) What the show actually emphasizes is that, all the institutions, the government, law enforcement and drug industry are so interconnected that, in order for them to retain their power, they should not act against each other. The show portrays the full circle of dependency between these institutions as, drug money is funneled to government (Clay Davis), which has indirect control of the Law Enforcement through the connection between Davis and Burell.
The show portrays different characters, and different ranks, within
the department, going from regular officers, to homicide
detectives, to lieutenant, over commander, and finally to the
deputy commissioner of operations. Even the ties to the mayoral
office are illustrated in the series. As The Wire exposes the whole
hierarchy of the department, it is able to show how corruption and
inefficiency work their way down from the highest echelons to
the officer on the street. (Dujardin 36)
57 While the characters are discussing their helplessness in doing their job properly because of the machinations of their superiors, “I'm trying to build something here.
Rawls just sticks a finger in my eye”(“The Wire”) the producers of the show present the viewer with a visual metaphor, which alludes to the previous conversation concerning chess and the hierarchy of the figures between D'Angelo and his associates, creating once again a parallel between the two backgrounds and their hierarchies.
The visual metaphor is very subtle as the characters discussing the inefficiency of the system are shot across an out of focus chess board, they are made to look like pieces in the game sandwiched between two faceless players in the extreme foreground, with only their hands discernable as they move the pieces about. The two players represent the institutions, which control the pieces and disable them from doing their job properly. These godlike institutions are presented by the show as omnipotent and the characters as mere puppets, which is one of the main problems of the capitalist society of a metropolitan American city. The show is very realistic in the depiction of corruption among the higher representatives of our society and how the institutions they represent do not allow individuals, no matter how talented, brave, radical or just stubborn they are to rise above these institutions and change the flawed system. David
Simon in his interview for the The Believer compares these institutions and their representatives to Greek gods:
But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the
postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police
department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school
administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the
lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much
of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often
58 portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama,
the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris
enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are
invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new
millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about
providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama
in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and
justice seems different in some ways, I think.
McMillan accurately points out that the organizations are,
Connected not just by wires, but by flows of power, patronage,
and profit, each demands similar compromises from the
individuals caught up within. Whether you’re a cop, a drug
dealer, or a politician, institutional discipline aims to make you
into a docile and obedient subject, leaving very little room in the
process for noble principles or heroic goals. (McMillan 53 54)
The motifs of chess are reflected in these scenes from the different perspectives and backgrounds raising contrasting issues from both environments. Both of the scenes tackle the relationships between the pawns and the more powerful pieces of the game.
The contrast between the scenes lies in the perspective that the two scenes present. On one hand Bodie perceives his position as a pawn as potentially profitable, with the opportunity of becoming the “top dog” in “the Game”, such as Stringer Bell is, on the other hand as D'Angelo says: “The pawns, man, in the game...they get capped quick.
They be out of the game early.”(“The Buys”) which is the case of Wallace who is killed by his own comrades, emphasizing the fierceness of “The Game”. The characters of
McNulty, Greggs, Bunk and Lester Freamon on the other hand represent the
59 helplessness of all the figures in the hands of all powerfull institutions, which are corrupt and control them. Both of these scenes address the inequality in the system and how rotten it is from the inside from their unique perspectives.
What happens in the show is that the superiors in the law enforcement call for
“dope on the table” rather than long term solutions to the problems caused by the drug trade in the projects. The viewer witnesses this in the eleventh episode of the first season, when Commissioner Burrel asks for immediate action, even though the detail unit is close to arresting some of the big fish in the drug business:
Burell: The commissioner wants raids citywide. Every door we can take. Any addresses we can write on, anything connected to a narcotics case. CID, tactical, the
DEUs...and tomorrow, on the 6:00 news... we put a lot of fucking dope on the table.A lot of it.
Daniels: Dope on the table?
Burell:We need to let them know who we are.We can't for one minute let them think that this will stand.The Commissioner wants to send a message, Lieutenant. (“The
Hunt”)
The message that the commissioner needs to send is actually not meant for the drug dealers, as the arrests of small dealers cannot really harm the business itself, the message is meant for the public, as the politics of the higher members of law enforcement require them to prove, that they are doing everything they can. Another important way to show the public how successful the law enforcement's administration and the government that this administration chose is, is by showing improving statistics.
