I Am NOT the Beastmaster

Doom Patrols 1: Grudging Admiration

I've been on a bit of a nostalgia kick lately, reading my favorite comics from fifteen years ago.  It all started with the recent release of this trade paperback, which includes my favorite issue (from right when I started reading the book, naturally--everybody's Golden Age), and with this trip down memory lane by Greg Burgas, which accomplished exactly what it set out to do:  get me hankering to re-read some Doom Patrols.

I don't think I've ever read them all in order before.  Doing so gives me a newfound appreciation for what Morrison and his collaborators built over the course of the series:  they started off with a bang, jettisoning all the lukewarm X-Men team-book cliches, and then they got better.  Artist Richard Case grows by leaps and bounds, from those chunky, plasticine figures in the early issues to the moodier and more expressive ones at the height of the run.  I hadn't realized how good he was at teasing different expressions out of Cliff Steele's unmoving face until I read the Kelley Jones fill-in issue; Jones cheats and makes it malleable and fleshy, basically a normal human face in orange paint.  Case doesn't have to.  He contributes some fun character designs, too (with a little help from Morrison and Brendan McCarthy), from Rebis to the Brotherhoods of Dada to the gallery of Replacement Heads.

(That's the other great thing about rereading the whole run:  taxonomy.  You can classify the Doom Patrol's antagonists into shadowy conspiracies and Bad Dads, as Morrison himself does, but I now prefer to think of them as Faceless and Replacement Heads.)

Rereading these issues has also given me a newfound appreciation for one of the least regarded stories--Greg calls it "perhaps Morrison's weakest of the entire run"--the big war in space that ran from issues 37 to 41.  Those issues are the least regarded for good reason.  The story is long (the longest single arc until the book's final one), slow-moving, light on action and heavy on exposition, much of it delivered in the annoying dialect stroke gimmick of the Geomancers.  It's almost completely devoid of the wry humor that leavened the weirdness in so many Doom Patrol issues.  It pulls the Doom Patrol too far out of their standard milieu--this is a milieu in which hungry paintings and transvestite streets are par for the course--and takes too much time explaining the setting instead of letting the characters run amok in it.  The Patrol spends most of the first half standing around and listening to the exposition stroke infodump, and as much as Morrison is enamored with the heavy-handed religious imagery of the pheromone communion, it just isn't worth the time.

But as the Doom Patrol joins the war the story takes on renewed life. The armies of functionally indistinguishable armored warriors clashing in endless, senseless combat, and especially the figure of the Judge Rock, come across as a Morrisonized take on the eternal war of the New Gods.  It's a much harsher spin than his recent foray into the Fourth World in Mister Miracle; it may also be the most intellectually rich story in Morrison's Doom Patrol.

The story is obsessed with signification and meaning.  The Geomancers and the Insect Mesh battle by psychosomatic proxies and plagues of abstraction; the war ends when Rhea topples the Judge Rock, bringing about "the end of all meaning and certainty."  Morrison lambasts the certainty of religious fanatics who are convinced they and they alone hold the key to scriptural interpretation, but he's also playing around with his own techniques of generating meaning.  The embodied neuroses of the Insect Mesh are no different from Dorothy's powers to externalize her subconscious or the battles inside the hungry painting, all of them embodiments of some subconscious terror or abstract ideology.  Morrison sees how far he can push his own tools, then takes them apart on-panel in the final issue as he reveals that the whole senseless war has been an allegory constructed by a being of limited creativity.  (Which does highlight the problem of reading an allegory of limited creativity for the previous four issues.)

He'd just done this as parody in the robot-on-gorilla extravaganza of #34.  (Interesting that one of the most humorless stories in the run is bracketed by two of the goofiest and most brilliant, this and the Flex Mentallo origin.)  The gorilla in the Che Guevara beret may claim that he and the brain in the jar in the baby carriage are "A vivid and explicit expression of Cartesian dualism," but they make ludicrous symbols in comparison with the real mind-and-body struggle of Cliff and his malfunctioning robot body, which is itself played for laughs.  Then Morrison does it again for real, using the symbolic warfare of the Geomancers and the Insect Mesh to explore the high stakes of theological certainty and the downside to his own method of symbolic externalization.  Creating objects that have only one possible interpretation can be a first step towards killing for them.

It's probably sheer coincidence that Morrison would name one faction after Jan Hus and the Utraquists, reformers who provide the historical backdrop for another story of religious fanaticism, warfare, and attempts to regain the certainty of Paradise in David B.'s The Armed Garden.  And surely it's a coincidence that the image of the Judge Rock--a floating head with a city sprouting on top--looks so much like the image on the I♥NY mug that opens Paul Karasik and David Mazzuchelli's retelling of the Tower of Babel in City of Glass.  Or that the war in space ends with both sides deciding to build a great tower to heaven.  Or that Paul Auster interprets the story of Babel as a retelling of the myth of the Fall from a perfect, primal language in which a word equalled the thing it stood for.  Or that Peter Stillman, Rohan the blacksmith, and the Judge Rock are all trying to reverse the Fall, with disastrous results.

