Thursday, August 2, 2012

The Wire: Bad Dreams (S2:E11)


“It didn’t happen overnight”

            Why even watch “The Wire”? It’s a fair question to ask. I have no doubt in my mind that “Bad Dreams” is among, at least, the 50 best episodes of television ever produced. It’s a perfect culmination of everything that has come before it, and it feels more “true” than most pieces of entertainment I could think of. Yet I’m sure tonight I’ll be in a miserable mood because of it. I still am, after taking an hour break between watching it and writing about it just to catch my nerves. It’s almost purely about pain, despair, etc. It’s not just evil triumphing over goo, but apathy, callousness, douchebaggery and many other crappy things winning, and winning permanently.
            The answer, I think, is one of two things. One, we’re all masochists, in which case bring out the whips and chains. Two, which I also think is more probable, is that there is some innate value in understanding the (WARNING, GRANDIOSE AND BULLSHITTY PHRASING APPROACHING!) fullness of the human experience, even when it’s as abjectly horrific as an entire family of fundamentally good people going under.  We need to understand what’s down in the hole in order to either fix it or enjoy what lies elsewhere.
            That aside, wow. What an episode. There are other things going on than the Sobotka’s, but this is really all about their story (I’ll talk a bit about Omar and the police in the Observations section). No one on “The Wire” was ever nominated for an acting Emmy, and I think in terms of submission episodes Chris Bauer might have the best in the show’s history (although looking at the nominees from that year, with this show up against Season 5 of “The Sopranos,” which may very well be its best, I can understand why he didn’t). You see the fullness of his life here, as he wakes up to go to work like any other day. He’s already broken, then, seeing Ziggy on the frontpage of the paper for his murder arrest. The cops serve the warrants on all involved on the docks: only Nicky is spared, because he was sleeping with Prissy (which the show hides wonderfully by not showing exactly who is holding onto Nicky until the end of the cold open. In the context of what follows, Nick’s infidelity is a minor issue, but it’s a crushing detail in an episode filled with reasons to despair).
            Frank is arrested at the docks, paraded in front of the media, and promptly released on bond. He has to visit his son (it’s bad when an arrest brings you to where you were already planning to go) in prison. Ziggy’s beatup from his time in prison, and the father-and-son talk in the jail. I trashed Ziggy a lot, which is largely the point of the character, but I’ll be damned if his final scene here wasn’t crushingly moving. We see all that has been left unsaid between the two all season, the way in which Frank remained with his union while leaving his actual family, mother and son, to decay more than the docks he patrols. Ziggy was, in the final estimation, too weak for the world he grew up in, and could never convinced himself he was truly a Sobotka (Frank even denies that he could have done anything for him).
            The heartbreaks continue. Frank’s brother chews him out for his lack of concern of his family. Beadie cries when she sees what has happened to Frank, and reminds him that what’s hitting him today is the accumulations of years of struggle. The grain pier vanishes because of the scandal. Each scene is as powerful as the last, and it’s only the pragmatic concern for space that forces me to summarize them in a sentence. In terms of emotional impact, each one deserves chapters of a book.
            As I come to the conclusion, all I can think about is what else could Frank have done. Without his actions, those dockworkers would all be unemployed, struggling in some other way. Nick couldn’t leave his family behind, either, and neither man had the mindset to leave. And that’s what really makes the final scene under the bridge unbearable. Everything had to go wrong, in the way it went wrong, to bring us to this point. Ziggy had to collapse, Nick had to get caught smuggling drugs, Frank had to be corrupt, because what else could have happened? Without that corrupt money, no grain pier, and the docks go under anyway. The tragic truth of it all is that we are all subject to these brutal societal forces, gentrification, economic decay, corruption (the FBI agent leaking information) we could never possibly anticipate. Frank doesn’t know he’s walking into, but he’s too good of a man to leave his son behind. The episode fades out as the Greeks come to the bridge, and it’s only out of a sense of mercy that David Simon cuts away…because we all know what is coming.

“I’ve got to get clean”

Observations and What-Have-You’s

n  The sins of the father haunting his sons is a recurrent theme of the season, but who, exactly, is the father? Frank seems to be raising a whole union, in addition to Ziggy and Nicky. He didn’t understand the fully F**ked nature of what he was getting into, how dock-crime was a different game than what it used to be, and it brought Ziggy and Nicky down, as his brother reminds him. Although, sympathizing with Frank, his brother’s inaction might have been just as much of a crime, only one that comes with plausible deniability.
n  It’s a testament to how I feel about this episode that I didn’t write about the great Omar scene in it. Omar is good at what he does, and manages to have a killshot on Brother Mouzone, only to realize that he’s been conned. Omar’s moral code combined with a general badassery has never been clearer than when he shoots a man, and seeing a man with a similar view on life, calls an ambulance to save him. Just splendid.
n  This episode really did shake me, even more because I knew where it was going the whole time. More than anything, it makes me dread rewatching “Final Grades” in Season 4, because my memory is that it’s the best thing the show’s ever done.
n  Also, a reminder of the crucial fact about “The Wire”: all the shit goes down when George Pelancanos is writing the 2nd-last-episode, and here we stand. The breather that follows will hopefully allow me to take better stock of all the important thematic material on decay and family I missed here.
n  Beadie clearly could be a good homicide cop, if she wanted to, but I think the way she treats her tail indicates just how much this type of work horrifies her.
n  Time for me to take a long shower. 

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