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Parcels of Rogues
Tom Jennings
In the wake of the Westminster expenses scandal, public disenchantment
with British parliamentary politics – at least measured by current affairs
punditry and perpetually declining election turnouts – appears to have hit
an all-time low unmatched since late-eighteenth century disgust eventually prompted
the Great Reform Acts. Lasting images from that period would include William
Hogarth’s paintings wallowing in the dissolute arrogance and greed of power,
and a characteristic soundbite – albeit in nationalist guise – Robert
Burns’ 1791 summary dismissal of “Such A Parcel of Rogues” selling
out Scotland for “English gold”. Even then, however, it seems that
the substance of the loyal opposition’s objections to prevailing conditions
revolves around moral judgements on individuals (even in their thousands) who
suborn in their own selfish interests what would otherwise, by implication, be
essentially neutral structures and processes of government. The common intuition
that the latter institutions had always been devised and developed precisely
to safeguard such private agendas – thus requiring a move back to the political
drawing board – is then obscured by the clamour of reformist (and revolutionary)
programmes seeking to strengthen the State, ostensibly to safeguard its potential
efficacy but incidentally rendering fundamental change even harder to envisage.
Now, with collapsing international financial mafias rescued with astronomical
hand-outs into corporate balance sheets even more blatant than the preceding
drip of deferred government debt scheduling in Private-Public-Partnership and
Private Finance Initiative scams – now largely propped up with 100% public
funding – it seems astonishingly parochial for attention to divert to the
minor creative accounting of MPs shaving a few thousand off the taxman. Perhaps,
though, it signals a manageable, if displaced, acknowledgement of the obscenity
of wagering the futures of millions of lives on us accepting depleting incomes,
dissolving welfare, and generally harsher prospects – when the only visible
benefits reliably accrue precisely to those plotting the wholesale plunder of
collective resources. Yet politicians in all mainstream parties parrot the mantra
of ‘no alternative’ to a vain hope for trickledown from globalised
profiteering – jostling to ridicule, suppress and criminalise dissenting
expression and action – so it’s only right that they’re all tarred
with the same brush. Meanwhile the chattering classes satisfy themselves with
hand-wringing and crocodile tears bemoaning the supposedly sudden loss of faith
in liberal democratic platitudes, tremulously wondering if further modernisation
and regulation can bodge it together. So where are contemporary visions of government
equivalent to those of Hogarth and Burns, focussing the righteous ire of the
masses in withering critiques of such an abject here-and-now? Or, put more cynically,
how do sophisticated postmodern media recuperate and neutralise popular discontent
while purporting to represent it?
From the Ridiculous ...
Stepping up from safe television comedy sketch shows sneering at easy targets
of low-brow culture, Armando Iannucci’s hilarious BBC 4 sitcom The Thick
Of It (2005-07) viciously satirised New Labour’s spin machine, showing
the gymnastic contortions of information massaging and packaging necessary for
variously venal, vacuous, mendacious and malicious activities and utterances
comprising ‘affairs of state’ to resemble slickly-managed ‘joined-up’ policy.
Harassed aides duck and dive delivering this conjuring trick from the heart of
government to media interfaces, bullied into arbitrarily transient Party-line
by Downing Street enforcers. Magnifying the premiss to cinema, In The Loop (2009)
abandons banal bungling bureaucracy in a minor Ministry for big-budget geopolitical
gravity as Iraq war propaganda is prepared in London and Washington DC. The fly-on-the-wall,
on-the-hoof, faux-documentary style persists from television, as do archetypes
of vacillating British politicians and squabbling, squirming assistants – with
Peter Capaldi’s No.10 PR supremo surviving in all his foul-mouthed sociopathic
glory. Finally, as per usual, he gets his warlike way – any residual principles,
ethics and decency comprehensively vacating the UN building – along the
way culling those who won’t play ball by hyping trivial scandals and leaking
them to the tabloids.
