GRAPPLING WITH GREAT THEMES:
TRAGEDY, CRITIQUE, AND CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM IN THE WIRE, BREAKING BAD, AND FARGO
By Klaas de Jong
I declare that this thesis is my own work except where indicated otherwise with proper use of quotes and references.
Introduction 2 Tragedy, Critique, and Capitalism in an Era of Quality Television 8
The Wire: Tragedy in a Neoliberal City 20
Breaking Bad: Willy Loman and Spectacular Violence in the Desert 31
Fargo: Carnage and Catharsis in the Midwest 41
Conclusion 51
By 2003, two years before his death, Arthur Miller had come to lament contemporary theater. Broadway had become obsessed with amusement, but largely disregarded social criticism as entertainment, he claimed.1 “[It] does seem to me that while films and television are trying to grapple with the great themes that affect us all, the theater–or the Broadway pocket of it–has, with extremely few exceptions, just about succumbed to glorious, glamorous show business.”2 Two decades earlier the notion that television, of all things, could be an example of a medium that “grapples with great themes” would have been near unthinkable for many. Media critic Neil Postman, for instance, had argued in his seminal Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) that television was unsuitable to healthy public discourse, and was pervasive enough to bring about a negative change in the way people think.3 Postman believed the epistemology created by television not only “inferior to a print-based epistemology but [also] dangerous and absurdist.”4 He was not alone in this observation. In the book Watching Television (1986), sociologist Todd Gitlin noted that the description of television as a “vast wasteland,” as Federal Communication Committee chairman Newton N. Minow had called it in 1961, had deservedly become cliché.5 To show what he meant Minow had invited his audience at the National Association of Broadcasters to watch an entire day of television:
You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials – many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom.
1 Arthur Miller, “Looking for a Conscience,” New York Times, 23 February 2003, last accessed May 15, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/23/movies/spring-theater-looking-for-a-conscience.html.
2 Ibid.
3 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, (1985; reprint,
New York: Penguin, 2005), 40.
4 Ibid., 43.
True, you’ll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.6
That Gitlin thought these descriptions were still accurate is telling of how television was perceived as recently as the 1980s, and not only in scholarly contexts. David Foster Wallace noted in his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” that “The New York
Times Arts & Leisure Section for Sunday, 8/05/90, simply bulged with bitter critical derision
for TV, and some of the most unhappy articles weren’t about low-quality programming so much as about how TV’s become this despicable instrument of cultural decay.”7
It is fair to say that we live in a different age now, at least as far as attitudes to television go. If by 2003, Arthur Miller, one of the great playwrights of the twentieth century was saying that television, as opposed to the theater, was actually trying to “grapple with great themes,” he was far from alone in his praise of the medium.8 New Yorker’s television critic Emily Nussbaum has claimed that during the 2000s “television became recognizable as art, great art: collectible and life-changing and transformative and lasting.”9 This paradigm shift was not left unnoticed by scholars. By the new millennium, television scholars like Kim Akass, Glenn Creeber, Jane Feuer, Geraldine Harris, Janet McCabe, Jason Mittell, and Robin Nelson were thinking about what it meant for television not merely to be “popular,” but also to be “quality,” and/or “complex.”10 Already in the 1970s, through the work of Stuart Hall among others, cultural studies started to engage with “popular culture.” This paved the way for the emergence of television studies in the 1980s, through the work of Ien Ang, Robert C. Allen, Jane Feuer, and John Fiske. Even though back then television was not nearly always praised, that it was being
6 Newton N. Minow, “Television and the Public Interest,” (speech, National Association of Broadcasters
Washington, DC, 9 May, 1961) available on http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/newtonminow.htm.
7 David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13,
no. 2. (1993): 156.
8 Arthur Miller, “Looking for a conscience.”
9 Emily Nussbaum, “When TV Became Art,” New York Magazine, 4 December 2009, last accessed 26 October,
2016, http://nymag.com/arts/all/aughts/62513/.
10 Janet McCabe and Kim Akass compiled an anthology on quality television; Quality TV: Contemporary
studied at all was a significant change. But now the medium even appeared on the radar of scholars outside of television and media studies. British literary critic Christopher Bigsby wrote a book called Viewing America: Twenty-First-Century Television, in which he suggested American television drama “had come of age.”11 Literary critic Walter Benn Michaels has pointed to the show The Wire as a bright example, a contrast to, in his view, a failing American fiction.12 Even political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. has pointed to film and television to contextualize cultural politics.13
For critics like Michaels and Reed Jr. the important question about fiction (and thus television) is whether it can offer an effective critique of capitalism in its “neoliberal” phase. This is itself significant because for many, including Postman and Gitlin, American television existed and continues to exist primarily as a form of entertainment, reinforcing mainstream capitalist ideology through easy-to-consume content interspersed with commercials.14 And yet, Michaels praises the television serial The Wire (2002-2008) as “the most serious and ambitious fictional narrative of the twenty-first century, [that is] about the world neoliberalism has actually produced.”15 The view that television could be a critique of neoliberalism is not merely a scholarly interpretation. The Wire show creator David Simon never shied away from asserting that The Wire was a critique of neoliberal capitalism.16 It seems the medium that reinforced capitalism was starting to show signs that it could and wanted to be critical of capitalism itself.
11 Christopher Bigsby, “Introduction: Television Drama,” in Viewing America: Twenty-First-Century Television
Drama, (Cambridge: University Press, 2013), 19.
12 Walter Benn Michaels, “Going Boom,” Bookforum, February/March, 2009, last accessed 28 October, 2016,
https://web.archive.org/web/20150906072603/http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_05/3274.
13 Adolph Reed Jr., “Django Unchained, or, The Help: How ‘Cultural Politics’ Is Worse Than No Politics at All,
and Why,” Nonsite.org, no. 9 (2013): no page, last accessed 29 January, 2017, http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why.
14 Christopher Bigsby, preface to Viewing America, ix.
15 Walter Benn Michaels, “Going Boom,”; In this dissertation, the term “serial” refers to a dramatic television
program that is “a continuous story set over a number of episodes that usually comes to a conclusion in the final instalment (even if a sequel follows)”; Glen Creeber, Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen, (London: British Film Institute, 2005), 8.
16 David Simon, “There are Now Two Americas. My Country is a Horror Show,” (speech, Festival of Dangerous
To be sure, that critique on television is not isolated from a broader public debate: the unexpected popularity of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and the 2016 Bernie Sanders primary campaign point to a post-2008 cultural moment in which the critique of the socio-economic system of neoliberal capitalism solidified its legitimacy in mainstream culture. For television scholars such as Harris and Nelson, not to mention critics like Michaels and Reed, Jr., television is participating.
