"Trapped in the same lie": Artifice and absence in the last episode of The Wire

(And now for the inevitable anticlimax, goaded out of me by Realdoc and others. Just be grateful that I've trimmed most of the Baudrillard and all the Barthes from it - at one point, it was about twice the length, not including footnotes. I did think a SPOILER ALERT might be appropriate here, but since The Wire is officially the greatest show you've never seen, and probably never will, there's not much point. Unless this provokes one or two of you to join the club, of course.)

The Wire is lauded for its realism; but of course, it is not real. We know the names of the actors who pretend to be cops and gangsters, teachers and students, politicians and journalists and dockers and priests and junkies and hookers; we know the names of the writers who put words in their mouths, and the directors and the producers too. The true obsessives know the cameramen and the editors and the stunt performers and all the musicians who recorded the various versions of the Tom Waits song and the person who crafted Brother Mouzone's bowtie.

But that's not what realism means, of course. Realism at its best means the art of lulling the viewer into two parallel states of consciousness: deep down, they know it's not real; but at the same time, they care as if it is real. The fun is in the tension between the two states. By the last episode of the last season, the makers had grown confident enough to play metafictional games with the audience, dancing in the spaces between The Wire's universe and ours, without severing that emotional, unironic bond.

It's in similar territory to Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt: deliberately alerting the audience to the artificiality of the drama to remind them that the big themes are more important than the imaginary characters. But David Simon (the most appropriate candidate for the role of 'author' here, if such a job title still exists) goes one better; he downplays the reality of Wireworld by allowing real Baltimore to intrude. Entangle yourself with the hyperreality of Omar and Kima and Carcetti; just remember that there's something approaching reality (that's real reality) going on at the same time.

Think of the relationship between the actors and the roles they play. Many characters take their names from real individuals in Baltimore; Sgt Jay Landsman for example, who appears both as a character (played by Delaney Williams) and as an actor (playing Dennis Mello). Journalist Bill Zorzi and convicted killer Felicia 'Snoop' Phelps, meanwhile, play themselves, or at least characters who share their names. Elsewhere, the producers cast from the headlines: reformed drug dealer Melvin Williams (who was arrested by David Simon's colleage Ed Burns) plays the Deacon; disgraced police commissioner Ed Norris plays a cop called, uh, Ed Norris, And sometimes it's just a matter of settling scores: Simon named a loathesome police lieutenant 'Marimow' to get back at one of his bêtes noires from his days on the Baltimore Sun. That's the real Baltimore Sun, by the way, not the fictional one on screen...

Ah, the paper. Which brings us to the last season, and the last episode, and the title screams its intentions. "-30-" is journalese to signify the end of a piece of copy. Not only is our attention drawn to the fact that this is the last episode; it also labels The Wire as a piece of journalism, something purporting to be true. Except that, as Scott Templeton's concoctions spiral out of control, and his paymasters turn a blind eye, we know that any claim that journalism may once have had on the truth is long gone.

Not that anyone else has clean hands, of course. As Norman Wilson says at the beginning of the episode: "Everyone's getting what they need behind some make-believe." Mayor Carcetti has just realised that his ascent to the Governorship may be derailed because the serial killer that he used as a way to lambast the State for lack of funding doesn't actually exist. He's a politician, so he's used to lying; what throws him is the fact that this time he thought he was telling the truth. Similarly, Templeton is a journalist, and well used to embroidering the truth; but on this story, he's unaware that his embroidery is decorating an invention. It's empty and, as his colleague Alma discovers, so is the notebook he wields as a badge of his journalistic integrity.

This emptiness, this absence, becomes a central theme when McNulty finds himself confronted by a classic simulacrum - a copycat of a killer that doesn't exist. "The lie's so big," he declares, channeling Goebbels, "people can't live with it." But they can, and they do, as the (conveniently insane) copycat is blamed for the other killings and Carcetti gets his photo-op.

But there's one more absence, one more lie to deal with. In the past, policemen who died have had wakes staged for them; this has also been a handy way for the makers to acknowledge the passing of cast members (both Foerster and Cole were honoured thus when the actors who played them died). These were fictional funerals to mark real deaths; McNulty now receives a wake when he (the character) isn't even dead. Except that this is the last episode, and as far as the viewer's concerned, he may as well have taken a bullet; Landsman's eulogy is for The Wire itself. -30-. It's all make-believe after all; the only difference is, the make-believe in The Wire won no prizes, unlike Templeton's Pulitzer-worthy creations.



In the end, only two characters break free from the cycle of mendacity, although they both express their moral purity in unlikely ways. Daniels, unwilling to help the new mayor by producing statistical bullshit, leaves the force entirely and becomes a defence lawyer, in which role, presumably, he lies for a living; but at least he and everyone else knows it's an act. And Marlo, encouraged by Levy to reinvent himself as a legitimate businessman, slips away from the posh party, knowing that his true self can only exist on the street. By acknowledging himself as irredeemably evil, he achieves a sort of nobility through self-knowledge; a sort of truth.

It's life, Jim...

In which I create a fictional detective who blurs the distinction between reality and fiction while covering the Haut de la Garenne case, but resist the temptation to call him Borgerac.

And while we're in the area, that Wire final episode effusion will be with you very soon, and I mean it this time. Oh, and Wyndham's pissed off again.

...plus c'est la même chose

3:am magazine is gracious enough to direct us to Reality Studio, a Burroughs site that has the complete archive of My Own Mag, the mid-60s publication created by artist, poet and all-round provocateur Jeff Nuttall.

Now, I never really found myself on the same wavelength as Nuttall. I first heard of him in the late 1980s, when I was growing increasingly exasperated with the dayglo floristry that constituted the 1960s revival of the time, which glossed over the social and political upheavals - Vietnam, Black Power, gay and women's rights, Powellism - in favour of footage of dollybirds dancing in parks (the sort of thing I described here).

