The Wire as Holistic Critique

This is a pretty thoroughly engrossing and engaging article and Williams strikes home some important points about the series (particularly about The Wire being a fiction more true than real life), though I must too say I disagree with his conclusions.

It has been said before (I forget where exactly) that it’s impossible to make an anti-war film, since there is no way to make war unexciting or unsensational. Williams’s argument seems to ascribe this same entertainment value to The Wire by proclaiming fascination to be the enemy of an ethical response. I disagree with this entirely. Fascination is not the enemy of ethical response. In fact, just the opposite is the case. One must be fascinated by a subject in order to provoke an appropriate ethical response, and hence a stimulus for reform. It’s only once an activity has become de-spectacled, institutionalized, and banalized that it becomes commonplace and unquestioned. Much of The Wire’s power stems from its willingness to question the commonplace, that which is rote and seemingly an inextricable part of culture, but whose damages are far more grave than they would let on.

And while the show is a fascinating series of studies in life dramas charged with meaning, it also de-glams roles often given over to hagiography and aggrandizement in mass media. The life of a cop is not a life fulfilled in the pursuit of justice. The pursuit of justice is constantly hard-fought through tedious bureaucracy and political struggle to such a degree that it becomes easier to do the least amount of work possible, like any other kind of valueless administrative position. The life of a thug on The Wire is far from the escapist fantasies of gangsta rap and Hollywood, but rather a microcosm of capitalism’s hierarchies. A few on top, generally those born into privilege, can score big, but the rest slave away in abject poverty, frontline soldiers for the interests of the wealthy and the powerful.

As Williams describes it, good people exist, but face the uphill struggle against a series of bullies and pencil-pushers who inhibit the ability for any real enactment of change. That’s certainly one interpretation, but a wider view might uncover that there are no “good”, or even “bad” people on The Wire. Every character contains multitudes; faults, foibles, and strengths in one and all. The characters on the show who do bad things may all be executing free will, and there’s certainly no reason that they shouldn’t be culpable for their actions. However, Simon and the writers take pains to show that most of the time these individuals are functionaries of a role, aligned like chess pieces in “the game”. To put it perhaps overly simply, they are just doing what they’re supposed to do, assigned to do, or expected to do.

What Williams calls “civic institutions” are actually corrupted versions of civic institutions, adjusted to a utopian vision of neo-liberalism and ravaged by the demands of capitalist democracy as a lone option and a singular might at the end of history. What becomes clear through the endless series of failures and interconnected atrocities is a sense that bureaucracy is able to service dysfunction better than it can service the demands of the ethical. Capitalism can function fine with a series of localized tribal conflicts between interchangeable oppressed and oppressors, but it becomes practically inoperable at the moment that acting in the interest of the community or the greater interest conflicts with the function of routine.

What good people, or rather good-intentioned people, lack at any moment is the ability to take in a full perspective, which is exactly what this TV series seeks to offer. When McNulty and company follow all the rules, it only breeds complacency and stasis, with no change or accountability. But when they bend the law for their needs, it encourages a system of corruption with its own equivalent accountability issues. It’s not that “the more things change, the more they stay the same”, but rather “nothing ever changes, because the game is fixed”. In this sense, The Wire is properly dystopian, in that it depicts accurately the dystopianism of capitalist realism, an apocalypse now. It presents the present as the worst possible case scenario, which seems to be as strong an impetus for reform as can be argued, even if the desired ends seem interminably out of reach. If things are truly at the tipping point, as The Wire suggests, there could be no better time to rip it up and start over again.

Williams argues that “we’re no wiser for having taken the trip” at the end of the series, but in fact this does make us wiser, seeing all the pieces connected as they are. He is right to imply that the audience is implicated in the outcome of the show, because to watch it and feel distantiation is to miss the point entirely, even if many of us live cushy middle class lives far from the desolation depicted in the show. The Wire reinforces the notion of the humanity buried by rampant institutionalization, the kind that we’re all affiliated with and afflicted by. Whereas we all run around thinking that we’re the sole functionaries of our own free will, a notion reinforced repeatedly by capitalism, The Wire shows that we are actually just the cybernetic bits of a larger operating system. Rather than “serving somebody”, we all serve a purpose. If the characters on The Wire seem like their lives are infused with a compelling drive due to their dire circumstances, theirs is but a distended reflection of our own ascribed purposes. We credit our jobs or social relationships with personal value, when in fact they only benefit ourselves by benefiting the institutions to which they service, scratching the back of a Deleuzian control society.

Williams argues that were the show rooted in humanism, it would focalize on an individual’s trials and tribulations rather than drift between characters, but it seems a central tenet of humanism that no man is an island or a Skinner box, but rather a complex and intricate series of Byzantine plotlines shared amidst communities and subcultures.

Life to characters in The Wire may be charged with purpose, but that purpose is more often a product of necessity than will. In the grand scheme of things, isn’t being a functionary of necessity, particularly someone else’s necessity, as arbitrary and involuntary as “mundane life”? Of course, purpose is surrogate from meaning. Williams states that real life has no meaning, while narrative fiction forces us to find meaning, but this is misguided. There are plenty of acts on The Wire that seem meaningless- senseless acts of violence, characters acting in incomprehensible manners, et al. They accrue meaning by having happened at all. The same can be said of “mundane life”. Life is not devoid of meaning, but rather the perspective to find meaning, or the foresight to realize the implications of seemingly meaningless events. Perhaps the reason man’s search for meaning constantly falls short is because what he is actually seeking is purpose, without looking for meaning in the mundane, which is why we require the refracted lens of art to help us examine the parts of ourselves we can’t burden ourselves to see.

“The Personal is Political” has been a rallying cry for every movement for social justice since the 1960s. On The Wire, Simon and co. find this to be true for not only for ethnicized groups (though seem certainly feel the personal affects of the political more than others), but for every individual inundated within the system. And since we’re all complicit, all oppressors and oppressed alike, gaining the kind of perspective that The Wire encourages allows us to see the connections and establish the meanings in our otherwise meaningless mundane lives.

The Wire is perhaps an anti-war statement, but the war it depicts is a civil war- not just the war on drugs, but the war baited by institutions, pitting all men against one another. One can’t be against a war unless they know it’s going on. Alternately, one can’t fight a war properly unless they understand the intricacies of the enemy and its stranglehold over the hearts and minds of its soldiers. If The Wire doesn’t exactly wage war against institutionalization, bureaucracy, and late capitalism, it at least maps out how these things have us and how they’re able to hold onto us with little promise of an exit.