What these observations fail to do is to take sufficient account of what looks like one of contemporary television’s primary vehicles for the critique of capitalism: tragedy. For Miller, a tragedian who was happy that television was trying to grapple with great themes, tragedy was evidently an apt literary mode for critique of capitalism, as his classic play Death of a Salesman (1949) demonstrates.17 But in television scholarship the relation between tragedy and the critique of capitalism remains underexplored. In 1997, television scholar Robert J. Thompson certainly remarked as a side note: “All quality shows integrate comedy and tragedy in a way that Aristotle would never have approved,” but he did not engage the topic again.18 Janet McCabe and Kim Akass point to commentators who have compared “quality TV” with “Greek tragedy,” and “Oedipus with semi-automatics.”19 However, they dismiss–or at least downplay– the importance of the comparison with tragedy by adding, “It is as if those reputable associations are essential before a discourse of what constitutes originality in television drama can be articulated and/or accepted.”20 There is a notable exception: Geraldine Harris’ account of the male antihero and the form of revenge tragedy in contemporary shows such as The Wire,
The Sopranos (1999-2007), Deadwood (2004-2006), Mad Men (2007-2015), and Sons of Anarchy (2008-2014). Harris aims to categorize shows that combine tragedy with
17 Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life, (London: Methuen, 1987), 184.
18 Robert J. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER, (1996; Reprint,
Syracuse, NY: University Press, 1997), 15.
anticapitalistic undercurrents as “postmasculinist television drama,” for “rather than signifying a new development produced by late-twentieth-century political discourses, this position of ‘[existential] crisis’ might be deemed as the key defining characteristic of the traditional white, western masculine subject.”21
However, while there certainly is value to understanding television’s male antihero as a renegotiation of masculinity in a quickly changing postmodern and capitalist world, taking its androcentric bias into account, a focus on television’s engagements with capitalism through tragedy seems a valid approach as well. For, that complex television does engage with the tragic mode in an attempt to use it as a means to critique, is beyond doubt. The Wire creator David Simon, for example, noted in an interview, “What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason–instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions… those are the indifferent gods.”22 In an another interview he explained, “Thematically, [The Wire is] about the very simple idea that, in this Postmodern [sic] 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.”23 Simon thus explicitly unites tragedy and the critique of capitalism. But The Wire does not stand alone. In Breaking Bad (2008-2013), Walter White’s tragic fall from mediocrity at the hand of a failing health care system, and in Fargo (2014-present), Lester Nygaard’s insecurities about being a mere insurance salesman, are also reminiscent of Arthur Miller’s own Willy Loman, the tragic embodiment of middle-class
21 Geraldine Harris, “A Return to Form? Postmasculinist Television Drama and Tragic Heroes in the Wake of
The Sopranos,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 10, no. 4, (2012): 444, 460.
22 David Simon, quoted in Margaret Talbot, “Stealing Life: The Crusader behind ‘The Wire,’” The New Yorker,
22 October, 2007, last accessed 7 November, 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/10/22/stealing-life.
23 David Simon, quoted in Meghan O’Rourke, “Behind the Wire: David Simon on Where the Show Goes Next,”
Slate, 1 December, 2006, last accessed 8 November, 2016,
anxieties produced by a capitalist society that lumbers men with high expectations yet harshly dismisses the unsuccessful.
For that reason, this dissertation will examine how (and how successfully) certain contemporary TV shows have used the tragic mode as a vehicle for the critique of neoliberal capitalism. It will argue that while those shows–The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Fargo–each have aspects that point to the strengths of their critiques of contemporary capitalism and/or neoliberalism, the effectiveness of their approaches varies wildly. The Wire on the one hand shows the power of social realist drama with an overarching tragic theme, but on the other hands points to a pessimism and cynicism that such television invokes, which undermines its critique of neoliberalism by suggesting resistance is futile. Breaking Bad, meanwhile, calls attention to the potential cultural significance of a modern-day Willy Loman in a postmodern and neoliberal culture of self-reliance, but ultimately, through revenge tragedy, inclines toward primarily being a spectacle of violence, which undermines its subtle Millerian critique. Moreover, by fixating on the antihero’s ultimately failed rebellion against his predicament, and not capitalism, the serial also suggests resistance is futile. Fargo specifically attempts to critique postmodern responses to violence, and though this leads to some insights about postmodernism and capitalism, ultimately it also shows an aesthetic fascination with the spectacle of violence which it attempts to critique. In short, these shows point to the difficulties faced by television when it critiques capitalism through tragedy.
My focus will be on determining what the tragic elements of each show are, and how those elements help or limit the construction of a critique of social conditions. While Mittell has argued against understanding television as “literary,” it is undeniable that tragedy, which is after all a literary mode, is incorporated into the storytelling techniques that these television serials use.24
24 Jason Mittell, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling, (New York: University
For that reason, the remainder of this dissertation has the following outline. First, I briefly examine significant developments in television history in the past decades to explain how “quality,” came to be used as an adjective to television. Second, I examine how recent television builds on the literary tradition of the tragedy of the common man, following Dreiser, Miller, and Steinbeck, to critique capitalism. In order to accomplish this, this section explores the notions of “tragedy,” “critique,” and “neoliberalism” (as the most common descriptor of the present stage of capitalism as it exists in the U.S.) more closely to explain the significance of their relation. This section also identifies violence as a common denominator between tragedy, capitalism, and television. Third, I examine The Wire’s reinvention of Greek tragedy as a tragedy of common men in a neoliberal city. This section emphasizes that, despite David Simon’s claims that The Wire is “Greek tragedy” in a postmodern city, its portrayal of tragedy as cyclical and/or torrential, marks a sharp departure from traditional tragic plot structure, and feeds a pessimism that is foreign to both tragic catharsis as well as social critique. Fourth, I examine Breaking Bad and its construction of Walter White as the modern-day Willy Loman, a depiction which is undermined by the serial’s use of spectacular violence. This section shows that the serial ends up a defeatist narrative that propagates the message that capitalism’s victims’ only choice is to suffer its injustices or wreak havoc. Finally, I examine Fargo’s use of spectacular violence as a postmodern metanarrative about violent television. Even though this section also demonstrates the series’ depiction of free market capitalism as a system based in violence, Fargo nevertheless ends up not just a television tragedy, but also a justice narrative filled to the brim with spectacular violence.