The problem with this is that these statistics are very easily fabricated and manipulated by the ones in power. This is what the show depicts and Simon sees it as one of the
60 main problems the law enforcement has to struggle with all over the country as he claims in his interview for Beilenson's Tapping into the Wire:
... Drugs on the table don’t matter. So readers would get the same
institutional dog and pony show and there would never be depth
reporting on the drug war. Or what policing had become. Policing was
being destroyed. The police department was learning mediocrity and
learning stat work because what they were abandoning was police work.
And so you don’t need to learn to do police work. … You’re going out
on the streets to get stats, whether or not those cases were ever
prosecuted—that was not even of interest. (Beilenson 4)
Ralph B. Taylor is a Professor at the Department of Criminal Justice at Temple
University and an expert on Baltimore government and its struggle to fight the crime in the city. Taylor in his Breaking Away from Broken Windows: Baltimore Neighborhoods and the Nationwide Fight against Crime, Grime, Fear, and Decline writes about
Baltimore's former mayor, Kurt Schmoke, the following:
Even though Schmoke's administration touted achievements in
literacy, housing, economic redevelopment, and safety, his
announced victory noted above coincided with unflattering
newspaper analyses of the police department and his housing
commissioner, Donald Henson. A pilot privatization program in
city schools, important to Schmoke, given his strong interest in
literacy, touted higher test scores, but it later turned out additional
resources had quietly been targeted to these schools. (Taylor 28)
61 Even though Schmoke can be criticized by many, according to Simon in his interview for Beilenson's Tapping into the Wire he was a quite pragmatic man with radical ideas too:
In many ways Schmoke was a pragmatic man in terms of filling potholes and getting stuff done and getting everyone moving the city forward. A little ethereal. He would have made a great senator. Being mayor is a much more prosaic thing. But as an idea guy he was smart as a whip. (Beilenson 11)
Corruption is a feature that connects the two backgrounds in that it is present in different forms in both settings, even though one would not expect it to affect the way things work in the law enforcement environment to such extent as it is depicted in the show. Social class is also an important feature of the environments the show depicts, as there are characters from various social classes depicted in the show even though the main focus is of course on the unfortunate people who live in the projects of
Balitomore, who have to struggle in a system which is build with their help, yet they do no profit from it. The people living in projects have to deal with more problems than they are capable of handling on their own, while the institutions that are supposed to protect the people artificially improve their statistics, leaving the problems for the communities to solve for themselves.
Jane Jacobs addresses the issue of unsuccessful neighborhoods in her opus magnum The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which is by many considered to be, even today, a bible of modern city planning even though it was first published in
1961. Jacobs draws the line between successful and unsuccessful neighborhoods based on their abilty to maintain a status quo, between the amount of problems a neighborhood has to deal with and the amount it is capable of dealing with:
62 A successful city neighborhood is a place that keeps sufficiently abreast of its problems so it is not destroyed by them. An unsuccessful neighborhood is a place that is overwhelmed by its defect and problems and is progressively more helpless before them. (Jacobs 112)
Both law enforcement and drug business have their own hierarchies and one of the principles that these two are based on is the chain of command principle. An important feature of this is the value of loyalty. Loyalty is not only important on a particular level of this hierarchy, it is most important between the levels of hierarchies mentioned above. Characters that prove to be disloyal to this principle and their superiors found themselves in unfortunate situations, because as Herc states in the first episode of the first season: “It's the chain of command, baby, the shit always rolls downhill.”(“The Target”) Every member of the hierarchy is expected to play out his role, yet “Those who misperceive their own status and engage in actions that others deem inappropriate”(Anderson 520) are according to "Power, Optimism, and Risk taking." written by Cameron Anderson and Adam Galinsky, rejected.
The means of punishment on the other hand are different for the two environments as it seems. What happens to detective McNullty when he talks to a judge instead of his superiors is that he is put on a detail as a means of punishment by his superior Major Rawls. This way he is put in a unit which seems to be assembled of incapable policemen, which in the end proves to be incorrect as one of the characteristic features of the show is the unpredictable development of different characters. The characters that are higher up the hierarchy such as Daniels, who experiences a relative freedom in making his own decisions, because as he says himself, “”there ain't nothing you [Burell] fear more than a bad headline now, is there?” But as Joe C. Magee, and his colleagues claim in their "8 Social Hierarchy: The Self Reinforcing Nature of Power
63 and Status":
The consequences for violating expectancies are more severe for
low status individuals than for high status individuals, especially
when low status people act above their rank. (Magee 360)
The punishment for disloyalty (or just making a mistake) in the drug business is even more severe, in many cases it means death for the transgressor, as one can see in the case of Wallace who wants to get out of “the Game”. He is shot down by his friend
Bodie. The guns are the tools of communication in the drug business and as Peter L.
