“That boy ain’t got no luck”
We open up
the eponymous episode of “The Wire” with another corpse, making this the third
opening shot to be of a murder victim (the unnamed corpse, Gant the witness,
and now Brandon, Omar’s boyfriend. Omar’s other partner was killed, but
offscreen). This isn’t a revolutionary
tactic: “Law and Order” has opened up approximately all 747,342 episodes in its run with the discovery of a
corpse. However, the repetition of the tactic has the odd effect of being
simultaneously horrifying and numbing. Another day, another corpse. There is
nothing theatrical, or even enjoyable about the violence here: it is withheld
for the very purpose of removing any visceral “entertainment” we could have.
Instead, we just have to remark at the horror of another corpse, and move on.
Just like everyone else in West Baltimore.
David
Foster Wallace gave a great commencement address (I forget where) arguing, in
essence, that a liberal arts education was useful in the fight against apathy
and boredom. The horror of even benign monotonies is that they crush the soul,
slowly but inescapably. What’s much worse is just how much (almost) everyone
brushes off the horrifying death of Brandon. And therein lies the great tragedy
of “The Wire’s” Baltimore: so much is wrong, that one cannot possibly
emotionally invest themselves in fixing a problem. If they were too, they would
either become emotionally overwhelmed by the associated problems, or fall into
apathy as a defense mechanism. We, as humans, only can care so much.
Still, hope
springs eternal (I’m falling behind in my “write sentences no one could ever
use to describe ‘The Wire’ accurately pool at work), and the viewer begins to
see the emergence of Wallace’s soul. Wallace, who informed D’Angelo as to
Brandon’s presence. We saw earlier that Wallace was clearly still a child,
playing with toys, and here that trait begins to provide dramatic payoff. We
know, from the moment he sees the corpse, that he’ll begin to question what’s
going on in his world.
Elsewhere
on the street, little of importance is going on. D’Angelo has begun a small
fling with the dancer from the club (Shardene is her name), Bubbles makes an
attempt at going legit (and is back doing heroin by the 40-minute mark of the
episode), and Bodie gets out of jail through the consummate skeeviness of
Maurice Levy, attorney-at-law. Bubbles’
scene provides some set-up to two threads (Johnny’s unbelievably poor luck, and
his numerous attempts to go clean) that will run the length of the show, but
the rest of it is mostly place-setting.
The cops,
meanwhile, get the bulk of the episode’s focus, with internal conflicts about
“good” policework dividing the unit. Det. Polk (also known as “the really
crappy detective”) comes into work drunk (see?) in the morning. As a rhetorical
threat, Daniels says he should either go to work or go to rehab: to Daniel’s
dismayed surprise, he chooses rehab. There are a ton of good policemen on this
detail, but “The Wire” makes an exhaustive list of ways as to how one bad egg spoils
the metaphorical eggs benedict of the Baltimore County Police Department.
It’s not
just over-the-top laziness, like Polk: it’s also ruthless careerism. Daniels
has, to this point, mostly favored his career over doing “good” work, but
bringing out Major Rawls goes to show how, paraphrasing Qui-Gon Jinn, “there
are always bigger piece-of-shit fish in the sea.” Rawls wants to bust D’Angelo
for three murders with essentially no evidence, which would derail the
Barksdale investigation but would juke his stats (a phrase which becomes more
important as the show goes on). Daniels, to McNulty’s surprise, takes a stand
and calls Rawls out in front of the commissioner. It’s clearly a bad career
move, but it’s so much the right move that Daniels can’t do anything else. And
it works, short-term: the team can continue the investigation.
I always
worry that these recaps may just seem like a list of what was going on in the
dozen-odd sub-plots of the episode. Indeed, taken as a singular episode, it’s
kind of hard to tell what the overall takeaway. There’s not a whole lot of
progress here, even by the show’s slow standard of pace, and the character
development is marginal and dispersed. But that’s sort of the point of “The
Wire.” It is, as I think I’ve written before, a mosaic. The show lacks a single
character as strong as, say, Tony Soprano, Walter White or Don Draper, but the
aggregate characterization of the show (call it “Baltimore”) adds up to
something greater. Hence:
“and all the pieces matter.” —Freamon
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