On The Wire by Linda Williams
Content
On The Wire
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L I N D A
W I L L I A M S
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© 2014 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free acid-free paper ♾ Typeset in Warnock Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Cover art: Still from The Wire . Courtesy of Photofest.
Library of Congress Catalogingin-Publication inPublication Data Williams, Linda, 1946– On the Wire / Linda Williams. pages cm
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Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8223-5706-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8223-5717-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Wire (Television (Television program). I. Title. PN1992.77.W53 PN1992.7 7.W53 W52 2014 791.45'72—dc23
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Contents Acknowledgments
vii
Introduction 1 PART I.
World Enough and ime: Te Genesis and Genius of Te Wire
1
2
Ethnogra phic Imaginati Ethnographic Imagination: on: From Journalism to elevision Serial 11 Serial elevision’s World and ime: Te Importa Importance nce of the “Part” 37
PART II.
Justice in Te Wire: ragedy, Realism, and Melodrama Te
3
“Classical” “Classi cal” ragedy, or . . . 79
4
Realistic, Modern Serial Melodrama 107 Surveillance, Schoolin’, and Race
PART III.
5
Hard Eyes / Soft Eyes: Surveillance and Schoolin’ 139
6
Feeling Race: Te Wire and the American Melodrama of Black and White 173
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Sweet Baltimore
bibliography 247
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index 255
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211
Acknowledgments I owe thanks to three different classes on Te Wire that I was fortunate
to teach at UC Berkeley after the series ended. Te first was a senior seminar that also served as my own initiation into television studies. Te second was a large lecture class whose discussion discussion sessions were extremely helpful to this book. b ook. Te third was a graduate seminar on serial television featuring Te Wire as a case study in which I tried out some of the ideas on seriality and melodrama. Many insights were sparked by the students in these classes and in countless discussions with friends.
Special thanks go to three wonderful research assistants and editors: Jonathan Lee (who led the way), Kelsa rom (wise beyond her years), and Irene Chien (without whom I would still be mired in research). I am also indebted to Christine Borden, who taught me the importance of Simon’ss journalism; Nikhil Krishnan, who understood the lure of techSimon’ nology; Mallory Russell, who counted many beats; Zeynep Z eynep Gürsel, who
knew about ethnography; Maryam Monalisa Gharavi and Catherine Zimmer, who were were both smart about surveillance; and Elisabeth Anker,
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who told me to keep my eye on the series itself. I dedicate this book to all of these friends, colleagues, and students who showed me new facets of the series. Especially heartfelt thanks go to the three people
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who first made me watch Te Wire: Edith Kramer, Kr amer, J. P. P. Gorin, and Quinn Qu inn Fitzgerald.
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Introduction But to tell the truth, I no longer watch many films. . . . I feed fe ed my hunger for fiction with what is by far the most accomplished source: those terrific American TV series like Deadwood , Firefly , or The Wire . . . . There is a knowledge in them, a sense of story and economy, of ellipsis, a science of framing and of cutting, a dramaturgy dramaturg y, and an acting style that has no equal anywhere, and certainly not in Hollywood. —Chris Marker, La Jetée / / Sans Soleil DVD DVD booklet Who knew that the movie business would disappear. It disappeared instantaneously.. . . . There will be festival films, there will be a way to live, instantaneously where a movie like ‘[Michael] Clayton’ gets made if you get a movie star like [George] Clooney to waive his fee, there will be exceptions for decades. But as a rule, the middle class drama, ambitious drama, it’s on TV. Everybody knows that, it’s why TV is so great right now, they’ve got it. —Tony Gilroy, The Playlist website website
This website stores data such as cookies to enable essential site functionality, as well as marketing, personalization, In andthe analytics. You and fall of 2007, I was laid up in bed. For the first time summer may change your settings at any time in my life since childhood c hildhood I had time to feed fe ed my “hunger for fiction” via or accept the default settings.
television. A friend had brought me an inspired gift: bootlegs of the first Privacy Policy three seasons of Te Wire. I proceeded to watch an episode each eveMarketingning until I ran out. As soon as I could, I purchased the last two seasons and continued to steadily feed fee d a growing habit. Te series ran weekly on Personalization Analytics from 2002 to 2008, but ran in a more concentrated, nightly form Save
on my bedroom from 2007 to 2008. By the time I finished watchAccept All
ing, I was more than a fanI was a convert. Te project of this book is to understand to what I had been converted. Trough the microcosm of one decaying American city, Te Wire re-
veals the interconnected truths of many institutional failures: a rampant drug trade that police cannot curtail, the devaluation of work work measured in declining unions, a cynical city c ity government government that raises and then crushes the hope of reform, the poignant waste of schools and the failure of education, and, finally, finally, a media that cannot report on the truth of any of the above, let alone see the connections among them, although Te Wire itself does. Te exemplary writing and plotting draws on the
expertise of some of America’s best contemporary writers of urban crime fictionGeorge Pelecanos, Richard Price, Dennis Lehanebut within the television serial form. Te series digs deeply into character
without making private virtue or evil the final cause of narrative outcomes, thus putting an unusual spin on melodramatic conventions. I have never seen anything so absorbing, so complex, so simultaneously challenging and gratifying coming from either the big or little screen.
