Blogging The Wire: "More With Less," Season 5, Episode 1.

 

We’ll be hosting a running season-long discussion of the final 10 episodes of HBO’s incomparably dope drama The Wire. Steve Logerfo, who recently left his job as a counselor in an inner-city Baltimore school to attend law school, handles the first week’s recap. Oh, yeah. Spoilers.

The Wire has methodically worked its way through several of Baltimore‘s social institutions: the drug trade, labor, the school system and city. The show is now focusing on the news media, with its own take on The Baltimore Sun, and the (real) Sun doesn’t exactly give a glowing review to its fictionalized counterpart. (As has been reported endlessly, show creator David Simon was a crime reporter for the Sun and had a somewhat acrimonious departure. — G.D.)

The school kids, the reason why Season 4 was so compelling, are at least 50% back. Michael and Dukie’s relationship is interesting because of its implications about masculinity. Michael’s become the head of the household, holding down a corner and financially providing for Bug and Dukie. Dukie isn’t tough, and he’s stuck running a corner when Michael’s gone and isn’t given much respect by his colleagues. Michael relieves him of his duties, and tells him to go home and take care of Bug, who should be getting out of school. Michael later tells him that he doesn’t have to work the corner, and Dukie asks what he’s supposed to do all day while Bug is in school. Michael has no real answer.

We find Carcetti struggling to balance both his desire to become governor with the promises he made as a mayoral candidate and his obligations as mayor of a cash-starved city. Refusing the state’s offer of money for the city keeps the governor from taking credit for fixing Baltimore and hurting Carcetti’s bid for the governor’s mansion down the line, but it also makes the mayor’s promises for pay raises for police officers absolutely impossible. When it comes down to it, it’s a bunch of men playing in the sand with millions of dollars of salaries at stake. The feds want to nail corrupt state senator Clay Davis to make a political statement against Democrats, and the state’s attorney is angling for the mayor’s office. Meanwhile, of course, police officers are unpaid, the department is falling apart, and people suffer.

The show continues to do a great job weaving in Baltimore‘s real-life politics. Episode 11 last season featured an ironic cameo by then-Governor Bob Ehrlich as a security guard at the state house who told Carcetti that the governor wasn’t available (Ehrlich lost his governorship to the real mayor of Baltimore, Martin O’Malley, weeks later). The city council president who would seemingly take over if Carcetti wins seems to be modeled on current real-life Baltimore mayor Sheila Dixon.

A valid criticism can be made about the show’s lack of dynamic female characters. Sandra Ruttan makes the argument that many of them are used minimally and only to aid the development of the male characters and their storylines. I wouldn’t say this is entirely true, but the female characters are rarely in the forefront. Zenobia was the only girl in the schools who regularly spoke (and delivered the infamous “I don’t want no damn welfare pencil!” line) and Snoop (as much as I love you, please don’t find me and hurt me) is a caricature of a masculine lesbian who occasionally delivers a one-liner or just baffles us with her unintelligible accent. Detective Greggs has long since stopped being a major character; she has acted in a very stereotypically masculine way toward commitment, children and relationships. We get glimpses of women throughout, whether it was Randy’s foster mother or Namond’s poorly acted mother Delonda, or the aesthetically pleasing city council president, but these characters’ lack of development is almost inexcusable. Perhaps the writers lack a female point of view, but that’s not an excuse. There is also no way you can really negate the role of women in every social institution that the show examines in Baltimore. Perhaps they’re making a larger statement by purposefully reducing women’s roles in every aspect of the show, but that would be entirely too simple for a show that is entirely too complex in every other way.

Another continuing theme is how the academy sometimes comes in contact with the other institutions. The failed experiment by Professor Parenti last semester to analyze the “corner kids” was doomed by the lead teacher’s sudden denouncement of the project and school pressure to do well on the MSAs and bring back a good report card. Now, pressure from the well-regarded Philip Merrill College of Journalism (which also brought us Jayson Blair) crushed a story on the exclusion of minorities on the University of Maryland campus (which, in real life, got in on last fall’s noose craze ). Back in my rabble-rousing days, I agreed that racism at Maryland was a problem.

I’ve come to care about all these characters, so it was good to see Dukie with fresh white-on-white 1s and finally learning Bubbles’ real name (Reginald!) after all these years. But still, I feel all kinds of ambivalence toward the larger social themes of the show. It’s funny that Bunk found a way to trick suspects in a shooting into snitching on each other with a Xerox machine disguised as a polygraph test, but maddening that a suspect’s basic rights are violated in order to keep the arrest numbers up.


