I Am NOT the Beastmaster

"We have some facts of our own"

The Wire is never more Wire-like than when it shows the vultures circling.  Seemingly everybody in episode five is out to play each other and doing a damn fine job of it, whether it's Marlo setting up Omar, Nerese finessing Clay Davis the way she did Burrell, Levy chortling as Marlo waltzes right into an anticipated wiretap case, or Herc--Herc!--finally remembering his friends.  And who would ever have thought he'd be in contention (a minor challenger, admittedly) for the Craftiest Bastard?

No, everybody is a crafty bastard this week, with the exception of McNulty and Freamon.  Now they're pulling resources away from real cases--including the case they started these phoney murders to investigate!--and driving Clay Davis's indictment off the front pages, and they don't yet have anything to show for it.  That's a great moment at the end as Lester is befuddled by Marlo's text message, but it just confirms that he and Jimmy are once again this week's stupidest assholes.  And Herc shows a flash of intelligence!  Has the world gone mad?

The fake serial killer plot gets tied in neatly--a little too neatly--with the fake journalist plot.  (And we get not one but two hard confirmations that Templeton's been juicing his stories, no surprises there.)  That sets up a wonderful instability between Templeton and McNulty as each one suspects the other is lying and neither one can openly say anything about it.  It's a perfect narrative tension primed to blow up in everybody's faces, but I wonder if that kind of suspense story belongs in The Wire.  This show works best when it uses the narrative framework of high-end police investigation to scale up and down the hierarchies of various institutions, surveying their successes and failures.  It's outgrown its investigative origins before--most effectively in the school plot of season four--but it never lost its original focus on drug crime and the institutions that tolerate or empower it.

Until now?  Of all the criticisms of season five and the newspaper plot--here's another one for your list, complete with a title that reeks of fan entitlement--the best has probably come from Matthew Yglesias in the WireTAP: 

...it's simply not the case that to understand ghetto crime you need to understand the decline of metropolitan daily newspapers in mid-sized American cities.  Simon happens to be interested in this issue because he used to work at one, and since a daily newspaper covers everything that happens in a city it's easy to make a media plotline intersect with a politics story, a crime story, an education story or whatever else. But an intersection is not the same as a rich, thematic entwinement and the story of crime in America and the story of the decline of the newspaper from its mid-century golden age are fundamentally different stories. Crime is much lower in urban America than it was 20 years ago despite steady erosion of daily papers like the Sun; these are simply separate questions.

The Wire is about more than mere "ghetto crime"--it's about the decline of civic institutions in general, so a newspaper fits on that front, and it's about the effects of postmodern capitalism (more on that later this week, I swear!), so the story of the Sun's decline is distantly related to the decline of the unions, police, schools, even the drug gangs themselves.  But it's only related at the most Olympian, macroeconomic level, and Yglesias's point seems fundamentally sound:  what do broke cities, corrupt bureaucracies, or sociopathic drug kingpins have to do with careerist reporters who juice their quotes?  I'm not sure what the two fabricator plots tell us about journalism or police work--let alone drug crime!--that couldn't have been said with far less outlandish developments.  The Wire draws its stories from an amazingly broad canvas, but the newspaper plot may have wandered off the frame.

Back in the early PR push, David Simon said season five would answer the question of why nobody pays attention to the people and problems depicted on The Wire.  So far it hasn't done that.  It's shown why newspapers can't cover stories with the breadth or depth they once had, but it hasn't shown why readers don't care.  It hasn't shown why other media aren't picking up the slack.  Except for a couple of bitter lines about missing white women in Aruba and dead bodies in the wrong zip codes--pointed and probably accurate, but maybe a little too narrowly aimed?--it hasn't answered or really even raised the question of why nobody is paying attention to the inner cities.

There is one major improvement in the media coverage this week--the criticism has expanded from the sagging ambitions of print to the manufactured outrage of talk radio.  This being Baltimore, the outrage runs to black paranoia rather than white but the show pulls no punches as Clay Davis martyrs himself with the full support of corrupt or just plain gullible politicians, radio hosts, church leaders, and a reassuringly tiny handful of citizens.  Those few tightly drawn scenes probably do more than the whole slow-motion funeral for the Sun does to answer the question of why nobody pays attention.  Politicians like Clay Davis and Clarence Royce, whose constituents are most affected by the drug trade and the war on drugs, are more interested in self-enrichment and self-preservation.  They protect their position by rallying around a racial politics as crass and divisive as anything coming from the other side, and the local media are only too happy to encourage them.  A story that should be about Clay's fake charities and ties to drug traffickers instead becomes a puffed-up drama of racial persecution--all the more galling when you consider that the people Davis is hurting and the state's attorney who's prosecuting him are themselves black.

And when Davis starts claiming there are two sides to every story and boasting that he has some facts of his own--echoing the press's obsessions with a false objectivity and even-handedness that cloud rather than expose the truth--that's a more damning indictment of the media than all the Sun scenes to date.  The criticism is finally starting to gel, and it's got nothing to do with fake serial killers or juiced quotes.  It's got everything to do with the show's old standbys of drug crime and corrupt institutions.  I hope future episodes build on it.