Beilenson writes in his T apping into The Wire: The Real Urban Crisis:
On The Wire , whenever pride gets wounded, reason fails, or
paranoia triumphs, guns are always at hand. For instance, when
Bodie needs to prove himself to Stringer Bell, he aims a gun at his
friend, Wallace. The latter’s feeble cry of disbelief, “Yo, man, it’s
me,” is no match for the bullet from Bodie’s Taurus PT99.
(Beilenson 123)
And there is no place for mistakes in “the Game” as Avon says in the fifth episode of the first season: The thing is, you only got to fuck up once. And how you ain't gonna never be slow...never be late? You can't plan for no shit like this, man. It's life. Scares me. (“The Pager”)
64 4. Conclusion
David Simon in his article for The Guardian titled “There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show” claims the following:
I'm not a Marxist in the sense that I don't think Marxism has a very
specific clinical answer to what ails us economically. I think Marx was a
much better diagnostician than he was a clinician. He was good at
figuring out what was wrong or what could be wrong with capitalism if it
wasn't attended to and much less credible when it comes to how you
might solve that.
Simon himself is a very accurate diagnostician when it comes to the flaws of a capitalist society. As the main figure in the production of The Wire , Simon carries a lot of his contempt for the capitalism that is not “attended to”.
The Wire presents a deliberate critique of institutions such as government, law enforcement and drug trade enterprise, which seek capitalist profit at the expense of the working classes.
This thesis has in its second chapter on narrative structure of the show established a framework for a deeper analysis of the show and the questions it raises concerning the issues of social class, hierarchy of law enforcement and drug trade business and flaws of institutions, based on the corruption of the high members of these institutions. In this framework the thesis discusses the importance of the complex narrative strategy that the producers of the show used. What distinguishes the show from conventional television dramas, is its complex narrative structure and continuality which allows the show to depict complicated character development. This thesis argues that one of the most outspoken features of the show is the production of parallels. These parallels a created between different characters, setting and motifs depicted in the show. The usual model
65 through, which these parallels are depicted is the model of reflected scenes. The purpose of these parallels in the show is to emphasize the similarities and differences between the law enforcement organizations and the drug trade enterprise. Among the features of narrative structure that enable the production of these parallels are; narrative continuality which allows the depiction of characters and events against each other, the aspect of the city of Baltimore as linking element between the various environments and characters, that has the power to shape identities of the characters, and the combination of documentary and dramatic style of the show, which gives the viewer insight and detailed voyeuristic perspective on the events and characters of the show.
The third chapter makes use of the framework and models discussed in the second chapter, in order to provide evidence and emphasize the parallels that The Wire offers.
This chapter discusses the issues of corruption and hierarchy of the system through the reflection of the motif of a game of chess which occurs in scenes from both environments. These parallels emphasize the flaws of the capitalist system, in which the institutions which are connected through their common goal of accumulating capital, give the individuals: McNulty, Greggs, Bunk, D'Angelo, Wallace no chance of changing the system. The show is as Karl Marx, according to Simon, great at diagnostics of the flawed system, yet it does not produce any solution, or prospects of change. It is cyclical in its nature and retains a sense of status quo, which is most convenient for the institutions it criticizes the most.
66 5. Works Cited
Alvarez, Rafael. The Wire: Truth Be Told . New York: Grove, 2009. Web.
Anderson, Cameron, and Adam D. Galinsky. "Power, Optimism, and Risk taking." European
Journal of Social Psychology 36.4 (2006): 511 36. Web.
Anderson, Paul Allen. ""The Game Is the Game": Tautology and Allegory in The Wire ."
Criticism 52.3 4 (2010): 373 98. Web.
Beilenson, Peter L., and Patrick A. McGuire. Tapping into The Wire: The Real Urban Crisis .
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. Print.
Brooks, Ryan .“The Narrative Production of 'Real Police'. The Wire: Urban Decay and
American Television . Potter, Tiffany, and C. W. Marshall. New York: Continuum,
2009. Print.
Calthorpe, Peter. The next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American
Dream . New York: Princeton Architectural, 1993. Print.