Subtle nuances of race, class, and language are made possible by a locale in which blacks are the majority of the citizens, yet fixing things is not a matter of simply electing more black politicians. pol iticians. Te Te usual racial
melodramas of black versus white are thus not the crude affairs they have tended to be in most movies and television. Race, for example, cannot be reduced to a problem of “racism.” “racism.” It is inseparable from class, the plague of drugs, the decline of work, and the failures of government, education, and media. Nevertheless, the series tantalizingly holds out This website storesthe datahope such as of change, the hope of a better social justice. justic e. Indeed, it is simultaneously abo ut cookies to enable essential site animated by the quest for this justice and deeply cynical about functionality, as well marketing, itsasachievement. A profound understanding of education both in and personalization, and analytics. You out ofatschool may change your settings any timemakes learning, as it should be, the key to change, while or accept the default settings.
a distinctive rootedness in the specific locality of Baltimore gives the
series a social solidity lacking in any other work on television. During and after the series’ run, many television critics, not to menMarketing tion the president of the United States, cited Te Wire as the best telePersonalization vision series ever ever.. Many other critics claimed it transcended the very Analytics form of television. Journalist Joe Klein claimed in the commentary
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2 Introduction
erature!” Simon himself called the work a “visual novel” (though just as often a Greek tragedy). Literary L iterary critics such as Walter Walter Benn Michaels have followed Simon’s Simon’s lead. In a lament about the failure f ailure of the American novel to tell stories that matter to the neoliberal present, Michaels has claimed that Te Wire is the “most serious and ambitious fictional narrative of the twenty-first twenty-first century centur y.” Sociologists Anmol Chaddha and William Julius Wilson Wilson also see the series as literature, arguing that it “is
part of a long line of literary works that are often able to capture the complexity of urban life in ways that have eluded many social scientists.” Tey cite novelists Richard Wright, Italo Calvino, and Charles Dickens as models, while Michaels cites Émile Zola and Teodore Dreiser. Te series has the ability, like Dickens, Wright, Zola, and Dreiser, to give dramatic resonance to a wide range of interconnected social strata, and the different behaviors and speech of these strata over broad swaths of world and time. Yet Yet at the same time it seems feeble f eeble to describe Te Wire as our greatest novel (never written) or, as Fredric Jameson does, to extol its “refusal “refusal to be ‘realist’ in the traditional mimetic and replicarepl icative sense.” Like the comparison to Greek Gre ek tragedy, much of this praise borrows a literary prestige that corresponds to the series’ excellence but not closely enough to its actual serial television cultural form. Before making these more exalted comparisons, then, it may help to see how Te Wire grew and what it grew out offirst as a form of journalism, then out of the conventional melodrama of crime genres and soaps.
Although I find this particular television serial exceptional, it will This website stores data such as cookies to enable essential site functionality, as well as marketing, vision today personalization, and analytics. Youis hardly a wasteland. Nor is it my intention to follow the may change your settings at any time lead of Te Wire’s prime mover, David David Simon, who has certainly certain ly created or accept the default settings.