So Morrison's war in space has tapped into some heavy ideas, and the story is better for the contemplation it invites.  Even if it's no damn fun at all. 

Next time we'll talk about what's genuinely the weakest story in Doom Patrol, but for now we'll let Cliff Steele have the last word:

"Screw symbolism and let's go home."

No Teacher Left Behind

I was beginning to wonder when, in a series that's given us self-serving cops, corrupt union officials, and crooked politicians, we would start seeing the rotten teachers.  Tilghman Middle School has been far from idyllic but most of its problems have stemmed from limited resources or troubled, undisciplined kids.  The people who run the school have come off pretty well.

Prez hasn't been a model teacher, but he's just incompetent; he still means to teach the kids.  And this week we saw some particularly noble and dedicated educators:  the teacher who knows her students well enough to bust Randy in the wrong lunch, the principal who's found a way to fund truant officers, the preternaturally calm teacher who guides Colvin through the school.  Had The Wire finally found an institution and a subculture it wouldn't criticize?

At the very moment I began to doubt the show's cynicism, Colvin's guide left and we saw another side of the school.  First Colvin overhears the teacher berating his students.  (Not that you can't chew out your classes--sometimes you have no choice--but you don't have to take such bitter delight in it.)  Then we see how the school's truancy program really works; it's our first glimpse of a system that exists only to generate statistics in order to perpetuate or placate some larger system.  Cutty and his partner are basically doing jump-outs, just as meaningless as the ones Carver and Herc used to run in the Western.  (This detached, commentless observation, not the twinned mayor-and-drug-dealer poker games, is how The Wire draws its best comparisons.)  Then we meet an administrator who will only allow the university to study the school's problem students if they pretend the school doesn't have a problem.  When Colvin gamely says "The system is fine"--well, on this show you know those words will never be true.

You almost had me going, Simon, but I knew you couldn't hold back forever.  I'd like to see more of the dysfunctional and self-perpetuating parts of the school system.  One teacher mentioned something about "team rules" back in the first or second episode--they can only make rules they can all enforce?  What the hell is that about?  And how does No Child Left Behind fit into this dynamic?

Education has always been one of the running themes of The Wire, long before the schools were on screen.  Avon tried to groom D'Angelo, D'Angelo tried to tell Wallace there was another path, Daniels and Griggs tried to school Carver and Herc, Cutty tried to train the young soldiers, Freamon tried to rein in McNulty, Colvin tried to teach Carver that a real police knows his district.  Most of these attempts failed.  That doesn't bode well for this season's teachers, a group that once again includes Cutty.  He's emerged as one of the most principled characters in the series, but he's got a thankless task.  Not only do his students ignore the pointers he gives them and focus instead on the boxers' muscles, then they overcompensate and imagine he's out to molest them.  This week's episode ended on a haunting image, Michael slinking off into some private teenage space, but the more he pushes away from Cutty the more it seems he'll end up with Marlo.

The Wire also dramatizes thought processes better than anything else I've seen.  The most memorable sequence in the first season featured McNulty and Bunk realizing another homicide detective had botched a murder scene.  As they reconstructed the murder literally out of thin air they punctuated their discovery solely with variations on "fuck."  This ran for a couple of minutes.  My favorite scene in the second season featured Daniels, called into Barrell's office to do him a favor, reading the departmental politics on the fly and asking for command of his own major crimes unit.  (This scene essentially salvaged the premise of the series from the wreck of the first season finale.)  And now we have an early contender for my favorite scene of the fourth season, as Freamon pieces together Marlo's missing bodies while Bunk degenerates on the stool next to him.  Freamon's a brilliant teacher, but nobody seems to be listening.

Fast Casual Noir

I think they're following me.

One week after their cartoon essay on the dickification of Adams Morgan, the writers of the Washington City Paper have stepped across the state line to rip College Park, Maryland a new one.  Or to take a crack at the well-worn old one, anyway--it's hardly news to anyone who's gone to the University of Maryland that the town of College Park is, with a few notable exceptions, a cultural wasteland.

At some point during my Music City Captivity the DC area real estate boom hit College Park.  A downtown (and by "downtown" I mean two blocks and one intersection) that had always been spotted with abandoned storefronts suddenly sprouted a half-dozen or more new stores between visits home--and every one of them was a fast casual restaraunt.  College Park is a great place to buy a six-dollar burrito, and that's about it.