Clandfield, Peter. “' We ain't got no yard:' Crime, Development, and Urban environment" The
Wire: Urban Decay and American Television . New York: Continuum, 2009. Print. 37
49
Corbusier, Le. The City of To-morrow and Its Planning . Cambridge, MA: M.I.T., 1971. Print.
Gibb, Jane and Sabin, Roger. “Who Loves Ya, David Simon? Notes towards placing The
Wire’s depiction of African Americans in the context of American TV crime drama.”
The Wire Files . Spec. Issue of Dark Matter Journal 4 (2009).
Dujardin, Xavier. The Wire Serial Storytelling and Institutional Criticism A Case Study of
Omar Little. 2013.
Fiske, Alan P. "The Four Elementary Forms of Sociality: Framework for a Unified Theory of
Social Relations." Psychological Review 99.4 (1992): 689 723. Web.
67 Gibb, Jane and Sabin, Roger. “Who Loves Ya, David Simon? Notes towards placing The
Wire’s depiction of African Americans in the context of American TV crime drama.”
The Wire Files . Spec. Issue of Dark Matter Journal 4 (2009).
Griffin. Nick. “ Inside HBOs The Wire" CreativeCOW.net. 2007. Web
Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope . Berkeley: U of California, 2000. Print.
Harvey, David. "The Right to the City." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
27.4 (2003): 939 41. Web.
Hornby Nick. “David Simon: Creator Producer Writer of HBO’s The Wire” , The Believer ,
August 2007,
Jacobs, Jane . The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961.
Print.
Jameson, Fredric. "Realism and Utopia in The Wire ." Criticism 52.3 4 (2010): 359 72. Web.
Nichols, Bill. Introducing the Documentary. Indiana University Press, 2001,
“Lessons” The Wire: The Complete First Season . Writ. David Simon and Ed Burns. Dir.
Clement Virgo. HBO (Warner Brothers). 2005. DVD.
Magee, Joe C., and Adam D. Galinsky. "8 Social Hierarchy: The Self ‐Reinforcing Nature of
Power and Status." The Academy of Management Annals 2.1 (2008): 351 98. Web.
McMillan Alasdair.“Heroism, Institutions, and the Police Procedural” The Wire: Urban Decay
and American Television . Potter, Tiffany, and C. W. Marshall. New York: Continuum,
2009. Print.
Metz, Christian. Film Language; a Semiotics of the Cinema . New York: Oxford UP, 1974.
Print.
Merriam-Webster . Merriam Webster, n.d. Web. 26 Apr. 2015.
Mittell, Jason. "Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television." The Velvet Light
Trap 58.1 (2006): 29 40. Web.
68 “Old Cases.” The Wire: The Complete First Season . Writ. David Simon and Ed Burns. Dir.
Clement Virgo. HBO (Warner Brothers). 2005. DVD.
Park, Robert E., and Ralph H. Turner. On Social Control and Collective Behaviour . N.p.: U. of
Chicago P., 1967. Web.
Park, Robert E. "The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City
Environment." American Journal of Sociology 20.5 (1915): 577. Web.
Peary, Gerald. "Frederick Wiseman”. March 1998
Porter, Michael J., Deborah L. Larson, Allison Harthcock, and Kelly Berg Nellis. "Re (de)
Fining Narrative Events Examining Television Narrative Structure." Journal of Popular
Film and Television 30.1 (2002): 23 30. Web.
Rotberg, Robert I. Corruption, Global Security, and World Order . Cambridge, MA: World
Peace Foundation, 2009. Web.
Sennet, Richard. "The Open City." Urban Age [Berlin] 2006: 1 14. Web.
Sheehan,Helena & Sweeney, Sheamus. “The Wire and the World: narrative and
metanarrative.” Jump Cut 51. (Spring 2009).
Smith, Anthony N. "TV or Not TV? The Sopranos and Contemporary Episode Architecture in
US Network and Premium Cable Drama." Critical Studies in Television: The
International Journal of Television Studies 6.1 (2011): 36 51. Web.
Smith, Glenn D., Jr. “Love as Redemption: The American Dream Myth and the Celebrity
Biopic.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 33.3 (2009): 222 238. SAGE Journals .
Web. 23 May 2012.
Spotnitz, Frank . "Dialogue on film". American Film 16. May 1991. (5): 16–21.
Simon, David. “There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show”. The
Guardian. 2013. Web.
Sullivan, Larry E. Encyclopedia of Law Enforcement . Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2005.