Iannucci’s primary strategy is to fashion screwball comedy from the petty
vanities, conflicts, indignities and tyrannies of office politics married to
the euphemistic inanity of modern business practices. Egotism, incompetence and
communication breakdown perpetually threaten conformance to bigger pictures which
the protagonists are only dimly aware of, busily chasing ever-shifting agendas
and deadlines. This effectively updates Yes, Minister’s (BBC, 1980-82)
caricature of traditional patrician government, with Thatcherism’s brutal
diktats filtering through elite civil servants to humiliate hapless junior ministers,
as well as House of Cards’ (BBC, 1990) Machiavellian high-Tory distraction. The
Thick Of It instead skewers politically-correct Orwellian fantasies of contemporary
statecraft as benign ‘better management’, exposing a hysterical class-based
underbelly of barely-suppressed macho posturing, rage and shame – the symbolically
violent regression of its wit cathartically mirroring the disavowed dirty deeds
barbaric neoliberalism wreaks in the real world. In The Loop, however,
bursts this hermetically-sealed pre-Oedipal bubble in the pragmatic US corridors
of power – which are portrayed as, in their own way, just as ad-hoc a muddle
of opportunistic rancour as ours even if their perks, pomp and circumstance are
correspondingly grander and more grandiose.
Curiously, however, the film’s US career politicians are given ideological
co-ordinates underpinning their efforts, which their connivances, complacencies
and flaws are genuinely mobilised to serve. Unlike the Brits, personal advancement
is not their primary concern, moreover the Yanks have no equivalent of the dictatorial
puppetmaster orchestrating apparatchiks, thereby allowing a freer play of the
balance of forces rather than top-down fixing. Whereas the Blairites learned
their rhetorical Third Way trade at Washington Consensus seminars precisely to
sacrifice authentic commitment on the altar of corporate culture. So inadvertently
projecting vestiges of noble ‘battles of ideas’ back across the Atlantic
seems a monumental failure of nerve and/or imagination – symptomatic, perhaps,
of cynicism’s concealed conservatism shading satire into farce. Nevertheless,
at least In The Loop injects some riotous bile into its fictional power
mechanics, pissing on the overblown saccharine complacency of The West Wing’s
(1999-2006) White House, or, for Westminster and Whitehall, the pseudo-documentary New
Labour: The Project (BBC, 2002), and The Deal and The Government
Inspector (Channel 4, 2003 and 2005) pandering to celebrity obsessionality,
and – most dystopic as well as soporific – the yuppie student narcissism
of Party Animals (BBC 2, 2007).
Entry-points for audience identification in The Thick Of It and In
The Loop lie with the legions of underlings getting bossed around, not really
knowing what’s going on, at the mercy of decisions made elsewhere and having
to take them on board in getting the job done. This parallels the situation for
ordinary folk faced with the practical consequences of deliberations conducted
far above our heads – yet these protagonists are mere cogs in an apparatus
of mediation, in the business of dealing only with how things appear. So while
their struggle for coherent understanding in order to act can stand for our own
confused paralysis in the face of the apparent insanity of the world, its empathic
effectiveness depends on viewers embracing the perspectives of middle-level,
middle-class bureaucrats, professionals or managers – who, to get this far,
must have already aligned their sense of personal interest and integrity with
the tasks of simulation and dissimulation in the service of institutional power.
Conversely, the living, breathing ultimate objects of its circuits of abstraction
and rhetoric have to deal with concrete outcomes – whether in foreign wars
or the routine juggernauts of domestic governance – where violation is likely
to be visceral as well as discursive and directly physical brutality accompanying
the moral dehumanisation state-sanctioned perpetrators feel obliged to reproduce.
Here, though, we are safely segregated from those in charge, cocooned off-screen
along with underlying rationales for the policies or strategies imposed, and
from all those unaccountably victimised. The latter only ever minimally impinge
as expedient symbolic fodder for pre-existing plans or narratives – whereas
writer David Peace builds from the blood, guts and imaginations of those at the
sharpest end.
... to the Anti-Sublime ...
