Every time a new season of The Wire premiers all the blogs, all the good ones at least, go crazy. The show is certainly the underdog of the HBO family. The Sopranos, Deadwood even Flight of the Concords seem to get more ink in the mainstream press. But those of us who know and love David Simon and Ed Burns' creation will always have a big place in our hearts for their depiction of Bodymore, Murderland.
Another of the litany of Wire articles floating around the web that stuck out to me is Mark Bowden's profile of Simon. As you will read in the article Simon did not participated in the article, in fact he very much opposed it. Bowden clearly loves the show but his profile raises the biggest problem the show has, its sense of hopelessness. That problem is also brought up on the TSOYA interview where Pierce talks about how he and actor Sonja Sohn argued with Simon over the idea that there's "no hope" in the world The Wire depicts. I love The Wire becuase it's so real and becuase it tempers its cynicism with the humanity it gives all its characters. But I am uneasy that all of the show's ideas lead to a conclusion that is too bleak to be applicable to real life.
All that being said I do believe in Simon's main point that "in this postmodern world of ours, human beings—all of us—are worth less. We’re worth less every day, despite the fact that some of us are achieving more and more. It’s the triumph of capitalism." I embedded the scene above because I love The Bunk's speech about how "we used to have a community but now we just have bodies." Tying this back into my last post (becuase really, when talking about Spider-Man the gritty streets of Baltimore are inevitably the next subject) I find in myself a greater and greater fascination with the past, particularly America during the 1960's and 1970's. I experience the comics, the music and the films from those areas as if they're new. One of the reasons I do this is because it seems back then, and born in '83 I really can't know but go with me here, there was a sense you could depend on the integrity of the human race. Things could get bad inside a society but you could still believe in the idea of that society in the first place. Now things feel too fractured and all of our modern advents seem to make the world colder and life lonelier. People think of themselves before society more and more, even though you can only improve one while improving the other.
This is a very important thought to me but I don't know if it's making any sense. Do I sound crazy in the last paragraph? I know I'm going to think more about this no matter what but maybe I just need to hear what other people's opinions are.
Comments:
I'm on Season 2 and I can say this much: as in the real world, any victory or triumph on the part of any character is always tempered with sadness. Simon's belief in the relative worth of individuals is pretty well reflected in the fact that the show is unafraid to kill off key characters. That's just my opinion, of course. I need to watch more.
# posted by AaronM : 9:37 AM
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