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Alvarez The Rules of the Game

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THE RULES OF THE GAME

was my expectation: McNulty was the Percival who, however bumbling, would ultimately attain his goal, be granted a sight df the grail of perfection and heal the unhealed wound of the land. He failedspectacularly ill his role as triumphanthero just as Avon failed intheroleofvanquislhedvillain.

,Judgedby,the rules of TV crimedrama; the showwas a moI111mental failure.·. mental" being the operative term. The Wire wasonly masquerading

!;at thdifferenttendatelyturning.its. conventionsin,ide'outln1he 'e'vie •. ·

Drama was first defined in Aristotle's Poetics as the "imitation of action theform of action," ''Action'' (praxis),as Aristotle,meantit,referred1to humanlife as.it is actually lived and experienced:' reason,emotion, desire,' ,suffering. This IS where The Wife, I think, beglnsto,expand and redefine

its genre. As literary critic' Francis Fergusson wrote ofgreat drama 'in' ,The Idea ofa Theater, "the realm of experience 'it takes for Its own is the contingent,fallible, changing one which isthis side offinaltruth,andin " constant touch with common sense," Its elements ofcomposition

world, related to each other in a vast and intricate web ofanalogies." The Wine was not interested in McNulty's ultimately futilequestso much as it was in probing the unhealed wound itself: in finge,ring thejagged grain of ,'Baltimore; beyond that, of the human suffering in America's urban core.

TV crime drama has its origins in the western, inAmerica's mYthic Wild West and the novels and movies that engendered andsustained this myth. The traditional western rests on a belief in a worldthat is in essence , innocent, albeit eternally menaced by evil: the hero plays a role in purging a speCific threat. The Wire by contrast assumes a fallen world. There is

no specific threat. Corruption is the state of things. Or rather, innocence, not evil, is the threat to the status quo, because when you set off a 'chiin of events in innocence, a nice word for "ignorance," you have no way of knowing, or even suspecting, how much damage you might cause.

Jimmy McNulty and D'Angelo Barksdale occuPY toughly the same. positions in their respective chains of command; both rage in various

ways, both suffer, against the strictures of the hierarchies in which they find themselves, but both lack any real power to effect change. They are the catalysts of the chain of events in Season One D' Angelo, through the' crime that sets the scene for the opening trial, Jimmy, through his outrage

Given the general customs of American filmed entertainment utilizing crime and criminals as its subject matter gripping narrativesthat,resolve in satisfying endings that reaffirm the audience's sense of the fundamental,'

justice of the world there is no reason for anyone to ,watchTheWire. ,We, .the audience, are warned from the first that therewill likely be no ' grand victories, no vanquished enemies, no heroes riding offinto the sunset in police-issue SUV s. There are rUles to this "game" Of'theTV ' crime drama, and TheWire flouts all ofthem,bringing us,intoa','wor1d where those charged to serve and protect are often more. concerned With' '

career advancement and bureaucratic number-crunchingthanwith any.: conventional notion of justice. Our ragtag band ofhero cops are flaw'ed far beyond the threshold of easy sympathy. The bad-guy criminalsthey , haphazardly pursue are portrayed as being so deeply, attimes Poignantl

circumscribed by the mean streets to which they themselves contribute meanness that easy hatred of them is likewise difficult. TheWireis' its own game.

I confess to a secret life as a dedicated consumer of crime drama.

From a childhood ordered by Streets of San Francisco, Hawaii Five-O, and Rockford Files, through a young adulthood Of Miami Vice, Hill Street Blues, and Homicide, to a maturity of CSI, NYPD Blue, andLaw,and Order, I have consciously, deeply, and cheerfully imbibed the rulesof the ' , genre. Throughout The Wire's Season One I kept stubbornly waitingfor drug kingpin Avon Barksdale to die: to be killed in a gruesomefashion' commensurate with the sum total of the lives his criminal activities 'had '

destroyed. I actively wanted it. Barring this, I wanted him sentenced,to life without parole in the Hole at Marion. Week byweek, The Wirekept alive these expectations; in fact, deliberately manipulated and toyed withthem; but ultimately, in the end meaning the end of Season ()ne betrayed them.

