Warning: Spoilers for the final episode of Season Four of The Wire.
Slate: If you had to sum up what The Wire is about, what would it be?
Simon: Thematically, it's about the very simple idea that, in this postmodern 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.
Slate: How so?
Simon: Whether you're a corner boy in West Baltimore, or a cop who knows his beat, or an Eastern European brought here for sex, your life is worth less. It's the triumph of capitalism over human value.
- David Simon, Slate, Dec. 1, 2006
Listening to Garvey over drinks that day, I came to realize that there was something emblematic here: that in postmodern America, whatever institution you serve or are served by—a police department or a newspaper, a political party or a church, Enron or Worldcom—you will eventually be betrayed.
It seemed very Greek to me the more I thought about it. The stuff of Aeschylus and Sophocles, except the gods were not Olympian but corporate and institutional. In every sense, ours seems a world in which individual human beings—be they trained detectives or knowledgeable reporters, hardened corner boys or third-generation longshoremen or smuggled Eastern European sex workers—are destined to matter less and less.
After watching what was done to my newspaper, and to the Baltimore homicide unit, I began to write the pilot for a new HBO drama.
- David Simon, "Post Mortem," Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, 2006 ed.
Bodie: I been doing this a long time. I ain't never said nothing to no cop.
I feel old. I been out there since I was thirteen. I ain't never fucked up a count, never stole off a package, never did some shit that I wasn't told to do. I been straight up. But what come back? You think if I get jammed up on some shit they be like "A'ight, yeah. Bodie been there. Bodie hang tough. We got his paid lawyer, we got the bail." They want me to stand with them, right? But where the fuck they at when they supposed to stand with us? I mean, when shit goes bad, and there's hell to pay, where they at? This game is rigged, man. We like them little bitches on the chess board.
McNulty: Pawns.
- The Wire, episode 50, Dec. 10, 2006
Four years ago I never would have thought I'd feel sympathy for Bodie Broaddus. But somewhere over the last two seasons, the kid who shot Wallace became one of most appealing characters on The Wire, the mordantly funny court jester of the corner boys. Not the show's moral conscience, exactly--I'm not sure Bodie developed a conscience until Marlo killed Little Kevin--but its spokesman for the codes of behavior that are supposed to govern the street just as surely as other codes do the police.
In a show where every institution will break its own rules and let down its most loyal workers, only those individuals who follow their own personal codes (Colvin, Freamon, Omar) come off well. (And not always then, as seen in McNulty's destructive individualism of season three--but McNulty was violating higher principles of loyalty and respect for Daniels and his fellow detectives.) Bodie probably wouldn't think of himself as following a personal code, just the way the street was supposed to run, but when the rest of the street decides anything goes even that dogged loyalty to the rules becomes a kind of ethics. The ethics of a corrosive, destructive business, to be sure, but he spoke for it with wit and something I can only call integrity.
It isn't lost on me that he died for doing exactly what he killed Wallace for, but it's hard to see any poetic justice in that when his death leaves Marlo out on the streets. Really, my own gradual warming to his character is what killed him: if McNulty weren't equally amused by Bodie's mouth and his slinger's ethic--always business, no personal animosity between cop and criminal--he never would have started those sit-downs and Bodie would be returning for season five.
But Bodie's also dead because Little Kevin's murder drove him to rail against his boss's casual disposal of his workers. Lives are worth so little to Marlo that he dumps them in vacants at the slightest provocation, or none at all. Bodie knows this violates the ethic that's supposed to govern them both and that's why he talks to McNulty--but he faces the consequences and Marlo, being the boss, doesn't have to. Bodie's speech to McNulty is as close as any character on The Wire has come to being a mouthpiece for David Simon: it's an elegant, effortless, enervated rant about the tendency of postmodern, late-capitalist institutions to chew up their own best workers with no respect for loyalty or ethics. They demand but they never give back.
