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.”
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