Other Wire business:

• Forgot to mention this last week, but episode four's homeless scenes were absolutely chilling.  Whether it was the guy who couldn't talk because he had to go to work or Johnny Fifty sitting there with the other homeless, his steady union dispatcher job presumably gone... yow.  That's how The Wire makes its best points--simple observed detail, not wild plotlines.
• Did Jimmy switch his story about the killer calling from a pay phone to a cell phone?  I suppose he'd have to--otherwise the detectives would notice when the false tap wasn't picking up any calls.  But that's one way he and Lester could get caught...
• And apparently Omar is now a superhero.  Fuck it, I'm still rooting for him.

Another Reason to Like Michael Chabon

He likes Barack Obama, and for one of the best reasons.  (No word on how he feels about Omar.)

In the same paper, Erica Jong writes a piece endorsing Clinton called "Hillary vs. the Patriarchy."  Because nothing would topple the patriarchy like voting for a woman based on who she married.  Or supporting another "liberal hawk" and DLC centrist who believes the only way to defeat the establishment is to vote just like it.

The amazing thing about Jong's piece is that it contains almost nothing supporting Clinton's policies or her accomplishments in office.  She praises Clinton for her triangulation and compromise on Iraq and Iran, not because she says those are the right stands to take, but because she says those are the stands that will help Clinton get elected.  Her biggest argument is that Hillary Clinton regularly caves in to the opposition and supports George W. Bush's saber-rattling so she can be the most electable candidate--in 2004.

Like many Clinton supporters, Jong can't let her arguments for Hillary pass without slipping in a couple shots at Obama.  (Chabon follows the example of his candidate and makes an affirmative case for Barack Obama without stooping to name, let alone attack, his opponent.  I wish I met that standard.)  She claims Obama was "lucky enough not to be in the Senate when the Iraq war resolution was floated," implying that he somehow ducked the issue when in fact he took a considerable political risk by speaking out against the Iraq war at a time when "Dixie Chick" was becoming a very nasty verb.  Jong hints, without quite having the courage to say it, that supporting Obama is "tokenism and condescension," which is pretty damn condescending itself--as if we only like Obama for his symbolic value and not his actual values.

Her piece is also a great illustration of Chabon's point that so many of the arguments made by establishment Democrats against Obama boil down to fear--fear that anybody who doesn't make the cynical, cowardly choices the Clintons made is somehow incapable of winning office in this country.  One of the best things about Obama's campaign, the element Chabon highlights, is that he's showing us we don't have to shed our principles.  We don't have to become the things we fear.  Barack Obama (and John Edwards, for that matter, when he was still in the campaign) is inspiring because he offers something that's been completely absent from our political discourse over the last eight to fifteen years--so absent we didn't even know it was missing.  We've forgotten that leaders can appeal to our best instincts and not our worst.  And he can actually win the White House, if primary voters reject the self-defeating calculations that drip from Jong's piece.

In short, Michael Chabon and Erica Jong have both written fantastic endorsements of Barack Obama.

"These are volatile times"

A step back from the heights of episode three, although there was a lot to like this week.

Mostly the fallout from last week as the mayor tries to drive out Burrell.  No appearance by my favorite bastard, but I like that Stan is Roger Twigg's go-to guy for dirt on the commissioner--that makes perfect sense.  The Craftiest this week has got to be Nerese Campbell, who not only corners Carcetti into handing public housing over to her developer pal, who not only gets Burrell to leave quietly without opening his file on Daniels, she walks away with the file!  No wit wasted on that woman.  Honorable mention to Bond for scheduling the Clay Davis Perp Walk.

Templeton finally gets a little praise from Haynes and a sense of belonging in the newsroom--a few episodes too late, at the very least.

Carver continues to grow into a real police and a real officer, although it means outgrowing his dumbass buddies who've been reared on "the Western District way" of breaking heads first and taking names later.  (And speaking of the Western District way... where's Walker?)  Nice to see him maturing into leadership material.  Probably something we can chalk up to Bunny Colvin, still helping the department long after his shitcanning.

Another upset in the sweepstakes:  Herc actually gets a fucking clue.  Not only is he not the dumbest guy in the episode, for once he's not even the dumbest guy in the room.  That honor goes to Proposition Joe Stewart, the Dumbest Asshole in a season that's been full of them.  I guess all those whispers to Slim Charles in the co-op meetings amounted to jack shit--he seemed to have no clue that Marlo was making a move on him, even with his suspicions that Cheese tipped him off to Butchie.  I would say that Cheese's reign over the east side will not be a long one, but with everybody thinking Joe's gone into hiding, who knows how long of a grace period he's got?  His biggest threat in the immediate run is his new pal Marlo.

Joe dies (oh, uh... spoiler alert!) for the same reason Stringer Bell did, thinking he could organize and regulate a trade that has come to thrive on violence and social devastation.  That doesn't make him any less stupid for ignoring all the obvious signs that Marlo was contemplating a move.