Unless you're looking to riot after a basketball game.  Here's the best observation in the article:

Violence like this hasn't cropped up on campus or near it since the antiwar demonstrations of the '70s.  Now it happens because Duke sucks.

And the second best, the City Paper plan for riot abatement:

Students are obviously bored.  Try this: Make College Park worth not destroying.

Understand the second and you will understand College Park.  Understand the first and you will be on the trail of something much larger and more dangerous to public life.

As with the Adams Morgan piece, though, the City Paper makes College Park sound like Dodge City because it allows for moodier journalism.  And it's pretty damned easy to make a town look desolate when your photographer takes pictures of such distinctive local features as... a pay phone!  And... clouds!  Maybe the real problem is that College Park doesn't even offer anything interesting for wannabe noir journalists to feel disaffected from.

But I know that isn't true.  Real noir is portable: it can follow you anywhere.

By sheer coincidence, I happened to read the City Paper article right after a trip to College Park and the university that impressed upon me the essential non-noirishness of the place.  I was on the outlands of campus, walking to the gym to buy an alumni membership (Maryland will never be rid of me) when I remembered a similar day almost exactly three years ago.  Early autumn, sunny, another desolate corner of another campus--my former employers.   I had just encountered one of those logistical-bureaucratic breakdowns that roll right off you when you love your job and lodge under the skin when you don't.  I don't remember why, but at that moment it seemed like the university couldn't perform any of the basic functions you'd expect an institution of higher education to be able to do.  In my aggravated and probably overactive imagination the whole place was a scam perpetrated on students and staff alike, a long con that only called itself a university.

And that was when it hit me, caught in the midday glare of the sun belt:  This is noir.  You don't need gangsters and D.A.s and femmes fatales.  You don't even need shadows or neon or stockings with seams.  All you need, as Dave Fiore said so long ago, is existential estrangement, and maybe a corrupt society to be estranged from.

Like every other student past or present, I used to bitch about the bureaucracy at the University of Maryland, before I learned the difference between bureaucracies that deliver and bureaucracies that don't.  On Thursday afternoon I was thrilled to be back in the hands of one that delivers.  I was headed for my old gym, walking down an empty path with a wooded creek to one side and a titanic, completely deserted parking garage on the other.

And that was when it hit me:  This is science fiction.  Colossal high-modernist structures built by heuristic bureaucracies that have outlasted their makers.  Radically discontinuous microworlds butting against one another.  A solitary human figure in the interface, marking the differences between past and present as he wakes up from his slumber.  Alienation, without the estrangement.  Without the corruption and despair that makes for true noir and not the urban-weekly-goes-slumming-in-the-suburbs variety.

Ah, but it's all in the context.  I could walk a hundred yards and find the gym, crowded with students and exactly as I remembered it (equally science fictional in its own panoptic way, but that's another story).  I could go to downtown College Park at closing time and find all the homophobic alcoholics training for the day when they work up the nerve to go down to Adams Morgan and piss me off there.  I could ignore the comic store I've been going to since high school, the bookstore that beats anything they have in certain cities of half a million people, and see only the fast casual places that have grown inside the record stores and coffee houses I used to love.

Yeah, College Park is a wasteland.  But it's my wasteland.

Holy Hot Pants!

Batman #657, by Grant Morrison and Andy Kubert

With its third installment, Grant Morrison's Batman has finally grown on me.  Morrison builds on the best feature of the previous two, otherwise disappointing issues, their embrace of all the strange, occasionally repressed corners of Batman's sixty-odd years.  All the old stories are here, from Son of the Demon to Batman's gallery of rainbow-colored costumes, even the Spook from those 70s David V. Reed issues--although he won't be around for long, I'm sorry to report.  Best of all, Morrison doesn't fiddle around with some tedious in-story explanation for why these pieces of forgotten lore have returned, the way a Mark Waid or a Geoff Johns would.  He doesn't feel the need to ontologically justify them, he just puts them in his comic and uses them to whatever extent they serve his story, caring not a whit whether they were in-continuity or not--they are now.

But the third issue pulls away from its predecessors, finally offering more than the shallow pleasure of recognition for the longtime fans.  After two issues of meaningless fight scenes and tongue-in-cheek set pieces Morrison has finally put something at stake for Batman, confronting him with the daunting task of raising a son he never knew he had.  Damian (too obvious by half, Grant) comes across as a younger version of the old Batman--sullen, spoiled, nasty, and violent.  Sure, the kid has been raised by terrorist assassins (the reference to living in caves draws a timely parallel between Ra's al Ghul and Osama bin Laden) but Alfred's line about "memory lane" tells us that the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree.  Nor is he just referring to the younger Bruce Wayne:  Damian's arrogance, aloofness, viciousness, and self-imposed isolation reflect the "sour-faced, sexually-repressed, humorless, uptight, angry, and all-round grim 'n' gritty" traits that Morrison is trying to purge from the adult Batman.  If he can raise this kid right, Batman has an opportunity to correct his own--that is, his writers'--past excesses.