Based on Peace’s ‘Yorkshire noir’ novels 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1983 (Serpent’s
Tail, 1999-2002), scriptwriter Tony Grisoni’s three Red Riding films
(directed by Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, and Anand Tucker) paint a compelling
picture of time and place, and retain much of their source’s hellish
intensity. Screening in March this year and representing a substantial wedge
of Channel 4’s drama budget, the superb design, filming and acting drip
with grey-brown authenticity, showing 1970s/80s decay, depression and desperation
in Northern England’s rapidly postindustrialising pit villages, rotten boroughs
and collapsing communities breeding the solipsistic barbarism neoliberalism would
soon legitimise in this sceptic isle. But its seeds were sown long before, exemplified
in the period’s notorious sexual violence sagas, and in each of these intricately-linked
stories a deeply-flawed protagonist gets to the bottom of botched cases of abducted
schoolgirls and butchered prostitutes. A naive Yorkshire Post hack, supercilious
Manchester DI and wretchedly ineffectual local solicitor dig into stalled police
investigations – including the Ripper hunt – convinced of incompetence,
frame-ups and cover-ups, their faltering progress hindered at every turn by out-of-control
coppers whose obstruction readily shades into outright intimidation. Recurring
thoughout unremitting menace and brutality are seedy property developers, vengeance-seeking
rent-boys, creepily ubiquitous priests, paedophile rings, and disintegrating
detectives trying belatedly to do the right thing surrounded by unredeemable
W. Yorks Constabulary colleagues. The latter’s endemic corruption extends
beyond collusion and parasitism to running vice and pornography operations as
well as enforcing for local Big Money, underlining their thorough integration
into ‘polite’ society and establishment hierarchies. And the deeper
we get, the more desperate the agents of authority become to paper over the cracks
with torture and death-squad tactics.
Unfortunately the missing story (cut when the money wouldn’t stretch) emphasised
the author’s primary concern to represent the struggle to understand the
horrors that surrounded him while growing up in the area – helping to orientate
confused readers, but not now available to viewers. Thus the controversial fictionalisation
around real events (with names and details changed) given the most nightmarish
spin is developed in 1977’s loose theme of collusion between cynically-bent
journalists and marginally well-meaning and slightly less-compromised cops – representing
the cream of professional ‘truth-seekers’ – during the punk era’s
crystallisation of hopeless fury. Peace’s own feverishly obsessional boyhood
fears and imaginings around the Ripper were later supplemented by sources such
as the ‘parapolitics’ of Lobster magazine which – however
outlandish in respectable discourse – made what happened potentially intelligible.
Nevertheless he insists that his ‘occult history’ doesn’t in principle
exaggerate the scale of official wrongdoing – recommending doubters read
high-profile accounts of police foul-play such as Tony Bunyan’s ‘The
History and Practice of the Political Police in Britain’, Chris Mullin’s ‘Error
of Judgement’, John Williams’ ‘Bloody Valentine’,
or books by Paul Foot (we might add Stuart Christie and Robin Ramsay, among others).
So it’s not as if he’s ploughing a lonely furrow here – and his
masterpiece about the miners’ strike, GB84 (Faber, 2004), required
less psychotic hyperbole because the political machinations were themselves sufficiently
monstrous. Meanwhile the ‘Red Riding’ quartet ties together
in literary form the philosophical, psychosexual, visceral and political corollaries
of wading into such morasses – hoping to emerge with sanity intact.
Peace’s fractured hyper-modernist writing juxtaposes styles from expressionist
exposition to pared-down pulp prose and noirish dialogue, diary entries, mental
lists, streams of consciousness and incoherent ravings, with different kinds
of texts breaking any naturalistic flow. Inspired by science-fiction writer Philip
K. Dick’s paranoid existentialism, the effect is precisely to blur times
gone by into now, actuality into distorted perception, downright hallucination
and fantasy. In the Red Riding novels, apprehension of the awful situations
dealt with then evokes and resonates with repressed sexual and violent impulses – with
neither characters nor readers sure of distinctions – which then circulate
and materialise in exaggerated figures and actions in the narrative. We are not
necessarily meant to interpret the results as objective reality, but are at least
obliged to ponder what framework of knowledge could account for the facts such
as they are. Crucially, the complete – and continuing – failure of
official accounts to give satisfactory explanations of these most appalling events
brings into question conventional disavowals placing such ‘inhumanity’ outside
the purview of both normal society and official structures. Ultimately the TV
version timidly shirks this final imaginative leap in favour of exactly those
recognisable crime-procedural and conspiracy-thriller genre cliches that the
author transcended – its grubby specificity then generating scarcely more
explanatory power than a Da Vinci Code or James Bond.