But by the time I got to Nuttall's seminal work, Bomb Culture (thanks, Murph), I'd read equivalent volumes by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Guy Debord and Richard Neville, and Nuttall's opinions on how to stick it to The Man gave me a distinct feeling of déjà lu.

Now, though, looking through the scrawls and doodles of his earlier stuff, you see the urgency, the need to communicate, that informs the best of blogging. OK, the mechanics of production and transmission are different, and you don't get the same sense of conversation (© Patroclus), although I'm sure the magazines provoked plenty of it.

And I bet there was some 1960s equivalent of bloody Andrew Keen to sneer about how amateurish the whole project was.

And just to prove the decade could indeed be dangerous and subversive and unexpected, not just jolly and tuneful, here's Jimi Hendrix and chums giving Lulu's producers psychedelic kittens. RIP Mitch Mitchell.

Another one bites the cyberdust

Patroclus has dropped her heaviest hint yet that she's going to knock this blogging malarkey on the head. I should respect her decision; or take a big-picture, Zen view of the whole thing, and accept that shit happens; or even play reverse psychology games and say that I never liked her poxy site, with its Pictish cryptograms and nerdy crushes on Steven Johnson and Cornish babies and two felt pens and all that, and good riddance, and neerrrrr.

But I'm just going to sulk, and occasionally kick the leg of this desk.

Big words

So I finally worked out how to post a word cloud, but then the chapter had to undergo some last-minute revisions, and then I forgot all about it and blah-di-blah. Whatever, as my niece Lily says, and she really shouldn't, but it's very funny when she does, 'cos she's only five.

Anyway, here's the text of the chapter I've contributed to the forthcoming title Radiohead and Philosophy, to be published by Open Court some time early next year. Click to make it larger. I can't imagine that any of the predominant words will surprise anyone, although I do use "profound" rather too much, don't I?



(Image from www.wordie.net)

When I get older, losing my hair

(I suppose I should post something about Obama but, really, what is there to say? The sheriff is near...)

The other day, I had an Ayurvedic fusion massage. It was work, not play: I was reviewing the spa facilities at a big posh hotel. This isn't my usual sort of gig, I should stress. I tend to cover restaurants, shops and the like; activities where you keep your mind on the job, and most of your clothes on. As I submitted to the expert fingers of my therapist, I wondered how one is supposed to review such an experience; how can you keep your critical faculties intact when the whole point of the experience is to drift off into a sort of blissful half-sleep? Like the Sixties, if you remember it, you weren't there.

At one point, she proferred a tub of some fragrant unguent, laced with ginger, aloe and apricot, explaining that it would strengthen my hair roots. As she rubbed it into my scalp, I wondered whether such claims would stand up to the rigours of the Advertising Standards Authority. I do remember that purveyors of hair products are forbidden from saying that such-and-such can give you healthy hair, because all visible hair is essentially dead; the best you can hope for is "healthy-looking hair". But what does that mean? If something can't in reality be healthy, how can it look healthy? Could you have a healthy-looking rock, or a healthy-looking chair?

The fact that my mind was meandering along such a pointless, meaningless trajectory is, I suppose a tribute to the care-kneading properties of the spa. Maybe I should just type 1000 words of stream-of-consciousness bollocks and say there, that's how good this place is.

On the way home on the train, still slightly spaced out, I found my battered copy of Douglas Coupland's The Gum Thief tangled up with various press releases at the bottom of my bag, and realised that three weeks ago, I'd got to within 20 pages of the end and then forgotten about it. Which may say something about Coupland's ability to write compelling prose, or my ability to finish what I'd started, or both. Or, of course, neither.

But I won't review the book, except to say that it feels like an uneasy synthesis of Coupland's self-consciously post-modernly smartarse works (Generation X, Microserfs, JPod - the ones where it sometimes feels as if the plot is just an excuse for a barrage of one-liners) and the more heartfelt ones about dysfunctional families and suburban loneliness (All Families Are Psychotic, Eleanor Rigby).

I'll just offer this short extract:

By twenty-five you know you're never going to be a rock star, by thirty you know you're never going to be a dentist, and by forty there are maybe three things left that you can still possibly be -- and even then, that's only if you run as fast as you possibly can to try to catch the train.

Which links, however tangentially, with two events of the weekend; my bubblewrap-related midlife crisis and seeing Nick and Barney for the first time in Dawkins knows how long. Because, with all due respect to the many fine, upstanding, dedicated, talented firefighters and brain surgeons and teachers and fishmongers and actuaries and Sudoku compilers and lumberjacks and bank clerks and hod carriers and psychiatric social workers and morticians and spivs and dilettantes and flâneurs and hotel spa reviewers out there, I've come to the conclusion that there are only two jobs worth doing: editing the Guinness Book of Records; and being a Dalek. And between us, we cracked them both. Before we were forty.

Wrapper's delight

There were a couple of largeish sheets of bubblewrap on the bedroom floor. I picked them up and put them in the bin, without experiencing the slightest desire to pop them.

I think I've finally grown up.

One of us

Yesterday saw a delightful evening with my old chums Nick and Barney, who are such erudite polymaths (books, paintings, songs, plays and more) that it seems rather reductive to describe them as Dalek operators, but I suspect that's what will appear on their gravestones. Sadly, none of their Dr Who gossip is fit to repeat in the public sphere, but by the end of the evening we had decided that this



should be remade starring these guys:



Which leads, I suppose, to a meme of sorts: pick a film to be reimagined (as is now the preferred terminology) and the band you'd like to see populating it.

Or, if you prefer, just make up something sordid about Dr Who.