Then again, a word from his connect would have helped--I have to wonder what the Greek was thinking.  Vondas says no, valuing Joe's discretion and showing him some loyalty.  (Just as he did with Nick back in season two... not a bad guy for a drug dealer and body trafficker, that Vondas.  And not a bad dancer!)  Why does the Greek overrule him?  He says it's because he knows Marlo will come back anyway, but he can't be afraid of Marlo, can he?  He could just pack up and leave the diner forever and Marlo would have no way of finding him.  Does the Greek just want insurance in case Joe screws up again?  Or does he assume Marlo is going to take out Joe regardless, and he wants to back the winner early?

In any case, the Greek's assent dooms Joe, replacing his cautious, capable distributor with a stone cold sociopath who barely understands the finer points of his trade.  I have to hope that comes back on the Greek--god, I would love to watch Major Crimes work Marlo's organization back to him but I just don't see that happening.

Marlo, of course, is this week's Biggest Asshole, with Cheese a close but thankfully less competent second.  It's not just about the killings or the betrayals or even that laugh as he turns his back on Herc.  It's that look in his eyes as he watches Joe die. He gets off on it.  We've known for a while that he's a sociopath who respects no co-op, no mentor, no code whatsoever, but that look drove it home.  Now I'm more desperate than ever, even after the security guard last season, to see Marlo get his due.

Which puts me right where the show wants me, with all my hopes pinned not on Lester Freamon or Jimmy McNulty or even Proposition Joe, but on Omar.  The romanticizing of Omar has always troubled me, but damned if I can't wait to see him make his move on Monk.

You know, if the writers really want to mess with our sympathies, they should set Omar after an up-and-coming young soldier named Michael...

The Undisturbed Vision

One way or another, most of the criticism of The Wire's fifth season has boiled down to the show stepping onto journalists' home turf.  Some of the criticisms are valid; some are honest oversights as journalists forget the show has always been exploring somebody's work culture; and some oversights are more calculated and more personal. For an example of the last type, look no further than Mark Bowden's article in The Atlantic.

Bowden opens his piece with enough praise for The Wire that his criticisms initially seem motivated by a reasonable concern for the show's quality.  They run for several paragraphs before he discloses that he's friends with William Marimow and John Carroll, a pair of former Baltimore Sun editors who have a long-running feud with David Simon who inspired this season's Klebanow and Whiting.  Before he gets around to mentioning his rooting interest, however, Bowden speculates that Simon's political views have overwhelmed his commitment to the truth:

This bleakness is Simon’s stamp on the show, and it suggests that his political passions ultimately trump his commitment to accuracy or evenhandedness.

[...]

But the more passionate your convictions, the harder it is to resist tampering with the contradictions and stubborn messiness of real life.  Just when you think you have the thing figured out, you learn something that shatters your carefully wrought vision. Being surprised is the essence of good reporting. But it’s also the moment when a dishonest writer is tempted to fudge, for the sake of commercial success—and a more honest writer like Simon, whose passion is political and personal, is tempted to shift his energies to fiction.

Which is precisely what he’s done. Simon is the reporter who knows enough about Baltimore to have his story all figured out, but instead of risking the coherence of his vision by doing what reporters do, heading back out day after day to observe, to ask more questions, to take more notes, he has stopped reporting and started inventing. He says, I have figured this thing out.  He offers up his undisturbed vision, leaving out the things that don’t fit, adding things that emphasize its fundamentals, and then using the trappings of realism to dress it up and bring it to life onscreen.

Bowden doesn't exactly say that Simon has fudged the facts; that would require substantiation, which he doesn't provide.  He just equates writing fiction with muddling the truth and claims, with no evidence offered, that Simon has left out anything that doesn't fit his vision.  As season five has devoted more attention to the dire consequences of fabrication, and as it has vilified the quote-juicing Scott Templeton, Bowden's insinuations about accuracy and honesty begin to look more and more appalling--like vicious but indirect attacks on Simon's integrity.

Bowden says fiction "frees you from concerns about libel and cruelty. It frees you to be unfair."  Like his earlier comment about "evenhandedness," that says less about David Simon and The Wire than it does about the modern media's obsession with a toothless and illusory "objectivity" that presumes there are always two (and usually only two) equally valid sides to every story.  Mark Bowden, for example, apparently believed that he could "characterize" the dispute between Simon and Marimow and Carroll "without entering it," even though he admits that Marimow and Carroll are his friends and Marimow was a longtime colleague.  (Then again, Mark Bowden also believes there's a valid case for torture.)

Curiously, while various journalists have rushed to defend Marimow and Carroll, none of them have named The Wire's third Baltimore Sun target, reporter Jim Haner.  (A couple of fabricated events and quotes, along with accusations by Simon and others that Haner invented these details "to jazz up his stories and his status," apparently inspired the Templeton plot.)  Bowden only refers to Haner as "a widely respected Sun reporter, protected by Carroll and Marimow."  Perhaps Bowden and the Sun's other defenders don't want to sully Haner's reputation any further, but it strikes me as perverse that Bowden would compare Simon's markedly fictional narrative with "tampering" and fudging the truth while concealing the name of a reporter who's accused of fabricating quotes and facts in his newspaper articles--not to mention defending the editors who protected that reporter.