Reducing to offscreen allusion the body counts and actual depictions of the heinous
crimes further censors the voices of victims previously given due weight. Instead,
the narrative arcs are “made more distinct than those in the novels”,
privileging minor heroic gestures which otherwise drown in the implacably malevolent
logic and interchangeably vicious complicity of serial killers and erstwhile
pursuers. Wanting “to be released from that hell by the end”, and stressing
that Peace “doesn’t save anyone. Whereas I needed to”1, Grisoni
gropes for what the books refused – an overall solution, redemption, and
an identifiable locus of organised evil pulling the strings to excuse the State
from ultimate culpability (if only its guardians lived up to ideals). So the
story’s salience no longer radiates from past to present throughout the
land, merely envisaging bad apples infecting this particular barrel of northernness – just
like G.F. Newman’s earlier Law & Order quartet (BBC, 1978) did
for the contemporaneous Met and London’s criminal justice system. Anyway,
mainstream critical responses eagerly followed suit, working overtime to refuse
any wider persistent real-world relevance, able to blame the author’s intransigent
interpretive idiosyncracies on his own maniacal genius/perversion – just
as the general prevalence of socialised and sexualised abusiveness is peremptorily
dismissed as so much personalised sickness with none of the intimate relationship
to respectable patterns of power we might suspect. With the most subversive elements
of the novels thus lost, the net effect here is to consign Red Riding’s ‘dark
Satanic’ costume drama to pretty much as conservatively remote a terrain
as Life On Mars.
Tackling the centrality of the police monopoly of violence in the hidden abusive
logic of government, Peace pursues parallels between masculine insecurity and
malevolence and motive forces permeating social and institutional networks but
repressed from awareness at all levels. Thus acquiring all the more motivating
force they coalesce in specific crimes of sexual violence as well as the general
habits and lifestyles of vice-ridden officers and municipal patriarchs, which
the police are constitutionally incapable of resisting or recognising. So while
it looks as if specific devilish conspiracies are solely responsible, actually
the norms and rules circumscribing official structures and processes nurture
such outcomes – the ‘wrong-uns’ and fuck-ups on both sides of
the law and their comprehensive entanglement with local conduits of money and
power. But the TV trilogy’s more didactically conventional trajectory dismisses
these insights as mere contributory factors allowing specific baddies in blue
their hegemony, implying that enlightened reform can weed them out. This historical
closure is reinforced if organised police violence originates purely in base
impulses at lower levels seeping upwards over time – so that the long-established
rank-and-file culture of racism, class hatred and elite exclusivity, also prevalent
elsewhere, takes root all the more severely in the absence of public oversight
and with special suitability in fuelling sadistic excess and all manner of corruption.
Suppressed from explicit expression by protocols of political correctness and
minimal controls afforded by complaints procedures, these patterns, of course,
persist. For example, the BBC’s Secret Policeman (2003) exposed white
racist Manchester recruits, and the Jean-Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson
cases demonstrate the systemic neglect of safeguards against misconduct also
seen in an Enfield Crime Squad recently disbanded for torturing suspects and
looting possessions. However, the meshing of police hierarchies with surrounding
institutions has accelerated since the 1980s, using New Public Management corporate
models and ‘fast-tracking’ university graduate officers. Tinpot dictatorships
of Chief Constables rising from the ranks were never really the core problem.
