The Wire

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mfunk9786
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Re: TV on DVD

#76 Post by mfunk9786 » Sun Dec 25, 2011 1:49 am

I'll get around to it eventually

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Noiradelic
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Re: TV on DVD

#77 Post by Noiradelic » Sun Dec 25, 2011 3:04 am

Till partway through the second episode, it's not the least bit apparent where they're taking the show. The first episode has to be one of the most underwhelming pilots for a great drama ever. You have to watch at least half of the first season to get a solid sense. Then in the third season they broaden the scope beyond the police department and the drug-dealer hierarchy to include the Mayor's office. And each season encompasses an additional social system: union/the waterfront, the public schools, a daily newspaper.

I bought the repackaged The Wire set last year during the holiday season and it was the packaging in Domino's pic.

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domino harvey
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Re: The Wire

#78 Post by domino harvey » Tue Jun 05, 2012 1:20 pm


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Professor Wagstaff
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Re: The Wire

#79 Post by Professor Wagstaff » Tue Jun 05, 2012 1:56 pm


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domino harvey
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Re: The Wire

#80 Post by domino harvey » Tue Jun 05, 2012 8:38 pm

Professor Wagstaff wrote:The Wire: The Musical
David Simon likes it (though he mutes it in the comments by saying the parody is funny "at points")

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Re: The Wire

#81 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Tue Jun 05, 2012 9:00 pm

That's a fair assessment, not every joke works but it's still hilarious.

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Gregory
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Re: The Wire

#82 Post by Gregory » Tue Jun 05, 2012 10:33 pm

I think it's more brilliant as a parody of that kind of musical production than as a parody of The Wire (which seems as it was intended to be, but Simon seems to stick up for it as mainly a parody of the show).

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Re: The Wire

#83 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Tue Jun 05, 2012 10:50 pm

That I can get behind, like a grittier version of Rent.

I'm surprised Simon saw the humor in it instead of being a grumpy Gus about it.

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Roger Ryan
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Re: The Wire

#84 Post by Roger Ryan » Wed Jun 06, 2012 8:14 am

domino harvey wrote:
Professor Wagstaff wrote:The Wire: The Musical
David Simon likes it (though he mutes it in the comments by saying the parody is funny "at points")
I got the impression that Simon was commenting specifically on the "gag reels" he and THE WIRE producers created during the show's run as being funny "at points".

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Sloper
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Re: The Wire

#85 Post by Sloper » Thu Jun 28, 2012 5:13 am

zedz wrote:
Sloper wrote:It's interesting that some of the most acclaimed TV shows of recent years have been extremely moralistic. The Wire, for instance, is overtly and relentlessly didactic: it has a message to put across about society and human nature, and it challenges its audience not only to follow a complex and multi-layered plot, but also to keep track of the ideas and lessons being explored. No doubt this is part of what makes it hard-going for some viewers, but generally it maintains a level of complexity, authenticity and entertainment that keeps people interested; more than that, though, I think its preachiness is part of its appeal, because the message itself combines topical relevance to the here and now with more universally relevant insights into the human condition. In that sense it's a model example of how finger-wagging and art can enjoy a happy marriage.

Treme, on the other hand, too often interrupted its immersive and authentic portrait of New Orleans life to deliver some cringeworthy lesson with a John Goodman-shaped sledgehammer. There, as with Kramer, it felt like the problem stemmed from the earnestness of the writers and directors involved - ideology trumping artistic quality.
I think it's a comment on the degraded state of popular and political culture that the only model people have for art dealing with ideas of contemporary relevance is didacticism or "delivering a message." I've heard The Wire in particular tarred with this brush more times than I can count, and I think it's a gigantic red herring. I don't think the show was concerned with (merely) 'delivering a message' at all. Sure, you could say that everything that happened ultimately indicated that "institutions fail individuals and communities", but that's not so much the message of the series as the premise, and what The Wire is really about is analysing and exploring the hows and whys of that failure, and that analysis and exploration involved levels of complexity and nuance far beyond those found in most popular culture. That's a valid, maybe even essential, artistic project, and it's about as far from 'delivering a message' as you can get. I don't think it's possible to extract any quick fix solution from the series, or condense the points it raises and processes it exposes into one paragraph or fifty, so if all you're getting from The Wire is its 'message' in the broadest sense, you're missing 99% of the show's point. And anyway, is "institutions fail individuals and communities" even contentious enough to count as a 'message' any more?

