The WGA Strike and The Academy Awards

I’m usually the first to bemoan the Oscars, the next-to-last person to watch the ceremony, and the absolute last person to pay any attention to the shallow procession on the red carpet prior to the show.  So I find myself surprised to say that the thing I will miss most this year as fallout from the WGA strike is not the “missing” half-seasons of 30 Rock or SNL or the lost months of Colbert and Stewart during the primary campaign season.  What I might miss most this year is the Academy Awards show, provided some hunches I have come to pass.

I hate Oscar because he refuses to award the best films.  And I shouldn’t blame it on Oscar, he’s just a statue.  I blame it on Hollywood, and on the Hollywood professionals who vote for the Oscars.  These are the folks who reward simpleminded tripe like Forrest Gump in the year of Quiz Show, The Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction.  The folks who make an annual ritual of patting themselves on the back in self-celebration of works like Gladiator (over Traffic), Chicago (over Gangs of New York), Shakespeare in Love (over maybe 300 better films that year.)  The meaningful films of the last 20 years by the emerging and existing master talents have been ignored in favor of crowd-pleasers by directors who are little more than seasoned and highly professional craftsmen.

This year, however, my hopes are high.  The two best studio films I saw this year, There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men, are tied for the most nominations.  They’re both made by directors whose bodies of work I greatly admire–Paul Thomas Anderson and The Coen brothers, respectively.  I think that The Diving Bell and The Butterfly was shorted by not getting a Best Picture nomination, but it’s not too often that Oscar gives nominations for direction, editing, screenplay and cinematography to a French-language film with no American stars.  I will grumble loudly though that it has not been nominated for Best Foreign Language  Film, and the same goes for 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, from Romania and maybe the best film I’ve seen in the past couple years.  I’d also grumble about Juno, which I hated, but I’ve already blogged in detail about my severe negative feelings toward that film, and suffice to say I don’t think it should have been nominated for anything.

But because of the attention to the films by Anderson and the Coens, and because Julian Schnabel’s film was so oft-nominated, there is that off chance that Oscar will smile this year on what are actually the best films of the year.  Or, Atonement, made essentialy standard for award season, could pick up a bunch of awards and it could be business as usual.

However, if Daniel Day Lewis, and PT Anderson or Schnabel or Joel Coen, and Janusz Kaminski, and  There Will Be Blood manage to pick up awards, and for once Oscar gets it right, but no ceremony takes place, then the American public not being exposed to Oscar finally getting it right would be the biggest tragedy of the WGA strike.  And it would be a bad thing for the writers, because some great original films, the kind of stuff that opens the market for their spec scripts, will not have garnered the attention they deserve.

The Wire Season 5 Episode 4

Spoilers abound for this review of Episode 4, which premiers Sunday, January 27 and is available now on Comcast OnDemand.

McNulty and Freamon are deeper into their fabrication of a serial killer who prays on the homeless. I’ve said plenty about this in reviews of earlier episodes, and will take a pass on my mostly displeased feelings about this element of Season 5’s plotline.

There’s a knockout scene, albeit a short one, in the last half of the episode between Beadie Russell and McNulty and it’s the scene I’ve been waiting three weeks for. First the leadup to the scene: McNulty has been out drinking and flirting with women at a local bar. He gets a call and heads out to look at a homeless body to see if it can fit into his plans. It can’t, and he goes home to Beadie. He’s knocking back (actually swallowing) some Listerine when she enters, upset. She can’t believe what he’s turned into, she tells him, adding that when people would tell her about McNulty’s past, she didn’t believe that he could have been that person. And now he’s that person all over again. McNulty is going to drive her away, the same as he drove away his first wife. Early in the season we saw Beadie waiting up for Jimmy at night, and the porch light in Episode 1 told us she was sticking with him–for the time being–but when will she break? I wish we were seeing more of Beadie this season, especially with her current domestic situation and also because I think the actress Amy Ryan is one of the best on the show. (Congrats to her on picking up an Oscar nom for Best Supporting Actress for the grossly underrated Gone Baby Gone.)

The question I keep running through my mind is: how are we going to see Jimmy McNulty when it’s all said and done, and the last frame of The Wire has been broadcast? Will we hold him in high regard or low? Because David Simon has done such a complete job of painting the portrait of McNulty–and so many other wonderful characters–he’s left somewhat open for our interpretation. Jimmy McNulty is, all at once, a brilliant detective, a stubborn ass, a father, an ex-husband, a raging alcoholic, a philanderer, a cop capable of working the street and a crime scene but not the inner-office politics of the police department, a sometimes negligent but caring father, a charmer, an intolerable dick, highly independent, incapable of working with anyone who doesn’t share his point-of-view, and a lot more.

