DVDS SEEN : The Wire pierces flawed systems
Posted on Sunday, March 9, 2008
The Wire, HBO’s bleak but beloved meditation on the time-release toxicity of institutions, has been nothing if not succinct. The catch-all affirmation of its late, lamented street bandit Omar — “Inn-deeed,” he would purr to agree with someone, most usually himself — wound up on T-shirts.
And an entire crime-scene investigation in the series’ first season, illuminating a bullet’s path through a kitchen window (and a victim ) and into the condiment shelf of an open refrigerator door, played out with no dialogue save two detectives’ ambidextrous usages of a single obscenity, escalating in urgency and expression as the scales fell from their eyes and the dead spoke.
In fact, every installment in the series’ sterling 60-episode run, which concludes tonight, contained at least two spoken selections suitable for installing in a quote-a-day desk calendar for the fatalist who has everything. (Series creator David Simon, who honed his television production acumen on the NBC show Homicide: Life on the Streets and his devil-in-thedetails porousness as a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun, replicates the slang of the statehouse, the squad room and the drug corner with equal mastery. )
Early in the fourth season, the most recent available on DVD (HBO Home Video, $ 59. 98 ), Detective Kima Greggs suffers an initiation after her transfer to the Homicide Division of the Baltimore Police Department. Through The Wire’s run, Simon trained on the department like the zoom lens of a surveillance camera, using one flawed if driven chain of command to examine other deeply flawed yet driven chains, from politics to the school system to the illegal drug market, replete with its own policing strategies and lieutenants angling to make captain.
Greggs has been shown to a murder scene by a veteran investigator; as a prank, he has planted a scroll naming the killer in the victim’s hand. Greggs doesn’t know that, and the ranking detective goads her to approach the scene with soft eyes: “You got soft eyes,” he tells her, “you can see the whole thing.” Soft eyes ultimately reward Greggs, but the dispiriting if enriching paradox of the series is how, in the course of five years, The Wire has hardened our gaze. The fourth season, in particular, steeled with its focus on the fates of four middle-schoolers pinned by parental and systematic neglect.
Their custodians at home expect no form of achievement from them except perhaps a contribution to household income by way of the wildly lenient child-labor laws of the drug game. At school, the boys are expected to perform on standardized tests and then socially promote — teacher’s-handbook jargon for herding children forward according to chronological age.
It was Simon’s “No Child Left Behind” season, to be sure, but the show’s core strength of patient observation — the very title is a reference to wiretapping, after all, the purposefulness of sifting the incriminating from the banal — rescued it from the pursuit of editorial agenda.
A student nicknamed Dukie is followed with special nuance, from his response to a brutal razor blade face-slashing dealt by one schoolgirl to another — longing to be useful, he cools the aggressor by holding to her face a junk-heap handheld fan he’s repaired — to his unsurprised “Dag, not again” upon spotting a yellow eviction notice flapping from his former front door and familiar shelves and mattresses piled callously in the street.
The season borrows its time frame from the first school year of a detective-turned-teacher who smuggles Dukie spare sandwiches and stations him at the classroom computer, where the boy thrives. When the system pries Dukie from his grasp, the teacher sulks in a recliner at home. “Nobody wins,” he sighs. “One side just loses more slowly.” That lament could be a coda for the entire series, if there weren’t so many codas in the running. Back in season one, Lester Freamon, a seasoned investigator, admonished the detective who’d eventually trade wiretaps for chalkboards not to discount a surveillance’s scraps, telling him, “All the pieces matter.” In a bit of reductiveness Simon has lampooned this season in a newspaper story line. The Wire’s squalid narrative sprawl has been called Dickensian; in a more fundamental way it perverts the romantic principles of Capra — that every life impacts another profoundly and irrevocably.
“Deserve ain’t got nothin’ to do with it,” as a cold-blooded, mushmouthed and thoroughly fascinating assassin observed this season shortly before her own demise.
In the fourth-season story line that set the larger stage for her death, one member of the police force had sold out a pre-teen whose knowledge of a murder could aid in the retrieval of an expensive camera the brash officer has lost to a cunning drug lord; the officer’s act of self-preservation effectively unplugs the drain holding any promise of stable home life for the boy.
Conversely, another police officer methodically parts a thicket of school-system bureaucracy and even penitentiary visitation protocols to pull another boy, an unsuitable heir to his imprisoned father’s drug-selling legacy, to safety. An achievement of The Wirein its entirety, and of its heartbreaking fourth season in particular, is the series’ dramatization of the futility of trusting systems to exhibit any sense of doctrinal, nurturing fair-mindedness. It saps none of the story’s power to say that, by the end of the “No Child Left Behind” season, out of four children, all but one are left behind. Simon asks us to consider that while a casual act of selfishness can ruin a life, it takes superhuman feats of selflessness to save one. All the pieces matter ? As Omar would say, indeed.
— Kyle Brazzel Notable DVD releases on Tuesday: And Justice for All, Sony, $ 19. 94 — The 1979 film was the bigscreen debut for Christine Lahti and had a screenplay co-written by Barry Levinson. But of course you want to watch it for the courtroom scene at the end where Al Pacino turns on his client and then screams, “You’re out of order ! You’re out of order ! The whole trial is out of order !” A lot of people forget the topper, which Pacino says as he is being dragged out of court: “Hold it ! I just completed my opening statement !” Def Comedy Jam: D. L. Hughley, HBO Video, $ 19. 97 — Standup comics and host Hughley, filmed at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles.
Pop Go the Wiggles, Warner Bros., $ 19. 96 — It’s the Wiggles ’ world; we just live in it.
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online