I think Sloper and I are largely on the same page about the show, but I think 'didactic' is the wrong word to use for a series that works with its ideas in such a complicated way. I really don't think people come away from watching The Wire with a little package of lessons about how to make the world a better place.

What Simon does dramatically that misleads a number of viewers, is has his characters articulate their particular political viewpoints from time to time. This leads the inattentive to raise the red flag of preachiness, but that's an age-old dramatic technique, and the characters who tend to do it are writers, academics, politicians and public figures: it's their job to articulate their views. Sometimes these views presumably coincide with those of the management (Goodman's character in Treme springs to mind), but even then the views are problematized and undermined by views articulated by other characters and the character's own actions (again, Goodman's character provides an extremely obvious instance of this). And again, in the case of Treme isn't much of what Goodman was ranting (e.g. the government fucked up bigtime) pretty much objectively verifiable? And when he's harping on the prurient interest of 'outsiders' in the city, that's a topic that's more and more contested within the series (and by its very existence!) and largely espoused by characters who are non-natives.

So, getting back to the question of 'didacticism' in art (which I'm also fascinated by), the problem arises for me not when I catch whiff of a political agenda, but when the argument of a given film never rises above a simple message (my God, if five series of The Wire really did amount to nothing more than the moral "institutions are fucked, y'all" being gift-wrapped and delivered in the final episode, what a terrible series it would be); when it cheats to make its points (e.g. taking narrative shortcuts in order to ensure the 'correct' dramatic outcome, or messing up the lives of its protagonists simply in order to exaggerate a social evil, or making the local representative of the social evil du jour a cardboard villain, or forcing the characters to make dumb decisions in order to exacerbate their plight - see any number of Ken Loach films for examples of the latter); or when its argument is illogical or over-egged. Basically, if a film is going to tackle Big Ideas head on, it needs to be able to engage me intellectually. Otherwise, it's probably best to tackle them obliquely and work on engaging me in other ways.
I've tried to be fairly oblique in this post, but there are some SPOILERS, so don't read this unless you've seen the whole of The Wire. And even if you have, maybe just spare your eyes and don't read it.


Interesting and challenging comments, zedz; I thought I'd better respond here rather than in the 1950s thread.

I don't really understand what distinction you're making when you say that 'institutions fail individuals and communities' is not so much the show's message as its premise. Isn't it both - especially if, as you say, the series ultimately 'indicates' this? In any case, if this is the premise of the show, the assumption or thesis upon which it is grounded (which I'm sure it is), how does that undermine the notion that it's didactic? A text has to take the message 'there is only one God' before it can work to impose this message on the reader.

I also agree that the show works very hard to show 'the hows and whys of that failure', but again this doesn't conflict with its didacticism, it reinforces it: the message is communicated all the more powerfully for being illustrated and reinforced by details.

For me the problem is that you seem to see 'didacticism' as an inherently dirty word (and 'delivering a message' as a dirty phrase). You defend the show against such terms by pointing to its complexity, so I assume you think of 'didacticism' as a simplistic endeavour, or one not naturally conducive to 'intellectual engagement'. But as anyone who's ever tried to teach anyone anything knows, it's generally more effective to engage someone's intellect (and emotions), if you want to teach them something, than it is to simply stand over them telling them what they ought to know. David Simon doesn't sit in front of a camera telling us that institutions fail individuals and communities, he (and his collaborators) spend sixty hours showing us how and why (and indeed that) institutions fail individuals and communities.

Having said this, I actually think you've simplified the message of the show with that phrase. It's impossible, of course, not to simplify it without actually spending sixty hours re-enacting the series, but I do think your formulation misses an important point, and one which highlights the didactic nature of The Wire. An 'institution' is not capable of making moral choices, but individuals are, and the show ultimately focuses on those disastrous moral choices made by individuals within institutions. For me, one of the big turning points of the show, and the point where I lost some of my respect for it, was the end of Season 4, where Tommy Carcetti is faced with a dilemma: he literally has to choose one of two courses of action.