In an equally nice touch, though, he has to resort to the humorless, angry martinet because that's the only treatment the boy respects.  Morrison has given Batman a complex challenge, to train Damian to be a healthier human being without backsliding in the opposite direction.  It's a rich premise and I hope Morrison does it justice by keeping Damian around longer than the one remaining issue of this arc.

While Morrison's writing has finally picked up, Kubert's art still hasn't risen to match it.  At best it's mere illustration, and not always effective illustration.  Either he or the letterer forgets which of the Spook's spooks is the goon and which is the undercover cop, although Morrison's script probably wasn't much help in this regard.  I do like the little mouths Kubert puts on their ghost costumes, though--an important detail that makes them overgrown trick-or-treaters rather than Klansmen.

He does a better job with the climactic fight scene, staging it against the Batcave's most iconic exhibits.  I suspect that's by Morrison's design, as the composition of that final splash page is just too perfect.  The page not only juxtaposes the fallen Tim Drake with the costumes of Thomas Wayne and Jason Todd (a juxtaposition that loses a little of its force, unfortunately, now that Jason isn't dead anymore--thanks for nothing, Superboy!), it drapes Tim with the most risible part of the old Robin costume, the green chain mail hot pants.  Is that meant to be a further humiliation?  A chilling replay of past failures?

Or is it a reminder that no matter how much these characters grimace, no matter how many depradations their writers inflict on them and no matter how much black their artists add or how much green they subtract, the somber heroes of "New Earth" will always be in continuity with the smiling four-color champions who apparently embarrass everybody at DC?

Everybody, it seems, but Grant Morrison.

ICAF 2006

Eleventh Annual International Comic Arts Festival (ICAF)
Thursday, October 12-Saturday, October 14
Mumford Room, Library of Congress Madison Building, Washington, DC

The International Comic Arts Festival, an annual conference devoted to the study of comics, returns to the Library of Congress this October for a three-day forum of panels, keynote speeches, artist talks, and exhibitions showcasing the cutting edge in work by comic artists and scholars.

This year ICAF is proud to present an evening with legendary cartoonist, comics artist, and author Jules Feiffer.  Feiffer will speak at 7:00 on the evening of Thursday, October 12.  That afternoon's programming will include a display of original Feiffer drawings and manuscript materials from the Library of Congress collection, from 3:00 to 3:45 in the Prints & Photographs Division Reading Room.

ICAF will also present a panel on the role of comics in documenting the Rwandan genocide at the George Washington University's Gelman Library at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, October 13.  The panel will feature Rwandan/Canadian cartoonist Rupert Bazambanza, whose graphic novel Sourire malgre tout presents a firsthand account of the genocide, and American conflict resolution expert Ellen Yamshon of the Comics Media in Conflict Resolution Project.  The panel will be moderated by George Washington University professor and Rwanda expert Steven Livingston.

Finally, ICAF will feature a symposium offering a rare behind-the-scenes look at American superhero comics.  Writer Stuart Moore and artist Jamal Igle (Firestorm) will appear in a panel detailing production methods, while comics legends Denny O'Neil (Batman, Green Lantern/Green Arrow, The Question) and Phil Jiminez (Otherworld, The Invisibles) will participate in a roundtable on the challenges of addressing political issues in mainstream US comics.  Both events will take place on the afternoon of Saturday, October 14.  ICAF will also host eighteen academic presentations by comic art scholars from around the world.

ICAF is pleased to work with the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division and the Caroline and Erwin Swann Foundation for Caricature and Cartoon. Our sponsors include the Canadian Embassy, the Washington Post, Andrews McMeel Universal, Jean Schulz, Cartoon Books, and Jay & Silent Bob's Secret Stash.

ICAF is free and open to the public. For more information, including schedules and sponsors, please visit our official website or contact Marc Singer.

The Three Faces of Frank

Frank Pembleton casts a long shadow.  Nine years after he departed Homicide: Life on the Streets the philosopher of the squad room, the king of the box, the all-around supercop is still showing up on TV in radically different form.

Pembleton was the reason I became a Homicide fan and the reason I remain one to this day.  Over the years I've come to realize that says a lot about my idealized conception of myself and my own profession but this is neither the time nor the place to get into that.  Suffice it to say that when I read David Simon's Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991) I was amazed to learn Pembleton was based on a single, real-life detective, Harry Edgerton of the Baltimore homicide unit.  In Simon's book Edgerton is, if not quite the master of interrogation Pembleton would become in the hands of actor Andre Braugher, still a brilliant detective with a knack for ignoring departmental policies and alienating his colleagues.  Simon allows a slight romanticization to creep into his portraits of many of the detectives he followed--filming them through gauze, as it were--but only Edgerton comes out looking like that familiar archetype, the maverick supercop.

