Urban Pedagogy and David Simon's the Wire

【연구논문】 “The Dickensian Lives of City Children”: Urban Pedagogy and David Simon’s The Wire Kelly Walsh (Yonsei University) Early in the fifth season of David Simon’s critically acclaimed HBO series, The Wire (2002-2008), Gus Haynes, city desk editor for the Baltimore Sun, argues with executive editor James Whiting over an investigative series chronicling the failures of the Baltimore school system. “The word I’m thinking about is Dickensian,” says Whiting, explaining that the series should portray the “Dickensian lives of city children, and then show clearly and concisely where the school system has failed them” (5.2). What Gus specifically objects to is Whiting’s directive to simplify an extremely complex issue by ignoring the larger contexts and social forces that have left the schools in their decrepit condition. For Gus, invoking an American tradition of long-form investigative journalism, an informed series must address the unruly constellation of systems in which the schoolchildren find themselves embedded: 162 Kelly Walsh You want to look at who these kids really are, you got to look at the parenting, or lack of it, in the city. The drug culture, the economics of these neighborhoods. Sure, we can beat up on city schools. Lord knows they deserve to be beat on every once in a while, but then we’re just as irrelevant to these kids as the schools are. I mean, it’s like you’re up on a corner of a roof and you’re showing some people how a couple of shingles came loose, and meanwhile, a hurricane wrecked the rest of the damn house. (5.2) Scott Templeton, the ambitious, ethically challenged reporter―who will subsequently file fraudulent, Pulitzer Prize-winning accounts of the city’s homeless population―ignores Gus’s analogy, asserting that a narrow focus will not preclude telling an impactful story: “You don’t need a lot of context to examine what goes on in one classroom.” Gus, with obvious annoyance, responds: “Really? I think you need a lot of context to seriously examine anything.” The crux of the conflict, then, boils down to readership and profit, with Whiting’s demand that the paper “limit the scope, not get bogged down in details” reflecting a neoliberal sensibility that contemporary readers are indifferent to “some amorphous series detailing society’s ills” (5.2). Instead of challenging readers’ received views of urban education with a broader, sociological examination, the executive editor calls for a decontextualized, “rifle-shot approach” (Williams 220), oversimplifying a social ill to provoke sentimentalism, increase circulation, and, ideally, gain recognition from the national media. The irony here, as sensitive readers of Charles Dickens will attest, is that Gus’s invocation of the complex, interconnected social forces― the family, police, and drug trade, urban deindustrialization, de-facto “The Dickensian Lives of City Children” 163 segregation, and poverty―which have precipitated the crisis of Baltimore’s schools is much more faithful to the expansive vision of Dickens’s serialized fictions than Whiting’s cinematic image of Oliver Twist asking for more gruel. At the same time, this scene enacts a moment of significant self-reflexivity in The Wire, for its fourth season, which examines West Baltimore’s Edward J. Tilghman Middle School and the conflicting social forces traversing it, closely resembles the type of wide-lens story for which Gus advocates (Valdez 200). The Wire, then, is “Dickensian” in its deeply contextualized, serialized presentation of urban social reality, which constitutes an appeal for comprehensive and reflective social reform. Moreover, if we consider Hard Times (1854), The Wire may also be described as “Dickensian” in drawing viewers’ attention to the act of reading and misreading, representing and misrepresenting, social reality, to the question of which “facts” count and for whom. This is fundamentally a pedagogic process,1) one, particularly in the fourth season, that subverts teleological, American narratives of advancement and achievement. And, like Dickens, who “popularizes an understanding of bureaucracies as inward-looking and self-perpetuating” (Levine 99), the series imparts lessons in critical thinking by attending to the vicissitudes of relations between part and whole. In the process, it reveals the distressing, yet banal, reality of how institutions reproduce themselves by conditioning the individuals that pass through them. The knowledge gained from The Wire is largely negative, but, having 1) Paul Farber, in a different vein, calls The Wire “both a dramatic and pedagogic work,” in which “information is to be attained by both its characters and viewers” (416). 