One will help Baltimore and enable him to keep the promises he's made to Daniels and others (note the focus on a relationship between two individuals there, not just two institutions), but will hamper his political career; the other will enable him to keep his personal dignity and further his career, but will mean breaking those promises. He chooses his pride and career over the good of the city.

Now at the time when he's faced with this decision, there's a sense that the choice is more complex than this, and that it really is hard to determine which is the morally right course of action; but as Season 5 goes on, Carcetti recedes into the background and is more or less written off as just another compromised and dishonest politician, who immediately chooses the path of self-interest, spin and political expediency as soon as he gets into office, and can scarcely look the outraged Daniels in the eye - let alone take responsibility for what he's done. The way Carcetti responds to the phantom serial killer, and the way he responds when it turns out the killer was made up, just reinforces all this. Someone who had been one of the most complex and nuanced figures throughout Seasons 3 and 4 has become a caricature, simplified to serve the needs of the show's message.

The message still isn't a simple one; I would say it's inviting us to look back at Carcetti's previous behaviour and realise that the kind of people who rise to positions of power tend to be very good at saying the right thing and looking the right way, winning over everybody (including themselves to some extent) into thinking they're going to do the right thing when they're finally able to - but by the same token, such people tend to be more concerned with image than with substance, and ultimately will choose to look good rather than do good. (It's almost too obvious to say, but I'm sure lots of people have applied all this to Obama.) The point is, I don't think we're given much of a choice as to how we evaluate Carcetti once Season 5 is underway. He's an individual who has made the wrong choice, and everybody suffers because of this. The show clearly wants us to think that if Carcetti had chosen differently, things would most likely have turned out better.

Nearer the lower end of the hierarchy, we have McNulty at the end of Season 5 deciding that, however fucked up the police force may be, he still has the option of being nice to his fellow man. (His final action is similar to Colvin's adoption of Namond; Colvin and McNulty complement each other in all kinds of ways - they both try to deal with problems through extreme and in some ways misguided measures, and eventually opt out of institutions altogether, not in despair but in order to focus on family and friends.)

As always, the message sounds corny and mawkish when you put it into words, but at the end of a sixty-hour series I thought the focus on individual acts of kindness was well-earned, and wholly appropriate to the show's humane focus on the suffering of individuals. If I had to boil the message down, I guess I would say it's about the imperative (especially for people in positions of authority) to make choices that are based on a concern for other people, rather than on their own selfish interests.

On a deeper level, The Wire shows how those wrong decisions made by people in authority ultimately put less powerful characters (like D'Angelo, Brodie, Michael, Duquan and Randy) into positions where they don't get to make any moral choices, or any real choices at all, but simply have to do 'the wrong thing' in order to survive. Prez's final ultimatum to Duquan was a really telling moment here: the kid doesn't really have the option of using that money for a good purpose, and the point is that those social evils perpetuated by the decisions of people like Carcetti not only inflict misery on the disempowered, they also disempower people like Prez, Carver and McNulty who are supposed to be able to help. Again, there's nothing simplistic about this message - the show doesn't just say Duquan does the wrong thing because he's a scumbag, instead it insists that many (if not all; Cutty is an interesting example here) of these gangsters are formed by circumstances beyond their control, circumstances created by powerful people who ought to have known better.

One more specific example of didacticism - again at the end of Season 4, we see Colvin shaking his head and walking out of the lecture being given by the academic, and again I don't think we're given the option of thinking that some good may come from this kind of scholarly approach to the problem. The academic, however good his intentions may seem, is simply too detached from the 'real world' to have any real impact on it. Maybe I'm biased, but to me this does feel like a slightly reductive moment, but again by the end of such a rich and complex season the show has earned the right to be this insistent.