It was a portrayal Simon would soon regret. In Tod Hoffman's Homicide: Life on the Screen (1998, and see how many permutations you can put that tagline through), he told Hoffman:

I gave Harry Edgerton too much credit for being antisocial.  I presented it as being healthier than it actually was, when, in fact, being a lone wolf is very dangerous and potentially self-destructive.

The Wire is, among many other things, an attempt to rein in the Pembleton myth so that it better reflects the reality of what happens to police who don't give the departmental bureaucratic structure the fealty it demands.  The series now has at least three characters who illustrate the drawbacks, the consequences, even the pathologies of the myth of the maverick supercop--three characters who bring Frank Pembleton back down to Harry Edgerton.

The Jimmy McNulty of seasons one through three is the harshest critique.  He's one of the finest detectives in the department but he burns too many bridges--destroying the Barksdale detail he creates, dumping murders in his friends' laps, and finally spitting in the face of Daniels, the one commander who's been looking out for him.  Worse, his attitude is contagious; by season three he's turned Griggs into a sullen, insubordinate, adulterous copy of himself.  If Pembleton is an overly idealized conception of the maverick detective then McNulty is perhaps a little too destructive to himself and the units around him, a slight overcompensation to correct for Pembleton's heroic mythologization.

Lester Freamon is a milder and more sympathetic revision who demythologizes Pembleton by going back to the source.  Like Harry Edgerton, Freamon was a homicide detective who got exiled to the pawnshop unit because he wouldn't play politics.  He seems to have learned his lesson, a lesson he tries to impart to McNulty and Griggs:  be a team player, have a life outside the department, and don't bite the hand that feeds you.  But now he's gotten the unit dissolved again, and exactly the same way it happened last time--by going after the politicians.  He was smart enough to manipulate Pearlman and the lieutenant into okaying the subpoenas, smart enough to time them before the primaries, but not so smart that he could see the departmental axe that would fall on him.

(You have to admire Lester's principles but I really wonder how the rest of the season will play out with the major crimes unit effectively gutted.  Season two took far too long to rebuild it after the scorched-earth ending of season one.)

This week a third character tapped into the Edgerton experience, if only briefly.  When we catch up with Bunny Colvin he's working security for a downtown hotel, just as Edgerton did after his early retirement.  And looking back to last season, Bunk Moreland's needle-in-a-haystack search for an officer's missing gun is taken from one of Edgerton's last, fuck-you jobs as a detective.  Any time we see a good officer screwed by the department Harry Edgerton seems to be lurking behind them, reminding us of the peril that awaits any police whose top priorities aren't kissing all the right asses and covering his own.

Other highlights from this week:

• Any scene with Omar stands a pretty good chance of being the most memorable of the week.  The morning cereal run and the bit with the Newports were no exception.  But as long as we're talking about dangerous mythologizations...  Last season Bunk took a good run at cracking the Omar myth, dispelling the aura of cool that had little kids playing Omar in the street.  So far it doesn't appear to have stuck.  Omar's just too slick.
• Whenever a police has enough integrity (or enough years for a pension, or enough of a martyr complex) to stand up to the brass and face the consequences, the brass go after his proteges: Bunny last season, now Lester.  McNulty is the only one who hasn't cared enough to back down.  Maybe that's what makes him so uniquely destructive.
• Or should that be "made him"?
• "The sommelier behind the plexi said it was dry."  The Wire has the funniest damn lines on TV, but they're so dry you'd never even notice.

Harmacy 2

Looks like somebody else is as unimpressed by the aging frat boys and bachelorettes invading Adams Morgan as I was.  From the Washington City Paper, artist Greg Houston brings you a portfolio of illustrations from DC's hottest nightspot in decline.

The funny thing is, to view these pictures and read the accompanying text you'd get the impression that Adams Morgan is Yoshiwara, and maybe it's as close as DC comes.  But when I went there in August I was disoriented by how tame the place felt as the slummers finally overwhelmed the neighborhood.

I don't think these two observations are mutually exclusive.  The slummers bring their own slum with them, a moveable feast of spilled beers and emptied stomachs and bumped shoulders and drunken fights.  Nothing "Funky, ethnic, bohemian" about them or the trouble they cause--that's just shit they wouldn't leave on their own doorstep.  All of which is to say that as Adams Morgan becomes rowdier it also becomes less of a break from the city around it, just another Georgetown filled with the very assholes it was supposed to be an escape from.