Which McNulty will we remember? He’s so complex that he can’t be summed up easily. But in the end what we take from him will depend on how his story is left after Episode 10 of this season, and whether he’s vindicated by his current actions, in jail, fired, or dead. Just as the character is complex and multi-faceted, where he could go in the next 6 hours of Wire time is rife with possibilities. I like the idea of McNulty, dead, having one of those Baltimore Detective wakes, laid out across the bar with every cop from the show drinking over his corpse, and several of them refusing to drink, understanding the irony of such a closing chapter in the book of McNulty. But I also like the idea that at such a wake most Baltimore cops would not appreciate that irony and would drink themselves silly. I also like the happy ending, where the McNulty of Season 4 comes back–the McNulty who was sober and happy. Either one is fine, as long as it’s true to the character. The only ending I can’t deal with would be the McNulty who is vindicated and celebrated for catching Marlo Stanfield via a series of grand lies. I don’t think I’ll be disappointed, because I can’t fathom David Simon giving that ending to McNulty: even if he succeeds in his rogue mission, in The Wire your successes are typically canceled out by the bureaucracy surrounding you.

We’ve heard so often from so many–Omar, Avon, Marlo, Joe–an understanding that “The Game is The Game”, or “It’s all in The Game.” Theirs is a mindset, an understanding, that McNulty and almost none of the other cops can quite get their brains around. McNulty is a mess because, as a detective, he cares in a way that is borderline pathological, and he wrecks his mind obsessing over his job. The guys who run the drug trade couldn’t be cooler, though. They know it’s all in The Game. Prop Joe knows it at the end of Episode 4, when Chris Partlow holds a gun to the back of his head and Marlo lets him know that his time is up. Joe doesn’t get emotional, just makes a calm plea for mercy, and when Marlo says no Joe closes his eyes and Chris puts a bullet in the back of his head. All in The Game. Because every person involved in The Game from the street side understands how it’s played–and is perfectly fine mentally and emotionally with those rules–there are no McNulty’s on that side of the coin. There are no rogue dealers who want to shake things up and play by their own rules. The only player in The Game who wanted to shake things up was Stringer Bell, who was killed when Avon gave him up at the end of Season 3, and Avon gave him up because Stringer was out of line with Avon’s plans. Most importantly, though, Stringer had to die because he wanted to reform The Game.

There are and have been other reformers in The Wire, most of whom have failed. Carcetti was going to be a reform mayor who fought crime and now he’s pulling money out of the police department as fast as he can. Waylon has been trying to keep Bubbles on the straight-and-narrow for a couple seasons and the jury is still out on how that chapter of The Wire will play out. And again, while Simon admires a reformer he’s usually quick to squash their reform with obstacles, bureaucracy and the intentions of others within a given institution.

The shot of Marlo’s face that closes the episode is one of the best I have seen in The Wire. The way he looks at Joe moments after Joe is killed is pretty creepy, and contains a complete understanding by Marlo that he now has what he’s worked for the past 2.5 seasons: the crown is firmly atop his head. He will make his deal with Vondas and will run the entire Baltimore drug trade. Barksdale is in jail, Joe is dead, as is Hungry Man, Cheese has changed his loyalty from his uncle Joe to Marlo and now Marlo has all the pieces in place……except one.

Omar is back from Puerto Rico, ready for revenge after learning of Butchie’s death. The next several episodes of The Wire are set up to be amongst the most violent, with a one-against-many war between Omar and the Stanfield crew. In the past, Omar meant something. A thief among criminals, who believed in and practiced their coda–”It’s all in The Game”–more than anyone else. Omar played by his own rules only to a small degree, and existed entirely within the rules of The Game. Over the first four seasons of The Wire Simon showed us why the police department could not keep up with the drug trade: the members of the drug trade followed their rules and their code to their death, while the police department was backed up with bureaucracy and politics. And while we did see the bureaucracy of the drug trade, the leaders of that trade never allowed it to stand in the way of their doing business. And if Simon was often brilliantly subtle in the use of his metaphors highlighting one side of the law against the other, there was never any such subtlety regarding Omar. He robs and kills drug dealers without apology and for a living. But he does it according to the rules–rules that are not written but understood and followed–in a system that governs itself by violence. Omar was the example of what the police department could be if it simply said: here are our rules, break them and you’ll be disciplined, and if you play the game hard and to win you can be successful. Omar showed us that he could win by playing hard, and that the police department can’t be as successful as he–or Barksdale, or Marlo–because they are too bogged down in inner-office politics to just go out and play the game hard and to win every day.

So what, I ask, does Omar still have to show us? If the above was his purpose, then what can he have left to give us, other than fighting a war with Marlo et posse? One of the hallmarks of The Wire has been it’s large revolving cast of characters–there are 76 of them on the show’s website’s “Cast & Crew” page and that does not count characters such as Johnny, Namond’s mama, some of the girls from the school, Wallace, Brianna, and many many more. And while all of the characters were well-written (except the newspaper staff of this season, see my blog from last week on Episode 3) the two who stand the tallest are McNulty and Omar. They are the ones who have illuminated more than any others in the show, the differences between the street and the police station. They are multi-faceted like no others on the show are (except possibly Stringer) and they have been the ones from whom we best learned this story of Baltimore cops vs. robbers.

What do they have left to tell us? What does David Simon have up his sleeve? I don’t know, but this has been my favorite Season 5 episode so far, and I think it’s setting up the last 6 hours of The Wire extremely well.

The Wire Season 5 Episode 3

Spoilers abound in this review for Sunday’s episode, now available on Comcast OnDemand.