So, in the first place, I don't agree that the show's complexity can work as a defence against accusations of didacticism. In the second place, you also say

'And anyway, is "institutions fail individuals and communities" even contentious enough to count as a 'message' any more?'

and

'And again, in the case of Treme isn't much of what Goodman was ranting (e.g. the government fucked up bigtime) pretty much objectively verifiable?'

Your point seems to be that the show is not 'didactic' because its message, insofar as it has one, is uncontested and indeed incontestable, and is therefore less a message than a simple observation. One of the reasons I enjoyed The Wire so much, and could stomach its didacticism, is that I could easily buy into its message. I'm sure much of what it's saying about politics, law enforcement, journalism and so on is true; it accords, to a great extent, with the way I see the world.

[Naive side note: I lead a very sheltered life, but I see many of the issues this show raises afflicting the institution I work in - academia - where decisions made by those at the top of the ladder force everyone else in the institution to make compromises and manipulate figures; for instance, universities have to buy in academics with good research profiles just to boost their standing in the upcoming Reseach Assessment Exercise (RAE), which has actually been renamed the Research Excellence Framework (REF), presumably on the basis that a good acronym is one that doesn't mean anything. It's one of those dumb ideas that's supposed to enable us to measure the extent and quality of our research, but in practice it turns everyone into a box-ticker. The 'research' an institution takes credit for is not the research it's been nurturing; indeed, it's stolen from another institution, which then presumably gets less funding, or has to buy its own academics... It's just like Season 3 of The Wire. I have of course written to David Simon suggesting he take the subject up. I expect he'll get to it when he's finished with New Orleans.]

But of course this is a contentious point of view, and of course it counts as a 'message'. For instance, if you look at The Thick of It and In the Loop (and, presumably, Veep), you'll see a vision of political corruption which, rather than focusing on the bad moral decisions made by powerful figures, tends to emphasise incompetence: ultimately, a lot of the bad stuff in these shows happens because the people involved are just not very good at their jobs. This isn't really an issue The Wire foregrounds, except briefly with Prez's early days on the force, and perhaps also with figures like Burrell and Herc. Simon's ideology is a much more optimistic one, in that by focusing on moral choice he insists that change is possible - these powerful figures are capable of doing the right thing, they just choose not to. To focus on ineptitude instead is far more cynical, pessimistic, and arguably apathetic and lazy, since it suggests that there isn't really a solution to the problem. As Ianucci might say, 'we're all twats', and there's not a lot we can do about that. It's probably because I'm apathetic and lazy myself that I incline more to this point of view, but I do suspect that a lot of 'social evils' result more from the actions of people who are just not capable of doing their jobs well than from merely self-serving behaviour.

[Again, this is something I find myself helplessly observing more and more as I get older; especially in the last year or two, I've been beset on all sides by universities, banks, housing associations and, quite frankly, family members, who are just too irredeemably inept not to fuck up absolutely every little thing they do.]

Beyond that, if you think it's an objective and uncontested fact that institutions fail individuals and communities, or even that the government fucked up over New Orleans, you must be ignoring a vast number of people who would contest both these things. I can't/won't speak to the situation in America... But I know someone (here in the U.K.) who works for the police, and vividly remember talking to him about The Wire (he's a fan) when I was nearing the end of Season 1. I was saying how shocked and upset I was by the death - especially the manner of the death - of a certain character, and this guy responded by saying 'Why? He was a scumbag drug-dealer.' This man is an avid Daily Mail reader; as far as he's concerned, anyone who sympathises with criminals and talks about them as though they were victims of circumstance is 'a commie Guardian reader'. (To be fair to him, he's not being totally un-ironic when he says stuff like this, and in practice, most of the time, I think he's a fairly good and sympathetic person. But it was an interesting, and short, conversation.)

Or, to give a better example, consider the riots we had here last summer. Amid all the media noise that followed, the only voices that made sense to me were the ones saying that, well, of course the so-called 'underclasses' (and not just them) were rioting, given that these days they have 'no real stake in society'. But for a lot of people, the incident simply showed how little respect the youth of today have for authority. Are those people simply wrong? Is it helpful to insist that my own point of view is simply right?