not be my intention to laud its exceptionality as a rare flowering in the “wasteland” of television, for as both my epigraphs indicate, tele-
great television but is not a particularly p articularly insightful critic of his own work. Privacy Policy Rather, in seeking to articulate what is so exceptional about Te Wire, I shall argue that it is first necessary to appreciate what is conventional conventional Marketing about it: seriality seriality,, televisuality, and melodrama. Personalization Analytics Save
For twelve years David Simon worked as a journalist digging increasingly deeper for social context. But he quit the newspaper busiAccept All
ness in angeraccepting a buyout with a substantial severance pack-
Introduction 3
age even though he was offered a raise to stay onand began writing imaginative teleplays for the television series Homicide. In both of these apprenticeships, apprenticeships, Simon absorbed a craft of writing that would serve him well in the leap into the less well-charted well-charted territory of Te Wire. A key first argument of this book will thus be that although Te be sui generi generis, s, it does not transcend its mass culture bases in city desk journalism and television melodrama; rather, it is woven out of this very cloth. And the fundamental warp of this cloth is the (sometimes preachy) journalism Simon practiced at the Baltimore Sun along with long-form “new journalism” with novelistic gestures, culminating in the experiment of his miniseries dramatization of the lives of real people in Te Corner . Its weft is fictional storytelling based on fact, which episodes of Homicide and Te Corner awkwardly negotiate, but which Te Wire, breaking more completely Wire may
with the righteous tone of editorializing journalism, weaves together perfectly. Out of the warp and weft of the nonfictional and the fictional elements of this cloth, Simon expanded his craft into the sixty hours of serial television that constitutes Te Wire. Te genius of this series was thus neither, as Simon saw it, a novelistic rebellion against journalistic journalist ic or televisual constraints but bu t a slow genesis that learned a great deal from the discipline of these fundamentally melodramatic forms of mass culture. A second part of the book takes up the most common praise given While Te Wirethat it is a modern tragedyand turns it on its head. While This website stores data such as cookies to enable essential site is obviously a generic “cop show,” clearly it is also something the series functionality, as well as marketing, personalization, and analytics. You argue atinstead may change your settings any time that it is superior serial melodrama. Simon writes: “We or accept the default settings. have ripped off the Greeks: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripedes. . . . We’ve We’ve
more. David Simon would like that something more to be tragedy. I
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basically taken the idea of Greek tragedy, and applied it to the modern city-state. citystate.”” Instead of the Olympians, “it’s the postmodern institutions
. . . those are the indifferent gods.” Simon’s claims are borne out by
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connection to tragedy, tragedy, and especially to Greek tragedy, tragedy, is the constant constan t theme of injustic i njustice. e. ragic ragic heroes may rail against injustice, but in the end they must accept their Accept All
fate. Tis, I argue, is not what Te Wire does. It is much more concerned,
4 Introduction
as all melodrama is, with finding a more immediate, less cosmic justice.
Melodramatic heroes suffer injustice; sometimes they overcome it by brave deeds, and sometimes they simply show their virtue by continuing continuin g to suffer. Te two chapters in this section are about Te Wire’s attempt to be “class “classical” ical” tragedy and its ironically greater accomplishment in dede -
veloping something more ambitious ambitious than the conventional conventional melodrama
we love to deride. Melodrama demands justice, while tragedy reconciles us to its lack. But justice itself, as we soon learn, does not consist
of catching dope dealers or solving homicides. Nor does it consist of thwarting surveillance. Rather, Rather, it consists of the larger question of what
might be an equitable and just society in which dope and homicide would not be central activities. Real justice, we are allowed to imagine, would consist of genuine, creative work, democratic governance, education with “soft eyes,” eyes,” and better stories about them all. However,, if it is the demand for justice, in the stark face of its frequent However failure, that draws Simon to the form of tragedy (and that causes him to make some of his more exalted claims for the series), it is the concern for those who suffer the failures of justice that keep us coming back to the series. We are made to care about those who strive and those who suffer the injustice of neoliberal institutions. I will wil l argue that the “base”
melodrama of crime drama is not “transcended” by the higher form of tragedy in Te Wire. Indeed, one key to understanding the greatness of the series lies in the spectacular tussle of these two forms: one world-weary worldweary,, screaming futilely against the injustice of the universe, the other reaching for the virtue of suffering innocence to restore the good This website stores data such as cookies to enable essential site “home” of America’s past. Dramatizing both the necessity for, and the functionality, as well as marketing, of,You reform within each of the major institutions portrayed, Te personalization, difficulty and analytics. may change yourWire settings at any time ’s melodrama operates at both the personal and the institutional or accept the default settings.
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level. I argue that it is the meshing of the individual and the institutional that allows it to picture the political and social totality of what ails con-
temporary urban America and to imagine what justice could be. No
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other television series or film “franchise” has accomplished this feat. A final section of the book asks about the relation between betwee n real learnAnalytics ing and surveillance. Who Who has the benefit b enefit of “soft eyes,” eyes,” and what does Personalization
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race Accept have to All do with the larger melodramas told? Police are “up on a wire” when they have court permission to listen in to private phone
Introduction 5
conversations. o “wear a wire” is to have even more ability to collect incriminating evidence. Te lure of surveillance as a quick fix to crime
keeps the cops tantalized throughout all five seasons of the series. If only they had this newest gadget, they imagine, they could catch and punish the criminals cr iminals.. Ultimately, however, however, the figure of the wire encompasses something altogether richer, something deeper and critically at the heart of our highly “disciplined” society, than one finds in the style glamour of so many police procedurals. For on the other side of “the wire” are the corner boys and kingpins who observe the discipline of avoiding all forms of communication that might be “wired” and thus thwart the electronic quest to pry with “hard eyes” into the lives l ives of drug traffickers. Over and over we see that the best police work done in the series is not the hard intrusive look l ook of surveillance, but the “soft eyes,” eyes,” which can build a different and better kind of knowledge. Indeed, one of the greatest features of Te Wire is its exploration of when and how people really learn, in a reconception of the familiar “school melodrama” of heroic teachers. In season 4 former cop and rookie teacher Roland Pryzbylewski is given a single piece of advice by a veteran teacher: “Y “You ou need soft eyes” (4.2). As it plays out throughout this season, season, this enigmatic advice begins to establish an alternative to the prying “hard eyes” of police sur veillance and ultimately a better better way to learn. learn. As Detective Bunk Bunk MoreMoreland demonstrates through his own practice of police pol ice work, “soft eyes” can take in subtle, seemingly peripheral forms of information and creThis website storesatively data such as process them to successful effect. Tis is a kind of learning that cookies to enable essential site functionality, as well as marketing,the opposite of Te Wire’s technological fix. It can only grow represents personalization, and analytics. You out of a perceptive, intimate experience of a given situation. It finds its may change your settings at any time or accept the default settings.
