2008-01-13 12:09:31

SUNDAY DEVOTIONAL: JOURNALISM IN THE WIRE

Filed under: Television, The Wire
Posted by: John

It’s too early to call it a backlash, but the first major assault on the critically adored HBO series The Wire had to come, and it arrives in the latest issue of The Atlantic, courtesy of the journalist Mark Bowden. If The Wire is anywhere near as good as its fans claim, then it cries out for attack. But this salvo comes from an unexpected quarter, from the same professional class that ultimately produced the show, the Fourth Estate itself.

A backlash is overdue, for starters, because the show was created by a card-carrying member of that despised professional class: a journalist.

For another, the show tells a story about America and its ruined cities that no politician, no lobbyist, no advocate for righteous social cause or promoter of the American Dream can ever embrace, i.e. that millions upon millions of people in this country are doomed, trapped in a system that relentlessly destroys those human beings too stupid, ignorant or weak to game the system.

Finally, the viewer feels convinced The Wire’s creator David Simon is telling the unvarnished truth. As a journalist, he has seen the matter first-hand. His creative partner on the series, Ed Burns, was a Baltimore city detective, then a teacher in the school system. Surely their encyclopedic, slow-roasting, fastidiously researched and documented vision of the death agonies of early 21st century Baltimore has to be as close to the reality as any account will ever come, journalistic or fictional.

David Simon himself encourages the view. On the DVD for Season Three, he appears in a panel discussion of the show and castigates New York City film and TV makers for pretending that their stories about crime and punishment in Gotham represent American reality. He tells the audience that the New York-centered vision is actually doing cultural and even social damage. He tells the audience of smitten New Yorkers that the rest of the country is more like Baltimore, but has been obscured time and again by the predominance of their city in our televised fictions, an overweening presence that perpetuates an untruth. In New York, crime fighters seem to be winning or have won the war on crime. The city itself has turned around.

In Baltimore, on the other hand, the city and its people are sinking fast, and the demise has become invisible. Simon argues that the experience of urban death transcends his home city, and I can attest to the semblance of that reality, at least.

Just south of my home in western Massachusetts are two more dying American cities, Holyoke and Springfield. On Saturday, I drove through the downtown section of the former, a town that grew rich on its paper mills and has since collapsed into a morass of seemingly irreversible poverty. I turned a corner, and there were “the vacants”, as seen on The Wire, there were “the corner boys”, hands in the pockets of their coats, watching the cars go by; and there were the “hoppers”, the kids who roam the streets. Or so it seemed. There are inherent dangers here.

Simon’s show has given us a seductive vocabulary and road map for looking at this picture of urban decay, and that was a large part of his intent, right from the start.

During the first season of The Wire in 2002, Simon shared his philosophy about the show with the on-line magazine Salon. “The Wire” is] sort of a visual novel. We knew exactly what we wanted to say about the bureaucratic aspects of the drug war. It is about what happens in this land of ours when product ceases to matter, when the institutions themselves become predominant over their purpose. Pick up the paper: You take a job, you go down to Houston, you move your family there, you find out they gutted the company and stole your pension. It’s like whatever you believe in, whatever you commit to that’s larger than you or your family, will somehow find a way to fuck you.”

Here he is arguing both as an artist and a journalist, and it’s a habit with him. He is both, in fact, so his commitment to the show involves both.

But there is a tension running in the cracks between the two callings, and here, inevitably, is where the the assault on his near universally praised creation has come. All things considered, the blow glances rather than lands. One-time Baltimore reporter Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo, praises the show but upbraids its creator for extending his dark critique of America to journalists, in particular, to editors for whom Bowden has worked. In the process, he tells the rest of us not to buy Simon’s vision as journalism.

While he grants the verisimilitude in Simon’s plot about a cop who tried to legalize drugs in Baltimore, to take one example, he still advises us to beware. “Story lines like these reflect the truth about Baltimore,” he writes, already grappling with the contradiction. “Mayor [Kurt] Schmoke’s own promising political career crashed and burned some years ago when he had the temerity to suggest a less punitive approach to the city’s drug problem. But they don’t reflect the complete truth [Italics mine]: like Dickens London, Simon’s Baltimore is a richly imagined caricature of its real-life counterpart, not a carbon copy. And precisely because the Baltimore in The Wire seems so real, down to the finest details, the show constitutes an interesting study in the difference between journalism and fiction.”

Oh, indeed, as Omar, the robber of drug dealers, might say. I will get back in a moment to this paragraph and to that telling phrase “the complete truth”, but let’s get a few things straight first about this show and its antecedents.

As we’ve seen, both Simon and Bowden compare the show in its richness to a novel, and Bowden explicitly mentions Dickens, but the show isn’t a novel, let’s face it. The Wire is very much a work of television, if a new and unprecedented form of television in this country. It marks such a break with American TV that even the show’s creator has a hard time fixing it in context. So, as a starting point, the comparison to Dickens may be useful, but it very quickly becomes misleading. The far better comparison would be to television of equal sophistication and artistic merit, and such TV does exist and has existed, just not here.