The University of Birmingham has now responded by setting up a 'Jubilee Centre for Character and Values', apparently aimed at fostering gratitude in the populace - Gratitude Britain is the phrase they've been rather hesitantly pushing. Gratitude for what? When I was reading about it the other day the whole thing seemed to have been set up by conservative Christians, mostly old white men from the House of Lords; I'm finding it hard to locate this information now. They're talking about the failure of institutions to set a good example, but I get the feeling this enterprise is designed by and for people who think that 'Honour thy father and mother' is the most important commandment. (I've always thought Moses could have saved us all a lot of trouble if he'd scraped 'Thou shalt not fuck up thy children' onto the tablet on his way down the mountain.)

Anyway, my convoluted point is that the vision of society The Wire presents is not objective, uncontested fact, it's an interpretation. Given the prevalence and power of conservative views that would contest his vision, it's not surprising that David Simon occasionally sacrifices authenticity for the sake of the message (there's some interesting discussion on this very point on p. 3 of this thread). The characters and their stories are all geared towards proving a point - a complex one, and one that I sympathise with, but not by any means the only available and legitimate one. I brought all this into the discussion of The Defiant Ones because I think that too is a film convinced that the importance of its message warrants a few sacrifices on the level of authenticity and artistic quality. The Wire, you might say, simply does a better job of balancing message, authenticity and quality - and it does - but I think it also has an urgency and relevance for our time which makes it easier for us to get on board. Your own view that its 'message' is simply 'the truth' is proof of that.

As for Treme, you're absolutely right, and I did post at much greater length about it (and in particular the complexities of Goodman's character) on the relevant thread. The complications worked into that character, in my view, only accentuate the show's didactic awkwardness. Still, it made me stop and think, which I suppose is a good thing.



On a more trivial note, I've found that watching The Wire has an unfortunate side-effect. My wife is a connoisseur of bad movies, and almost every time she sticks one on, I see familiar faces. With dismay. There's Maurice Levy in Liar Liar! There's McNulty in Mona Lisa Smile! There's Frank Sobotka in Fools Rush In! Carver in Did You Hear About the Morgans?! Bunk in It Could Happen to You! Lester Freamon in Notting Hill!

It's a kind of Hell.

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Professor Wagstaff
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Re: The Wire

#86 Post by Professor Wagstaff » Thu Jun 28, 2012 6:40 pm

Hey, no need to lump a charming romantic comedy like It Could Happen to You in with the dregs.

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zedz
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Re: The Wire

#87 Post by zedz » Fri Jun 29, 2012 12:31 am

This is an interesting topic and I appreciate your detailed response.

I guess I do find 'didactic' an unhelpful and reductive term. For me it implies that teaching a lesson is the primary purpose of a work of art, and that's not how I experience The Wire at all, which is why I distinguished 'premise' from 'message'. The series is doing a lot more than just exploring those particular ideas, and I don't even think that exploring and substantiating the premise is the main thing it's doing. But then, I'm much more interested in narrative, so I tend to be more engaged with its experiments in those areas. For me, 'didacticism' is in part a function of what else is going on in a work of art. Is Anna Karenina a didactic work because a particularly dull reader could reduce it to the message that "adultery is bad"?

Structurally, the show is clearly 'about' the impact of institutions on everyday lives; at the level of plot, it could be seen to reflect chaos theory; and at the level of character, the whole series could be seen to be about free will / predestination. I agree with you that my glib 'institutions' premise is problematized by what's going on on those other levels - and this is one of the reasons why I think 'didactic' isn't a helpful descriptor of the series as a whole. Alongside Carcetti's actions that you noted (more spoilers folks!) there's the very interesting phenomenon that one of the series' key villains, Herc, is a character whose bad actions are practically unconscious - but this is a world where all actions - good, bad and indifferent - tend to go sour when they're passed through institutions.

There are plenty of instances where you can see ideas and positions being worked out by characters or by the plot, but I don't think that this necessarily makes the show as a whole 'didactic'. For example, I'm buggered if I know after the 'Hamsterdam' plot in season three whether or not I'm supposed to be pro- or anti-decriminalization (in terms of the show's 'ethics', at any rate), though that storyline allowed for a lot of airing of arguments about it, often in quite direct terms.