But the underlying neighborhood is still there.  Most of my recent visits have been off-peak; one Sunday night it was deserted, prompting some good comedy about Adams Morgan after the rapture.  (On reflection we were dead wrong.  Adams Morgan would be more crowded after the rapture.)  The Pharmacy, I'm happy to report, is as solid as ever.  On my last trip there wasn't a polo shirt in sight.  But then, we had the good sense to get out long before closing.

Sign of the times.  The last time I was down in Adams Morgan--in the middle of a placid post-drizzle afternoon--I saw an advertisement that perfectly captures this city in its local and national obsessions.  Bear in mind that the skyrocketing real estate market here has finally started to cool, if not collapse.

The poster was for a real estate agent looking to attract sellers eager to dump their houses.  The caption read

WHAT'S YOUR EXIT STRATEGY?

Mayor Carceral

Feuding, Bawlmer-style:

In his "Post Mortem" to the new edition of Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (the book so nice I bought it twice), David Simon reveals the fate of Gary D'Addario, the homicide lieutenant who inspired Al Giardello (inasmuch as any white man can be said to inspire a part played by Yaphet Kotto).  D'Addario, who had been technical advisor and had a recurring part on Homicide, eventually became a major in command of the city's Northeastern District.  Then things changed:

He was forced to resign abruptly three years ago by a police commissioner who never offered a reason, simply summoning D'Addario to his office and issuing the demand.

That this came a couple days after D'Addario first appeared in a brief scene of The Wire, playing the part of a grand jury prosecutor, may be relevant.  The current city administration is known to dislike the HBO drama, and though D'Addario wasn't the only department veteran to appear in episodes, he was the only ranking commander to do so at the time.  I wrote a letter to the mayor, noting that the part was a neutral one and that D'Addario's dialogue brought no discredit on the department.  I suggested that if displeasure with the major stemmed from his appearance on the show, then the decision should be reconsidered, and, further, that the administration should in form us one way or another if it had concerns about officers appearing on the drama.

No response was forthcoming.

That was in 2003.  The next year, The Wire featured a maverick district commander who is forced into retirement and an ambitious white city councilman whose career trajectory and tough-on-crime platform matched Mayor Martin O'Malley's.  A necessary part of the show's indictment of Baltimore's failing institutions, or was there a little payback on the side?

Any personal motivations notwithstanding, Councilman Thomas Carcetti is a necessary part of the show's indictment.  It's to the show's credit (and perhaps a sign of David Simon and Ed Burns's forgiving natures) that Carcetti isn't just a bilious caricature of the ambitious politician.  He's sincere about fighting crime and making Baltimore safer, but he begins his mayoral run by adopting the git-tuff war on drugs rhetoric that has governed the nation's drug and police policies for more than twenty years and led both of them exactly nowhere.  Carcetti has plenty of good detail-oriented positions about funding witness protection and the like, but when he has to articulate the big picture all he can do is recycle the war metaphor and dial up its intensity.  In the final episode of season three his rhetoric goes so over the top that we can only read the whole season as an allegory for another war built on wobbly assumptions and sustained by ever-hotter air:  another conflict that turns civilians into new enemy combatants every day, by locking them up and treating them like the enemy.

(The preceding analysis would be ever so much cleverer if Simon hadn't flat out said season three was an Iraq commentary at a reading a couple weekends ago.  I'd gotten it before then, honestly:  titling the season finale "Mission Accomplished" doesn't leave much to the imagination.)

The worst part is that Carcetti isn't entirely at fault.  The end of season three also makes it clear that the police, the federal government, and even the voters won't tolerate any other approaches to treating drug use or ending drug crime.  (The same could be said of the Iraq war, nationally if not in every locality, up until around the time John Murtha changed his mind.)  Anything but the paramilitary option is a loser; flirting with legalization is political suicide.  We get the wars we want, and the governments we deserve.

The next to worst part is that other voices are trying to look outside the war rhetoric.  Bunny Colvin's method of cutting the Gordian knot was spot-on, but sloppily executed and too extreme for the city to contemplate.  In the mayoral debate we saw tonight Tony Gray identifies the city's schools as the solution, the only way to catch the kids before the corner gets them.  Based on what we know of this season's theme it seems like he's right, although we have yet to see all the ways the schools are falling short (we've already seen a few of the ways the drug system undermines them before the year even begins).  But Tony Gray is an also-ran, a walking corpse, a distant third to Carcetti's attack dog and Clarence Royce's slimy machine politician.  His idea will get lost in the shuffle; even this episode could barely find the time to show it.