McNulty is drinking again, Carcetti is struggling, Dukie is dejected and Marlo is plotting. Unless Simon decides to fade-to-black like the last episode like The Sopranos, a whole lot is going to go down. What is Chris trying to do with Sergei? Is Marlo going to challenge the
East Side dealers? How is Dukie going to cope with being relegated to a nanny? What’s up with the ambitious and disgruntled young reporter?


Words to live by this week:

“The bigger the lie, the more they believe.” – Bunk

Carcetti: “Say it,
Norman. You’re thinking it. Truth to power, Norman. Isn’t that what I keep you around for?”
Norman: “When the governor threw that fifty-some-million on the table, you should have picked that shit up.”
Advisor: “He takes the state bailout and he never becomes governor.”

Norman: “He shorts the police department, the crime rate stays up, he ain’t no governor, neither. Just the weak-ass mayor of a broke-ass city.”

Carcetti: “Feel better?”
Norman: “L’il bit. You?”

Johnson: ”You say 120 people were evacuated.”
Gutierrez: “Yeah, they were.”
Johnson: “You can’t evacuate people. I mean, you can if you want but that’s not what you want to say here.
Copy Editor: “A building can be evacuated. To evacuate a person is to give that person an enema. The details, Ms. Gutierrez. At the
Baltimore Sun, God still resides in the details.”

  • G.D.

    i think Kima is more layered than Sandra Ruttan gives her credit for. At first, i thought she was, essentially, a woman who was being written as a dude. her troubles with her girlfriend, her womanizing after that relationship dissolved, etc.

    but when you think about it, there’s nothing neatly masculine or feminine about Kima. she’s clearly a woman, as we remember when McNulty hit on her in the hotel room and all the detectives in homicide were staring at her ass as she walked away. that’s how the other characters in the police department deal with her (compare her with Snoop, who a lot of people didn’t even realize was female for a long time) i think outside of her ambivalence toward being a mom, that that that criticism is faulty.

    but that’s only Kima; she’s the exception to the rule. Brianna Barksdale was an interesting character, and i guess you could argue that Donette was kinda layered too, though her screen time was pretty limited. but there are tons of characters like Rhonda Pearlman who get a considerable amount of screen time and are kind of simplistically considered. even in the schools, where most of the teachers and the assistant principal were women, they didn’t get a ton of development.

    random aside: Obama’s favorite show is ‘The Wire’, according to TV Guide. do you believe that, or as another commenter said in a post over at edgeofthewest, that him saying that is just dog-whistle politics for progressives who remain unconvinced about his campaign? “i’m one of you” or whatever?

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  • sandraruttan

    Respectfully, I said about Kima, “It’s actually unfair to say she’s a throwback to a male stereotype. I think more men are interested in children than Kima ever seems to be. She’s a woman in a male-dominated world, and comes off in some respects more “male” than the guys do. I don’t get the impression she’s pushing it to try to prove herself… She genuinely seems to be as much the tough guy pussy hound as any male, and then some.”

    That isn’t to say that she isn’t a woman, in that she’s certainly female. But we see no real development of female characteristics with her. Just because guys are dogs and look at her ass doesn’t mean she was putting a wiggle in her walk to get their attention – she wasn’t. They’re just dogs. End of season 1, wasn’t it, when McNulty went to visit her in the hospital and she said something to the effect of him in there crying, acting like a bitch and shit. (It’s been several months since I’ve seen it, so that’s undoubtedly a bad paraphrase.)

    There are many men in the show we’ve seen closer to tears than Kima. I hadn’t thought about her not really being a main character anymore, until reading this post here, and there’s a valid argument to be made there.

    I’ll be going on to talk about women in the other seasons, but I’m finding it tricky. I want to deal with Beadie properly, because I do think an argument can be made that she’s the strongest female character overall. I’ll deal with that argument when I do the post, but I almost regret starting it before season 5 began, because this season holds the promise of a lot of development with her character.

