The Wire : urban decay and American television

263 Pages·2009·1.287 MB·English

by  Marshall, C. W., Potter, Tiffany

The Wire
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The Wire
Urban Decay and American Television
edited by
Tiff any Potter
and
C. W. Marshall
2009
Th e Continuum International Publishing Group Inc
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
Th e Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
Th e Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
Copyright © 2009 by Tiff any Potter and C. W. Marshall
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written
permission of the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN: HB: 978-0-8264-2345-0
PB: 978-0-8264-3804-1
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt. Ltd. Chennai, India
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgements ..........................................................................vii
“I am the American Dream”: Modern Urban Tragedy and
the Borders of Fiction
C. W. Marshall and Tiff any Potter ................................................1
Baltimore before Th e Wire
Afaa M. Weaver...........................................................................15
I. Baltimore and Its Institutions
1. Yesterday’s Tomorrow Today: Baltimore and the
Promise of Reform
David M. Alff ..................................................................................23
2. “We ain’t got no yard”: Crime, Development, and Urban
Environment
Peter Clandfi eld ..............................................................................37
3. Heroism, Institutions, and the Police Procedural
Alasdair McMillan ......................................................................50
4. Th e Narrative Production of “Real Police”
Ryan Brooks .................................................................................64
5. “I Got the Shotgun, You Got the Briefcase”: Lawyering
and Ethics
Lynne Viti ....................................................................................78
6. Posing Problems and Picking Fights: Critical Pedagogy
and the Corner Boys
Ralph Beliveau and Laura Bolf-Beliveau ...................................91
v
vi CONTENTS
II. On the Corner
7. Corner-Boy Masculinity: Intersections of
Inner-City Manhood
James Braxton Peterson ............................................................107
8. Stringer Bell’s Lament: Violence and Legitimacy in
Contemporary Capitalism
Jason Read .................................................................................122
9. Networks of Affi liation: Familialism and Anticorporatism
in Black and White
Stephen Lucasi ...........................................................................135
10. Barksdale Women: Crime, Empire, and the Production
of Gender
Courtney D. Marshall ...............................................................149
11. Aft er the Towers Fell: Bodie Broadus and the Space
of Memory
Elizabeth Bonjean .....................................................................162
III. Twenty-fi rst-Century Television
12. “Th e Dickensian Aspect”: Melodrama, Viewer Engagement,
and the Socially Conscious Text
Amanda Ann Klein ...................................................................177
13. It’s All Connected: Televisual Narrative Complexity
Ted Nannicelli ............................................................................190
14. Dislocating America: Agnieszka Holland Directs “Moral
Midgetry”
Kevin McNeilly ..........................................................................203
15. “Gots to Get Got”: Social Justice and Audience Response
to Omar Little
Kathleen LeBesco .......................................................................217
Works Cited .....................................................................................233
Episode List .....................................................................................243
Notes on Contributors.....................................................................245
Index ................................................................................................247
Acknowledgements
As with any edited volume, and particularly with a scholarly collection
such as this, we have incurred many debts along the way. We are grateful
to all our contributors, and to the people at Continuum for their assis-
tance in bringing this project to fruition. We would like to thank for
their assistance David Barker, Laura Hamilton, and Sam Tucker. We are
also grateful to the University of British Columbia Hampton Fund and
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for
funding research time. We are grateful to HBO for permission to use the
cover images. Above all, we would like to acknowledge our great debt to
Hallie Marshall and Ken Madden, for constant support, encouragement,
insights, conversations, and (especially) for their tolerance of our obses-
sion with television. Really, it’s incredible what they put up with. You
have no idea.
vii
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“I am the American Dream”:
Modern Urban Tragedy and
the Borders of Fiction
C. W. Marshall and Tiff any Potter
“It’s kinda fun fi guring shit out.”
—Prez (1.07)
Requiem for Snot Boogie
A cop and a drug dealer are sitting on a stoop in front of a boarded-up
vacant, talking about the murdered man on the street before them. Th e
opening dialogue of Th e Wire (1.01) encapsulates so many of the series’
tensions that it is worth spending a moment contemplating the fate of
Snot Boogie. Street names are in some ways a cover, hiding who you are:
for a while, Little Kevin’s physiologically inapt name keeps him safe from
police (4.09). But they are also a badge, of honor or of shame. Th e cop,
Jimmy McNulty, contemplates the body on the ground: “. . . his nose
starts runnin’, and some asshole, instead of giving him a Kleenex, he
calls him Snot. So he’s Snot forever. It doesn’t seem fair.” It isn’t fair, and
the show implicates its viewers in that unfairness by drawing us into a
position where we oft en think of characters only by their street names.
Bodie, Stringer, Wee-Bey, and Snoop don’t have recognizable fi rst
names for most viewers, and even if the names are known (Preston,
1