164 Kelly Walsh recently taught the series in a Korean university seminar, I can attest to its pedagogical force, provoking student-viewers to critical reflection on their own positionality, their readings of, and complicity in, the realities of today’s globalized, neoliberal societies. The Wire, then, has frequently been considered “Dickensian” in its ambition to present urban social reality in its totality (Jameson 240; Valdez 198; Knight 37; Williams 209). And, indeed, the term is almost ubiquitous in critical discourse on the show, even as the adjective tends to function as shorthand for an aesthetic “realism,” rather than designating concrete points of convergence or influence. Dickens’s reform-minded critiques of nineteenth-century English society are lengthy and densely textured, sprawling with details that contextualize urban poverty and reveal myriad interconnections of various social networks. In its sixty-some-hour “realist representation of Baltimore’s victims of American capitalism,” The Wire, as Galen Wilson argues, offers itself as an extended “meditation on whether such realist representations can be a productive force for social change” (Wilson 59). The answer today, it would seem, is even more ambiguous than in Dickens’s time, but the effort to provoke critical reflection, rather than exploiting viewer sentimentality, transforms television into a medium for serious social investigation;2) while The Wire invites viewers to form attachments to individual characters, its appeals for affective investment are counterbalanced by formal strategies―self-reflexivity, ironizing, lack of narrative closure―which 2) Simon, himself, notes how the show addresses concerns more traditionally taken up by serious novelists: “it is, of course, vaguely disturbing to us that our unlikely little television drama is making arguments that were once the prerogative of more serious mediums” (“Thank You”). “The Dickensian Lives of City Children” 165 bring attention to how viewers “read,” construct, and cognitively map social reality. And for the characters, not unlike those we find in Dickens’s fiction, their possibilities and material outcomes remain tied to their ability to learn their “place among global, social, economic, and political conditions” (Buttress et al. 363), their success in navigating the “rules” of the different institutions they cycle through (Anderson 375). The Wire is also novelistic in its deployment of intertextuality, with Dickens a significant touchstone.3) But while the length of the series and its expansive form resonate with Dickens’s Victorian fiction, there are other generative intertexts; these include writings by serious literary figures, Shakespeare, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, and popular culture visual texts, police procedurals like CSI (2000-2015) and uplifting urban education narratives like Lean on Me (1989). These hybrid intertextual nodes, in part, accentuate the opacity and inertial force of bureaucracy, while adding texture to the sense of fatalism or historical determinism that pervades Simon’s Baltimore. Equally, the self-conscious deployment of intertextuality draws attention to how cinematic and literary narratives have prefigured and distorted viewers’ understanding of urban social reality; in particular, The Wire strives to dispel American myths of individual achievement and advancement, in which intelligence, effort, and inspiration seamlessly eventuate in a future qualitatively better than past and present. The Wire’s inaugural season focuses on the Baltimore police and 3) The sixth episode of the fifth season is ironically titled “The Dickensian Aspect.” 166 Kelly Walsh their efforts to bring down Avon Barksdale’s drug organization. The second turns its attention to organized labor and organized crime at the Port of Baltimore, while the third examines the city’s political landscape. The fifth and final season, as suggested, is concerned with the media, specifically the decline of American print journalism. The Wire’s penultimate season, widely considered its best, thus takes on the educational system, tracking four students, Michael, Randy, Duquan, and Namond, in their eighth-grade year at Tilghman Middle School. Of this season, Robert Bell argues that it dispenses with the others’ affective investment in nostalgia, offering, instead, “an uncharacteristic exploration of the inchoate as such, the nature of potential” (531). On the surface, this seems plausible; as I shall argue, though, it is more accurate to say that the fourth season expends significant energy exposing how “the nature of potential” is circumscribed before students enter the classroom, significantly limited by the social, familial, and economic forms in which they are immersed. Epistemologically, this season, like its predecessors, “privileges the worldview of the block” (Neal 399), disclosing both

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