David Simon’s The Wire has been so great so consistently based a lot on Simon’s worldview: fiercely liberal, anti-corporate, a proponent of America’s lost people, and distrustful of any institution except maybe labor unions. He has told us a story for the last four-plus years that is politically charged, seen from the perspective of a pissed-off Baltimore resident who is disgusted with the turns his city and our country have taken in the Bush years.

In the first four seasons The Wire focused on institutions and circles of people that Simon was removed from by at least one click. He is a former Baltimore Sun reporter, who left the paper when offered a buyout, a budgetary measure in which a company saves money by incenting senior staff (read:  more highly compensated than younger staff members) to retire early. In telling us stories of police, dock workers, junkies, drug dealers both at street level and the top rung of the US drug trade, kids, educators and politicians he was narrating the lives of those who he knew and had covered as a reporter. Now, in Season 5, The Baltimore Sun itself becomes a part of the story, as Simon takes on the media in the final 10 episodes of his masterpiece of a drama. And in doing so, he may be headed down a road in which he tarnishes the reputation of that masterpiece.

I think Simon is too close to the newspaper to tell the story objectively, something that a reporter should always do.  Roger Twigg, the police reporter in The Wire is a clear alter-ego for Simon: a little stocky, balding, hanging out on the loading dock having a smoke with the other veterans of the staff. In Episode 3, he’s offered a buyout and takes it, saying now is the time to start work on the Great American Novel. Simon has spoken in interviews about his disgust for the brass at The Sun who were managing the paper when he left, and–again to the detriment of The Wire–he has transferred that disgust directly to the characters of Executive Editor James C. Whiting III (third, get it? There have been others just like him) and Managing Editor Thomas Klebanow (awfully close to Marimow, the surname of the Editor at The Sun when Simon took his buyout.)

In The Wire Whiting (White, get it? He’s corporate) is completely aloof. He is out to cut jobs, saving money, and to win Pulitzer Prizes by telling the “Dickensian” story of Baltimore denizens. (The real Sun would go on to win two Pulitzers under Marimow, telling those Dickensian stories.)  Whiting favors Scott Templeton, an ambitious young reporter who bemoans the lack of news in Baltimore and who dreams of hitting it big at “The Times or The Post.” Templeton is another target of Simon’s wrath: he’s emblematic of the young reporters who remained at The Sun after buyouts. In Season 5 of The Wire Templeton fabricates everything, from phony quotes attributed to high-ranking city officials to entire stories: a black kid in a wheelchair who skipped school for opening day at Camden Yard. Templeton can offer no photo of the kid, no last name, just a bunk story–which Metro Editor Gus Haynes sees right through. (As a spoiler to future episodes, Templeton will make up a whole lot more.) Simon’s dislike for Templeton is clear.

The problem with the Whiting, Klebanow and Templeton characters is that Simon does not treat them the way he has treated every other character on The Wire: fairly, balanced, and with dignity despite their (sometimes many) flaws. The people at The Wire’s paper are all one-note characters. On the other hand, Gus Haynes and some of the other veteran members of The Wire’s Sun are all seen as pure: they know more than the younger staff and their bosses, they don’t make mistakes, they love newspapers and reporting more than prizes.

Simon can’t see any of the newspaper characters clearly because, probably, of his bitterness with the real Baltimore Sun. When Whiting gives his blessing to Templeton’s entirely made-up story about the wheelchair kid, you wonder how it’s possible that this man ever became the managing editor of a major newspaper. The character in that way is not a genuine, believable person, which runs 180 degrees opposite of The Wire’s tradition of reality.

In Episode 3, after Twigg has taken his buyout, a story is leaked from City Hall: Burrell will be fired by Carcetti, Rawls will be acting police commissioner while Cedric Daniels is groomed to take over the job. Twig is inactive, so Haynes gives the assignment to Templeton. Templeton asks who Daniels is and Twigg, still at his desk, gives us an oral history of Cedric Daniels, not missing a single detail.  Simon is telling us what The Sun lost by putting the older staff out to pasture before their time, and it’s a good moment, a moment that’s far better, and far more illuminating that any of the other moments so far this season in the newsroom. Unfortunately, Simon then reverts to having Templeton deliver a phony reaction quote, again hammering home that Templeton is a one-note character.

Away from The Sun, McNulty is falling deeper into alcoholism, causing him to make bad decisions as a detective. He’s adding evidence to old case files and planting an item on his most recent body, furthering his attempt to create a serial killer in hopes that the mayor will put money into the police department that McNulty can use to chase Marlo, who he states is “a real serial killer” with 22 bodies on him. I had a hard time believing in McNulty’s actions in Episode 2, but I can accept that his alcoholism has clouded his judgment. What we’re seeing is the McNulty who existed before the first minute of The Wire: the McNulty who drove his wife away, the McNulty who was out of control. The McNulty of the past 4 seasons has been somewhat of a McNulty in remission, trying to get his life back, but now he has completely lost control due to his drinking problem. Harder to swallow though, is the end of Episode 3, when Lester Freamon agrees to work with McNulty on stringing along his lie. Freamon, like McNulty, has long been dissatisfied with the politics of the police department, and we’ve been told of some bad judgment on his part early in his career. However, we’ve also seen Freamon in the past argue with McNulty over Jimmy’s bull-headed nature, and he’s currently assigned to the Clay Davis case, chasing the money that he desperately wanted to work on in Season 1, working what he and Sydnor have discussed as being a “career case.” I know he wants Marlo, but I also think that his partnering with McNulty on the creation of a serial killer is even more out of character than McNulty strangling already dead bodies.