In short, the more I learn about Simon's feuds with the Sun and the more season five addresses the corrosive effects of dishonesty in the media, the more Bowden's comments read like the ultimate in hypocrisy.  For a legitimately evenhanded take on the Simon-Marimow & Carroll feud, I recommend this Columbia Journalism Review piece.  Lawrence Lanahan reports on some of the same events Bowden describes--and includes key information Bowden omits, like Simon's kind words for Carroll and Marimow's recent troubles, his realization of "his own smallness and pettiness," and his determination to take season five beyond his old grudges.

What was that about the undisturbed vision?  Thank God journalists like Mark Bowden are around to give us the fair and balanced truth those shady writers of fiction evade.

My colleague Bart Beaty, in an e-mail correspondence after the first episode aired, had this response to Bowden's article:

I suppose it will be a long and grueling campaign, waged by the Sun and its compatriots, to suggest that all is right in the world of journalism. When The Wire stuck to criticizing those things that journalists wished they had the balls to criticize (civic corruption, union corruption, the schools, the courts, the police, unfettered free market capitalism) all was right with the world. When the show demonstrates how complicit they are in the problem, let the howls of outrage be unleashed.

Last night's was a great episode and Simon masterfully laid the same foundation for criticism that he has in other seasons. Look how quickly the problems with journalism were enumerated: The reporters, one played by his own wife!, who watch the fire rather than investigate it; the editor who spikes a story for a crony; the careerist young man who sees nowhere to go in this small town. These features - cronyism, apathy, careerism - are exactly the traits that the show has relentlessly documented in other areas (the cops, the politicians, the unions, the teachers, the dealers) and for which it is praised. By heaven forfend that he suggest that the system extends to the watchmen themselves. Heaven forfend that it extend to "notable newspapermen who are my friends".

Anyway, a logically convoluted piece by someone who has trouble distinguishing fiction from reality. Not surprising from the torture-advocating chronicler of American manliness, Mark Bowden, the "thinking man's" Tom Clancy.

I couldn't have said it better myself, unless I replaced "by heaven forfend" with something from this century.  Or the last one.  But otherwise, Bart cuts to the heart of the recent journalistic outrage.  The Wire is making largely the same criticisms it's made of the police, drug dealers, unions, politicians, and teachers--but it's not supposed to be making them about journalists.

(Thanks to Bart for allowing me to publish his e-mail, and for steering me towards the Bowden and CJR articles.)

Meet the Press

The Wire's fifth-season focus on journalism has prompted a torrent of coverage from the print media, not all of it positive.  It's hardly surprising that this critical darling would finally sustain some negative criticism this year:  the show reached a national profile after last season's amazing exploration of inner-city schools, and with that greater exposure comes greater vulnerability.  It's also predictable that the typically slow build of the season openers wouldn't compare well to the heartwrenching final episodes of season four.  And frankly, those openers have had some problems compared to previous seasons--not in the least a narrative compression (mandated by HBO cutting the season from twelve or thirteen episodes to ten) that's led to some blunt exposition and other uncharacteristic shortcuts.

But there's another reason The Wire has been coming under so much journalistic fire:  this season, it's turning its withering urban criticism on the journalists.  Many of the complaints about season five have centered around its portrayal of a fictionalized Baltimore Sun newsroom, and many of them have come from people with ties to that newsroom or its former editors.  Sometimes it's hard to separate the valid criticisms from the long-simmering feuds or simple stung pride.

Some of the more earnest criticisms come from David Zurawik in this review for the Baltimore Sun.  I believe he comes by them honestly, but he lets his familiarity with the newsroom distort his view of the show's past seasons.  Zurawik writes,

the newsroom scenes are the Achilles' heel of Season 5 - with mainstream entertainment sacrificed to journalistic shop talk, while fact and fiction are mashed up in the confusing manner of docudrama.

I think he gets this much right:  the newsroom scenes have been the most likely to drag on the rest of the storylines.  I would say that's because they tend to lean heavily on expository dialogue, not "shop talk"--if it were only shop talk these seasoned reporters wouldn't spend so much time telling each other things they should already know.  Besides, when has The Wire not featured shop talk?  For that matter, when has it not combined fact and fiction?

Most of Zurawik's criticisms take the show to task for doing things it's always done.  For example:

Simon, who is so skilled in creating multifaceted characters elsewhere in the series, makes Haynes a one-dimensional figure without flaws.

I might quibble that Gus Haynes does have a flaw or two--he's been ignoring Templeton and his combative attitude towards Klebanow and Whiting has destroyed what little political capital he has in the newsroom--but he is one of the series' unambiguously good characters.  The thing is, he's no different from the other good mentors like Walon, Grace Sampson, or especially Bunny Colvin.  I could see criticizing Simon for recycling the character type, but the good mentor isn't a new development.

More problematic still is the way Simon links certain newsroom characters to real-life journalists through words and actions - and then depicts them exclusively in a negative fashion. Simon moves deeper into docudrama when he does that, and The Wire suffers as a result.

The docudrama genre, which has come under increasing fire in recent years, combines the look of documentary film with the literary license of theater - giving viewers the sense that what they are watching is true even though facts have been rearranged and actions invented.

Beyond blurring fact and fiction and ignoring any sense of proportionality, the genre also telescopes and confuses time. Simon left the Sun in 1995, and his newsroom villains are patterned on editors and a reporter long gone from Baltimore. But Simon presents his story as if it is taking place at The Sun today.