Other bits of business from this episode:

• No wonder Cutty's getting the love.  As we saw last season, he was one of the only soldiers his age who wasn't in prison or dead.  Seems like the same is true wrt African American men in Baltimore as a whole.
• Carcetti brilliantly exploits the racial fissures within the police department, from Valchek all the way down to Sgt. Landsman.  (The real Jay Landsman, by the way, was the inspiration for Richard Belzer's unkillable John Munch.  He appears on The Wire as Bunny's and now Daniels's second in command in the Western.)  Always a pleasure to see the canny old operator Valchek in action.
• The parallelism between the kids taking Marlo's money and the politicians taking drug money was pointed--maybe a little too pointed by the show's usual standards.
• Carver is becoming a real police... but that's a post for another week.

So what else did you like?

No Corner Left Behind

The Wire isn't just a crime drama; it's ethnography.  The first season explored the twinned hierarchies of police and the drug gangs they pursue; the second took us inside a dying stevedores' union; the third took us even farther up the police chain of command while also delving into city hall and conducting a brilliant thought-experiment on drug legalization.  The fourth season adds city middle schools into the mix, tracking a quartet of kids on the cusp of adolescence and showing how the school system funnels some of them towards the very corners it's supposed to be keeping them away from.  If the fifth season--and according to producer David Simon, there are no guarantees we'll see a fifth season--shows us a dying newspaper then The Wire's depiction of liberal society in decay will be complete.

If that doesn't sound like the most enthusiastic tagline for a television series that's because it leaves out the execution, where The Wire truly shines.  It's never pretended to be a feel-good drama, or one of those crime shows that stokes our desire for righteous retribution as perfect cops avenge murdered supermodels with necro-pornographic forensic investigations.  But The Wire isn't a dry sociological treatise either; its sociology is living and breathing, from the biting dialogue to the nuanced understanding of human behavior to the insider's view of places most of us will never see--if we're lucky.

The Wire is produced by a former Baltimore Sun crime reporter (David Simon, author of the brilliant Homicide) and a former Baltimore homicide detective turned teacher (Ed Burns), written by a team of journalists and novelists who know their city to its rusting heart.  Every word feels true, and some of them verifiably are.  Christy and I had a good laugh at the scene where middle school teachers swelter through a late-summer orientation filled with empty platitudes and content-free acronyms.  The first day of my last job opened with insights the university president had gleaned from a book called Hug Your Customer, "customer" being his preferred conceptual frame for "student."

That job brought me face to face with the deficiencies of the business-model university and its secondarization of higher education.  If the universities that serve most working and lower-middle class Americans are getting turned into high schools, then what's happening to the high schools filled with kids who are never going to college?  What about the middle schools?  The Wire hasn't shown us yet--the first episode just aired last night--but it doesn't look good.  At the same time, I know the show isn't just going to wag its finger, hang one scapegoat and absolve everyone else.  Everybody will get their moment; The Wire will let us see the world through their eyes, and then give them exactly as much or as little rope as they deserve.

Add to that a couple of ongoing plots: the police investigation of a newly ascendant drug kingpin and the mayoral campaign of a white politician who's more than a little reminiscent of Baltimore mayor Martin O'Malley--timed to air just as O'Malley campaigns for governor.  This should be interesting. Last season's creation of "Hamsterdam" (a frustrated cop's unsanctioned drug legalization program) will be tough to beat, but this season could be the one that hits closest to home.

More reviews to come...

Torture Heroes

In today's Washington Post, Stephen Hunter bemoans the lack of heroism in modern action heroes.  (Free registration required.)

Initially, his taste in movie heroes looks pretty good.  Effusing over John Wayne's Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, Hunter looks for the qualities D.H. Lawrence identified in his survey of Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales ("The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer").  But he finds them so lacking in today's leading men that he can only assemble them in a Frankenstein compilation of traits culled from the men who ruled the silver screen in the 1960s and early 70s, when Hunter was presumably coming of age.  He devotes a lot of attention to individual body parts, until the whole column reads like a mash note to the strictly heterosexual crushes of his puberty.

But he can't swoon over the tough guys of his past without first running down the presumably softer heroes of the present, implying that we're suffering some sort of manliness shortage.  He never really explains why Matt Damon (star of the admirably unsentimental Jason Bourne movies) and company aren't tough enough except to say that Ben Affleck is "too pretty"; the production department pitches in by running a picture of Johnny Depp in all his kohled-up Jack Sparrow glory.  Hunter wants but cannot permit himself to say that the new stars are just too goshdarned effeminate, although again the production department comes through for him.  In the illustration that accompanies the print version of the article, they've pasted the features from a half-dozen older stars onto a shaved, waxed, faux-hawked male body that looks like it's walked straight out of an underwear ad.