If Avon Barksdale was the villain in The Wire's first season, then it would follow that Jimmy McNulty was the hero, the knight -errant whose' self-appointed task was to set the corrupt city of Baltimore to rights. Such

at the result of this trial and "mouthing off" to the judge (who has his OWn' motives for setting the hunt for Avon in motion) but both are " horrified by, the changes they do effect, the trail of wreckage and bOdies,' they leave in their ,wake. D'Angelo is unable to look at crime

when finally in custody; Jimmy, looking back ,toward the end, says, "What

the fuck did Ido?" " '

What Jimmy did (and stubbornly did again in Season Two )wassi to shake one thread ofthe "vast and intricate web" of relationships by whIch the city generally, seamlessly, runs itself; and in so doing; to , , the invisible visible, before it inevitably settles back into place. No' one is' above or below this web, no one is immune. The Wire casts its unblinking ",

, eye on the upPerand,lower echelons of cops and criminals: each of them.,' suffers, invariousways, from the malady of the city; even Avon Barksdale is perpetually menaced by competitors and by his own crew.

" " In the beauty and fullness of the show, Wallace, a lovely boy stranded' at the bottom rung, of the drug trade, is granted his challenges and trials of , soul; the addict and informant Bubbles, motivated by love and a sense of responsibility, has moments of dignity; even Omar, the pitiless stalker of ' the pitiless, isshown to have human qualities and impulses. Every character is granted his reasons; The Wire, again to quote Fergusson, "catch[esl the creature in the very act of creating those partial rationalizations which' ' 'make the whole substance of lesser dramas." There is no abstract principle of justice operating in this world, only real people; there is no good' and evil, but there is right and wrong; actions do have consequences: lives are broken, shattered, lost, or saved, in a game that has no end.

I am, along with being a lover of crime drama, also a student of true, crime: corporate malfeasance, from John D. Rockefeller and Andrew'. Carnegie to Enron and Worldcom; political corruption, with a special: fascination for the morass of greed, brutality, and inhumanity that into the making of my home city, Chicago; police corruption, from Boston '' to New York City to Los Angeles; and drug crime, having lost relatives and childhood friends to what might be termed "the game." In none of these various permutations of crime is there ever an end to the human " cost involved; in none, given the vast interwoven chain of cause and effect" and the ultimate mystery of context or fate versus individual free will, can, the journey of one individual, one Percival, stand for or redeem the whole.

the wire that links, society, that ties us all together in this case luonzed by thepen register following the trail of money and ultimate ' ' ,esponsibility will be allowed to trace and implicate only so far. Beyond' scope, as 'theoldmaps Of the flat and undiscovered world used to

'caution,the're be IImonsters. ' ' "

This is the real the fallen world, an under-acknowledged aspect' our country, theUnited States, that The Wire so thoroughly, brutally,

compassionately portrays.'

This brings me to what I would argue is the true achievement of '

Wire: its subtle,awateness,andunderstated indictment of the larger thatoccursoff-screen. As much as I enjoy crime drama, I am always on level wary of showsthat use urban suffering as a forum for entertailnment

I am constantly searchingfor the eScape, the"letting off the hook,"that

shows' givethe 'predominantly middle-and, upper- middle-class "

, ,

the ritualpurgation ,that allows the audience 0-:: myself induded to go

, on with their' lives :While. the predominantly poor' and African body countcontinues to accrue in real projects, in Bridgeport, Camden, St. Louis, Dallas, Denver, Oakland. In The Wire, there is no grand public outrage' Or o{1tcry for the murders to be solved; these deaths have become' , so commonplace, as they have in our world, as to seem unremarkable.

"Jimmy McNultycomes torealize that the motivations behind his quests have more to do with ambition and arrogance than they do with 'outrage,at injustice.

I admired The Wire's matter-of-fact awareness that the lives

inner-city blacks to the cops, the community, and the larger public ' are not worth a dime. But the show goes a step beyond this: it is aware

" that these lives are alsd, paradoxically, worth quite a bit. The profits of the drug and sex trades travel out from the projects to banks, corpora politicians, developers, while the unutterable suffering through which that money is made remains geographically contained. For me, the plangent ofthe show's many great lines was spoken in Season One, by the sacrificial lamb, 16-year-old Wallace: "If it ain't West Baltimore,

I don't know it."

As articulated by D'Angelo in his classic set piece on the rilles

chess, the pawns suffering on the game board don't see the larger game; to them, it is all in the game. The forces that profit from the game, allow the carnage to occur without outrage, without fear, shame or guilt include us, the audience and wider public off-screen,: with our own comfortable notions of justice, our own necessities, our own reasons and partial rationalizations for doing nothing to demand that it stop. The Wire's true greatness is its chilling awareness of this fact",

DMU Timestamp: February 01, 2013 22:13





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