Below the fold, you’ll find excerpts from a long and intermittently interesting interview with David Simon, creator of the best show in television history. The interview contains spoilers. And perhaps more insight into Simon than is desirable.
Simon on the much-maligned newspaper storyline, which I like more than many other observers (Which raises, in my mind, the question of whether The Wire is like any other ethnographic portrait: the more one knows about its subject, the easier it is to spot flaws in the details. Or maybe the Sun story just isn’t very good.):
This was a story about a newspaper that now — on some fundamental basis — fails to cover its city substantively, and guess what — between out-of-town ownership, carpetbagging editors, the emphasis on impact journalism or Prize-culture journalism and, of course, the economic preamble that is the arrival of the internet and the resulting loss of revenue and staff, there are a f–k of a lot of newspapers that are failing to cover their cities substantively. That is the last piece in the Wire puzzle: If you think anyone will be paying attention to anything you encountered in the first four seasons of this show, think again.
On the show’s ostensible moral relativism:
One of the great overstatements was always made about “The Wire” is “There’s no good guys or bad guys.” I was always amazed by that. Marlo’s not a bad guy? Do characters acquire a bit of nuance as you live with them longer? Of course. The more time you live with them on screen, the more chance you have to add nuance. And I know I said good and evil bored me, but the notion that all characters are treated equally is sort of a misunderstanding of point of view.
On the tragedy that is life:
I’m not saying that “The Wire’s” unique in that respect — there’s a lot of other high-end television that is dark and continues to be dark — but I agree with Chase in one respect. I read an interview with him where he said what American television gets wrong relentlessly is that life is really tragic. Not a lot of people want to tune their living room box to that channel. It’s an escapist form. There are people who are willing to look at it for something else. It’s not a mass audience, but possibly some portion of that mass audience finds its way to something else, and then they expect to be treated as they’ve always been treated. There’s nothing the writers can do about that, other than twist themselves into hacks trying to please people with what they want. What are you gonna do?
Is The Wire cynical?
I think it’s a misuse of the word “cynical.” I think it’s a dark show. I think it has a great deal of sentiment to it. I just don’t think it’s sentimental. I think it’s intensely political. I think if you want to suggest that it’s cynical about institutions and their capacity to reform themselves or be reformed, I would have to plead guilty to that. The only thing I would cite is to say that, given where we’re at as a culture right now, cynicism therefore becomes another word for “pragmatically realistic.”
I don’t think it’s cynical about human beings. I think that’s why viewers were so committed and loyal, because the human beings that were traversing this rigged game were entirely worth the time spent following them.
Here’s Mr. Happy on Obama and the hope for change:
Not that I’m announcing my support for anybody, but I’m impressed that Obama got this close to being a nominee just being part African-American. There’s a part of me that looks at that and says, “Damn, we’re getting healthier on some things.” Now, is Obama any more able to address the fact that we’re a money-obsessed oligarchy and not a democracy? I don’t think so.
I think for change to happen on a level that actually affects the structure of that oligarchy, a lot of distressing things will have to happen, and more people are going to have to suffer a great deal more. More struggle for the working class, and the middle-class is going to have to be marginalized. Wages will have to go a lot lower, the recession will have to go a lot deeper — and I think we’re in a recession and headed for some bad economic times. I think it’s going to have to go a lot deeper.
At some point, the Sunis that we paid out with money and guns are going to have to wait until we fashion whatever escape we have from that war and start ripping the country up and reducing it to a civil war. I think we’ve built a Lebanon, and once it becomes clear that we’ve built a Lebanon and condemned that region to generations of internecine violence, and it cost us 4000 troops and a veritable treasure — I hope we get out of there before it’s more — I think people are going to be angrier.
Right now we have the illusion that we’re fixing things. I don’t know for sure; I’m not there on the ground. But I’m sitting here in a room with Even Wright, who just was in Baghdad and spent weeks there interviewing everybody there and talking to Petraeus and to people on the ground, and his take on it is we’ve built another Lebanon. Right now, we’re paying people not to shoot at each other, and we’re giving people guns and saying, ‘Please don’t use these.’ At some point, somebody’s going to assert for power there, probably after we’re gone, and we’ll realize that this was over nothing, over absolutely nothing.
When that happens, maybe the next war gets harder, and when the economic structure fails to a point where people begin to realize en masse that they’ve been cheated and that their future has been marginalized, at that point maybe there’s another New Deal coming, maybe there’s another reckoning. But short of that, as long as it’s just some people in places like Baltimore, and it’s only 10 percent or 15 percent of the population we don’t need, I’m sorry, I think there’s a lot of money to be spent by a lot of people in order to keep people pacified.