Again, The Wire has always done this.  Every time the show uses a real person's name--usually names of unseen homicide detectives, though occasionally a fictional landmark like the McCullough homes or an on-screen character like Sgt. Jay Landsman--those names are ten to twenty years out of date. 

Somewhere back in season one or two, McNulty rattles off a list of the good homicide detectives in Baltimore; they're all guys who worked back when David Simon was tailing the unit in 1988.  Bunk Moreland is based on one of them.  This season, McNulty says one of the homicide unit's only working cars is "at the morgue with Fahlteich."  Richard Fahlteich, a 1988 detective who rose to the rank of major and homicide commander, retired in 2006.  When a couple of Arabbers are trading stories about hardened criminals late in season four they name-check Junior Bunk and other fixtures of a long-gone Baltimore underworld.  The Barksdales are based on a couple of criminals Ed Burns investigated and caught in the 1980s (one of whom now appears on the show as a church deacon). Bubbles is based on a snitch of the same name who died in 1992. 

I don't wholly disagree with Zurawik here.  While these names are no doubt meant only as homages or in-jokes they do telescope time, generating a troubling sense that the show is sometimes more about the Baltimore of the 1980s than today.  Zurawik is right that this telescopy can be confusing, disorienting, even disappointing.  But it didn't begin when The Wire turned its sights on the Sun; that's just when the journalists took notice.

The Wire is telling the same story it's told all along, a story about how institutions are destroyed by new economic forces and corrupted by the careerist ambitions of the people who should be safeguarding them through the rough times.  (In fact, it's a story that predates The Wire, going back to some of Simon and Burns's finest work in The Corner, but that's a post in its own right.)

The only difference is that now The Wire is telling its story about a very different group of people.  Whether they're friends of Simon's targets like Mark Bowden or just newspaper insiders like David Zurawik, the show's new legion of critics all assume this is the first time The Wire has said unpleasant things about real people, and they all claim it's treating their colleagues as one-sided caricatures.  David Montgomery of the Washington Post is the first mainstream media writer to concede this obvious point:  "wouldn't members of the longshoremen's union have said the same thing about Season 2, which featured the Port of Baltimore?" 

But previous seasons have focused on groups that have no voice in the national media (drug gangs, teachers) or that close ranks and keep their dirty laundry to themselves (politicians, police, unions).  Now the show is taking aim at people with the ultimate media access who are none to shy about defending their their friends and their profession.

I don't think David Zurawik is criticizing the show out of some misplaced loyalty to his paper. (Mark Bowden, that's another story--come back tomorrow.)  He's just letting his insider knowledge as a Sun writer overshadow this season's continuity with what's come before. The Wire has always spiced its fiction with a little fact, and previous seasons have productively mined real-life events.  Does anybody really think Rawls and Burrell aren't acting out some old stories from the Baltimore police department?  When Bunk is saddled with a thankless, no-hope assignment to find a missing police gun in season three, that's based on an actual punishment doled out to Ed Burns's former partner.  Season three was still one of the show's finest.

Previous seasons haven't suffered for being based on real people and events; I don't see why this one has to either.

(Thanks to Bart Beaty and Mike Rhode for sending me the newspaper links.)

"You could do a lot worse than give me a run"

The Wire has always been about politics--not just campaigning and government, but the interpersonal politics that make or, more frequently on this show, break institutions.

That's why the fifth season didn't truly begin until last night.  In the first pure Wire moment and already one of the best of the season, Stan Valchek comes angling for Burrell's job because he wants the pension bump (or because he plans to use the Acting Commissioner gig as a way of getting his foot in the door for the real thing?).  Stan, even if your ploy didn't work this time you're still the Craftiest Bastard in my book.  And you may have gotten rid of Burrell, a gift to the people of Baltimore.  It's funny how often Valchek's actions, always undertaken for the most selfish and venal of reasons, end up having a positive effect on the police department and the city:  he pulls Daniels out of Evidence Control and starts him on his path to colonel, indirectly creates the Major Crimes Unit and exposes the Greek's smuggling operation, helps Carcetti knock off Royce, and now hammers what I can only hope is the final nail in Burrell's coffin.  Stan, I take back the Delonda Brice crack--you've found a way to make your disfunctions work for the city.  Is that the definition of a real police?

That scene and everything that unspooled from it--that look in Rawls's eyes as he realizes Burrell has just buried himself, the chief of staff's plan to float Daniels in the press, Norman's commiserating with Gus Haynes, Daniels's fear over the cooked quote, and especially Carcetti's humiliation of Clay Davis--was The Wire firing on all cylinders after a typically slow build.  Some figures in the media have pronounced this season flawed for its handling of the newspaper (more on that later this week) but the angling over the commissioner's job is proof the show hasn't lost its touch.  So thank you for that as well, Stan.