Tragedy, Critique, and Capitalism in an Era of Quality Television
(HBO) began to find success with refreshing fictional programming in genres comparable to what existed on network television.25 During the 1980s and early 1990s broadcast networks had themselves been experimenting with “quality” dramas such as Hill Street Blues (1981-1987) and Twin Peaks (1990-1991), but the majority of television was considered unsophisticated and formulaic.26 In fact, HBO deemed it necessary to distance itself from the low-brow medium with the slogan “It’s not TV. It’s HBO.” The premium cable network’s dramatic serials Oz (1998-2004), The Sopranos (1999-2007), and Six Feet Under (2001-2005) established HBO as a channel that attempted to transcend the negative connotations of television by identifying stylistically with non-televisual genres, narratives, and media.27 And with this change of form came a change of content. HBO series were a departure from the ironic comedies, detectives, and action series of the previous decades. Instead, these shows provided a candid insight into underexposed social spheres, such as prisons and “ghettos,” and in that context, they dealt with themes such as drug abuse, mental illness, gender and sexual identity, race, and social stratification, largely without resorting to the detached ironic tone of mainstream television.
By the early 2000s, critically acclaimed quality television was standard fare for HBO, and by the end of the decade other cable networks had followed suit. HBO continued its own momentum with the police procedural-meets-crime drama The Wire (2002-2008), which television critic Alessandra Stanley argued was “the best and most dyspeptic police drama on television.”28 HBO’s new competitor AMC debuted its second hit, Breaking Bad (2008-2013), which The Guardian’s Maxton Walker later called “Dostoevsky in the desert–an epic tragedy that now, appropriately, arrives in a box set thick and heavy enough to compare with anything
25 Jason Mittell, “The Wire in the Context of American Television,” in The Wire: Race, Class, and Genre, ed.
Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2012), 15-18.
26 Robert J. Thompson, preface to Quality TV, xvii.; Robert J. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age. 27 Gary R. Edgerton, introduction to The Essential HBO Reader, ed. Gary R. Edgerton and Jefferey P. Jones
(Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky), 10.
28 Alessandra Stanley, “So Many Characters, Yet So Little Resolution,” New York Times, 10 March, 2008, last
any Russian writer ever produced.”29 More recently, Fox Extended (FX) debuted the rebirth of the Coen brothers’ movie Fargo as an anthology series (2014-present).30 While television critic Emily Nussbaum was less enthusiastic about its opening season, she called Fargo’s second season “deeper and more daring, as well as a kick in the heart, visually glorious and darkly funny. It makes moves TV hasn’t tried before.”31 That television was no longer broadly despised was clear.
As television shows became “better,” they more frequently started to take inspiration from tragedy and its (anti)heroes. In the preceding decades, through action series such as Knight
Rider (1982-1986), The A-Team (1983-1987), and MacGyver (1985-1992), television had
shown a keenness for the male hero, but the male tragic (anti)hero was a rare sight. However, the character Tony Soprano from the popular HBO series The Sopranos (1999-2007) changed the standard for television’s best characters. The list of what writer Brett Martin has called “difficult men” includes some of the past two decades’ most iconic television characters: Dexter (Dexter), Don Draper (Mad Men), Omar Little (The Wire), and Walter White (Breaking Bad).32 These characters are flawed, and burdened, and (self-)destructive. And what’s more, even though they all have at least some good motives for their actions, their morals are questionable at best.
Related to this, and certainly deserving of further study, is the relevance of gender in this debate. Even though there is some evidence of a surge in strong female characters on
29 Maxton Walker, “Breaking Bad – box set review,” The Guardian, 5 December, 2013, last accessed 25
October, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/dec/05/breaking-bad-box-set-review.
30 In this dissertation, the term “anthology series” refers to a dramatic television program that is a “number of
single stories that are connected by a related theme, setting or set of characters,” in the case of Fargo spanning an entire season; Glen Creeber, Serial Television, 8.
31 Emily Nussbaum, “Snowbound: The Minnesota Noir of ‘Fargo,’” New Yorker, 23 June, 2014, last accessed 26
October, 2016. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/snowbound-2; Emily Nussbaum, “2015’s Best TV: I Hate Top Ten Lists, But O.K., Fine, Here’s A List,” New Yorker, 22 December, 2015, last accessed 22 October 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/2015s-best-tv-i-hate-top-ten-lists-but-o-k-fine-heres-a-list.
32 Brett Martin, Difficult Men, Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to
contemporary television, few television shows have succeeded in emulating the success of “difficult men” for women.33 One possible answer as to why, is that in the Western collective subconscious men are still more credible as violent tragic heroes. Similarly, another possible answer is that femininity is still seen as part of the character role of the follower, and not of the rebel. Moreover, as an aftereffect of, or an insistence upon, traditional gender roles, the downfall of the father figure may incite a stronger cathartic effect. Geraldine Harris’ beforementioned contribution to this debate is certainly a good starting point for understanding the male anti-hero in the context of gender, tragedy, and contemporary television.34 However, it is clear that the focus of this dissertation ultimately underexposes this perspective.
While this study is certainly also too brief to reflect the exhaustive body of theoretical work on tragedy by, among others, Georg Hegel, Gustav Freytag, Northrop Frye, and Raymond Williams, a definition of tragedy is helpful for understanding television’s turn toward it. The most famous ancient definition of tragedy is that of Aristotle in Poetics. In it, Aristotle described tragedy as “an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in the separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative, through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.”35 The broad gist of this definition is: tragedy represents real life; tragedy forms a self-contained plot, and follows the structure of beginning-middle-end; tragedy has a convincing chain of events; tragedy uses poetic language; tragedy relies on what is acted out rather than narration; and tragedy has a cathartic effect. The basic structure of tragic plot has traditionally been represented with a triangle or a pyramid, as Freytag proposed
33 Alison Herman, “Finally, TV Gets a Few Difficult Women,” The Ringer, 6 June, 2016, last accessed 6 April,
2017, https://theringer.com/unreal-girlfriend-experience-female-antihero-fb35fac1d2b7.
34 Geraldine Harris, “A Return to Form? Postmasculinist Television Drama and Tragic Heroes in the Wake of
The Sopranos,” 443-463.