At the beginning of Episode 1, Bunk says “The bigger the lie, the more they believe.” Obviously this–and “More With Less”, the title of Episode 1 and a quote we’ve heard from City Hall, the police brass, Whiting and Klebanow–is the theme of Season 5. We’re left to wonder how far McNulty can go on his lie, and how far Templeton can continue on with his. Will Simon give any kind of balance to Templeton, to Klebanow, to Whiting? Will the latter two show us that they know enough as the top dogs at The Sun to finally question Templeton’s stories, as Gus and other veterans at the City desk already have? Or will Simon try to live with his lie that everyone is complex except his former bosses and younger co-workers? That would be a shame.

On The Small(ish) Audience for The Wire

The tag line in a recent Newsweek piece on The Wire summed it up nicely: “For five seasons, critics have worshiped The Wire—and lamented that more people don’t. Now’s your last chance to catch what may be TV’s best drama ever.” Along with the critics, fans of the show, small in number but very dedicated, have been telling people about this terrific drama, and for a number of reasons new viewers have been slow to come around.

The only comparable television show to The Wire would be The Sopranos, the recently retired other-greatest-drama-ever. Both featured plot lines that carried over multiple episodes and often seasons. Both centered, at least in part, on crime. Both used the allure of a crime show to draw in viewers who would then be exposed to the themes that most interested the Davids who created and ran the shows–David Chase of The Sopranos and David Simon of The Wire. Both were, and are, so well made that one would be hard-pressed to find anyone–critic, fan or casual viewer–who could deny the quality of the shows.

But while The Sopranos would grow to become a big part of our pop-culture vernacular, drawing what are for pay-TV very large numbers of viewers on each new showing, The Wire has struggled along. The Sopranos regularly drew 8 million viewers per episode, The Wire usually has about half of that, and their season 5 premier recently drew only 1.2 million.

There are plenty of reasons for only 1.2 million people watching the premier of The Wire on January 6. First, it was running on Comcast’s HBO OnDemand a full week before the sixth. Additionally, episodes 1, 2, 5, 6, and 7 are available via download or streaming media on a few Internet sites. So fans who were chomping at the bit had plenty of opportunity to see the episode prior to the January 6 premier date. The first episode additionally will run several more times on HBO and HBO2 during the following week, and will remain on OnDemand through the end of the season, meaning a subscriber can catch up later. Put all these factors together, and 1.2 million is certainly not an accurate account of how many people were eagerly anticipating the first episode of the last season of The Wire. The Sopranos, in comparison, did not premier a week early on OnDemand, and the episodes were extraordinarily closely guarded, with no major Internet leaks prior to the premier of each episode.

I’ve tried to convert viewers. I’ve pleaded with people that this is a program that is novelistic in scope, much like reading Moby Dick or Dickens. Or, as one character says in Episode 2 of the new season: “an amorphous series on society’s ills.” I’ve explained to friends, to work associates, to people in bars that it’s above The Sopranos, because it dares to be about all of America. I’ve had only one success. My wife, would not watch a single episode during the first few seasons. She’d take a glance at the TV, see a couple gangsters talking about the dope trade and who needed to be killed next, and would proceed to open a book. She started on Season 4 and became so hooked so quickly that we quickly had to rent Seasons 1-3 so she could catch up.

One of the big challenges for The Wire as far as bringing in new audience members is the need for a newbie to catch up. If someone saw Season 5 Episode 2, with all the talk between Marlo and Avon and Sergei, not only would that new viewer not understand the depth of the conversation–especially Avon’s olive branch to Marlo–they would not understand the basic plot. Sample explanation: You see, back in Season 3, Avon and Stringer argued over joining the Co-Op with Proposition Joe Stewart…Wait, who’s Stringer…Oh, he was one of the central characters in Seasons 1-3 but he’s dead now. Anyway, Avon hates the Co-Op and East Siders, see he used to run the West Side, and now Marlo runs it, and Avon and Marlo were at war in Season 3 but despite that they share a dislike for Prop Joe….Who’s Prop Joe?…Oh, he’s the big guy who ran the co-op meeting at the hotel last week. Remember? Short dreadlocks and reading glasses, kind of freckled? Yeah, so he runs the East Side and the Co-Op, but it looks like, ok this guy Sergei is from Season 2, when…

You would have to pause the show for 20 minutes every 5 minutes to get your new viewer caught up. HBO did a nice job of running all of The Wire on Comcast OnDemand over the three months leading up to the final season. They ran Season 4 last month, Season 3 in November, Season 2 in October, Season 1 in September. But I have a problem with the way they did this, and I think it has cost them viewers for the final season. When each new season appeared on OnDemand, they took the last season off. So the only way a complete newcomer would have used this service to catch up on the show is if that viewer 1. Knew that the final season was coming in 4 months; 2. Knew that Comcast was running the episodes OnDemand; and 3. Was willing to put in the time to watch them all. But HBO didn’t do any marketing to let their subscribers know that this was coming. So if you were flipping through the OnDemand menu in November and found Season 3, you were already way behind. They should have left all the episodes up–and they should still be up. The Wire has been in the news lately, with just about every critic in print journalism saying the same thing as Newsweek: the best thing you have never seen. If these episodes were still on OnDemand, perhaps a few new viewers would hustle up and catch up to this series. (I can say from experience, it’s not impossible to watch 1.5 seasons of The Wire in a long weekend and another 2 seasons in the course of a week of evenings.)