    Mainly, I find it disappointing that, as much as I like Ronnie, her role and behaviour (particularly in the first and second seasons) were trumped by Theresa D’Agostino (my spelling could be wrong there). But my god – do none of these people keep their legs together? Apparently not. The women who resonate to me as most real are Beadie, Jen and Shardene. And all three are minor characters. (As much as I like the character of Ronnie overall, women who screw married men and then wonder why the guy won’t commit to them don’t get much of a sympathy vote from me.) I don’t find much substance to Donette. Comes off like one of those girls who had a kid so she could sink her claws into a suitable guy and the minute he was out of the picture spread her legs to replace him. Yes, it comes off crude saying it that way, but she was only about herself. She wasn’t a good mother and she wasn’t good to Dee either. That scene, after Shardene had left and she’d moved in and was just running at the mouth about all the things she wanted and Dee just walks out – that’s classic Donette. She had more control with Dee. With Stringer, she had to shut up a bit more and behave. To a degree, it’s realistic. There really are women who have babies to get men. But again, we’re focusing on a very specific type of women – contrast to Ronnie and Theresa and it’s just a different type of whore, women who use sex and their gender for power. I liked Shardene because that’s never what it was about with her. And Kima never used her body to gain an edge. We never see her flash cleavage with her CO to get approval on something. Season 1 – Kima telling Daniels she’ll tell Marla if he tells Cheryl and them laughing – that’s being ‘one of the guys’.

    What I think is tragic is that Brianna probably had the brains and ability to run the Barksdale organization after Stringer’s death. She certainly seemed to know everything about the operation and handle her fair share of it before. It could have been interesting to see her at least try to take the throne. Okay, maybe it never would have happened, but I still would have liked to see the attempt made.

    I won’t be commenting much on season 5 until it’s near the end, but the opportunity was there, with the addition of the newsroom (as well as the school and City Hall in season 4) to bring in strong female characters and develop them meaningfully. I won’t buy that there’s no place for them in those worlds – I had my first newspaper column at the age of 13, when I studied journalism the women outnumbered the men, and I also worked at an inner city school that had a majority female staff. I absolutely love Prez, but I’d like to know about the reasoning for having so few truly developed women in the show, even in places where the female roles were feasible. I certainly don’t believe David Simon is sexist – not for a second. I’d be curious to know if there’s a more reasoned, complex explanation. (I do know Simon’s wife, Laura Lippman, although I do not know David Simon, but I feel I know enough about him to believe there must have been reasoning behind the decisions about gender roles. Simon has gone on the record talking about black actors and discrimination in the film business http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20080107/the_wire_080107/20080107?hub=Entertainment)

    Truth is, moving through the seasons, I’ll get to Kimmy and I have a thumbs up for her. She wasn’t content to be one of those other girls who slept her way into money. She went for it, the only way she knew how, and when it suited her to be tough she was almost as cold as Omar, a total pro in a robbery, and she knew when and how to use her gender to her advantage – season 4, robbing the shipment. But the lifting of the skirt leads to removing a gun and she’s suddenly all business, and follows through by shooting the guy to get them to comply. Comes off in every respect like a woman and a total professional at what she did, capable of handling herself on the street. For the amount of screen time she had, she really came alive for me.

    Always interesting to see where opinions differ. I’m watching season 5 with interest -the newsroom opened the opportunity of having more strong female characters come front and center, but it doesn’t look likely.

    As a complete aside, the one thing that I’ve been wondering is if this is the season we’ll see one of the cops, or “good guys” killed. We’ve had no major characters lost to violence from that side of the equation. You have to know with a show like The Wire it isn’t likely to end well. The question is, how will it end? In truth, I usually like to watch a season through twice fully before wading out with strong opinion, so what I’ve said here about season 5 is tentative. It’s impossible to take one episode alone and form conclusions of this nature with a show like this.

  • I caught on via reruns on HBO on Demand and now I’m hooked for life on this show.!

  • Sandra and Steve,

    I was thinking more about the fourth season. An argument I’ve heard elsewhere was that Simon was dealing in mostly ‘male’ worlds, but since the focus and locus of the fourth season was a middle school, that defense seemed full of holes.

    I loved Randy, Namond, Dukie and Michael; I thought they were note-perfect. But I wonder if any of them could have been swapped out for a teenage girl? Not Michael and Namond, obviously, because their specific story arcs had to do with them shouldering the mantle of ‘man of the house/breadwinner’. Also, the resolution (if you can call it that) of Michael’s storyline wouldn’t have allowed for a female character. with the exception of Snoop, there probably aren’t a ton of female hitters out there.

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