The system breaks its promises to its workers but it serves itself well, creating a steady supply of new workers to replace those it grinds down and destroys. Bodie's dead and Marlo already has two new middle schoolers to replace him. Nothing changes: that's why this season was relentlessly circular, from the images in the opening titles to the many direct references to season one (including the chessboard meditations at Bodie's last supper, recalling a lesson taught to him by another pawn sacrificed for the kings, D'Angelo Barksdale). From the corners to City Hall, systemic reform is difficult and halting if not downright impossible.
If The Wire offers any relief it's in those rare moments of grace when one individual reaches out to help another--when Landsman can say "Fuck the clearance," when Waylon shows up out of nowhere because he knows Bubs needs him, when Colvin works the game to save one kid. These are the most moving moments on The Wire, because they are so scarce, and unlikely to repeat.
Amen.
This is the first full season I've seen. Now I'm going to have to go back and watch from the beginning. I didn't even know that backstory for Bodie. Even then, his death, to me, was disturbing but not surprising. I called it several episodes ago when I realized this kid showed some real heart. "That's not gonna work out," I figured. Sigh.
Posted by: Jen | December 12, 2006 at 09:31 AM
Excellent post, Marc.
It's been awhile, but I seem to remember Bodie freezing up and being unable to shoot Wallace. I thought Poot took the gun and killed Wallace (or maybe it was that Poot had to yell at Bodie to finish Wallace). I'm unsure of the details, but I do remember hesitation on Bodie's part. This hesitation caught up with him in Season 4: Unable to stomach Marlo's methods, Bodie questions the rules of the game and, snap, he's gone.
Amazing that a detail like that from Season 1 could have such repercussions. I'm chomping on the bit for the DVD of Season 4.
Posted by: phil | December 12, 2006 at 10:52 AM
I think you're right about Bodie, Poot, and Wallace--I'm in the middle of rewatching season one on Netflix so I guess I'll find out.
Season three was where I started warming up to Bodie, with his confusion at Colvin's respectful treatment and his "contrapment" defense, but the blunt wit and the insistence that the street follow its rules were always there. I'm not so sure if Bodie questions the rules of the game so much as he questions the lack of rules, or the fact that the kings no longer have to play by them as they drop their own pawns.
Me, I'm chomping at the bit for season five already...
Posted by: Marc | December 12, 2006 at 02:24 PM
I hear you on Season Five.
I think if Season Four could be summed up in one scene, it's the scene in Colvin's class with Namond and the others discussing life on the corners: The importance of never giving an inch in your public dealings; the necessity of being perceived as someone not to be trifled with.
Of course, we discovered that Namond isn't really part of that world. Luckily for him, Major Colvin came into his life (I'm eagerly awaiting how that relationship plays out).
Bodie, I think, was also never really part of that world. His hesitation with Wallace in Season One and his inability to keep it together when the bodies were revealed demonstrate the extent of how out of place he was. However, he didn't have anyone like Colvin and, by the time we were introduced to him, was too far into the game to see a way out.
Posted by: phil | December 14, 2006 at 09:24 AM
Interesting to remember that at the start of season four Bodie was playing the incredibly unsympathetic role of drug trade recruiter, trying to talk Michael into working his corners (the job Namond was ditching).
Why did he fail where Marlo succeeded? Partly because Michael didn't need him at the time, and what Michael did need later Bodie couldn't provide, but that speaks to Bodie's precarious situation in season four.
Bodie's been part of this world for as long as we've seen him--almost the only constant part from season one until now. He started at thirteen, just around the age Michael and Namond are when he tries to pull them in behind him. He was one of Bell's most trusted and resourceful soldiers. But in season four he was a soldier without an army above or beneath him. What condemns Bodie is not any hesitation or softness, but his loyalty to absent bosses who can no longer protect him and a street code that only he seems to follow. And we've all seen just how far loyalty gets you in The Wire.
Posted by: Marc | December 14, 2006 at 02:38 PM