35 Aristotle, Poetics, translated by S.H. Butcher, online republication, MIT The Internet Classics Archive, last
in the 1860s.36 The basic phases of this triangle are: “exposition,” the introduction of background information, during which the (flawed) tragic hero is still at peace with his world; “rising action,” the unfolding of a chain of events following an inciting incident; “climax,” during which the plot reverses, fortune changes, often accompanied by an important realization or discovery by the tragic hero; “falling action,” which is the unraveling of events; “catastrophe,” in which the tragic hero ends up worse off, or losing something significant. 37 It is important to note that Aristotle believed that, while the tragic hero is flawed (hamartia), it is necessary that he remains human, so that it is possible to identify with him, or else tragedy cannot achieve catharsis.38
In contrast with traditional definitions and in conformity with other recent tragedies, the tragic heroes of television are not usually noble men.39 Tony Soprano is a mafia boss, Omar Little a stick-up man, Dexter Morgan a forensic analyst, Don Draper a creative director at an advertising firm, and Walter White a chemistry teacher. It could be argued that some of these characters are of higher social standing than the others, but none of them are kings or noble men. Instead, the tragic heroes of television reflect a tradition in American theater and literature that goes back to Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, and indeed Arthur Miller. Miller championed for re-invigorating tragedy by replacing the noble tragic hero with the common man. Shortly after the premiere of his Death of a Salesman on Broadway in 1949, he published a short essay in which he argued that the quality of tragedy
derives from the underlying fear of being displaced, the disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what and who
36 Also known as Freytag’s pyramid, after Gustav Freytag’s analysis of ancient Greek and Shakespearean drama;
Gustav Freytag, The Technique of the Drama: an Exposition of Dramatic Composition and Art, translated by Elias J. MacEwan, (3rd edition, Chicago: Scot, Foresman and Company, 1900), 114-140; Available on:
https://archive.org/details/freytagstechniqu00freyuoft.
37 Gustav Freytag, The Technique of the Drama, 114-140. 38 Aristotle, Poetics, xiii.
39 Terry Eagleton points out that Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman “manages to violate almost every tenet of
we are in this world. Among us today this fear is strong, and perhaps stronger, than it ever was. In fact, it is the common man who knows this fear best.40
It is important to note that Miller takes a particular view of tragedy in which not only the tragic hero is flawed, but also his environment.41 He noted “if it is true that tragedy is the consequence of a man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly, his destruction in the attempt posits a wrong or an evil in his environment.”42 In “The Mythos of Autumn,” Northrop Frye pointed out that there are two contradictory views of tragedy: “One of these is the theory that all tragedy exhibits the omnipotence of an external fate…the other reductive theory of tragedy is that the act which sets the tragic process going must be primarily a violation of moral law.”43 Traditionally, external fate has been represented by gods well-nigh torturing men, but, contrastingly, many tragic heroes make such grave mistakes that the torture seems somewhat deserved. Thus, the important question is, “who is ultimately responsible, men or his gods?” Miller and his contemporaries employed the contradiction as a dialectic on the relation between man and his environment. Ultimately, Death of a Salesman inclines to neither extreme, but shows a flawed individual shaped by a flawed society, for while individually men are shaped by society, society is formed by men and their ideas.
Arthur Miller was not ambiguous about why he thought the fear of being displaced was so strong in his day; he hoped that Death of a Salesman would prove a time bomb “under the bullshit of capitalism, this pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last.”44 In other words, Miller
40 Arthur Miller, “Tragedy and the Common Man,” 27 February, 1949, last accessed 6 April, 2017.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/11/12/specials/miller-common.html.
41 Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence, 98.
42 Arthur Miller, “Tragedy and the Common Man.”
43 Northrop Frye, “The Mythos of Autumn: Tragedy,” in The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, (Princeton:
University Press, 1957), 209-210.
thought that tragedy and the common man was a fitting combination specifically for the critique of alienation at the hands of capitalism. Similarly, Dreiser, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck have shown that tragedy is a fitting critical counterpart to capitalism. For instance, in Dreiser’s An
American Tragedy, “lower-middle-class men and women, armed with nothing but prohibitions,
are thrown into the harsh world of industrial capitalism, which itself molds and enforces behavior with dour insistence,” notes critic David Denby.45 Thus, this American tradition of tragedy does not merely replace the noble man with the common man, but also specifically uses the tragedy of the common man as a vehicle for the critique of capitalism.46 Certainly, tragedy and capitalism are not incompatible, notes Terry Eagleton: “The trope of capitalism is tragic irony, as the system needs for its own purposes to unleash forces which are able to take it over.”47
But what might it mean to think of television as a form of critique? The everyday definition of critique as a forthright subjective “fault-finding” rhetoric is too narrow for much of the critique found on television. Firstly, art often subtly suggests rather than directly states. That is why analysis is such an important aspect of understanding art in the first place. Secondly, as Williams points out, the emphasis on “fault-finding” points to judgement, which distracts from critique also being a specific conscious response that can indeed range from judgement all the way to appreciation.48 For, when a television critic praises a serial, is he or she no longer a critic? Or, when a television serial itself shows an aesthetic appreciation for a certain style, it that not a conscious response that is important to how the serial represents its world? Certainly, there are differences between the critique of television by a television critic, and the critical
45 David Denby, “The Cost of Desire: Theodore Dreiser’s ‘An American Tragedy,’” New Yorker, 21 April, 2003,
last accessed 16 May, 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/04/21/the-cost-of-desire.
46 Calling the tragedy of common men an American tradition is slightly misleading, as the 19th century
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen is also known for tragic plays about common people.
47 Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence, 98.
48 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, (New York: Oxford University Press,
representation of the world through television, but both forms in the very least share the rejection of critique as merely a negative judgement.
Critique is therefore inherently ideological. Even in the everyday definition of critique, judgement contains a sense of measuring by one’s own worldview. But judgement is itself not necessary for conscious responses to have ideological origins. That is, even a conscious response that is apparently neutral is based on the assumption that such response should be neutral, and therefore, paradoxically, is not. It is important not to focus on what The Wire,
Breaking Bad, and Fargo appear to judge, but also what they praise and what they normalize,
for, if their critique is to be coherent and without mixed messages, those aspects have to align. Michel Foucault, in his famous lecture “What is critique?” defined critique as a radical element in the question of what it means to be governed. He suggests that if governmentalization subjugates individuals to certain truths through mechanisms of power, then “critique would essentially insure the desubjugation of the subject in the context of what we could call, in a world, the politics of truth.”49 The governmentalization of societies, which has prompted the question “how to be governed?”, therefore cannot be separated from the question of “how not to be governed?”, and critique is therefore “The art of not being governed quite so much.”50 Effective critique on television thus necessarily provides perspectives and knowledge that are independent from hegemonic/status quo politics, and can be used against them.