greatest expression, in and out of the classroom, over the course of a
fourth season that revolves around ilghman Middle School. Privacy Policy A final chapter begins begin s with the fact that this series is the only dramatic Marketing narrative in television or film to proceed from a world in which “integration” is not a liberal fantasy of “tolerant” interaction, but a necessary Personalization Analytics if uneasy cohabitation. Indeed, it is the presumption of a certain black Save
power base and what George Lipsitz calls a “black spatial imaginary,” Accept All
what I also call a black linguistic imaginary with special eloquence and cultural power. What is thus refreshingly missing from the series, and
6 Introduction
what gives it its edge, is any assumption of de-ethnicized de- ethnicized whiteness as
a cultural or political norm. However corrupt or righteous this black political and cultural power base may be, it is the ground from which all else proceeds. It renders black culture the center rather than the margin of experience and makes the acknowledgment of race necessary in practical political ways that the liberal ideology ideolog y of “colorblindness” cannot countenance. It also paradoxically takes the burden off race as the key difference and renders the role of class much more visible than it usually is in American television or film. Most importantly, it rewrites the conventional conventional melodrama of black and white that has been dominant in American culture since Uncle om’s Cabin. Tis long-running long-running melodrama is manifest in powerful cycles of racial feelings acted out in mass culture and major media events going back to the most popular novel and play of the mid-nineteenth mid-nineteenth century, Uncle om’s Cabin, and the most popular film fil m of the early twentieth century, Birth of a Nation. Te “om/anti-om” “om/anti-om” antinomies contained in these two determining cases of moving-image moving-image mass culture have continued to play out in American culture. But in Te Wire they encounter a decidedly new turn. Institutional rather than personal melodrama, worldbuilding seriality grounded in a black spatial imaginary results among other things in the construction of new kind of herothe elusive and ubiquitous robber of drug stashes, Omar Littlewho poses a relevant answer to the “magic Negro” of the white spatial imaginary. This website stores data such as cookies to enable essential site functionality, as well as marketing, personalization, and analytics. You may change your settings at any time or accept the default settings.
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Introduction 7
Notes Introduction Introduct ion
1. In the last minute of a podcast interview conducted by Bill Simmons on March 1, 2012, an interview otherwise devoted to basketball, President Obama
was asked to “settle an office debate” by naming the “Best Wire character of all time.” His answer“It’s got to be Omar, right?” was backed up by the statement “And that was one of the best shows of all time.” Simmons, “B.S. Report Transcript: Barack Obama.” 2. Indeed, at one point he even goes so far as to compare his achievement to Moby Mob y- Dick , with police p olice procedural substituting for whale procedural. Simon, “Introduction,” 25. 3. Michaels calls it “the most serious and ambitious fictional narrative of the twenty-first twentyfirst century so far.” Walter Benn Michaels, “Going Boom.” 4. Chaddha and Wilson, “‘Way Down in the Hole,’” 163. Jameson, This website stores5. data such as “Realism and Utopia,” 368. cookies to enable essential site Mittell has passionately argued, “Television at its best shouldn’t 6. As Jason functionality, as well as marketing, personalization, be andunderstood analytics. You simply as emulating another older and more culturally valued may change yourmedium. settings atTe any Wire time is a masterpiece of television . . . and thus should be underunderor accept the default settings.
stood, analyzed, and celebrated on its own medium’s terms.” Mittell, “All in the Game,” 429. Privacy Policy 7. Talbot, “Stealing Life.” Playingg the Race Card . Marketing 8. See Williams, Playin Personalization Analytics Chapter Save
1: Ethnographic Imagination
Accept MultiAll 1. Falzon, Multi-Sited Sited Ethnography, 1. 2. Lanahan, “Secrets of the City,” 24.