When The Wire hasn't been about politics, it's been about mentoring:  the way institutional wisdom is passed down from senior to junior workers.  It's an efficient, natural way to quickly sketch the outlines of a subculture without relying on the stilted exposition that's weighed down so many of the newspaper scenes.  (The critics aren't completely off-base.  I never want to hear "we need to do more with less" again.  We get it already.)  This week's Biggest Asshole, Scott Templeton, is partially a product of bad mentoring.  His worst habits of sensationalism are encouraged by the top brass, while Gus Haynes, otherwise an ideal editor, seems to have already written him off.  I can see why Haynes doesn't like Templeton, but the lack of regard is so palpable that Templeton has to see it as well.  A few words from Haynes and Templeton might not have fabricated the quote that could scuttle Daniels's shot at commissioner.  (At this point I think it's pretty clear that he has been juicing if not outright inventing quotes and sources.  Though I wouldn't mind a little more ambiguity on this point.)

Those few words might have explained something important Scott is missing.  Roger Twigg gets the Daniels story because he knows his beat backwards and forwards, the kind of knowledge The Wire most respects.  (Remember Bunny Colvin's first question to all his men.)  Gus is handed the story because he knows Norman from Norman's days on the Sun.  Their journalism is rooted in deep connections to their city--and Scott, so anxious to work his way up to a big-name newspaper, probably hasn't bothered to set down any roots or cultivate any relationships.  Juicing is the only game he's got.

So many of the characters have been students of one sort or another:  Prez and Sydnor, D'Angelo and Wallace, Nick and Ziggy, Herc and Carver, Kima in homicide, Michael and Namond and the other kids.  Hell, Joe is even trying to school the unschoolable Marlo (and if he doesn't know by now that Marlo is trying to do an end run around him to the Greek, then he's a fool).  All of the noblest characters--my favorites Colvin, Freamon, and Waylon, along with Cutty and new good guy Gus Haynes--are mentors who know their professional and moral codes and try to pass them along.

Which is why--and I cannot believe I am typing these words--Lester Freamon is this week's Dumbest Asshole.

Freamon has always had a streak of intellectual vanity, a tendency to approach cases as puzzles and a weakness for "thrill of the hunt" mystique, and that's exactly what does him in this week.  He approaches Jimmy's fabricated serial killings as an intellectual exercise--a flawed but promising rough draft that needs to be corrected--not as a dereliction of duty and desecration of the dead.  Certainly not as a needless risk that could ruin several careers.  There's always been more McNulty in him than he would probably care to admit, including a willingness to pull the walls down around him, and now the two of them are reinforcing each other.  It's a perfect twist:  surprising, appalling, yet absolutely in character with everything we've seen of Lester over the past four seasons.  I hate it, and I'm loving every second of it.

They haven't lost a step.

I'm Not There

In an age where the musician biopic has become such formulaic Oscar-bait that it now has its own parody movie, Todd Haynes has given the genre an original, distinctive twist.  Maybe we can start calling the Todd Haynes biopic a subgenre in its own right, since his Bob Dylan sextuple biography I'm Not There shares that twist with Velvet Goldmine and, to a lesser extent, Superstar:  a willingness to leap outside the particulars of its subject's life, to jump into allusion and parody and outright fantasy and so arrive at some larger, less easily represented truth.

Not that you can pin down anything as specific or confining as a Todd Haynes formula.  I'm Not There bears a few crucial differences from its predecessors, and one unmistakeable advantage--this time Haynes made sure got the rights to the music.  Velvet Goldmine arguably thrived under its constraints since the fake Bowie numbers dovetailed so perfectly with its themes of fabricated authenticity, and those Shudder to Think songs are fantastic homages.  But that's not a trick a director can pull twice, and while I'm Not There also pivots around the idea that its subject created his own identity, many times over, Haynes's polymorphous Dylan doesn't work quite the same way as his gloriously fake Bowie.  He isn't creating fantasy personas like Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane or The Thin White Duke; he's creating Bob Dylan, many Bob Dylans, and to tell his story nobody else's music will do.  (The movie isn't exactly hurting for use of his back catalogue, either.  I'm not sure you could find a more bittersweet soundtrack for the collapse of Robbie Clark's marriage than "Visions of Johanna.")

The six lead roles are split between different periods in Dylan's life, different aspects of his personality, and different idealized conceptions of himself, with a few actors getting to walk the line between fact and fantasy.  Christian Bale plays the most squarely historical Dylan and the most boring one.  His late-developing paunch and the small crowd at his church strike me as a devastating shot at the Christian Dylan, but it's perceptive of Haynes to have the same actor playing the young, fiery, protest-movement Dylan everybody lionizes.  (The casting makes such telling insights that the script doesn't always pull its own weight.)  Heath Ledger gets some of the most moving scenes as the married Dylan, while Cate Blanchett gets the most fun Dylan and the most successful stunt casting--although Marcus Carl Franklin is unbelievably good as 11-year-old "Woody Guthrie."  Ben Whishaw plays what appears to be a purely ideal Dylan who never enters the biography, which is just as well since the movie is already bursting with Dylans.

We shouldn't overlook Bruce Greenwood, who contributes a great turn as all the various authority figures Dylan pushes against (one of them, naturally, named Mr. Jones). If Blanchett, Ledger, et al are one person fractured into many guises then Greenwood is the perfect antithesis, many forces compressed into one stoic face.  Sadly, a quick intercut almost ruins the trick by making the dual role too obvious, but Greenwood pulls off the aging Peckinpah villain and the sanctimonious BBC gatekeeper with equal aplomb.