The use of anti-capitalist motifs on television certainly seems to satisfy Foucault’s understanding of critique, but caution is obviously required. After all, according to Postman and Gitlin, television is pre-eminently the medium of capitalism. As television critiques capitalism, the critique of capitalism is itself integrated into capitalism’s own mechanisms and
49 Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?” in The Politics of Truth, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, translated by Lysa
Hochroth and Catherine Porter, (1997, reprint, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 47.
self-reflections, and that is quite foreign to the notion of desubjugation in the context of the politics of truth. Moreover, it is clear that HBO’s more critical shows did not simply restructure commercial television into a paragon of journalistic and critical virtuosity. Frankly, while the quality of a subset of dramatic television has drastically improved over the past decades, still the majority of dramatic television does not employ the critical tone of HBO’s The Wire. In fact, Walter Benn Michaels points out the serial itself was not left unaffected by the markets, for “of course, you had to pay the HBO subscription fee to watch it.”51 Thus, one of the questions this study, and studies like it, must answer about the critique of capitalism on television is, whether the existence of any form of critique of capitalism on television is more valuable than the risk of allowing capitalism, through television, to co-opt its own critique.
It is furthermore important to emphasize a difference between the tragedy-critique of Miller’s contemporaries with the tragedy-critique of contemporary television. Miller critiques capitalism, but he does not, like David Simon, critique neoliberal capitalism specifically. Miller could not have referred to the concept, at least during his earlier plays, as it did not exist as we understand it today. “Neoliberalism” refers to the resurgence of 19th century laissez-faire economic ideas from the late 1970s onward, and is frequently associated with the free-market economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and political leaders Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It is certainly not an undisputed concept, with some denying its semantic distinction from free-market capitalism, and others lamenting it as a socialist hobbyhorse. This is in no small part because neoliberalism is ill-defined, and, as Boas and Gans-Morse point out, “used asymmetrically across ideological divides, rarely appearing in scholarship that makes positive assessments of the free market.”52 Usage in present-day scholarship and left-wing politics refers to radical free-market fundamentalism. Policy aspects that are associated with
51 Walter Benn Michaels, “Going Boom.”
52 Taylor C. Boas and Jordan Gans-Morse, “Neoliberalism: From New Liberal Philosophy to Anti-Liberal
the contemporary understanding of neoliberalism are deregulation, fiscal austerity, free trade, privatization, and small government. Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro have perhaps given the best explanation:
Neoliberal economics stands as the particular and newly dominant phase of capitalism defined by a set of core strategies involving the reestablishment of social inequality, the privatization of public resources, the deregulation of markets by disabling the State’s protective oversight, the financialization of everything into movements of fictitious (or speculative) capital, and the acceleration of disempowerment of any collective form of representation, but especially that of labor (unions) through a tactical deployment of individual liberty, the freedom of consumer choice in a world composed less by consensual negotiation than by selfish competition that is often predetermined for the benefit of an elite crony-cartel, and the embrace of entrepreneurial risk, as the “rational choice” for organizing even the most basic of life choices, such as housing and service utilities, health, education, and so on. In urban terms, it refers to the sociospatial restructuring of the city in the interests of a deregulated, speculative capital that seeks out “spatial fixes” for excess accumulation and thereby displaces and devalues established social formations and landscapes. Under these conditions of “Creative destruction,” urban governance involves new strategies of social control, policing, and surveillance, and managing social reproduction.53
53 Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro, “Tales of the Neoliberal City: The Wire’s Boundary Lines,” in The Wire:
Critics of neoliberalism inside and outside academic spheres, notably Noam Chomsky, Joseph Stiglitz, Slavoj Žižek, Noami Klein, and George Monbiot, argue that neoliberalism undermines liberal democracy because it offers a false liberalism. Monbiot writes: “Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.”54 Robert W. McChesney notes:
Instead of citizens, [neoliberalism] produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless. In sum, neoliberalism is the immediate and foremost enemy of genuine participatory democracy.55
It follows, if such critiques are valid, that the critique of neoliberalism in art is imperative; for while neoliberalism undermines democracy, public awareness is the foundation of democracy. However, if contemporary television critiques neoliberal capitalism, this does not necessarily mean that it also critiques capitalism as a whole. David Simon has explicitly stated “I don’t believe that a state-run economy can be as viable as market capitalism in producing mass wealth… I’m utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century.”56 It follows that, to Simon, the contradiction between neoliberalism and its critique on commercial television is more easily resolved than for, for instance, Michaels and Reed Jr. But, as Jeremy Gilbert suggests, perhaps a less explicit and abstract anti-capitalist mobilization against neoliberal capitalism, in this case through dramatic
54 George Monbiot, “Neoliberalism: The Ideology at the Root of all our Problems,” Guardian, 15 April, 2016.
Last accessed 6 April, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot.
55 Robert W. McChesney, introduction to Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global
Order, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999), 11.
television, might actually prove more effective politically.57 But television’s hesitance to wholly reject capitalism might also point to capitalist realism, a notion which Mark Fisher has defined as “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”58
One aspect which, in broad terms, television, tragedy, and capitalism share is an element of violence. Television famously is this medium of spectacular violence. David Simon once specifically named violence and sex as “the only two currencies that have been proven to work time and again.”59 Of course Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus are both very violent tragedies, but even Death of a Salesman also uses a lot of sublimated violence, notably the rubber pipe being a foreshadowing of Willy’s impending suicide, and just as important is Willy’s role as victimizer in his relation to his wife Linda. The relation between capitalism and violence is also nothing new. Karl Marx, for instance, famously predicted an eventual violent revolution of the oppressed proletariat against capitalists. He also expressed the belief that the economic relation of wage labor did not originate in bourgeois society, but in wartime.60 Alex Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu point out that the Western capitalist hegemony was partly established through relations of overt violence such as colonialism, indentured servitude, and slavery.61 Jeffrey Reiman points out that even though capitalism usually operates without overt violence, it does operate through a power-relation which he calls
57 Jeremy Gilbert, Anticapitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and Popular Politics, (Oxford: Berg, 2008), 128,
133.
58 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, (Winchester, UK: Zero, 2009): 2.
59 David Simon, interview by Craig McLean, “The Wire Creator David Simon Interview: ‘Violence and Sex are
the Only Two Currencies that Work on Television Time and Again,’” The Independent, 7 August, 2015, last accessed 30 January, 2017, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/the-wire-creator-david-simon-interview-violence-and-sex-are-the-only-two-currencies-that-work-on-10444973.html.
60 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, translated by Martin Nicolaus,
(New York: Random House, republication), 109.
