Acephalous

A list of people whose deaths I have permission to mourn.

An annoying anonymous person writes:

Why is it any time anyone hipsters or academics are supposed to like dies, they just so happen to be very important never-before-mentioned influences on your life? Are you really so needy that there's no death you won't use as an excuse to call attention to yourself?

Although this comment belongs to the tedious category of "complaints about bloggers having blogs and writing about stuff on them," it nevertheless struck a chord: first, because the size of the community grieving for Alex Chilton surprised me; and second, it seems to be a dangerous time to be a living artist or academic who changed my life.  That said, this annoying anonymous person is reading in bad faith: not everyone who influenced me did so greatly or uniquely, which is why I noted Kurt Vonnegut's passing in passing, as a "Vonnegut phase" is required to join the community of readers.  The same cannot be said of those academics and artists with whom I shared an intimate relationship over many years, which is why I wrote individual remembrances of Octavia Butler, David Foster Wallace, Howard Zinn, or Alex Chilton. 

If I seem to be too familiar a type, blame central casting: academics play the part because that's the part they've been asked to play.  That there seems to be a wider community of similarly interested intellectuals is, to my mind, a sign that while academic disciplines may be irrevocably balkanized, something resembling a larger intellectual culture still exists.  Whether this cultural homogeneity is a good thing depends on what it actually contains, and given how surprising Chilton's inclusion image was to me, I probably should refrain from saying much more about it. 

However, in light of the recent proliferation of lists like this, I think I'll take a moment to silence future scolds by listing all living authors, musicians, and filmmakers with whose work I feel a deeply irrational kinship.  They may not still move me as they once did, but they once did and when they die a little bit of me will too.  

Narrative Exhaustion Strung Along The Wire

On that same post by Ari Kelman, ac wonders whether The Wire doesn't appeal to those it condemns:

Isn’t it also something to do with the audience at whom violent gangster stories are directed? There is a voyeuristic or vicarious observance for the male viewer, too. It’s not like most men watching operate in violent code-of-the-warrior mode themselves.

Even ogged—of "there's no such thing as an anti-war war movie" fame—concedes there may be something to the notion that The Wire defies this (extensive) logic, that it may be an anti-gangster gangster serial.  Not that ac and ogged have no point: who sympathizes with law enforcement while watching The Godfather?  (That Fredo's execution has become an object of cultural parody indicates the extent to which viewers sympathetically identify with Michael Corleone.)  The Wire escapes that voyeuristic pull for two reasons, one simple, the other so complex I've auditioned it before many, many, many people without working up the gall put in writing.

The Simple Reason

The Wire combines the narrative perspective of three previous David Simon-related projects: Homicide, Oz, and The Corner.  As if to underscore this, at one point we see Omar Little and his boyfriend curled up watching Oz.  (If that ain't irony enough for you, they're watching Chris Keller threaten to rape Toby Beecher, and Keller's played by Christopher Merloni, a.k.a. Elliot Stabler from Law & Order: SVU.  So you have two gay men watching one gay man who plays a sex crimes officer rape a straight man and haven't we been down this road with these same folk before?)  The multiple perspectives force the viewer to adopt an almost sociological attitude toward the characters in each group.  We adore detectives McNulty and Bunk one moment, D'Angelo and Bodie the next.  The narratives splinter our sympathies, forcing us to confront the limitations films like The Godfather would have us embrace:

We root for D'Angelo while hoping CID destroys his cousin (and employer) Avon's organization.  Simon and company disseminate our allegiances so wide and thin that when conflict arises we feel genuine confusion.  The algebra of identification grows to calculus so quickly that we stare, dumbfounded, unable to understand the ramifications of what we witnessed.  This confusion is essential to the show's appeal.  Knowing what happened is less important than understanding the potential consequences.  (As is dramatized, via nail-gun, on numerous occasions in Season Four.)