I was hoping the Billy the Kid sequences would culminate in a burst of redemptive violence a la Peckinpah, but I guess that wouldn't be true to Dylan or his music.  Instead those scenes link up with one of the movie's most conflicted and compelling themes, an ongoing question of whether art is compatible with political engagement.  For most of the movie Dylan (in all his various guises) tries to wriggle free of everybody who wants to claim him and his music for their cause, but his scorn for awards banquets and possessive folkies quickly shades into total quietism and withdrawal.

This is where we pick up Richard Gere's Billy the Kid Dylan, in hiding from the world and his own reputation.  He learns soon enough that sometimes the world won't leave you alone--first through the sounds of jungle warfare echoing from the woods around his cabin and then, with a less heavy hand, when the law encroaches on the strange and mournful town of Riddle.  When Billy pushes back it's not with the gunplay his name and his cinematic inspiration seem to demand, and it's not terribly effective either, but the point has been made:  independence and artistic freedom are all well and good until the forces you've been ignoring set their sights on you.

Plenty of people, artists or otherwise, will tell you that art should never engage with politics (not infrequently after they encounter a work of art whose politics they don't share).  It's a common enough stance but, for me, an unsatisfactory one, especially when your country is engaged in something as monumentally, unavoidably evil as an unnecessary and unjust war.  I'm Not There flirts with the ascetic approach but says it can't work for long.  And if the movie comes back around to something like the other Dylans' position that music doesn't need a cause or a champion, if it resists being locked into one message just as much as Dylan does one identity, it still feels stronger for having questioned and ultimately rejected Billy the Kid's confusion of freedom with escapism.

That's not the only movie in I'm Not There.  At best, it's one of about five or six.  This is also a movie of haunting musical numbers and smart period jokes, of Fellini and Richard Lester and D. A. Pennebaker parodies (reminding me again of Velvet Goldmine and its playful exhumation of Citizen Kane), of Julianne Moore in a Joan Baez wig and David Cross on a golf cart.  A movie as witty and cryptic and passionate and melancholy and mercurial as its subject.

Another Reason to Like Barack Obama

The man has excellent taste in television.  (Via Matthew Yglesias.)  His favorite character is Omar, whereas I'd go for Lester, Colvin, or Waylon.

The actor mentioned at the end of the article, Michael Kostroff, plays Levy.  How can Obama lose with Levy on his side?  That guy always--

oh god I hope Herc isn't working for Obama--

"Too good a story to check out"

Anybody else think The Wire has been getting a little too meta lately?  From the electrolite neutron magnetic scan last week to Lester's rhapsodizing about the career case to Whiting's idea that he can fix the schools (or at least win an award) with a series on the "Dickensian lives of the city's children," the show's been winking at us an awful lot.  Once or twice is fine, and they get a certain license for being in their final season, but The Wire is far better when it's about something other than itself.  Of all the facets of postmodern culture they've shown us over the past four seasons, I never missed relentless self-awareness.

Granted, it's going to be hard for a season focused on the media to avoid picking up some of their bad habits.  And I kind of like the bracing self-criticism of having Whiting pitch an obviously smug, condescending version of last season--although it's pretty clear Whiting wants to produce a very different sort of series, the antithesis of The Wire in much the same way that "When the Whistle Blows" is the antithesis of The Office, or "Jerry" of Seinfeld.

Which maybe makes Scott Templeton the antithesis of David Simon and everything he thinks journalism should be.  It's easy to see why Templeton is Whiting and Klebanow's favorite cub reporter.  He offers exactly the sort of maudlin heartbreakers and stock characters they're looking for:  every story is relentlessly personalized until it's no longer about anything but their desire to manipulate readers and pick up accolades.  Unlike Gus Haynes, who preaches the importance of social context (hey, more meta!), Templeton, Whiting, and Klebanow are so focused on reducing social problems to individualized tearjerkers that they trivialize every story they touch.  (Notice how Templeton ignores real angles that are practically flung in his face, like the increased toxicity in blue crabs or the fan who's bitching about steroids and lockouts, because he's trying to fit everybody into his preconceived, sentimental shlock.)

That incessant trivialization of the news is why Templeton is poisonous even if he hasn't been fabricating sources--and it would be a great twist if he hasn't.  A newsroom plagiarist makes an easy target, and a topical one, and a fair one, but the trivializers are much bigger and better examples of what's wrong with modern journalism.  The Sun editors look just as bad if Templeton has gotten played by some panhandling kid and they ran a weak story because they liked the way he dressed it up.  Save the obvious villains for the Scott Templeton stories.

The complicating factor here is that the writers of The Wire know they need to balance the personal with the sociological.  Whiting gets a couple of good rejoinders in on Gus about the importance of reining in the context (though he's too much of an ass in his other scenes for any of them to stick... best use of the word "truant" in all of 2008, by the way), and his and Templeton's idea of following one classroom to talk about the schools' problems is basically the approach taken in season four.  The writers know they need the personal element to capture viewers' interest and give shape to social indictments that would otherwise sprawl out of control; but they also know they need the social context to keep from falling into easy morality tales and cliches of the ghetto drug dealer, the hard-working maverick cop, the poor wheelchair-bound baseball fan, the noble, dead mother of four.  And to keep from trivializing the issues they write about, so they don't mistake social failures for purely individual problems.