61 Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of
structural coercion.62 And then there is the “monopoly on violence,” the notion which Max Weber has argued to be one of the core characteristics of the contemporary sovereign state, but which also suggests that violence is a market in the first place.63
Ultimately, if one is to assess or even critique a televisual critique, both the notion of critique as a conscious response as well as the notion of critique as the art of not being governed quite so much are therefore fundamentally important. “Is the critique coherent?” is the first important question that will determine whether a serial is able to maintain its critical function in the context of ideology, narrative storytelling, and commercial interests. A more specific version of that question tailored for The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Fargo is: “When does emphasizing social injustice through tragic violence transgress a border between violence as critique and violence as spectacle?” A second question is “Does the critique offer perspectives and knowledge that desubjugates the subject ‘in the context of the politics of truth?’” In other words, does the critique offer an alternative insight that has been overlooked or that has been suppressed by the status quo, that could potentially empower the individual? The first and second question are inextricably linked, for a critique that compromises itself by serving multiple interests is unlikely to be taken seriously as a form of desubjugation, just as one cannot advocate peace by waging war.
The Wire: Tragedy in a Neoliberal City
To find out whether the tragic elements of The Wire do in fact, to use Miller’s words, put a time bomb under anything, it is important to first understand what they are and what is special about them. The serial does not beat around the bush and establishes its gritty tone in the first scene; night time, streams of blood on asphalt, illuminated by police lights with an underscore of a
62 Jeffrey Reiman, As Free and as Just as Possible, (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell), 23.
63 Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” (lecture, Freistudentischen Bund. Landersverband Bayern, Munich,
wailing police siren.64 Such a shot may seem somewhat expected of a police procedural, but, in contrast with formulaic cop shows, The Wire does not use the scene to introduce a police case. Instead, the shot mainly serves to introduce the viewers to one of the serial’s major political themes: the ineffectiveness of Baltimore’s social institutions. Indeed, the shot shows the police unable to prevent a crime. Even though its significance can only be fully understood in relation to what follows, it is indicative of the tragic tone of The Wire.
In its entirety, the opening scene is a prologue in the form of a short tragedy; a statement of intent, as it were. After the shots of blood and asphalt, the camera cuts to a body in the middle of a dimly lit street. Some police officers are collecting evidence, one is writing on a notepad. From a distance, a few kids, no older than twelve, watch. The serial then cuts to two men, sitting on a curb. One we will come to know as detective Jimmy McNulty, the other is a black Baltimorean bystander. McNulty asks “So your boy’s name is what?” “Snot,” the man answers. “You call a guy snot?” McNulty asks. “Snot Boogie, yeah.” McNulty contemplates:
This kid, whose momma went through the trouble of christening him Omar Isaiah Betts. You know, he forgets his jacket so his nose starts running, and some asshole instead of giving him a Kleenex, he calls him “Snot.” So he’s “Snot” forever. Doesn’t seem fair.65
The Baltimorean man responds with a forlorn, “Life just be that way, I guess.” He goes on to tell McNulty that Snot would rob Friday night dice games in which he participated. “Every time?” asks McNulty? “Couldn’t help hisself.” Snot, then, is presented as a tragic hero whose flaw of compulsively robbing dice games caused his downfall. McNulty and the man agree that Snot deserved a beating, but they also agree that, in the man’s words, the “Motherfucker, ain’t
64The Wire, “The Target,” season 1, episode 1, directed by Clark Johnson, written by David Simon and Edward
Burns (NYC: HBO, 2002).
65 The Wire, “The Target,” season 1, episode 1, directed by Clark Johnson, written by David Simon and Edward
have to put no cap in him though.” It is clear that they experience a form of catharsis, as they watch with pitied faces, contemplating the unfortunate fate of Snot.
However, Snot’s story is but one of the many storylines in The Wire that follow a tragic story arc; most spanning several episodes or even seasons. For instance, the storyline of robber Omar Little shows a lot of similarities with traditional tragic narrative. Unlike Snot from the opening scene, Omar’s flaw is not the fact that he “couldn’t help hisself” from robbing drug dealers. In fact, he is shown to be quite good at it. Ironically, Omar’s flaw stems from his major strength: his strict moral code. Omar only robs people who are “in the game,” usually people protecting stash houses that belong to Baltimore’s most powerful drug kingpins, like Avon Barksdale, “Proposition” Joe Stewart, and Marlo Stanfield. When at one point Omar is jailed because Marlo’s people successfully frame the murder of an outsider on him, he pleads with homicide detective Bunk Moreland: “When have you ever known me to put my gun on anybody that wasn’t in the game?”66 To Omar the robberies are strictly business, knowing full well that his enemies would “get” him, given the chance. For him that is the risk of doing business. Omar, who is otherwise a coldblooded character, nevertheless allows himself to be guided by emotions when his enemies avenge him by getting to his lovers and friends. That is Omar’s tragic flaw. His storyline reaches its climax as Omar successfully robs a large shipment of drugs from a collective of drugs organizations called “the Co-Op,” and retires to a quiet life in Puerto Rico with his boyfriend.67 As everything seems to have quieted down, the tragedy of Omar has a reversal when Omar learns that Co-Op-member Marlo had ordered Omar’s friend Butchie to be tortured and killed. Omar returns to Baltimore dedicated to avenging the death. However,
66 The Wire, “Unto Others,” season 4, episode 7, directed by Anthony Hemingway, written by David Simon,
William F. Zorzi, Edward Burns, and Cris Collins, (NYC: HBO, 2006).
67 The Wire, “That’s Got His Own,” season 4, episode 12, directed by Joe Chapelle, written by David Simon,
Omar cannot find Marlo and becomes increasingly more incautious in his search.68 One day, after having wandered the streets, calling out messages for Marlo from outside his stash houses, Omar decides to go buy a pack of cigarettes, but one of Marlo’s corner boys follows and shoots him through the head, putting a crude and fittingly catastrophic end to a complex and principled tragic hero.69 Spanning 60 episodes over 5 seasons, the tragedy of Omar, rather than the tragedy of Snot, is representative of extent of The Wire’s tragic story arcs.
While on its own Omar’s storyline follows a more-or-less traditional story arc, The Wire as a whole does not. Rather, it interweaves several tragic stories to show a bigger picture of Baltimore as a city where tragedy is a continuous state of affairs. This is quite unlike Aristotle’s belief that a good tragedy has a self-contained plot, and follows the structure of beginning-middle-end.70 The contrast that is produced by the interweaving of, for instance, the “falling action” of the Barksdale organization and Mayor Royce, with the “rising action” of Marlo Stanfield and Mayor Carcetti, evens out story arcs and gives a sense of stagnation, like a “game,” where the rules and procedures remain as players change. There is even a sense that this tragedy is cyclical, as for instance, in one of the serial’s last scenes, an on-the-run Michael Lee, a former Stanfield corner boy suspected of talking to the police, robs a money laundering front with his hood up, holding a shot gun, speaking calmly and gently. Just before he walks away with a bag full of cash it is almost as if he channels the recently deceased Omar: “Nice doing business, gentlemen.”71 There may be a sense of resolution in the tragedy of Omar, but for the other Baltimoreans the tragedy goes on.