HBO is delusional regarding the pricing of their DVDs. Each of the three seasons of Deadwood retail for $99.98. Each box has 12 episodes that clock in just under one hour, and a few hours of supplemental material. So you’re paying over $8.25 per episode. The Sopranos DVDs are priced the same: $99.98 for Season 6 Part 1, 720 minutes of content. The Wire is not as exorbitantly priced. $60 per season for 13 episodes of Season 4, only $4.61 per hour, a bargain compared to the others. On the surface, it compares well to other television on DVD: both Lost and Desperate Housewives retail at $60 per season. However, they both offer about 50% more content for the $60 price tag: Season 1 of Lost has 1068 minutes of content, so at $3.37 per hour it’s over 25% less expensive than The Wire. Perhaps if HBO priced their DVDs more accordingly against other televised drama, they would have more success in selling those DVDs and gaining new viewers and new subscribers. This is especially the case for The Wire, a show that Simon himself has described as being a show for the underdog, the downtrodden, the people society often forgets.

The nature of The Wire such that character is far more important that plot. Going back to high school English, we know that plot is what happens: Bunk and Landsman take this kid and convince him that a photocopier is a lie detector capable of indicting the kid in a murder. Story is what’s going on beneath the plot, it’s what we’re watching is about: the police in Baltimore resort to creative deception to lure not-too-bright criminals into admitting guilt. While The Wire does not want for plot, it relishes story, and the story for Simon and his crew of writers is derived from character. We who have watched and lived with these characters for four years know them like they are family–small spoiler, but not too major: when Randy Wagstaff appears for a couple minutes later this year, we know all we need to know about him, and we’re not surprised one bit by his situation or his reaction to what happens around him. The richness of the interaction he has with another character is rewarding, and it’s rewarding because we have spent time with him and we’ve put in time thinking about him. It comes from character and from story, both of which have been very carefully and accurately drawn by the writers of The Wire.

The Wire runs 180 degrees opposite of most of the rest of television. This is not Law & Order or CSI, which work within the framework of the classic television policier: 1. Cold open with crime, 2. Credits, 3. Commercials, 4. Act 1 in which we learn about the crime and the people involved, 5. Commercials, 6. Act 2 in which the investigative work is done and we get a little bit of character work from the supporting actor playing the suspect/relative of the victim/witness to the crime, 7. Commercials, 8. The solution to the crime. All is resolved, and we do it again next week. In The Wire all is not resolved every week. In fact, very little is resolved. We get a burst of violence here and there, a few characters are killed off, some go to jail, but the stor–not the plot, but the story–continues to unfold, week after week, season after season. McNulty’s drinking problem, the bureaucracy of the police department, the financial mess the city of Baltimore is in, these bits of story run on and on. The Wire runs against the grain of episodic TV, and it’s especially a hard pill to swallow in the post-MTV age of YouTube, in which our attention spans are growing even shorter. Simon et posse demand our attention for a long period of time–in this case five years, and it’s a lot to ask and it costs him viewers.

But Simon doesn’t really care. From the Newsweek piece: “(smaller viewership) pleases Simon enormously because it appeals to his underdog instincts, and his conviction that bare-knuckled authenticity isn’t for everyone. And besides, he’s got the fans he really wants. ‘I’d rather have the allegiance of these people than all the viewers in the world,’ he says. ‘Mainstream America has 100 shows to love. The other America has this one. I’m proud of that.’” Simon’s attitude is what makes The Wire so damn good. He doesn’t care if he fits in with the rest of TV, he’s making a show about the forgotten people in a forgotten city in a country in great decline. It’s grand Greek tragedy, in which the institutions fail the people in them and no knights in shining armor–or even a collection of knights in somewhat tarnished armor–exist to bring the city out of its slump. This is not Sex and The City in which all the characters are upscale women-on-the-make in the Big Apple. This is the slums, the police station and city hall in one of the most depressing cities in the US. And Simon is a misanthrope with little trust in the types of characters found in more mainstream television. He’s interested in the little people, those who struggle with life every day, and those who want to make things better but are restricted by the institutions in which they live and work. So while Simon’s maverick instinct is what makes the show so good, it’s also what turns off viewers. Not everyone is interested in a show that, if pitched in a single sentence would be described as “an amorphous series on society’s ills.” It’s big, it’s difficult, it’s grandiose–like The Sopranos–but it’s very liberal, and it’s not for everyone, unlike The Sopranos.