Unfortunately, most of our stories are seriously out of balance.  The excessively personalized, creepily intimate focus of Whiting and Klebanow and Templeton has infected every other part of our public life.  When was the last time you heard a John Edwards speech where he didn't mention the health care woes of the same two real, average people?  (Not to single out John Edwards here.  Every politician does it sooner or later--I just happened to hear him do it twice in the same week.)  Everywhere you look, somebody is reducing societal problems to personal ones.

Except Bubbles.  It's entirely in keeping with the spirit of this show that the one guy who really needs to tell his story is keeping his mouth shut.

Asshole sweepstakes.  With Herc taking a week off, the field is wide open!  The US attorney is in the running for once again letting politics (party and personal) kill the Stanfield investigation, and Carcetti is retroactively in the mix for pissing him off so spectacularly last week.  Clay Davis is currently too weak to pull off any assholery but damn do I love watching him twist in the wind, and Burrell too.  Whiting's mandarin manners get under my skin, but the E.J. story isn't quite corrosive enough yet for him to take the prize; before the season is out he may yet earn the title of Royal Asshole.

However, the big winner... for Biggest and Dumbest Asshole, another two-fer for the second week in a row... is Jimmy McNulty.  I'd been assuming for about a year that he would stir up a shitstorm this season by leaking a story to the papers so he could keep an investigation running, but I had no idea he would take it this far.  Dishonorable mention to Bunk for letting him do it.  You can't just wash your hands of this one and walk away, Bunk.  A man's got to have a code and you both broke yours.

"How many years you figure we been doing this same shit?"

The weirdest part by far of the fifth season premiere of The Wire was watching the homicide detectives acting out a blow-by-blow replay of the "electrolite neutron magnetic scan test" stunt from a first-season Homicide episode (which was itself a replay of actual stories told to David Simon in Homicide the book).  Was this just another example of The Wire retelling an incident already dramatized in Homicide, like the Snot Boogie story that opened season one?  A little homage to commemorate Homicide regular Clark Johnson coming back around to the front of the camera?  A rather blunt foreshadowing of themes of gullibility and the "big lie" that will probably underscore this season's critique of the media?

All of the above, maybe, but the feature that truly makes it part of The Wire is its hinting at the endless repetition, the lack of any lasting change. The status quo has previously sunk all attempts at reform and now it seems to be claiming Carcetti and Daniels.  Notice how the last line of the episode is a detective answering a ringing phone with the word "Homicide."  That sound brought me so much joy back in the nineties but hearing it now, as Major Crimes has been gutted again and McNulty seethes in the place he once viewed as the promised land, brings only a bitter appreciation for this show's consummate skill.

And if The Wire is indicting its predecessor--or at least bringing it up in this rueful context where a criminal gets caught by a trick that was broadcast on network television when he couldn't have been more than four or five--then it isn't letting itself off the hook either.  The trailers for next week show the Sun's pompous editor calling for a series of articles on the kids who are let down by the city's school system.  It's a clever wink at season four, although The Wire didn't break its arm patting itself on the back for its patronizing attentions the way James C. Whiting III does.  (I don't think they ever self-applied the "Dickensian" label, for starters.)  Simon and company seem to be acknowledging that if nothing changes, well, they haven't changed anything yet either.  But at least they're telling stories with an honesty and a complexity that nobody else in the media can match.  The backlash has already begun, folks, but it's possible that The Wire will critique itself more elegantly than the defenders of the media class can manage.

On to the rest of the episode...

City editor Gus Haynes is apparently this season's Colvin--the veteran who knows his city so well he can pull a drug dealer's name out of a zoning bill, who's willing to poke his bosses when they compromise their integrity, and who looks out for his subordinates (giving Price credit he didn't deserve).  If the Sun ownership is anything like the Baltimore police department--and The Wire gives us no reason to think they won't be--that concern for his subordinates will probably be the last thing they use against him.  When corrupt institutions can't exploit your flaws, they will go after your virtues.  (Or they'll hit both at once, like Rawls and Burrell taking away Daniel's car while they kill the MCU--a power play if there ever was one.)

Interesting contrast between the reporters and the homicide detectives:  the reporters beg for stories and have to justify their own jobs with daily budget lines; the detectives duck calls and try not to catch the cases that pile up on the board.  Both have a habit of missing the big stories that fall into their laps or pass right under their noses.

As always, there's such a great economy of detail in the show's characterization.  Templeton and Gutierrez sitting apart from the veterans at the bar, and Gutierrez joining them and Templeton remaining apart, tells us a lot about who they are and where they want to be.

The opening titles suggest the focus will expand from print to broadcast media.  (Presumably once a story gets large enough to attract the TV stations.)  Kima's ex is a TV journalist, isn't she?

And, since there's no point delaying the ceremonies any further:

For working for Maury Levy, Herc is both the Dumbest and the Biggest Asshole.  This is the guy who stonewalled the detail after Kima was shot, then got Savino off with baking soda!  Carver should be calling him on it (if he even knows).  I may need to draft a "Herc exemption" if I'm going to do this every week...