Every once in a while, I open to an article in the New York Review of Books that makes me feel like I've accidentally stumbled into a guest lecture at some kind of intellectual retirement home. The subject matter seems exciting and relevant, the author seems promising--then it devolves into an explanation of basic cultural phenomena to an audience assumed to be hopelessly out of touch.
That's how I felt when I read Charles Petersen's "In the World of Facebook" earlier this year. Its rants describe "the mechanics" of superficial Web-era friendships in a way that seems almost calculated to excite "why-I-never" cane-shaking among anyone still fighting the good fight against the Internet. That's also how I felt recently when reading Lorrie Moore's piece on The Wire.
I always get excited when I see writing about The Wire. That excitement comes partially from hometown pride, and partially from the fact that I think we're living in the golden age of television, and we should be talking about TV shows a lot more than we talk about, oh, Jonathan Franzen for instance. Add to that the fact that Lorrie Moore is a great writer, and you'd seem to have the perfect formula for a great article. (I don't know if Charles Petersen is great, because according to my superficial Web-era scholarship, he appears to be a deceased Danish boxer.)
Imagine my disappointment, then, when I discovered that Moore's piece more or less describes the entire series to an audience who is assumed not to have heard about it, or to have heard of it only to call out "HWAT'S THAT DEARIE?!" and turn up the volume on their hearing aids. I kept waiting for Moore's incisive account of the series to materialize, but instead I got summary sprinkled with helpful glosses that remind us that "the game" is what "the drug business is called." Thanks?
Most surprisingly, Moore never questions the blue-collar snobbery implicit in much of what The Wire thinks it's teaching us. Instead--perhaps out of guilt for her own relatively white and relatively middle-class subject matter?--she argues that the series's use of the inner city
might be seen as a quiet rebuke to its own great living novelists, Anne Tyler and John Barth, both of whose exquisitely styled prose could be accused of having turned its back on the deep inner workings of the city that executive producer David Simon, a former Baltimore reporter, and producer Ed Burns, a former Baltimore schoolteacher and cop, have excavated with such daring and success.
Well, sure, the series certainly wants to be seen that way. Its form of realism is one that denies "reality" to anyone who isn't taking part in a life-or-death struggle of some kind--which makes for great drama, but leads to characters whose three-dimensionality fades as their socio-economic status climbs higher and higher above the poverty line. As a result, there's a serious omission from the otherwise breathtaking sweep of
The Wire's social survey of Baltimore: the residents of leafy neighborhoods like Guilford, Roland Park, and farther north into the county, the kinds of places where I spent my first 18 years.
All of that gets classed as "Leave-It-to-Beaver Land" in the phrase from
The Wire that Moore admires, but I keep asking myself what to make of that exclusion, and what it means for
The Wire's ability to accurately represent the kinds of social and economic transactions that lead to urban problems like Baltimore's. In Simon's work, the upper classes are offstage presences who serve alternatively to mark social immobility (like when D'Angelo Barksdale looks despairingly around the Prime Rib in season 1) or to initiate and benefit from the misery of "real" Baltimoreans (like when Nick Sobotka heckles Carcetti's conversion of the waterfront into condos, or bemoans the re-classification of his family's rowhouse as a "Federal Hill" property). The politics of what counts as real in
The Wire is one of the most insistent and problematic parts of its social vision, and it's disappointing to watch Moore let it pass with nothing but a polite golf clap.
Compare Moore's largely congratulatory descriptions of
The Wire with
Nicholas Lemann's take on Simon's latest project, Treme. Lemann's analysis appeared only a week earlier, but his descriptions of what goes right, and wrong, with
Treme are wonderful. He recognizes the series's insecurity about proving itself as a "real" depiction of New Orleans, and the awkwardness that results as
Treme repetitively flashes its street cred to audiences. Lemann also rightly identifies Simon's inability to portray wealthy families clearly. He makes a mistake, however, in assuming that issues of reality and authenticity weren't a problem for
The Wire, where Simon and his writers could more easily access a local perspective. The issues are there, but they're muffled by their alignment with the typical conflation of the low with the real.
There is, in other words, a big portion of society--in fact, the portion that used to be called Society--that never really makes it into Simon's view of the world. You have to wonder how that impairs his ability, and his projects' ability, to tackle the issues they claim to depict so accurately. It's a weird reverse ghettoization: wealthy North Baltimoreans see the origins of social ills in the form of the occasional member of the underclass who comes into their neighborhoods to steal from them; advocates of the underclass see the origins of social ills in the form of the wealthy who come into their neighborhoods to steal from them. Simon is a master of the second version of the narrative, and he does it beautifully, powerfully, and unforgettably. But at some point it seems as if maybe, to effect any real kind of change, we need a new story.