The Wire Season 5 Episode 2

I caught the second episode of the new season on OnDemand last night, and it’s the first time I’ve been disappointed in an episode of The Wire. Spoilers to come, stop reading now if you do not want to know.

With Major Crimes disbanded and with his personal life hitting the toilet again via heavy drinking and womanizing, McNulty isn’t thinking clearly. He finds a DOA body, who died of overdose, and chokes the dead body to put bruises on the neck. His plan is to create a fictional serial killer in order to get fresh money pumped into the police department, and to then use the manpower to investigate Marlo Stanfield on the down and low.

McNulty has always been an insubordinate ass, but he has always been honest. He’s never cut corners in his police work, and while he has always fought with his bosses, rarely toeing the company line, he has always taken a moral high ground. This move struck me as being dishonest to the character, and a cheap plot device. I think Executive Producer David Simon, like McNulty, is cutting corners.

Marlo goes to Jessup to talk to Sergei, hoping to get a line to Vondas. He’s met by Avon Barksdale instead. Avon knows what Marlo is up to, and tells him that if he wants through to Sergei, Marlo needs to take “100 large” to Brianna Barksdale. This is a great scene, and while it’s as unexpected as McNulty strangling a dead body, it’s true. Marlo wants to cut out Prop Joe and the rest of the co-op, an organization that Avon was never a fan of and which he battled Stringer over in Season 3. Avon is quick to assist Marlo, who’s equally quick to comply, because, Avon tells him, he doesn’t care about “east side bitches” while “I got nothin’ but love in my heart for west side niggas.” By the end of the episode Marlo has met Sergei and it’s pretty clear that he’ll be taking over the connect, warring with Joe and anyone else in his way, and making a move to run all of the Baltimore drug trade, not just the west side.

There’s a great closing to the scene between Avon and Marlo. Avon: “What about you, how you been?” Marlo: “You know. The game is the game.” The sentiment we’ve been hearing from everyone in the game continues to be the mantra. The only person who didn’t follow the code of the game, who wanted to change the game, was Stringer Bell. And he had to die exactly because he wanted to reform the drug trade, for which there is–and never will be–reform.

There are a couple other good scenes in Episode 2, I especially look forward to seeing what will happen with a now clean Bubbles. If there is redemption for a David Simon character, I would imagine it will be him. And I’m loving Clark Johnson, so wonderful in Homicide: Life On The Street as Metro Editor Gus Haynes. It looks like he’ll be the moral center of the final season, as all the story lines come to a head. Scott Templeton, the Sun writer who Haynes does not trust, is beginning to show us why that lack of trust is well deserved. He fabricates a story about opening day at Camden Yard, and I’m sure he’ll be more dishonest as the season progresses. I can see this story line disappointing me as much as the McNulty one, honestly.

Also, Marlo comments to his muscle that since the cops are off of him, he wants to bring Omar out from hiding and put and end to him. War between Omar and Marlo is definitely brewing.

I’m really pumped to see how the Marlo/Omar/Avon/Vondas thing shakes out, I think this is going to be the most violent of all the seasons of The Wire. But I’m dreading seeing this McNulty lie dragged out for the final 8 episodes. Here’s hoping I’m wrong, and that Simon will end on a grace note that is true to the characters he took such care in building from the start.

The Wire: Season 5 Episode 1

January 6 will bring the first episode of the final season of HBO’s “The Wire.” If you have HBO OnDemand on Comcast, it’s there already, and I’ll talk a bit about this episode later. First some words on “The Wire” in general.

“The Wire” ending will represent a new era in television: the end of the “It’s not TV, it’s HBO” era. Gone are “The Sopranos”, “Deadwood”, and “Six Feet Under”, all of which defined HBO as the place to see cutting edge, quality television. What’s left on HBO is the almost unwatchable “Entourage”, “The Flight of The Conchords”, which if you’ve seen one episode you’ve seen them all, and the over-the-top and not terribly good “Big Love”. With the failure of “John From Cincinnati” and “Tell Me You Love Me” HBO is in serious trouble. But “The Wire” represents not just the fading of HBO: it represents the end of the (yes, I really think so) greatest televised drama in history.

“The Sopranos” and “Deadwood” were amazing Shakespearean dramas about violent men and the inner workings of their minds. “The Wire” is Greek tragedy, a huge revolving cast of characters doomed not by their own actions but by the institutions in which they work and live.

David Simon, creator of “The Wire” has delivered something that is far closer to a 60 or so chapter novel, The Great American Novel even, than episodic television. Simon asked a lot of the viewers, and a lot of what he asked was not easy to anyone weaned on typical episodic television. What started as a cop show refused to deliver the crime/investigation/resolution structure of other cop shows. He asked that we understand that the cops are not heroes and the drug kingpins are not villains. He told us that the bureaucracy pertaining to one is the same as that relates to the other–keep your stats up, don’t be too idealistic, and do what the bosses tell you, and you’ll go far.

At the beginning of Season 2 Simon started with a pro-labor story of Baltimore dock workers. Season 3 brought a corrupt mayor and a mayoral hopeful, and a new drug war, and Season 4 introduced the Baltimore public school system to the mix. There have been at least, I would guess, 100 characters in “The Wire” who have been significant, characters who regular viewers would recognize on sight.