Instead, privatised lack of accountability visible in rogue units throughout
the country of varying degrees of scale and viciousness – or gangsterism
versus freemasonry – now reconstitutes centrally in the Association of Chief
Police Officers (ACPO), which has no obligation to consult or inform anyone of
its activities co-ordinating nationwide strategic planning and implenting resulting
policies. Meanwhile successive governments underwrite escalating carte blanche to
arrest anyone on suspicion of anything, inevitably encouraging – indeed,
if anything, insisting upon – out-of-control policing. With crime itself
recast as anti-social individual thought and communication as well as action,
proliferating surveillance and biocontrol technologies provide infinite evidence.
Institutions, though, are, almost by definition, innocent. So if the War on Terror
reflects awareness among the political classes of their impotence, perverted
psychopathy potentially attributable to all is both a perpetual alibi for the
health of the state and an eternal reminder of its sickness. Hence the recurring
fascination with compromised politicians, now rehashed on both sides of the Atlantic
in State of Play.
... and from Rogue Statesmen ...
Kevin Macdonald’s passably entertaining blockbuster State of Play sees
a young likely-lad gunned down in a professional hit, whereupon Cal McCaffrey
(Russell Crowe), intrepid chief reporter at The Washington Globe, investigates.
Immediately afterwards nearby, a political researcher falls under a commuter
train, with her Congressional Committee boss Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) tearful
at an ensuing press conference arousing Monicagate-style tabloid suspicions.
However, McCaffrey discovers that his victim phoned the dead woman immediately
before the murders – after a bagsnatch yielded surveillance material on
her, having obviously tried to flog it back to the killer. So McCaffrey commandeers
the now-merged story, helped enormously by being the Congressman’s old college-buddy.
Repelling interference from police, his editor and colleagues, and, with the
assassin running amok, he unravels a plot further thickened by revelations that
the monolithic private security contractor Collins was probing ran the researcher
as a mole – planted, moreover, by his own Party grandee mentor. Touching
all the tainted bases of the contemporary military-state-industrial complex,
the film thereby neatly fits current ultra-cynical (or, arguably, realistic)
Hollywood fashions.
Abandoning increasingly tired international espionage templates, 1970s US conspiracy
thrillers exploited greater awareness of high-level hi-jinks among Big Money
and Power – with well-meaning reformers, journalists and citizens victimised
by government and corporate agencies in The Parallax View (1974), Three
Days of the Condor (1975), Winter Kills (1979) and The China Syndrome (1979).
Then, after a protracted cinematic truce, Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian
Candidate (2004) conservatively revised John Frankenheimer’s 1962 Cold
War mind-boggler, with benign intelligence services and traditionalist politicians
now deploying patriotic dirty tricks only against the multinational menace, while
John Sayles’ equally transparent anti-Bush sentiment in Silver City (2004)
resuscitated countercultural heroics to thwart naked neo-con pollution. And whereas
the Bourne series and its ilk pit macho postmodern solipsism against schizophrenic
secret-state apparatuses, the more sophisticated Syriana (dir. Stephen
Gaghan, 2005) sketches parapolitical convergence among conflicting powerful interests
overdetermining apparently insane global events. Yet throughout – however
strident the rhetoric – generic resolution looms via public exposure of
the evil exceptions infecting otherwise robust body-politics.
State of Play reproduces clichéd individual corruption despite
twisting its tale to also indict the Democratic good guys, whose righteous crusade
derails after adopting methods usually attributed to the other side. Incipient
critique is, however, undercut by displacing dispassionate checks-and-balances
onto a heroic independent press – albeit with capacity all-but hamstrung
by modern downsizing imperatives favouring profitable cheap tat like celebrity
chitchat and the opinion-peddling bloggery that McCaffrey so derides. But then
our film’s low-rent blown conspiracy hardly measures up to its explicit
cinematic inspiration either – the Washington Post Nixon-busters
classically portrayed in All the President’s Men (dir. Alan J. Pakula,
1976), naffly referenced by locations in Watergate and sinister underground carparks.
But here the ruling echelons escape scot-free, with even the shocking scoop the
screenwriters conjure – a Blackwateresque privatised monopoly of state security – already
yesterday’s news (except it has never been reported properly). Plus the
story was in any case sleuthed by the congressman, not the newshound – thus
representing a remarkably tepid testament to the virtues of old-school investigative
journalism. In effect, if this is the fourth estate’s best shot, it’s
hardly surprising the sector faces terminal decline.