The More Complicated Reason

I crib from sources sage and wise:

The Wire isn’t simply the best show on television, in many ways, it’s not a television show at all, generically speaking. To judge it by the standards you’d apply to other shows denies it its uniqueness, denudes of it what makes it it.  I know that sounds abstract, but let me explain the experience of watching it:

The age of television on DVD has created a Culture of Marathon. We purchase entire seasons, then watch them in one or two consecutive evenings. At least, the desire to do so is there, as if the serial nature of the Victorian novel were abetted by having a Perpetual Dickens Machine in the closet crunching out the next chapter on demand. We might not always do so—not always prudent to be watching season finales at 3 a.m.—but that’s how we want to watch it. This mode of watching (and reading) creates some retention problems: we get so caught up in the big arcs that we miss a lot of the nuance. Instead of brooding over details for the weeks/months between serials, we ride the wave of plot from start-to-finish, and leave the little pleasures for repeated viewings. (If the show merits any, that is, which creates of host of other problems, but that’s another comment.)

Unlike any other show, The Wire demands you watch the next episode, but leaves you so drained that it’s almost impossible to do so. You take in so much in any given episode that, though you desperately desire to continue, you know you won’t enjoy it as much, since you’ll be so cognizant of all you’ve missed. They pushed this dynamic hard through the first season; the second reversed course for the first few episodes, then slammed you with almost overwhelming complexity. The thing of it is, you always feel there’s a perfect balance somewhere: two hours and fifteen minutes, maybe? But you can’t stop in the middle of an episode, or you’ll lose its arc, &c. That’s what I mean when I say that as a televisual experience, The Wire’s utterly unique, comparable only to something that doesn’t exist, like a page-turning modernist novel.

I can't best that tonight.  Consider it the germ of something larger and to come ... but by all means critique it mercilessly.  I may be blinded by The Wire's brilliance or embracing a pernicious televisual presentism. 

Birds on The Wire

In response to Ari Kelman's post on The Wire at (on?) The Edge of the American West, Sandie writes:

What, for example, are the lives of the “Miss Annas,” the foster mothers like? What would it mean to focus on the foster care system and social work, another occupation/institution that is female-dominated? How do all of these areas fit into the puzzle that is Baltimore? Again, I suppose that one could make the argument that the writers are writing what they know, but would it kill them to find out some things that they do not know?

To which I responded:

You can’t let Simon off the hook so easily.  The Corner’s very much about the place of women in the masculine world, and its central character, Fran Boyd, is a script-consultant/on-set verisimilitude-guarantor. Simon knows the effect of this life on women, he just chooses to focus elsewhere.  That women aren’t involved in the day-to-day drug operations, or in the dock workers union, isn’t a matter of making masculine what is, in fact, more diverse—it’s a legacy of the extant misogyny in the groups being depicted.

Simon knows the toll "the game" takes on those who ply its margins.  Consider the families of the Barksdale crew: Donette finesses her way through relationships with one of its top soldiers, D'Angelo Barksdale; and when D'Angelo goes to prison, she insinuates herself with its de facto leader, Stringer Bell.  Brianna Barksdale negotiates the increasingly strained relations between Avon and Stringer, and more significantly, their relationship to her son, D'Angelo.  Brianna also works to support the families the incarcerated, managing the delicate egos and strident demands of De'Londa Brice and the like.  While you may not respect the positions these woman occupy, Simon and his staff portray them with a keen sympathy for the pained decisions which have brought them there.  (Even De'Londa becomes sympathetic by proxy, if only as Wee-Bey's wife and Namond's mother.)

That said, these figures do exist on the margins of Simon's Baltimore, so you can legitimately criticize him for choosing to depict a world in which women are marginal.  Before doing so, rent The Corner, the mini-series Simon helmed for HBO.  (Or read the book.)  If The Wire neglects to document the toll of the game on women, The Corner focuses so intently on the human cost of the drug war that the structural critique central to The Wire's narrative appeal never emerge.  We see the effects of systemic failure, but only hints of its origin and extent. 

This is more true of the mini-series than the book, as the latter contains explicit criticism of the infrastructure of everything from drug organizations to the political entities who task incompetent law enforcement agencies to incarcerate the dealers et al. in brutal, corrupt correctional facilities.  (But only after they're sentenced by number-crunching prosecuting attorneys who overwhelm the meager talents of drunken public defenders before august, indifferent judges.) 

The Wire contains these beshitted multitudes, weaving their mercenary narratives into something so grand, it deserves it own post. 

[UPDATE: Before I tackle that other post, I should mention one more thing about gender on The Wire: namely, that the traditional roles are often reversed, such that the most motherly character on the show is a homeless drug addict who helps other even more destitute souls learn how to survive the streets.  More on this later.]