Since he won't directly voice this masculine anxiety, Hunter's case is mostly hypothetical and mostly negative as he inventories the things the new heroes won't do:

Today's stars need love.  They don't want to be feared, they want to be hugged.  They want to be told, "It's okay, big fella."  They don't want to shoot anyone, if possible; they certainly won't beat a confession out of a suspect [...]

In other words, today's male action heroes are wusses because they won't torture people.  By the end of the paragraph, this celebration of brutality isn't even subtext anymore:

They never get even, they don't punish, they see the folly of vengeance, they inflict pain only on special occasions.  (Last year's "Sin City" was one such occasion, where the point of the film was its removal from a moral spectrum, thus allowing its brutish heroes the freedom to torture, which they did.)

Sin City must be a tough case for Hunter, providing exactly the kind of swaggering, suspect-beating, bitch-slapping heroes he pines for yet rendering them as moral and physical grotesques.  I didn't much like Sin City but if it troubles Stephen Hunter by holding up a mirror to his ethic of abusive toughness then it did exactly one thing right.  (It also foregrounds and amplifies the misogyny of those old-school heroes, something Hunter studiously dances around in his paean to them.)

Elsewhere in the same paper Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan (our freedom-loving partners in the Global War on Terror), provides another perspective on interrogation and torture as seen from outside the comforting darkness of a cineplex:

The next day, an envelope landed on my desk; inside were photos of the corpse of a man who had been imprisoned in Uzbekistan's gulags.  I learned that his name was Muzafar Avazov.  His face was bruised, his torso and limbs livid purple.  We sent the photos to the University of Glasgow.  Two weeks later, a pathology report arrived.  It said that the man's fingernails had been pulled out, that he had been beaten and that the fine line around his torso showed he had been immersed in hot liquid.  He had been boiled alive.

And, if this should seem far from home:

According to a press release distributed to local media by the U.S. embassy in Tashkent in December 2002, the [Uzbek President Islam] Karimov regime received more than $500 million in U.S. aid that year alone.  That included $120 million for the Uzbek armed forces and more than $80 million for the re-branded Uzbek security services, successor to the KGB.

In other words, when the prisoner was boiled to death that summer, U.S. taxpayers helped heat the water.

But I'm sure the authorities got their confession, administered by torturers with the eyes of John Wayne, the lips of Clint Eastwood, and the callused, manly hands of Lee Marvin.

Hunter gives away his game when he writes that "Only a few boys seem to have the man-junk that can get them through the heavy lifting of a hero's role."  (The first one he lists is Samuel L. Jackson.  Mr. Hunter, I offer you this advice:  you might want to reconsider any sentence construction that has you referring to fifty-seven-year-old Samuel L. Jackson as a "boy.")  There it is, surfaced at last--the man-junk.  He wields the words with all the dexterity of a middle-aged dad picking up slang from his son, but the meaning is clear:  our generation of sensitive, torture-averse heroes just don't have the balls for the job.

His essay provides yet another reminder of the inadequate, appalling, embarrasingly Freudian explanation for the Bush administration's misdeeds in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and "black prisons" all over Europe.  We have inflicted horrible violence on the world, our principles, and ourselves because on September 11, 2001 our masculinity was threatened.  With the White House occupied by the worst possible people under those circumstances--a pair of guys who ran on a hawkish platform but had ducked the military conflict of their youth--our leaders became desperate to reassert our (their) manliness by any means necessary.  Too many of us, equally threatened, fell right in step behind them.  (Hunter, by the way, is a conservative movie reviewer and novelist who praised Dick Cheney's "samurai" qualities after the VP shot his hunting/drinking buddy in the face.  Apparently the modern samurai can coast by on draft deferrals--the important thing is the steely resolve with which he sends other people to fight.)  And so a bunch of the softest, most cowardly bastards in history play at hard men by ordering their subordinates to shock, drown, strip, beat, and humiliate prisoners, while the Stephen Hunters berate our fictional heroes for not joining in.

Which brings us to one of the most puzzling things about Hunter's piece: our culture currently has no shortage of torture heroes.  From movies to TV to comics, you don't have to look far to find entertainment that luridly dramatizes, justifies, or outright glorifies the business of inflicting pain on captives.  (An aside to my academic friends:  another sign that most culture doesn't "subvert" a damn thing.  An aside to my conservative friends:  still more evidence that "liberal Hollywood" doesn't just make liberal product.  Popular culture eagerly offers itself up to whoever's in power, ready to spread whatever good news they dictate.)

We would all do well to remember another piece of film criticism from New York Times religion writer Peter Steinfels:

In even the most morally unsophisticated forms of popular storytelling, it is certainly not violence in itself, not even killing, that unmistakably separates good guys from evil ones. It is torture. Heroes may kill; villains torture [...]

Our government would like to obliterate that difference in its desire to excuse its own crimes.  We don't have to help them.