The first time I ever saw a television series that merited the comparison with great novels was in London in 1986. A small art-house cinema showed the Edgar Reitz mini-series Heimat, the 11-part saga of a small German town in the Twentieth Century. When it aired in 1984 in West Germany, the series had been a phenomenon, posting huge ratings and sparking a discussion about the German past that continues to stir controversy. On its own terms, it was a work of art, every bit as compelling, as thrilling, as profound, as anything I’d ever seen in the cinema, and it marked the first time that I ever thought to compare a work in a visual medium to a book.

Like Simon’s The Wire, Heimat examined a place and a time, over time, introducing characters that deepened and changed with the passage of years, offering narratives that seemed to approximate real human destiny, life and death in ebb and flow, mindful of history—though not mindful enough, many of its critics said–respectful of idiosyncrasy in behavior, and yet a story nonetheless with epic sweep. More than any other work, certainly more than any book, Heimat prepared me to understand and appreciate The Wire.

Both series made full use of time, the key component. No two-hour movie could have encompassed so much material. No movie could have afforded so much leisure to explore character and place. And yet both series were unabashedly visual. Reitz’ cinematographers shot the fictional town as Schabbach in color and black and white, using every trick in the vocabulary of image, just as Simon and his crews have exploited eighty years of noir to create their Baltimore.

At the same time, I never saw the German series as “real” account of German history in the way that I might regard Simon’s as a “real” account of life in Baltimore. I knew my textbook well enough by that time to have an informed opinion on the subject and could see that Reitz had sliced a small corner of the whole and enlarged it, leaving out lots of elements of the Nazi past that would surely have belonged to a complete version.

More to the point, Reitz never claimed to be a journalist. He was a director in the German New Wave, explicitly an artist, creating a vision that drew its power from a truth that went deeper than mere journalism. I am almost certain that’s how he would have expressed it. Journalism, for Reitz and his fellow film makers, as for many German artists and writers in the last century, constituted an inferior level of perception, an obstruction of “truth”, not an extension. In this sense, Heimat and The Wire could not be more different, and yet both were accused of confusing art and reality, or inciting that confusion in viewers.

But there is another achievement much closer in spirit to Simon’s work, and even more groundbreaking than the Reitz film. Heimat may have marked my own personal revolution in conciousness of the possibilities of television, but as far as I can tell, the first time that the medium ever aspired to novelistic complexity and cinematic artistry came four years earlier, in 1980, also in West Germany. That year, Rainer Werner Fassbinder unleashed the 13-part miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz on an unsuspecting German public that had only recently been affronted and inspired by the much more mundane 4-part American miniseries Holocaust. For all its failings as drama, Holocaust shocked West Germans in 1978 and opened a new era in understanding of the Nazi era.

The success of the American series, along with the commercial and critical stature of Fassbinder, allowed Berlin Alexanderplatz to get made. But nothing, it seems, could make the public swallow the result. In an article included in the newly released Criterion Collection DVD of the series, the German director Tom Tykwer writes about its impact. “It is once again time to think, to speak, and to write about this fifteen-hour film, which, at the onset of the eighties…enraged the national spirit and occasioned assaults by the yellow press and (in the wake of this) protests from millions of television viewers who felt themselves ‘robbed of their subscription fees’.”

Part of the controversy stemmed from the perceived technical flaws, which were enhanced by the inferiority of the era’s television technology. But, writes Tykwer, the outrage had less obvious roots. “The pain caused by the film somehow went deeper, and with each further episode, broadcast one week after another, it seemed like a dirty thorn was boring itself deeper and deeper into the wound of this republic, a country that wasn’t very comfortable in its own skin anyway…”

That account of the reception of Fassbinder’s work may put Bowden’s mild caveats in some context. Simon could only dream of that level of national outrage. Berlin Alexanderplatz makes a more interesting comparison to The Wire than Heimat, because, like Simon’s series, it deals with the criminal underworld, telling the story of small-time hood Franz Biberkopf, who gets out of prison at the start of the miniseries and tries to start a new life. In the third season of The Wire, we met a sort of Biberkopf in the character of Cutty, newly out of prison, who also returns to the streets and tries to start a new life.

But the differences are huge and lead us back to the question raised by Bowden about the line between journalism and fiction. Fassbinder, like Reitz, never aspired to journalism. His take on the material, based on an early Twentieth Century novel by Alfred Doeblin, could never be mistaken for realism. The style is melodrama mixed with stream of conciousness, heavy with German gloom and rage, Douglas Sirk meets Alain Resnais in the dank bottom of a Berlin cabaret. Critics generally consider it a masterpiece.