All this said, I have to concede many of your points about the final season. There are a lot more problems here, and even though a number of those may be attributable to HBO shortchanging the show by a number of episodes (which could well have provided the plot finesse and character cushioning that complicated things in earlier seasons), there's definitely an unfortunate anxiousness to hit certain thematic points. But even if it hits its marks a little too baldly here, there's still a momentum of complexity from the previous seasons that keeps it interesting.
'And again, in the case of Treme isn't much of what Goodman was ranting (e.g. the government fucked up bigtime) pretty much objectively verifiable?'

Your point seems to be that the show is not 'didactic' because its message, insofar as it has one, is uncontested and indeed incontestable, and is therefore less a message than a simple observation.
Not quite. It's more that I can't imagine that the creators of Treme set out with this aim: "by the end of the first season / the entire series, our primary concern is that our viewers will believe that the government fucked up bigtime in New Orleans." As I see it, that position is taken for granted at the outset, and the characters move on from that - to the extent that each individual character can move on. I'm not even convinced that Simon cares one way or another whether we agree with that premise or not. I've only seen the first season of the show, and I agree that the political stuff is much lumpier here than it was in The Wire, but I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt because:
a) I've seen how things worked out in The Wire;
b) it's a very different narrative context, in which there's a singular big event that a lot of people are angry about, so of course they're going to get polemic;
c) the three most obvious 'mouthpiece' characters were also the three most obnoxious / unlikeable of the main cast.
So I'm happy to wait and see where things end up.

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Re: The Wire

#88 Post by domino harvey » Fri Jun 29, 2012 1:28 am

Sloper, I think you're being a little hard on Carcetti and Simon's treatment of him within the narrative of the show, in part because I think you've misidentified his dilemma: It's not to either do the right thing or do the politically viable thing, it's whether to stay idealistic and be crushed or become content in complacency. Simon is showing quite bleakly but probably accurately that there's no hope from the top, even from those who initially care. I also think you've also glossed over Carcetti's transition as the series progresses. He decidedly starts out ambitious then cares and then finally consents to needs of the machine. It's an important distinction and much crueler than a noble guy merely being corrupted by power. He was already corrupted, became redeemed by getting involved, then lost the fight to what Baltimore necessitates in its leaders. That makes it hard to consider him a "moral" character (unless "no fanatic like a convert" equates to high morality), though he does clearly care at some point. But caring makes it harder and the series goes out of the way to show what dividends get returned when characters care about others (The foster mother who cares about her charge and ends up in the burn ward, McNulty treating Brodie with kindness only to essentially cause his death, &c) and what dividends get returned from caring about themselves (Marlo self-preservation, Bubbles reforming after accepting responsibility for Sherrod, &c). Simon's message seems to be the only way for Baltimore to heal is to eschew the systems and codes of others, legal or street, and for each individual to do the work themselves, eventually forming a collective improvement. This is as close to impossible a task as it gets, especially since Baltimore is more driven by competing personal and societal codes than anywhere I've ever encountered, but Simon shows over and over the only real results come from a character defying the external codes they're supposed to enforce in favor of their own (Marlo doing his own thing, McNulty faking a serial killer, Bunny forming Hamsterdam, &c)

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Re: The Wire

#89 Post by zedz » Fri Jun 29, 2012 5:20 pm

That's an interesting take as well, and helps to illustrate the depth of the overall work. It's interesting that none of those examples actually lead to particularly positive outcomes in the long term, either for the characters in question or society in general. Other characters who defy the codes and do what they think is right or necessary are that reporter who makes up stories, Omar, Frank Sobotka and (where's) Wallace. So I think your "real results" mileage may vary!