68 Ibid., “Transitions,” season 5, episode 4, directed by Daniel Attias, written by David Simon and Edward Burns
(NYC: HBO, 2008).
69 Ibid., “Clarifications,” season 5, episode 8, directed by Anthony Hemingway, written by David Simon and
Dennis Lehane (NYC: HBO, 2008).
70 Aristotle, Poetics, vi.
71 The Wire, “—30—,” season 5, episode 10, directed by Clark Johnson, written by David Simon and Ed Burns
The Wire should therefore not merely be understood as the struggle of the individual,
for, by interweaving its many storylines, it constructs its tragedy as the struggle of an internally divided collective from all social classes against complex forces that are bigger than any of them individually. Jason Mittell argues that, instead of any of The Wire’s human characters, the city of Baltimore itself is the lead character.72 Indeed, the serial portrays the conditions for crime not as isolated incidents that are conveniently molded into episodes, but as part of a much broader urban social context, which, fittingly, span episodes and seasons.73 Even though the serial portrays its social themes through a wide range of reoccurring characters, from the homeless Bubbles to career politician Tommy Carcetti, ultimately The Wire is about neither of them, and it is about both of them at the same time. That is, The Wire is not concerned with the particularities of these individual stories in and of them themselves. Rather, it is concerned with the particularities of individual stories because it understands that a city is a collective of individuals, and that these individuals are essential to the portrayal of Baltimore’s fundamental socio-economic flaws. To accomplish this, the The Wire does not over-emphasize any specific perspective or individual, but distributes its focus on city hall, criminal organizations, the docks, the judicial system, the newsroom, the police, the schools, the streets, and the individuals that inhabit those spaces, contrasting the black-and-white representation of good and bad in traditional examples of the cop show genre. Thus, The Wire shows, to use Simon’s words, a collective of “fated and doomed people” as their local institutions “[hurl] lightning bolts” at them for no reason.74
All of these formal and informal institutions have, among them, found a certain equilibrium that forces them to be what they are. To illustrate that effect The Wire shows how the war on drugs, instituted by government and enforced by police, has made drugs very
72 Jason Mittell, “The Wire in the Context of American Television,” 30. 73 Ibid.
precious. To protect their profitability, groups of drug dealers have formed feudal gang systems that provide responsibilities and rights for members, and violence for enemies. The war on drugs therefore has an accumulating effect: drugs policy enforcement raises the stakes by driving up the profitability of the trade, further incentivizing heavy protection, which leads to more violent crime, and necessitates even more resources to be spend in combatting it. The
Wire even speculates as to the reverse of that effect, as the free drug trade zones set up by the
recalcitrant police major Howard Colvin produce a significant drop in crime.75 But the serial also points out that societies often respond irrationally to pragmatic solutions, as Colvin’s policy causes major political backlash. The Wire, then, instead of presenting Baltimore’s society as a polarized collection of “good guys” versus “bad guys,” and “good institutions,” versus “bad institutions,” proposes a more nuanced view that society is a complex organism that moves in various complex and sometimes contradictory ways.
Nevertheless, those complex forces are not left undefined by The Wire, as the serial exposes the destructive snowballing effects of fiscal austerity, reductions in public spending, and, as a consequence, deliberate misrepresentation of social reality through the misuse of quantitative data, in a distinctly anti-neoliberal critique. For instance, the destructive effects of the austerity on public policy are exemplified through Mayor Clarence Royce’s administration. Sensing Tommy Carcetti’s run for mayor, Royce decides to require a cut in crime rates at all cost to steal the thunder from Carcetti, who, as city councilman, had been critical of City Hall’s handling of crime. Royce orders police leadership to accomplish a 5% reduction of felonies and a murder-rate ceiling of 275 for the year, effectively instituting quantitative over qualitative policing.76 City Hall’s policy change has various effects on the city’s institutions. For instance,
75 The Wire, “Reformations,” season 3, episode 10, directed by Christine Moore, written by David Simon and Ed
Burns, (NYC: HBO, 2004).
76 The Wire, “Time After Time,” season 3, episode 1, directed by Ed Bianchi, written by David Simon and Ed
in order to make clear to their subordinates that they are serious, Police Commissioner Burrell and Deputy Rawls fire Major Marvin Taylor who is unable to fulfill the command’s wishes. This prompts the other majors to use, in Major Howard Colvin’s words, “certain processes by which… [they] reduce the number of overall felonies.”77 However, Colvin himself refuses to doctor the statistics and decides to set up the previously mentioned free zones, nicknamed “Hamsterdam,” where drugs policing is not a priority, effectively legalizing drugs, which of course stirs up tensions on the district’s drug corners.78
The snowballing effects of austerity are similarly exemplified in the last two seasons, when an unforeseen schooling budget gap forces the seemingly well-willing Mayor Carcetti, who is a Democrat, to choose between, effectively giving up his gubernatorial run by pleading for help with the Republican governor–in doing so forfeiting local control over the schools against the will of the teachers–and a comprehensive austerity program that would force Carcetti to break his campaign promises of raising police wages and paying out backlogged overtime. Carcetti decides to reject bailout, which means that not only are the schools now underfunded, it also forces him to further slash the police budgets. These budgetary cutbacks result in rising crime rates, which on one hand facilitates Carcetti’s objective of replacing police commissioner Burrell, who presented Carcetti with “juked stats,” but on the other hand inspires homicide detective Jimmy McNulty and Lester Freamon to frame unaccounted-for homeless deaths as sensational serial killings to leverage funding for actual police work. Thus, The Wire shows how neoliberalism makes institutions apathetic to their social function, and how it provides further incentive for corruption.
If Carcetti’s character is to convey a universal truth for the world of The Wire, political capital and progressive change are mutually exclusive, as the power needed for progressive
77 Ibid., “Time After Time,” season 3, episode 1, directed by Ed Bianchi, written by David Simon and Ed Burns
(NYC: HBO, 2004)
78 Ibid., “Hamsterdam,” season 3, episode 4, directed by Ernest Dickerson, written by David Simon (NYC: HBO,
change can only be obtained by allowing oneself to be corrupted. When Tommy Carcetti first appears in Season 3, he is an idealistic and ambitious city councilman who hates the cronyism and corruption that he recognizes in the city. Carcetti is convinced that, given the chance, he would do things differently. However, by the end of Season 5 Mayor Carcetti is himself asking police leadership to juke the stats to help his gubernatorial run, appeasing his own consciousness with the utilitarian claim that he can be more effective for Baltimore as governor. Carcetti goes as far as to replace Police Commissioner Cedric Daniels, who Carcetti promoted because of his integrity, with the apparently less-principled Stan Valchek.79 Thus, by using tactics that motivated him to change city government, Tommy Carcetti ends up contributing to the continuation of that institutional culture. While he is shown to be hesitant about his actions, he does not back out, and ends up becoming the villain to his former self. Carcetti’s tragedy shows the downfall of his integrity to be inversely proportional to his political career, for, the world which David Simon argues to be neoliberal, apparently incentivizes cronyism and corruption.