69 Tannenbaum, Arnold Sherwood. Heirarchy in Organizations; an International Comparison .
San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1974. Print
Taylor, Ralph B. Breaking Away from Broken Windows: Baltimore Neighborhoods and the
Nationwide Fight against Crime, Grime, Fear, and Decline . Boulder, CO: Westview,
2001. Print.
“The Buys” The Wire: The Complete First Season . Writ. David Simon and Ed Burns. Dir.
Clement Virgo. HBO (Warner Brothers). 2005. DVD.
“The Hunt” The Wire: The Complete First Season . Writ. David Simon and Ed Burns. Dir.
Clement Virgo. HBO (Warner Brothers). 2005. DVD.
“The Pager” The Wire: The Complete First Season . Writ. David Simon and Ed Burns. Dir.
Clement Virgo. HBO (Warner Brothers). 2005. DVD.
“The Target ” The Wire: The Complete First Season . Writ. David Simon and Ed Burns. Dir.
Clement Virgo. HBO (Warner Brothers). 2005. DVD.
“The Wire” The Wire: The Complete First Season . Writ. David Simon and Ed Burns. Dir.
Clement Virgo. HBO (Warner Brothers). 2005. DVD.
Vint, Sherryl. The Wire . Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2010. Web
Weisberg, Jacob. “ The Wire on Fire: Analyzing the best show on television,”. Slate , September
13, 2006,
70 6. Resumé (english)
This thesis analyses the themes of corruption and social class in the first series of
HBO's television show The Wire. In order to produce a proper analysis of these features, the thesis in its first part gives a structural analysis of the narrative strategy, which
David Simon and his associates use in order to produce a realistic depiction of the institutions and backgrounds of law enforcement and drug enterprise organizations. The thesis discusses various features of narrative structure, which make the show original and different from conventional television shows. Its narrative structure gives the producers a unique opportunity to portray complex character development. The show is distinctive for its complex narrative structure, serial continuality, scene composition, narrative style and its ability to genuine portrayal of an American metropolis and its impact on shaping of individual identity. The basic unit of analysis for this thesis is a scene, or a pair of scenes that produce parallels and reflect each other.
The thesis in its second half argues that the narrative tools discussed in its first half are essential for the depiction of the corruption, social distance and flaws of the capitalist institutions that seek self enrichment through deliberate exploitation of the
American underclass. The thesis argues that the producers of the show are through the unique narrative strategy able to produce parallel between the two backgrounds that are depicted in the show, the law enforcement and drug trade enterprise. This parallelism are one of the most outspoken features of the show and reflect and contrast the two environments and address the issues of corruption and social inequality in a metropolitan society.
71 7. Resumé (česky)
Tato práce analyzuje témata korupce a společenské třídy v první sérii televizní show The Wire z produkce HBO. Za účelem vytvoření řádné analýzy těchto funkcí, práce ve své první části ponouká strukturální analýzu narativní strategie, kterou David
Simon a jeho společníci používají za účelem vytvoření realistického znázornění institucí a pozadí organizací jako jsou policie a nelegální obchod s drogami. Práce se zabývá různými funkcemi narativní struktury, které z téhle show dělají originální a od běžných televizních pořadů odlišné dílo. Jeho struktura vyprávění dává producentům jedinečnou příležitost vylíčit komplexní vývoj charakteru. Show je příznačná pro svou složitou strukturu příběhu, navazující formu, kompozici scén, styl vyprávění a svou schopností realistického ztvárnění americké metropole a jejího vlivu na utváření individuální identity. Základní jednotkou analýzy této práce je scéna, nebo dvojice scén, které produkují paralely a významově se reflektují.
Práce ve své druhé polovině tvrdí, že narativní nástroje popisované v jeho první polovině, jsou nezbytné pro zobrazení korupce, sociální vzdálenosti a nedostatků kapitalistických institucí, kterým jde v první řade o vlastní obohacení prostřednictvím
úmyslného zneužívání americké spodiny. Práce argumentuje, že producenti této show jsou díky unikátní narrativní strategii schopni vytvářet paralely mezi dvěma prostředími, které jsou v show zobrazeny. Tyto paralely jsou jedním z nejtypičtějších rysů The Wire, které reflektují a porovnávají policii a obchod s drogami, přičěm poukazují na otázky, týkající se korupce a sociální nerovnosti v metropolitní společnosti.
72