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Re: The Wire

#90 Post by Sloper » Sun Jul 01, 2012 6:00 pm

Professor Wagstaff wrote:Hey, no need to lump a charming romantic comedy like It Could Happen to You in with the dregs.
Yeah that was a little unfair - I actually showed this one to my wife a few weeks ago, selling it as a rom-com that's actually quite good. I hadn't seen it since it came out, and it's curious to see how dated it looks now, but also a cut above most of the equivalents being vomited out these days.
zedz wrote:I can't imagine that the creators of Treme set out with this aim: "by the end of the first season / the entire series, our primary concern is that our viewers will believe that the government fucked up bigtime in New Orleans." As I see it, that position is taken for granted at the outset, and the characters move on from that - to the extent that each individual character can move on.
Absolutely; I was thinking more of The Wire on that point. However, as I understand it a lot of the show was responding to the perspective represented (very clunkily) by that British journalist in the first episode: the one that belittles New Orleans and its inhabitants, and implicitly plays down the losses caused by the disaster. In other words, Simon is trying to show how beautiful and vital this place is. But as I said in that other thread, while I find Treme even more didactic than The Wire, I also (paradoxically) think it's more confused about what precisely it's trying to say, or whether it (and by 'it' I mean David Simon) has the authority or the right to show us the 'real' New Orleans, or to get angry on the city's behalf.
zedz wrote:I guess I do find 'didactic' an unhelpful and reductive term. For me it implies that teaching a lesson is the primary purpose of a work of art, and that's not how I experience The Wire at all, which is why I distinguished 'premise' from 'message'. The series is doing a lot more than just exploring those particular ideas, and I don't even think that exploring and substantiating the premise is the main thing it's doing. But then, I'm much more interested in narrative, so I tend to be more engaged with its experiments in those areas. For me, 'didacticism' is in part a function of what else is going on in a work of art. Is Anna Karenina a didactic work because a particularly dull reader could reduce it to the message that "adultery is bad"?
I certainly don't watch these shows in order to be 'taught' by them, I just feel as though their creators were primarily interested in pushing a certain ideology, and happen to be able to back this up with superb story-telling ability. How I receive and experience the show is another matter. Anna Karenina is an interesting example to bring up: there too I felt that Tolstoy was rather insistently trying to tell me something, albeit something very complex, and I'm afraid I'm one of those readers who finds Levin more and more of a pain as the novel goes on. Indeed, if memory serves he pretty much takes over towards the end, even though his story has little narrative interest of its own. The frequent and repetitive history lessons in War and Peace were less obtrusive for me, partly because I had more sympathy for the ideas in that case, partly because they felt better integrated into the novel's central narrative(s), but also because it seemed the author was being a bit more up-front about putting his own voice into the text there. But I'm instinctively more drawn to a writer like Henry James, who may well have strong views on a given subject, but almost never stoops to didacticism.

Anyway my stake in all this is that my research focuses on late-medieval poetry, mainly love poetry, and of course most of the time it's pushing a Christian message; scholars tend to play this down, driven by much the same attitude you've expressed here, and I'm trying to make the case for reclaiming these texts' Christian didacticism as crucial to our understanding of their structure, artistry, and so on. I'm coming at this from the perspective of an atheist who normally prefers non-didactic art, but I think sometimes by enshrining the secular and the polysemous we end up closing off some important aspects of such texts. This is so much truer of medieval poetry than it is of 21st-century television, but I'm very interested in how these ideas apply to the culture of today.
domino harvey wrote:Sloper, I think you're being a little hard on Carcetti and Simon's treatment of him within the narrative of the show, in part because I think you've misidentified his dilemma: It's not to either do the right thing or do the politically viable thing, it's whether to stay idealistic and be crushed or become content in complacency.
I wonder if your re-phrasing of this narrative really changes it all that much? But you're right that I over-simplified things; I did see your post on the previous page, and the things you point to in seasons 3 and 4 were part of what made Carcetti my favourite character (alongside Stringer, of course, whose developing relationship with Avon in seasons 2 and 3 were, for me, easily the greatest thing about the whole series). And I like your version of what happens to Carcetti from the end of season 4 onwards. Indeed, I wish I could agree with you on this point. But I think that if the show wanted us to see him like that it would have presented him differently: I'd have to re-watch the relevant episodes to back this up, but it seemed to me the emphasis was on his realisation that image was more important to him than substance. There was always a tension about whether he was fundamentally a self-interested cynic toying with idealism or an idealist tempted by compromise and complacency; my disappointment stemmed from my feeling that he simply turned out to be the former. The latter would, I think, have struggled harder to fulfil his promises before giving in. If we'd seen more of him in season 5 it might have been different. Anyway, I'll bear what you say in mind when I get around to seeing it all again, as I would certainly like to see Carcetti in a different light.

