The Wire and Art

cansv:

I haven't seen "Treme" (no cable) so I can't comment on how accurate this review is. But as a native Baltimorean intimately familiar with the haunts of "The Wire," where David Simon injects a fantasized moral complexity where there is little (there is nothing more numbing and banal than the world of the inner city drug corners), I'm predisposed to think Simon's same sort of faux authenticity is being imposed on NOLA.

ironyroad:

". . . where David Simon injects a fantasized moral complexity where there is little"

Isn't that exactly what art does? Or one of the things at least?

The same accusation -- not simply replicating numbness and banality -- could be leveled at Brecht for "The Threepenny Opera" (beggers and thieves hanging out), Shakespeare for "Henry IV" and "Henry V" (king dies, son becomes king and acts differently than before), or Camus for "The Fall" (guy from Paris goes to Amsterdam and meets other guy like him).

me:

cansv interesting posts

I haven't seen Treme. But didn't The Wire do the opposite of injecting "...a fantasized moral complexity where there is little..."? I can see why someone, me, would think that in some ways from certain perspectives the "world of the inner city drug corners is numbing and banal". But they are populated by disenfranchised, socially alienated people, many kids, tied in complicated ways to crime organizations made up of people who at their tops have much wealth and power which themselves bleed into and overlap with business and politics also comprised of compromised people. How in all this is their not moral complexity ranging from the smallest diddy bopper to those in the very seat of power, especially considering the elemental confrontation running through the series between crime as individual and scial dysfunction and state order with all of its own internal tensions? There is I submit no need here for injecting fantasized moral complexity: it's all there; it all inheres there. Plus, after all, "there's a special
providence in the fall of a sparrow..."

So the question for The Wire is not the imposition of moral complexity on a subject that can't sustain it, but the bringing out in art of the moral complexity that is there, nececcsarily. I think in The Wire Simon did this expansively and magnificently.

jhildner:

ansv, I didn't think that The Wire celebrated or romanticized street crime -- as "authentic" or in any other way. I don't even think that the morality of The Wire is very complex (which is fine with me, by the way). It's not making apologies for criminals. According to the show's moral scheme, the greatest virtues are competence and an understated sense of high principle both of which are doomed to fight losing battles against crass, short-term self-interest and endemic corruption in all its varieties. The competent and the principled generally get punished, and the world doesn't get any better, in a variety of gritty urban venues from street corners to City Hall. With respect to the characters who are criminals, I don't think that investing some of them with charisma turns them into sympathetic figures, any more than it did for Richard III.

me:

...According to the show's moral scheme, the greatest virtues are competence and an understated sense of high principle both of which are doomed to fight losing battles against crass, short-term self-interest and endemic corruption in all its varieties. The competent and the principled generally get punished, and the world doesn't get any better, in a variety of gritty urban venues from street corners to City Hall...

I wonder whether there's a problem with this argument.

This telling paraphrase of the series' "moral scheme" sounds complex enough.

But my underlying point is that once you try prosaically to render what a work of art is about thematically--another word, I think, for "moral scheme"--it's necessarily reductive in the Cleanth Brooks sense of the "heresy of paraphrase". A great work of art may have an easily stated theme or moral scheme--say Paradise Lost--but it would be wrong to say it's not complex. And it may be a misconceived splitting of artistic form and content, I'd argue, to say a work is formally complex but morally or thematically simple. Form and content are integrally, or, better, perhaps, intrinisically, related ways of speaking about the same thing.