Carcetti is not the only character whose story would be aptly described as a “tragedy of integrity.” The beforementioned Jimmy McNulty and Lester Freamon, the detectives who frame a fake serial killer to leverage the city budget, are doing similar moral gymnastics. While they believe that they are ultimately doing a good thing, even helping a few other detectives to close cases, they are unwilling and/or unable to recognize their contribution to a culture where, to get things done, apparently, one has to tread outside of moral and legal boundaries. When police leadership finds out and informs Carcetti about the actions of the detectives, the Carcetti administration, fittingly, orchestrates a cover up, and McNulty and Freamon are not appropriately punished.80 The downfall and catastrophe of characters like Carcetti, McNulty,
79 The Wire, “—30—,” season 5, episode 10, directed by Clark Johnson, written by David Simon and Ed Burns
(NYC: HBO, 2008).
80 The Wire, “—30—,” season 5, episode 10, directed by Clark Johnson, written by David Simon and Ed Burns
and Freamon are thus fittingly expressed through their loss of integrity, rather than a fall from public grace or jailtime, for their downfall implicates the continuation of cronyism and corruption through a culture of unaccountability, which is the true tragedy of Baltimore.
If Baltimore truly is the hero of this tragedy, neoliberal ideology is its tragic flaw. Free market ideology is so profoundly interwoven into the social fabric of the city that it has become “common sense” to most Baltimoreans. For instance, in the opening scene McNulty asks the bystander why Snot was allowed to return and play after robbing the dice games. The man answers, “Got to. This America man.”81 According to the Baltimorean man and the other dice players, apparently, Snot had to be allowed access to his free enterprise. But the tragedy of Snot points out a discrepancy between access to free enterprise, which Snot did have, and a fair chance at life, which he did not have as McNulty’s theory on his name suggests. “The game,” as the Baltimoreans call the black market and its processes, is not a rejection of but a reflection of the ideological and economic system that has failed them–this point is further emphasized through Stringer Bell who attempts to organize the Barksdale organization as a legitimate business. Ultimately the tragedy of Snot proves symbolic for the predicament of the powerless individual on the streets of Baltimore. Even before “the game” starts they are a point behind, yet they still return time and time again to play.
As a side note, if we are to take David Simon’s claim that he is not anti-capitalist at face value, the issue with The Wire as a critique of neoliberalism, and not capitalism as a whole, is that neoliberalism ends up a vague umbrella term for everything that is wrong with modern life.82 In this sense, neoliberalism is not a term that clarifies more about the dangers of capitalism than “crony capitalism,” a word that is used to suggest that with its eradication a
81 Ibid, “The Target,” season 1, episode 1, directed by Clark Johnson, written by David Simon and Edward Burns
(NYC: HBO, 2002).
pure capitalism emerges. In other words, to scapegoat neoliberalism in isolation means to argue that capitalism is not, in essence, a danger in and of itself.
It is important to emphasize that besides using tragedy as a vehicle for its critique, The
Wire uses the language of social realism. Social realism is always a form of social critique as
well, for it emphasizes the real social conditions of certain consciously selected individuals in a society. The notion that The Wire is a work of social realism is particularly significant because the medium it uses is one that has been repeatedly criticized for its inclination towards unrealism and fallaciousness by the likes of Minnow, Postman, Gitlin, and Wallace, from which it follows that to them a social realist critique of capitalism on television must have seemed implausible.
Unsurprisingly, the serial’s attempt at telling believable non-traditional televisual narratives means it takes fewer cues from traditional commercial television. As mentioned, David Simon specifically named sex and violence as “the only two currencies that have been proven to work time and again.”83 That is not to suggest that sex and violence play no role in
The Wire, evidenced by several romance scenes as well as many murders and shootings, but it
would be an overstatement to say that The Wire attempts to exploit these themes for commercial gain. In fact, in typical social realist fashion the serial neither denies the existence of sex and violence nor attracts undue attention to them. For The Wire the avoidance of commercial tropes goes beyond sex and violence. Indeed, the serial arguably does not even invite that great postmodern pastime of binge-watching, for, by not using overtly televisual tricks like cliff-hangers and mystery, it does not entice its viewers to crave what comes. Indeed, once familiarized with the narrative tone, watching The Wire often feels more like watching inevitable suffering, or taking “punches to the gut” over and over again. Thus, it invites a dosed
83 Ibid, interview by Craig McLean, “‘The Wire’ Creator David Simon Interview: ‘Violence and Sex are the
intake, for watching it episode-after-episode would probably serve cynicism more than it would serve its critique.
Indeed, The Wire’s combination of social realism with continuous and cyclical tragedy pushed it to be particularly pessimistic and cynical. The serial comes eerily close to suggesting that real Baltimorean (and broader neoliberal capitalist) society is corrupt and nothing can be done to stop it. Rather than social realism, this is reminiscent of the notion of capitalist realism; the inability to imagine alternatives to capitalism. If the reality of Baltimore is indeed tragic and cyclical, there is no point in trying to turn the tide. And nothing could be more foreign to the notion of desubjugation of the subject in the context of the politics of truth than the resignation of hope for progressive change. Therefore, to an extent the serial’s critique of neoliberal society falls flat, for, one of the characteristics that allows tragedy to achieve an effect that is cathartic and not merely melancholic, is the knowledge that the fate of the tragic hero, Baltimore, could have been avoided. As noted, Aristotle suggested that the perfect tragic hero was neither good nor bad, and that the hero’s fate was neither merely catastrophic nor completely inevitable, but most importantly that the hero could be identified with.84 Only then does the narrative serve to cleanse pity and fear.
In the end, even if The Wire is able to answer “how not to be governed?” by showing social issues in a context of ideological and systemic injustice, and explicitly avoiding becoming binge-watch-television, it will remain of niche relevance. That is not to say that somber themes are always destructive for televisual success, but The Wire’s despair is essential to its own coherence. With a more optimistic, funny, or ironic tone it may have fared better as a television show, but that approach would deflate its own political message. Journalist Matthew Yglesias rightly points out: “[Certainly, trying to] do a piece of extended drama that embodied the values of pragmatic progressive reformism would be impossible. The results…