Simon did not worry about who was supposed to be a main character. Jimmy McNulty was, if anyone, the protagonist of Season 1. In Season 4 we barely see him, and only briefly at that. McNulty is complexity defined. If there’s a true natural detective, someone born for the job with the ability to do brilliant detective work as second nature, it’s McNulty. But he’s a mess. His drinking and philandering led to the dissolution of his first marriage and have left him broke to child support payments going to children he rarely sees. He’s typically right, having terrific instincts as a cop, but he’s an unbearable asshole, arguing with anyone who dares to disagree with him. He routinely upsets the apple cart in the police department, arguing with his commanding officers like a spoiled child when he does not get his way. He is wholly incapable of understanding the inner-office politics of the department, insisting that his opinion is the right opinion. At the end of Season 3, he decides he’s done drinking and he’s done with detective work: he’s going to walk a beat as a uniformed officer in the Western District, and he’s going to commit himself to a new start with a new woman. We hardly see him in Season 4, but here he is at the top of Season 5, back in the detective game, tracking kingpin Marlo Stanfield with the rest of the Major Crimes division. And here he is, back to falling over drunk, cheating on the new girlfriend, calling her to tell her he’s working late when he’s off for an affair. McNulty’s biggest roadblock to happiness is McNulty, but Simon will not let those around McNulty off the hook completely: he’s created McNulty to always be right, and to punish himself when those around him don’t agree with him.

In fact, if there is a primary character in “The Wire,” it is the city of Baltimore. Simon clearly loves his city, and clearly loves and hates many of its denizens. Season 5 brings us the staff of The Baltimore Sun, the local newspaper, and returns most of the characters from the previous seasons. By its end, we will have glimpses into the city’s rich, poor, cops, criminals, politicians, media, educators, students, religious leaders, courtrooms, lawyers, prosecutors, strip club owners, grandmothers, children, elderly, straight, gay, stevedores, labor leaders, and smugglers. All the above give us the most complete big-city environment outside of the stateless Springfield of “The Simpsons.” While Homer et al reside in an animated environment, in which the creators have free will to draw the city as big or small as they desire, Simon uses real actors in real locations to deliver something just as big, without Baltimore coming across as real life and not larger-than-life.

It’s Simon’s ambition to paint such a large picture, and his ability to make that ambition reality, that ultimately puts “The Wire” so far above other television. Baltimore is the US. Baltimore and the US both have problems with crooked politicians, drugs, crime, labor and more. And a lot of those problems can be directly traced to the institutions we create, and how the shortcomings and failures of those institutions are informing the decline of American culture. It’s Simon’s daring to portray those opinions, especially during the Bush years, that make “The Wire” so daring, and so spot-on.

It’s obvious on first viewing of the first episode of the new season that there’s going to be a big conflict between the reporters at the Sun and City Hall. Naresse Campbell, President of the City Council, has completed a deal with a drug dealer via the city. The city buys the dealer’s strip club for $1.2 million and sells him a nicer property for $200,000. The Sun gets wind of it and runs the story. Naresse says it’s important for city development. The Sun points out that this dealer gave $40,000 to her campaign, and that many other donors, using the strip club’s address, gave thousands more. This is the springboard for Season 5.

Add to that (spoiler coming) that the Major Crimes unit is disbanded save for two detectives. Freamon and Sydnor will remain, but not to chase drug dealers and killers, but to chase State Senator Clay Davis, one of the sleaziest characters in TV history. The States Attorney, newly elected, wants to nail Davis, and in an atmosphere of city budget cutbacks, the mayor is still more than willing to spend the money to go after Davis. So it would look like Season 5 will be a lot like Season 2: the cops will still chase the drug dealers, but in the background, while a larger battle wages. That will be the three-way battle between the prosecutors, the politicians and the newspaper.

In a recent HBO half-hour special on HBO, someone–I forget who–said that the season will be about “how far you can go on a lie.” From the first episode I can’t tell who the big liar–or liars–will be, but I have a few guesses. I’m going with Naresse, McNulty, and the red headed guy at The Sun whose name I didn’t catch.

However it ends, whoever is telling the lies, it won’t be cut and dried. Simon is too great a storyteller to let us go on believing that the liars are bad guys, the truth-tellers good. There are 12 more hours left in a complex, rich novel of a TV series, and I’m looking forward to every minute.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Before we get into the film, a few notes on seeing the film and it’s screening in Chicago.

“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” is being shown on one screen in Chicago, at the Landmark Century Centre. Not unusual for a foreign-language film with no stars familiar to American audiences. Now at the Century there are I believe 7 theaters and one of them, number 2, sits directly above the Bally Total Fitness in the complex. So when you see a film in Landmark Century Centre #2, you can expect the floor–and your chair–to mildly shake for the duration of the time in which you’re seated. So no surprise that “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” is showing in this room, with the better real estate being dedicated to more populist films like “Juno” and “Atonement” and “No Country For Old Men.” This is something about which I would have groused ten years ago, demanding the manager after the screening, but now I know I have to accept that there will be some work to be done on my part the more difficult, more obscure, and more foreign the film.