For The Wire too, which I, for not the only one, think is high art.

jhildner:

Basman, fair enough. I didn't mean to say that the show is not complex. It certainly is. I meant to say that the show is not, I think, morally dubious for romanticizing bad things and bad people. I caught a whiff of that complaint from cansv who insisted that urban street life is more banal bummer than rich tapestry. If it promotes any values -- and I think it does -- then those values strike me as conventional ones. There is moral conflict -- there are numerous plot lines that involve breaking the rules in order to achieve a higher purpose -- but these conflicts aren't subversive. You're not really invited, I think, to leave the confines of the moral universe of nice, bourgeois liberals like ourselves. That's not a knock. I don't in fact like art that preaches, in often sanctimonious or specious fashion, that we should leave those confines, and that in some way endorses (as opposed to merely exposes) so-called alternative morality.

me:

jh I agree in part and disagree in part with what you say about The Wire. I agree with you as against cansv. But I think Simon wouldn't like to think he was leaving us, ultimately, to our bourgeois selves. That in itself isn't an argument really, but isn't there is a meaning in The Wire that wants to say in part something like that there is an unfathomable evil here that swallows up people in the darkest, most vicious way imaginable and that is hopeless, unreachable, and all consuming?

It has to do with the so many episodes of sheer viciousness and bloodletting, of characters, whose pluck and survival are admirable, who only to come to terrible, terrible ends, that one kid in the last episode who just wanders away into the darkness of the Baltimore inner city.

It's been a while since I've seen it and can't remember so many specific instances, but my general recollection is thematically of great stretches of irredeemable darkness. In fact a complaint about its last year was how dark and muffled was the camera work and the characters' speech. For me that was atmospheric and metaphoric for that darkness.

There's a sense in which all art delivers us back to our bourgeois lives, if we are lucky enough to have them. It's art after all, not life. It ends and life goes on. I think that art's transformative powers are vastly overrated, especially in relation to effecting change in the world. And I don't know anyone, I don't think, who was "transformed" by a work of art or had his or her life changed. Art does not, in my experience, abate distress or real personal sorrow. It's best enjoyed when you're nice and comfortable and can take it in with a clear mind and heart, undistracted by real world problems and sorrows.

ironyroad:

Or, as T.S. Eliot remarked (I'm paraphrasing a little here), it's difficult to read a great poem if you have a nagging toothache.

me:

Lonnie Johnson - Toothache Blues - Part 1 (1928)

VS: Ahhh, hahhh ¦[spoken words (s.p.)]
LJ: What's the matter, darlin'?[s. p.]
VS: Ahhh, hahhh ¦[s. p.]

VS: I'm havin' so much trouble with those toothache blues.
LJ: I'm a real good doctor to ease those toothache blues.
VS: Ahhh, ahhh ¦ [s. p.]
VS: It's got me floor walkin' and wearin' out both of my shoes.
VS: Ahhhhh ¦ [s. p.]

LJ: You need a quick fillin' dentist, now don't be mean and cross.
VS: Ohhh, doctor ¦ huhh ¦ LJ: Hush up, darlin', just a minute ¦ [s. p.]
You need a quick fillin' dentist, now don't be mean and cross.
VS: Mmm, mmm ¦ [s. p.]
VS: Last night I was hot with fever, I just rolled and tossed.
VS: Ohhh, doctor ¦ LJ: Just a minute, darlin' ¦ [s. p.]

LJ: Don't get nervous honey, when I lay you in my chair.
VS: Mmm ¦ LJ: Sit still, darlin' ¦ [s. p.]
Don't get nervous, honey when I lay you in my chair.
VS: Ahhh, doctor, doctor ¦ [s. p.]
VS: If you use what's in your hand, you'll make me pull my hair.
VS: Ahhh, ouch, mmm ¦ LJ: Just a minute ¦ [s. p.]

VS: I feel a funny little somethin' easin' into my cavity.
VS: Mmm, ouch, ohhh ¦ (giggling)
I feel a funny little somethin' easin' into my cavity.
LJ: That's nothin' but cocaine and liquor to ease your pains you see.
VS: Ohhh, doctor, mmm ¦ LJ: Wait, just a minute now ... [s. p.]
VS: Mmm ¦ LJ: I got it now ... [s. p.]
VS: Ahhh, ahhh ¦ LJ: I ¦ I pulled it now ¦ [s. p.]
VS: Ahhh, doctor ¦ LJ: Don't it feel better now? [s. p.]
VS: Ahhhh ¦ LJ: It won't be long now ¦ [s. p.]
VS: Mmmm ¦ mmmm ¦ [s. p.]

The dentist's name is, natch, Dr. Feelgood.