Jeffrey Goldberg and David Plotz were online on March 6 to chat about The Wire. Read the transcript.
Dear Jeff,
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StumbleUponYou're mad at Kima? She's the one cop who has the courage to blow the whistle—the courage to do what she asks her witnesses to do every single day—and you're Stop Snitchin' her? She didn't push Jimmy off a bridge: He jumped himself, weeks ago. She's just alerting the coroner.
I knew this week's Sun scenes would be a red flag in front of the Goldberg horns. The "pull all of Templeton's stories" scene was agonizingly stupid. At least it was over quickly. (And I must confess that I'm excited to see how Simon is going to destroy Gus since it's clear that Gus must fall and Templeton must rise. On the upside, Gus will then have time to write his long-anticipated "Letter From Baltimoringham Jail.")
A few years ago, a brilliant journalist named Adrian Nicole LeBlanc wrote a book called Random Family about an extended family of drug dealers, wives, girlfriends, and children in the Bronx. My favorite scene in the book is when, for reasons I can't remember, one of the characters gets a windfall or wins a prize, and the reward is a night out in New York in a limousine. (Forgive me if I mess up the details slightly—I don't have the book in front of me.) She and her friends pile into the limo and set out for Manhattan, but they can't think of anything to do. They don't know where to eat or even where to go. They end up driving back to their derelict Bronx neighborhood and hanging out on the same corner where they always hang out. It's an unbelievably powerful and grim scene about the way poverty not only closes off avenues of escape, but even stops you from being able to imagine those avenues.
It seems to me that this is the essential theme of The Wire this season and perhaps in all five seasons. Again and again, The Wire's characters are discovering that they have nowhere else to go and also that they can't even imagine how to leave. Home in Baltimore is horrific, but the great world beyond is a mystery. The Season 4 scene of Bunny and the kids in a fancy restaurant was the most memorable depiction of this, but this season, and particularly last night's episode, has given us many more examples. There's Dukie, driven from his home once again. Michael now must strike out alone into the unknown. Omar escaped to island paradise but couldn't stay away. Prop Joe had packed his bags to leave but was murdered before he could walk out the door. Jimmy—soon to be jobless and womanless—can't escape himself. Templeton seeks his fortune at the Post but can't get a job. Even Gus is in some sense a prisoner, unwilling or unable to find a more congenial newspaper job because he loves sick old Baltimore too much. Only the schizophrenic, kidnapped homeless guy is allowed to leave.
You know whom I want working security at my next party? Those two guys who accompanied Chris to the drug warehouse. They were the biggest men I've ever seen!
David
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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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