All the more ironic that the source material for such a disappointing cop-out
was so provocatively intelligent. The BBC’s 2003 six-part drama directed
by David Yates shattered a similar hiatus in UK intrigue after some doom-laden
mid-Thatcher prognostications – sundry Cold War throwbacks, nuclear nightmare
in the Edge of Darkness (1983), and Chris Mullin’s A Very British
Coup (1988) embroidering Wilson-era aristocrats plotting soft-socialism’s
overthrow. Presumably later Tory megasleaze (rather than penny-ante expenses
chiselling) rendered fictitious finessing superfluous, after which Blair’s
new deal took time to fester – but Paul Abbott’s State of Play emphatically
puts the boot in. His script implicates Cabinet-level machinations arranging
the espionage (by the energy lobby) of their own rising-star MP, specifically
undermining the adversarial posture which simultaneously furnishes the government’s
public-interest alibi. The resulting policy stitch-up represents a prescient
metaphor for New Labour’s entire neoliberal trajectory, boosting heavyweight
economic agendas, socialising risks and privatising profits – disingenuously
concealed under vapid spin complemented by the newspaper’s proprietorial
Murdoch/Maxwell amalgam riding shotgun. Whereas the film’s lone crooked
politico conniving a corporate paymaster’s advantage pales infinitely limply
in comparison.
Worse, Macdonald’s cardboard cut-out cast’s sterotypically wooden acting
cements a complete lack of believably rounded human intercourse matching entirely
unconvincing institutional settings. Conversely, the television series fully
incorporates personal biography into political allegory, fleshing out threadbare
idealism, compromised loyalty and troubled maturity into fractures and divergences
in professional and intimate relationships and ambitions. The intricate social
nuances work effortlessly thanks to impeccable dialogue and performances, so
that even weaker plot points pass muster – as does the microcosmic contrast
of conflict, morale, scheming and suspicion in the newsroom and at Westminster.
The humble utopian core of Abbott’s vision is his fully-functioning reporting
ensemble – representing, at a stretch, any genuine collective of ordinary
folk. Diverse skills and flaws meld in their relatively egalitarian endeavour
to transcend systemic collusion characterising an official public realm constitutionally
riddled with corrosively alienating manipulative duplicity – the writer’s
lack of interest in superhuman saviours and liberal grand narratives of journalism’s
lofty nobility obvious in playing its management as farce. Meanwhile, Hollywood’s
contempt for honest dirty work – and final clinching evidence of Macdonald’s
all-round botch-job – surfaces in Collins’ objection to a privatised
military based on its employees only showing ‘loyalty to the pay-packet’.
So much for the honour of wage-slaves everywhere – but what on earth does
he imagine motivates the low-rank-and-file to enlist in the armed forces in the
first place? From all wide angles, therefore, State of Play’s pretensions
to contemporary relevance break down into a bungled bog-standard retro-romp fingering
absolutely none of the president’s men. Whereas The Wire damns them
all and their entire bankrupt system.
... to Failed States
Widely acclaimed as the best television ever, US crime saga The Wire finally
arrives on freeview in Britain, continuing on BBC 2 into the summer. “A
political tract masquerading as a cop show”2, the first season introduces
central characters and situations in the inner-city narcotics trade and its policing
in Baltimore, Maryland – or in local street argot ‘Body-More, Murdaland – intended
to represent any decaying second-tier rust-belt metropolis (or, less seamlessly,
the ‘developed’ world generally). The self-defeatingly stupid but electorally
compelling ‘War on Drugs’ focuses the five seasons’ test-case
of the dysfunctional amorality of postmodern government – subsequent narratives
expanding these narrowly-delineated parallel micro-worlds into the contemporary
social complexity of a tragically ailing urban America and the terminally failing
institutions nominally charged with its welfare. The net effect is a forensic
fictionalisation of economic ruination in the docks and trade unions, corruption
and bureaucratic degeneracy in municipal politics, chaotically incompetent and
helpless leadership in the police department and school system, and comparably
cynical sociopathic management in local media and drug-dealing franchises – with
great pains taken to demonstrate the convergent operation of power as all these
contexts interact in prioritising the establishment and reproduction of personal
gain and the protection of privilege.