The public outrage is hard to fathom viewed from a distance, but imagine a version of Alex Haley’s slavery epic Roots in which each character, including the black ones, exhibits extremely unpleasant behavior, struggles for a minimum of dignity, floats through a word completely devoid of justice, of divinity, of any hope beyond the next day’s meal, in which the production values seem to echo the seediness of the world on the screen, and then imagine that this concoction airs on one of three available channels in a media environment consisting mostly of crude German gameshows, Bavarian sex comedies, nature documentaries, American action flicks and variety hours featuring men in lederhosen singing about Mutti, Maechen, sunrises and mountains, and you may have a better sense of the moment. In 1980, in West Germany, there was simply no escape from Fassbinder.

Simon’s creation comes to us under radically different circumstances. We can and do escape. Most of us in this country of 300 million have probably never heard of the series; even more of us have never watched. Let’s go back to journalism for a moment. In a sense, the show bears the same relationship to our viewing habits as the problems of Baltimore bear to our political culture. They exist, clearly, but we choose not to pay much attention. We don’t have to. Outside of the affected neighborhoods, and the cities that have to manage them, the only people who bring this sort of world to the rest of our attention are liable to be journalists.

Or that used to be the case. When I started in the profession, major metro newspapers could still grow their circulations. Television news divisions could still count on lots of viewers at appointed times of the day. The Internet information pipeline didn’t yet exist. Twenty-four hour cable news barely existed. The confidence of a successful enterprise in a limited market still came with a sense of mission about the job, and part of that mission involved showing those things most people refused to see. It can still happen, as when Hurricane Katrina blew through New Orleans. But how much longer, in an environment that gets worse every day for the kind of granular reporting, the daily acquaintance with a beat, with a city, with a school board or city council, that constituted the meat and potatoes of my profession when I started? That was Simon’s profession as well.

And what media company in the world would devote any coverage at all to the decline of its own standards, with as much attention to detail, with as much passionate conviction about the urgency of the story, as Simon is going to do over the last thirteen episodes of The Wire? There isn’t one, which brings me to my point about The Atlantic article. Bowden writes as if we still exist in the earlier era, as if the kinds of stories that Simon tells on The Wire are to be had in journalism throughout the land. But they aren’t, and it’s just the kind of reporting that informs the series that is most in danger of disappearing.

I don’t dispute Bowden’s thesis that there are differences between journalism and fiction. Of course, they exist, and the distinctions are important. But the notion that fiction can afford to be “unfair” while straight journalism is more honest because it doesn’t distort reality seems to me to miss the point of Simon’s enterprise. His journalism failed to draw attention to these woes. Readers, by and large, don’t want to read these stories, and so media companies, by and large, don’t want to report them. So what’s an outraged hack to do?

Simon has been smart enough to game the system, just like one of his characters, and smuggle his journalism in highly and beautifully dramatized form into a slightly more hospitable medium, and now his city and its woes are talked about in places that never gave a damn before. Instead of acknowledging the victory there, Bowden seems to want to make an obvious point without spelling out the fine print. Yes, it’s obvious that The Wire isn’t “the complete truth”. It’s not a documentary, it’s not a series of photographs, it’s not journalism. And yet even there, one might ask whether these forms tell “the complete truth”? Did his excellent book Blackhawk Down , the definitive account of the Somalia debacle, manage that incredible feat? I doubt even Bowden would make such a claim. No honest journalist would.

Bowden never really tells us where Simon’s creation fails as journalism when it cames to the main subject—Baltimore’s decline—because in that regard, The Wire doesn’t really fail. It is probably closer to the truth than anyone in America is liable to find in mainstream journalism. That doesn’t mean its foolproof. Earlier, I mentioned my drive through the city of Holyoke, and how I used The Wire to interpret the very real people and places appearing before my eyes. There are substantial dangers in taking that interpretation too far. Holyoke isn’t a scripted show; using Baltimore to see it only works from a distance, and even then, it’s necessary to proceed with caution.

But it’s not necessary to buy every aspect of Simon’s project to see what he has accomplished—a work of art that lives and breathes great journalism, that redeems the profession, in some sense, through the fury of its purpose and gives the rest of us hope that there is still room in this culture for those uncomfortable truths that muckraking has always provided. If, in the process of making this work, Simon shifts some of the blame onto his own colleagues, that’s not just a matter of the prerogatives of fiction, as Jim Hynes argues so well over at Cultwriter; it’s also a matter of integrity. Should Simon pull his punches just because he’s dealing with his own? On the contrary, his equal opportunity anger demonstrates his professionalism. It’s the hallmark of a good journalist.

Comments (2)

2 Comments »

1. Simon’s own take on his departure from journalism. The discrepancies between this account and that of Bowden in the Atlantic are notable:

   http://www.esquire.com/features/essay/david-simon-0308?src=rss

   Comment by AnotherCounty — January 13, 2008 @ 2:19 pm

2. So it always takes The Wire a few episodes to warm up. With Proposition Joe dropping in episode 4, The Wire is starting to hit its stride. By the time Omar is back in action, the series will be almost too painful to watch–in the best possible way. Cherishing each remaining minute….

   Comment by Craig Detweiler — February 1, 2008 @ 1:00 am

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