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RagingNoodles
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Re: The Wire

#91 Post by RagingNoodles » Mon Jul 16, 2012 7:46 am

Anyone here get the complete series box-set? I'm really surprised at how bad the video quality is in Season 4. It's very disappointing to the point that it seems like a bootleg. But it seems the other seasons have better VQ. Is the Season 4 individual set also as bad as the S4 discs in the complete series?

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denti alligator
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Re: The Wire

#92 Post by denti alligator » Mon Jul 16, 2012 8:28 am

Yes, it is. Very disappointing. Don't know what went wrong.

AnamorphicWidescreen
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Re: The Wire

#93 Post by AnamorphicWidescreen » Mon Jun 03, 2013 12:26 am

Saw The Wire on DVD over a period of several years back in the 2000's, and went back recently and re-watched the whole series. Though I know this has been said before, this show is nothing short of brilliant; IMHO, it's one of the top 5 TV shows of all time.

What was especially interesting about the show was that it didn't try to solve the world's problems and/or wrap everything up in a neat bow at the end, but instead presented things realistically.

The theme song Way down in the Hole by Tom Waits was definitely one of the most iconic elements of the show. I enjoyed how each season had a different version of the same song - my favorite was probably the 5th season theme (sung by Steve Earle). The theme song(s) set the tone for each respective season, and gave each season it's own individual vibe.

Though each season was great, possibly my favorite individual episodes are 9 & 10 from Season 5. Especially the last 5-7 minutes of Episode 10....sheer poetry.

To those who watched this when it was originally broadcast, it must have been tough to have long gaps between several of the seasons - the show wasn't on at all throughout 2005 & 2007.

Here's an interesting retrospective on the show from 2012:

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainmen ... ng/257910/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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Polybius
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Re: The Wire

#94 Post by Polybius » Mon Jun 03, 2013 3:38 am

I'm so used to shows that I really value being yanked away from me prematurely (Terriers comes quickly to mind) that I resolved early on with The Wire to try to savor each new season as a gift and not worry about any delay but, yeah...it was a long wait between doses sometimes.

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warren oates
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Re: The Wire

#95 Post by warren oates » Wed Jun 12, 2013 6:07 pm

David Simon in somewhat crotchety old-man contrarian mode on the leaks about those massive NSA wiretaps on everyone. Painstaking pen registers 30 years ago ≠ massive metadata vacuuming today.

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: The Wire

#96 Post by matrixschmatrix » Wed Jun 12, 2013 6:44 pm

There seems to be an unsupported leap of logic from 'it is acceptable to obtain this data about a particular series of phones, given a specific and reasonable belief that they are being used for a specific series of crimes' to 'it's fine to harvest the same data from all phones in case it helps with some kind of a problem at some point'- the whole issue is one of unlimited scope without purpose. He questions whether the data being harvested are being used ethically, but surely it would be far easier to ensure that it is if the harvest is limited beforehand, instead of trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle afterwards.

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colinr0380
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Re: The Wire

#97 Post by colinr0380 » Fri Jun 14, 2013 6:41 pm

I'll see your David Simon and raise you a John le Carré!

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Max von Mayerling
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Re: The Wire

#98 Post by Max von Mayerling » Tue Aug 26, 2014 12:41 am

Is it possible that this is authentic? Some of the comments indicate that others saw it broadcast on HBO, not just via this youtube post. And if it is for real, I assume that means a blu ray release somewhere down the line.

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Re: The Wire

#99 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Tue Aug 26, 2014 2:04 am

According to the schedule on HBO.com it is.

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Re: The Wire

#100 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Tue Aug 26, 2014 11:34 pm

I also heard that the episodes on Amazon Prime are in widescreen. Can anyone confirm this?

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