Beginning in early-90s West Baltimore, yet another teenage gangbanger is murdered
and, as we encounter his peers and police investigators, the suspected ‘corner-boss’ culprit
wriggles free after witness intimidation. A frustrated detective persuades the
judge to pressure the brass into tackling the gang who, despite running things
for years, are unknown to official ‘intelligence’ because City Hall
prefers paramilitary tactics to pack crime-stats. Loaded with dead-weight from
sundry divisions, the new squad nevertheless makes headway via telephone intercepts,
and glimpses into the targets’ social and professional networks thereafter
intercut with those of the taskforce. The range of idiosyncratic personalities
involved grows, manifesting varying degrees of strength and weakness, wit, intelligence
and compassion, malice, violence and selfishness – with the significance
of conduct for personal gratification, misery and effectivity depending on position
and impact upon wider interests. Conversely, ongoing activities are regularly
disrupted by banal, brutal and/or arbitrary twists of fate, mistakes, external
forces, and decisions and conflicts higher up both foodchains. Final outcomes
are provisional compromises, minor defeats and victories, in the drug trade and
its law enforcement mirror – the overriding message being ‘the game
remains the same’, reinforced by concluding roving pans around successive
generations of city districts and organisations negotiating their way through
each manifestation of its dialectics.
The plotlines and arcs crowding sixty Wire episodes in five series originally
emerged from meticulous journalistic research by David Simon (former police reporter
with the Baltimore Sun) and Ed Burns (ex-city detective and secondary
schoolteacher). Filmic forays first followed documentary books Homicide: Life
on the Killing Streets (with Simon embedded in murder investigations; Barry
Levinson’s television adaptations running from 1993-9) and The Corner (from
hanging out with drug-dealers and their milieu, portrayed in a 2000 mini-series3).
The resulting material organised into a guiding vision was spun by a top-notch
script team, including crime novelists George Pelecanos, Richard Price and Dennis
Lehane, cementing a seamless literary sprawl and verisimilitude of dialogue and
relationships among an impressive and massive ensemble of relatively unknown
actors and amateurs. Repudiating good/bad guy simplification and capturing the
everyday humour and pathos of protagonists at all levels constrained by circumstances
allowing only limited ethical and practical options, the resulting Dickensian
specificity attracted fierce partisan loyalty – among the cast but also
local and (inter)national viewers in the ghettoes and lower reaches of officialdoms
depicted, seeing aspects of their lives detailed realistically for once. Meanwhile
the non-naturalistic economy and meticulous artfulness of narrative execution,
condensing full-spectra societal conflict into unflashy visualisations a few
hours long, fascinated cultural commentators, media pundits and intellectual
fans amenable to the show’s ideological and artistic ambitions.
In its multilayered refusal of individual or collective resolution, the creators
conceived series 1 as “a training exercise ... to watch television differently” so
as to appreciate their relentless “deconstruction of the American Dream” – namely,
the postwar consensus whereby supposedly “everyone gets to make a living”4.
The show then proceeds as a modern equivalent of Greek tragedy – except
that capricious late-capitalist institutions rather than omnipotent gods orchestrate
hierarchies and systems according to their interests, agendas, whims and fancies, “hurling
lightning bolts, hitting people in the ass for no reason”5. However, rather
than mythical fairytale stereotypes, actual city characters and events are woven
together with their contours and logics intact, including the most apparently
outlandish figures and developments. But then reality is more bizarre, as Simon
sketched in a Guardian essay last year6 concerning a major criminal justice
scandal which recently propelled Baltimore’s mayor to Maryland governorship
but was never publicly analysed – yet all its salient features repeatedly
skew The Wire’s prognoses. Thus, being “separate, unequal, and
no longer even acknowledging each other”, the “two Americas” can
connect in this TV ‘entertainment’ but not in “the stunted political
discourse ... eviscerated, self-absorbed press ... [or] any construct to which
the empowered ... comfortable and comforted America, gives its limited attention”.