Okay, read the rest yourself. If you want to. Again, though, beware the spoilers.
Via Ezra Klein.
11 comments
March 11, 2008 at 9:48 am
More from the Cluttered, Angry Mind of David Simon. « PostBourgie
[…] (Hat-tip Ari/Eric). […]
March 11, 2008 at 7:48 pm
charlieford
I’ve never seen the Wire, but it seems everyone at npr and such like is going into big-time withdrawal with it’s demise. Interesting that here, at a history-oriented blog, the topic arouses near-zero attention. (Unless they’re all at “I’ll-miss-the-wire” bogs?) Anyway, if so, I sort of have a theory that while there are many exceptions, historians tend to have a diminished need for fiction, compared to some other disciplines. For example, I know tons of philosophers who read science fiction omnivorously. But I know almost no historians who read any, and those that do, very little. I know very few historians who are all ga-ga over the Lord of the Rings. Most, like me, confess an immense impatience with it and an indelible conviction that reading that many pages about something that never even happened would be a huge waste of time. For myself, I read very little fiction, mainly because I just don’t see the point. Now, I do have one historian friend who does love Tolkein, watches all the HBO series things–Deadwood, Big Love, the Wire–even owns them, watching them over and over. His undergrad degree was in English. He’s now on sabbatical. And he’s writing . . . a novel. So, maybe I rest my case.
March 12, 2008 at 6:26 am
Sandie
Charlieford, I must respectfully disagree with you. There are many Wire fans on this blog, but, if they’re like me, they were hesitant to read the interview because they haven’t seen all of the episodes yet and they don’t want to read the spoilers. But, more to the point, I disagree with your take on history and literature. Perhaps I’m proving your point–I majored in both history and English in college–but I think the fact that historians try to create narratives out of disparate pieces of evidence bespeaks (did I just use that word?) a hunger for narrative, something that much literature provides. Unfortunately, the historical occupation requires that we read large doses of non-fiction, making it harder to find time to read fiction, so we get our fiction/narrative fix by watching novelistic t.v. series such as The Wire. Just a guess.
March 12, 2008 at 6:52 am
charlieford
Well, I guess I was making two (each potentially dubious) points, one having to do with relative interest in fiction respective to other “moderns,” the other having to do with whether the historical mind-set predisposes the historian to find fiction generally unsatisfying. We could do a lot of back and forthing with anecdotes and assertions about who’s representative and such, and that probably wouldn’t be so productive. So, I’ll say this: My interest in the topic derives from a thought experiment I did awhile ago, thinking of alternative ways of thinking about modernity and its characteristics. One could be this: it’s the age of the book (or TV/movie) and especially, the age of listening to/watching/reading stories. We take it for granted that it’s normal to spend several hours a day (and who knows how much $$$ a year?) on stories. Our lives revolve around their consumption, to a startling degree in some cases. Many people in our culture read fiction almost exclusively. Academics in many fields read only fiction if they’re reading outside their disciplines. Historians in my experience relish non-fiction and of all kinds and tend to read more of it, it seems to me, than the general population, even of academics. I wonder if that’s because of, what shall we call it? “Orientation”? Would most historians agree with you that this situation is “unfortunate”–ie, that we’d rather be reading (or watching) fictional stories, if only we had the time? I know that’s not the case with me. Just curious if that’s odd, or normal.
March 12, 2008 at 7:08 am
silbey
I know very few historians who are all ga-ga over the Lord of the Rings.
You know (of) at least one. (Pulls out leatherbound edition of Tolkien and caresses the spine thoughtfully).
March 12, 2008 at 7:30 am
ari
Silbey doesn’t count. He’s too small, too black, and insufficiently working class.
March 12, 2008 at 8:29 am
silbey
Racist.
March 12, 2008 at 8:39 am
ari
Reverse racist. That’s the worst kind, you know.
March 12, 2008 at 9:05 am
silbey
By the way, several members of the local worker’s soviet will be by to discuss your remark about “insufficiently working class.” They didn’t appreciate it being directed at a Hero of the Revolution.
March 12, 2008 at 1:36 pm
washerdreyer
Do any of you history-teaching types have insight on the likely accuracy of the new HBO John Adams mini-series?
March 12, 2008 at 2:12 pm
eric
I have it from a highly reputable historian of the American revolution, who likes nothing better than a good dose of Founding Fathers, that he can’t bear to watch it for fear of idiocies.