So while I wasn’t surprised to find this film playing on only one screen, and a bad one at that, I was surprised to find that we were in an almost full house. My wife would come home from work on Wednesday saying that a co-worker was turned away, the box office telling him the showing was sold out. This sort of restored my hope in the moviegoing public in Chicago, and I certainly hope to see more full houses at movies such as this in the near future. Then–and only then–will theater management start booking more foreign fare and not relegating these films to their worst screens.

Part of the drive can be credited, again surprisingly, to the Hollywood Foreign Press, who have nominated the film for three Golden Globes, including Best Director and Best Screenplay–who not surprisingly failed to nominate it for Best Picture–and to the critical response from across the US, where the film is making many a Top 10 list and earning praise from critics associations. Rare is the foreign-language film which makes the AFI’s Top 10. While it may not have “Juno” buzz, it has some.

To the film. Most everyone knows the story, but I’ll recap quickly. Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor of Elle magazine in Paris, has a stroke, is comatose for three weeks, and awakes with Locked-In Syndrome. The only parts of his body he can move are his left eye and left eyelid. His right eye, in a queasy early scene, has to be sewn shut, since it cannot blink, to avoid going septic.

Bauby’s mind is functioning as normal, his memory, wit and imagination unharmed by the stroke. One of his therapists creates a means of communication in which Bauby can “talk”–she recites the French alphabet in order of most-used letters, Bauby blinks when she hits the right letter. He uses this system to dictate a book, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” This book would be published and Bauby would die two days after it’s release, in March of 1997.

The film picks up with Bauby in the hospital, and ends with a flashback to the stroke. Aside from 10 or so minutes of flashbacks of the able-bodied Bauby, he is immobile either in bed or in a wheelchair for the duration of the film. Much of it is shot from his point-of-view, looking up from the bed.

On paper, this sounds incredibly boring, but under the direction of Julian Schnabel and with the cinematography of Janusz Kaminski, it is turned into something transcendent. Schnabel is a painter by training and mostly by trade, and there is a very painterly sense of composition throughout the film. The images are very carefully constructed, and the from-the-bed-up point-of-view shots work their way into the viewer’s conscience, communicating the feeling of being “locked in” that Bauby is experiencing. Kaminski uses a series of filters and plays with focus and depth-of-field to further this perspective, at times perhaps confusing viewers but also drawing focus to important areas in Bauby’s field of view. As a work of images, the film is highly accomplished and a textbook case of how to convey perspective in motion pictures.

Bauby is played by Mathieu Amalric, probably best known in the US for playing a supporting role in Spielberg’s “Munich”, a film I have not seen. He’ll be more popular soon enough, as he’s reported to be the next Bond villain.

I can’t speak with a very informed opinion about Amalric’s career, because most of his films are not released in the US, either theatrically or on DVD. I can say that in the films in which I’ve seen Amalric–”My Sex Life…Or How I Got Into An Argument” (1996) and “Kings And Queen” (2005), both masterpieces by Arnaud Despechin, and “Late August, Early September” (1998) by Olivier Assayas–I’ve enjoyed his work, and I always look forward to seeing a film in which he will star. In these three films he carries a nervous energy throughout, and these films are all very talky in a good way. In “My Sex Life” he’s a lifetime graduate student, unable to finish is 400-page thesis which he describes as “very dense, very good.” In “Kings and Queen” Amalric’s Ishamel is an easily-offended, paranoid bipolar artist who talks a mile a minute and has never-ending energy. (As a note, if you like long movies about character full of great acting, you can’t do much better than “Kings And Queen”.)

So while I’ve only seen Amalric in three other films in over a decade (not counting his very brief appearance in “Marie Antoinette”), it’s still a bit of a shock to my system to see this very phisical actor bed-ridden, immobile and mute.

We do get to see flashes of the Amalric energy in the flashback scenes, and brief as they may be, Schnabel and Amalric do an admirable job of showing us that Bauby was a substantial figure in the lives of those around him. Additionally we see scenes from the immobile Bauby’s imagination, which is full of wonder. In a particularly telling scene, Bauby imagines himself in a Parisian restaurant with his therapist. They eat–and eat and eat and eat–with their fingers, forks be damned, licking and sucking at the food and their fingers as they go, stopping now and again to kiss across a table. The act of eating as portrayed here is heavenly and lush, it’s what porno would look like if it were based on food and not sex. This is Bauby imagining if he could just get out of bed, this is the one meal he would eat and how he would eat it, a luxury he doesn’t have, he’ll never have, and none of us will ever have, since we can’t control where, when and how our last meal will take place (suicides obviously excepted.)

I wouldn’t necessarily call Amalric’s performance a tour-de-force, since most of it is spent immobile, only blinking. But the scenes of him in fantasy and in flashback are wonderful and the post-stroke scenes do give a nice counterpoint to what I’ve seen from Amalric in the past.

Schnabel has made not only a great film, but a film that gives us the best view into the mind of a creative person. Locked in, Bauby has only his imagination and his memory, and Schnabel, Amalric, Kaminski and the rest of the cast and crew behind “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” illuminate the importance of imagination and of an active, thinking mind. It’s a beautiful film and not to be missed.