Yet beneath the bluster of belligerent broadsheet broadsides about public accountability
and media morality, uncertainty hovers about exactly whose attention and action – beyond
cable channel and box-set sales – is being courted.
Flouting film and current affairs conventions to question fundamental tenets
of mainstream US discourse, this is surely a refreshing and magnificently sustained
artwork. Yet it is restricted by working assumptions consistently privileging
objectifying observers – the title itself and its eavesdropping metaphor
underlining the nature of knowledge acquired. Even the most vividly well-rounded
characters are perceived through the policing prism, in terms of salience to
identifying and solving ‘problems’ defined and acted upon by external
others. So, however tangential to the drugs scene, neighbourhood residents only
appear in that context – and myriad additional social and cultural interactions
and dimensions are neglected, ruling out their own understandings, relative independence
and collective potential. Whereas the filmmakers’ mission – like the
authorities – renders the world intelligible in terms amenable to the agency
allowed in their field, and thus the questionable binary “two Americas” firmly
reinstates passive victims in traditional positions. The creators’ honest
anger about the complacent indifference of power to the suffering and wasted
human energy of millions is palpable. But so is nostalgia for a time before current
trends in political economy when life was (or might have been) better – unmistakable
in the affectionate tribute to old-time newspapermen; with union boss ‘Frank
Sobotka’ in series 2 encapsulating the fantasy best: “You know what
the trouble is? We used to make shit in this country; build shit. Now we just
put our hand in the next guy’s pocket”. Whereas such dreams of national
unity through social-democratic prosperity were yesterday’s illusions incubating
today’s fiascos – The Wire equally, in the end, being ‘a
cop show masquerading as a political tract’.
Throughout its storylines, thoughts of reform are commonly expressed in humble
aspirations to decent behaviour, but also further up the ladder as exasperated
functionaries try to marry rhetoric with effect. An underlying humanism – in
stark contrast to Red Riding – posits originary benevolence and genuine
interest in meeting social needs, all other things being equal. But the latter
never holds – the exercise of domination intended specifically to prevent
it – any such manoeuvres being nipped in the bud as soon as potential autonomy
is noticed by superiors. Correspondingly, prospects for real change are tied
exclusively to leading figures in the hierarchies, in the absence of collective
grass-roots bonds forged in explicit opposition to the status quo rather than
mirroring it – whether in the drugs game’s bloody adolescent sociobiology
or In The Loop’s infantile sociolinguistic circularity. Pressure
from below relies wholly on hitching to bureaucratic, corporate or electoral
careers, with no communal activity with remotely political potential visible
outside church and charity ‘NGOs’ plugged awkwardly into the gravy
train. Unravelling the synergistic failure of the system by exposing exemplary
travesties, as in State of Play, then not only spectacularly misses the
point but inoculates ruling discourses with illusion of protection from the evils
which are in fact intrinsic to their power. This possibility is at least hinted
by the almost instant redundancy of The Wire’s titular investigations,
even if its protagonists are given no wherewithal to react – beyond, that
is, shrugs of the shoulders before returning to the serious narrow individualism
of selfish concerns that the paradigms deployed to produce the series disproportionately
concentrate on. No wonder Hogarth and Burns still resonate.
http://www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
Notes
1. Cited by Nick James in ‘Bloody Yorkshire’, Sight & Sound,
March 2009.
2. David Simon, interview with Lauren Laverne, Culture Show, BBC 2, 15th
July 2008.
3. And new Simon & Burns’ Blown Deadline Productions exploiting similar
reportage-based strategies for fine-grained television serial fictions are Generation
Kill (2008) about US marines in Iraq, and Treme (due to air in 2010)
about local musicians in post-Katrina New Orleans.
4. David Simon, interviewed by Oliver Burkeman, The Observer, 28th March
2009.
5. Culture Show, see note 2.
6. ‘The Escalating Breakdown of Urban Society Across the US’, 6/9/08.
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