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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 7 Feb 2010 04:24 am |
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I may be the last adult on the planet to find what The Wire is.
If I'm not, and you are similarly in the dark, I can tell you that it is a television series, broadcast in the US between 2002 and 2008. It has, as I understand it, been shown here, albeit late at night. (Way past my bedtime anyway.) I have been watching the first three series in the last two weeks. That's 36 hour-long episodes in 14 days. I can speak fluent gangsta now.
To save time backgrounding this subject I'm going to quote the opening paragraphs of the very comprehensive Wikipedia entry about The Wire. I need however to flag an error in this entry. Wherever Wikipedia says something like "According to many critics The Wire is the best television programme ever made" it has omitted "...and David Harcourt..."after the word "critics". Please correct this egregious error in your head as you read the following:
The Wire is an American television drama series set and produced in Baltimore, Maryland. Created, produced, and primarily written by author and former police reporter David Simon, the series was broadcast by the premium cable network HBO in the United States. The Wire premiered on June 2, 2002 and ended on March 9, 2008. The five seasons comprise 60 episodes. Each season of The Wire focuses on a different facet of the city of Baltimore. They are, in order:
* the illegal drug trade
* the port system
* the city government and bureaucracy
* the school system and
* the print news media.
The large cast consists mainly of character actors who are little known for their other roles. Simon has said that despite its presentation as a crime drama, the show is 'really about the American city, and about how we live together. It's about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how whether you're a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge or a lawyer, you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you've committed to'.
Despite never seeing large commercial success or winning any major television awards, The Wire has frequently been described by critics as the greatest television series of all time. The show is recognized for its realistic portrayal of urban life, literary ambitions, and uncommonly deep exploration of sociopolitical themes...
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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 7 Feb 2010 04:56 am |
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For those who have watched the programme, I have two observations which may be of interest. Both stem from the fact that I am not an American, and have been watching this programme in New Zealand, not the US.
The first is that there are half a dozen extremely explicit sex scenes in the series. These scenes probably did as much as anything else to earn The Wire its restricted rating here in New Zealand. Which is a pity, because virtually all of these scenes are completely gratuitous: they are wholly unnecessary to the development of the plot. Their presence would seem to reflect a need on the part of the creative team to include explicit sexual content in a programme aimed at an adult audience merely because the American audience expects such material to be there.
This is a disappointing lapse into conventionality on the creators of The Wire. In the context of the series as a whole it is of course a fault so small as to be unworthy of mention unless it serves to point up by way of contrast a less predictable characteristic of our American cousins. And this it does, for whereas the sex scenes are frequently tasteless and often completely irrelevant the many scenes involving violence - and there is a great deal of violence in The Wire - are almost invariably presented with exquisite judgement and finesse. In fact, although the series becomes, if anything, increasingly violent as it progresses, the depiction of violence becomes increasingly oblique as the series proceed, presented as much through the reactions of other characters as through explicit depictions of wounding and killing. Yes, there is one major exception to this towards the end of Season Three but even that death is a long-awaited coda to a story arc which is by that stage 35 episodes long. It had to happen, and when it happens it happens quickly.
My conclusion from the very different way in which sex and violence are treated in The Wire is that Americans are far more sensitive about the way in which violence is depicted on television than they are about the depiction of sex acts. Sex is a minor theme throughout the series, usually serving to illustrate something or other about the characters involved (in most cases, the fact that they are extremely promiscuous, and almost infantile in their sexual behaviour), but violence is central. Part of the reason why the series is so good is therefore a product of this peculiarly American set of values. The Wire is brilliant in its depiction of violence as defining characteristic of the life of the American under-class partly because it has to treat this aspect of the subject with sensitivity and great skill: it simply has no choice.
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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 7 Feb 2010 05:18 am |
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The second point which a viewer of The Wire outside America picks up on very quickly is this: whereas we and everyone else outside America - certainly in the western world, at any rate - see 'the rest of world' as a place outside our own country, Americans see 'the rest of the world' as a place outside their own city - or even, as in Baltimore, anywhere beyond their immediate neighbourhood.
So the citizen of western or eastern Baltimore sees the rest of Baltimore as other, alien, remote - not their problem. Even more remote is that vague entity, the rest of the US. Unimaginably remote - might as well be in a different galaxy from us remote - are foreign countries, like Canada, and Mexico, and London, and Paris. If London and Paris are countries, which I'm not really sure about. And it doesn't matter anyway.
This is a radically different perspective from that which most of us have here in New Zealand, and I suggest most citizens of western countries, apart from the US. There is New Zealand, and then there is the rest of the world, starting with Australia and the Pacific, of course, but France, say, like Australia, is essentially "foreign". The degree of foreigness differs, of course - some countries are far more alien than others - but the basic division is: (a) New Zealand; (b) the rest.
What is the implication of this perspective? It's this: if an earthquake or similar calamity strikes another country, we know how to react. It's not our problem, in the sense that it's happened to us, but it is our problem in the sense that it's happened to some one, more or less like us, and could happen to us some day, and for this reason some of us feel motivated to help. Similarly, if there's a problem within New Zealand - if, for example, drug-taking and murder on a scale comparable with that in Baltimore were to arise here - we would feel (those of us, that is, who feel about anything) that this was our problem. We would simply have to deal with it. No options about that.
In America, however, the layers of affiliation which people feel are so many, and the secondary and subsequent layers so thin, that people can live in one part of Baltimore and consider that the problems of another part are as remote as, say, a riot in Italy or an earthquake in China would seem to us. When you combine this with the American desire to clothe unpleasantness in anodyne language you have a recipe for disaster. An American psychologist once told a group of which I was a member that in America "a problem" is something which you can solve, readily, and with the materials at hand. If you can't solve it, it isn't a problem; it's a phenomenon - something you cope with, and navigate your way around (if you can). So there is no "drug problem" in America, for example; there is criminality, certainly, some of which involves illegal drugs, but it has nothing to do with you or me, gentle reader. Similarly, guns don't kill people; people kill other people, sometimes with guns, so it's people that are the problem, not guns. And what are you going to do about people?
I will return to this topic later this week, and try to make my thoughts more coherent. Meanwhile, please watch The Wire. It really is every bit as good as they - and I - say it is.
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