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The Wire Final Season

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from: David Plotz
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Week 7: How Marlo Stanfield Is Like Daniel Plainview

Posted Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2008, at 11:33 AM ET

Jeffrey Goldberg and David Plotz were online on March 6 to chat about The Wire. Read the transcript.

The Wire. Click image to expand.

Dear Jeff,

This afternoon I took my kids to see Roar: Lions of the Kalahari, an IMAX documentary at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, and, of course, it got me thinking about The Wire. In Roar, an old male lion rules a water hole at the Kalahari, with a bevy of hot young lionesses to hunt springbok for him and raise his cubs. But a younger, tougher male shows up at the hole, challenges and conquers the old king, takes his ladies, and exiles him to the desert, where he soon dies. It's the Marlo-Prop Joe story, or maybe the Marlo-Avon story, but with springbok as the bodies and the desert as the vacants.

Roar made me notice something I had overlooked about this season of The Wire. It's perfectly obvious what the lions are fighting for: sex, food, and reproductive advantage. The male lion who triumphs gets all the lionesses and as much springbok as he can eat. But it's not at all clear what Marlo is fighting for. He has no appetites. He sucks on lollipops. He's never fooling around with hot women, never spending his money on flashy cars, never taking the slightest bit of pleasure in his achievements or even in his money. The two great capitalist villains of this year's culture are Marlo and Daniel Plainview, the vicious protagonist of There Will Be Blood. They are very similar, and somewhat unpersuasive, because they lack any human appetites. Yes, there is an occasional businessman who longs only for money, not the tangible satisfactions that money brings. But most capitalists—even the nastiest, most ruthless of the breed—are in it to get laid, to buy a fancier jet, to own a bigger house, to get the kids into the best school. That's why I continue to find Marlo slightly unsatisfying as a character: He represents an idea of pathological capitalism, but because he's an idea, he's not persuasively human. Even Chris Partlow gets a wife and kids.

And since I'm being all ponderous and philosophical, let me mention another perhaps tenuous connection, between The Wire and this week's Roger Clemens-Brian McNamee steroid hearing. Republican members of Congress who support Clemens all but called McNamee a rat, accusing him of betraying a friend to protect himself. Their assault on McNamee is an unsettling reminder of how pervasive the "stop snitchin' " code has become. Stop snitchin' is a pervasive theme of The Wire, from D'Angelo in Season 1 to Randy in Season 4. And this season, we're seeing stop snitchin' through Bunk's eyes. He can't get anywhere in his investigation into the murder of Michael's stepfather. We see Bunk desperately trying to bully or cajole or trick his witnesses into revealing something, but they're smart enough protect themselves. What's so clever about Bunk's frustration is that he himself is obeying the stop snitchin' code in his own life, even as he tries to get his witnesses to break it. Bunk knows that Jimmy and Lester have faked the murders and that the bogus investigation is stealing time and money away from real police work, but he won't rat Jimmy out. The right thing to do would be to snitch on Jimmy and end his charade. But Bunk, like his silent witnesses, has chosen loyalty over right, and the people of Baltimore must pay the price.

With a roar, not a whimper,
David

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from: David Plotz
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Week 7: How Marlo Stanfield Is Like Daniel Plainview

Posted Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2008, at 11:33 AM ET
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Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor. Andy Bowers is the editor of Slate V. Jeffrey Goldberg is a national correspondent for the Atlantic and the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror. Melinda Henneberger is a Slate contributor and the author of If They Only Listened to Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians To Hear. David Plotz is Slate's deputy editor. He is the author of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. You can e-mail him at . John Swansburg is a Slate associate editor. June Thomas is Slate's foreign editor. You can e-mail her at .
Entry 1: Photograph of Tristan Wilds by Paul Schiraldi © HBO. Entry 8: Photograph of Clark Johnson, Brandon Young, Michelle Paress, and Tom McCarthy by Paul Schiraldi © HBO. Entry 21: Photograph of Felicia "Snoop" Pearson, Jamie Hector, Method Man, and Robert F. Chew by Paul Schiraldi © HBO 2008. Entry 27: Photograph of Lance Reddick by Paul Schiraldi © 2008 HBO. Entry 42: Still of Wendell Pierce by Paul Schiraldi © 2008 HBO. Entry 52: Still of Tristan Wilds by Paul Schiraldi © 2008 HBO. Entry 57: Photograph of Sonja Sohn, Wendell Pierce, and Dominic West by Nicole Rivelli © 2008 HBO. Entry 61: Still of Lance Reddick by Paul Schiraldi © HBO 2008.
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Remarks from the Fray:

I hope Goldberg and Plotz move on to discussing the idea that the press is complicit in allowing the inner-city (especially black inner-city) to decay by not paying attention to the problems that caused its sharp decline. Maybe newsroom characters feel cliched, but shouldn't we discuss how they enter into the "War on Drugs"?

--tsell89

(To reply, click here.)

So far as we've seen most of the newspapermen are indeed stock characters, but that's nothing to worry about. Except for a few leads each season, very few characters have conflicting motives. Think Clay Davis, Mayor Royce, Herc, Horse, Burrell, Rawles, Weebay, Chris Partlow, Snoop, the school administrators, even Marlo.

The strength of the show isn't in the complexity of the characters; it's in the multi-layered coherent vision, the way these somewhat two-dimensional characters all affect one another. Granted, that's a formula for pedagogy, but what saves the show (and not only saves it but really does make it the best show ever) is the one thing that fools everyone into thinking that Snoop, with her paucity of lines and sole motivation of kill-everyone-Marlo-tells-me-to, is a great character -- namely, style.

All the characters have great style, great lines. It's what makes the show fun as well as edifying. And from what I can tell, the newspapermen are going to have as much style as anyone. "Stay hungry. Good things come... when they come." C'mon.

--jamessal

(To reply, click here.)

I don't doubt that the busyness of the first episode had a lot to do with the retards at HBO deciding to cut the Wire from 13 episodes to 10 for its final season but I know Simon will make it work in spite of his bosses stupidity.

As far as Jeffrey's weak defense of the Sopranos, give it up man. The show lost its way after 3 seasons, so the claim that the Sopranos was on longer is not much of an excuse. Of course it is probably true that the Sopranos was a victim of its own massive popularity, while the Wire has been able to stay on course precisely because nobody was watching. Maybe if David Simon had gotten all the money and all the ball licking from critics that David Chase received he would have turned into a hack writer as well.

--sir biff

(To reply, click here.)

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