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| ISBN-13: | 9780822376446 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/08/2014 |
| Series: | Spin Offs |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
On The Wire
By Linda Williams
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2014 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7644-6
CHAPTER 1
Ethnographic Imagination
FROM JOURNALISM TO TELEVISION SERIAL
David Simon only ever wanted to be a great journalist. However, his notion of journalism was grandiose, aspiring to a deep sociocultural understanding of the lives of the people whose stories he reported. If ethnography can be defined as a method of nuanced qualitative social research, "in which fine grained daily interactions constitute the lifeblood of the data produced," then Simon's journalism at the Baltimore Sun can be described as ethnographic from the very beginning.
Simon filed three hundred bylines at the Sun in his first year out of the University of Maryland reporting on the cop beat. Starting first with short pieces, he soon developed strengths for writing longer, multipart series. His first such story, "Little Melvin Williams," published in 1987, was about a late eighties drug lord who had until recently been kingpin. In many ways Williams is the foundation for the character of Avon Barksdale in The Wire. This story was published in five parts after Simon took a leave to write the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, where he developed a knack for even longer stories. Based on cases occurring in 1988, the book was finally published in 1991 at 646 pages. Simon was allowed to follow the lives and cases of the Baltimore Police Department's homicide unit on the condition that he did not communicate what he witnessed to his newspaper and did not quote anyone by name unless they agreed to go on the record. The twenty-something Simon hung out with selected shifts of police and followed the progression or impasses of their many cases, most frustratingly the rape and murder of a young girl that was never solved.
After completing Homicide, equipped with deeper knowledge of the police and criminal justice system, Simon wrote another series for the Sun, "Crisis in Blue," a four-part article about the increasing dysfunction within the Baltimore Police Department. In this series he revealed that the failure at the heart of the system was institutional and far from individual. In 1993 he took another year off, this time with former cop–turned–schoolteacher Ed Burns (who had been a frequent source in his crime reporting), to investigate the cops' antagonists: drug dealers and drug addicts in West Baltimore. The resulting book, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, reports on an extended West Baltimore family (crack mother, heroin-addicted father, crack-dealing son, and their friends, lovers, and associates). This 543-page tome was published in 1997, after Simon had abandoned journalism.
Both of Simon's long books employ the basic methodologies of ethnography: a long term—one year—stay in a field where a particular set of social relations can be observed. The observer learns the rituals and habits of the culture by following selected individuals in their work and daily lives. Simon's goal in both books was to understand and depict the deeper workings of police culture and drug culture in inner-city Baltimore through the eyes of their informants. In Homicide, they were mostly cops investigating murders, along with some witnesses and victims' families. In The Corner the informants were drug dealers and users. In this latter case Simon and Burns had no official sanction to observe what could, after all, be criminal acts. They simply hung out on the West Fayette Street neighborhood corners practicing what they unpretentiously call "stand-around-and-watch journalism." This journalism transmuted into ethnography at the point at which the two men had been there long enough to become regular fixtures on the scene.
Ethnography is essentially a more systematic extension of "stand-around-and-watch journalism." Field techniques are rooted in the idea of participant observation, in which data is regarded as a gift from willing informants. Simon was not a professional ethnographer; indeed, in studying the cops he may have been too enthusiastic, may have identified with his subjects too deeply, for the level of meticulous observation and precision that ethnography requires. He admits he simply loved "these guys"—their language, their procedures, their tough and sometimes tender ways. Studying the corners, on the other hand, he and Burns were more measured, a bit more scientific. Their model was Elliot Liebow's classic,Tally's Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men, first published in 1967. While on the corner Simon and Burns adopted Liebow's principal rule: to limit loans of money or other favors to what each asker would have gotten from another friend. Thus they would occasionally drive a sick addict to a clinic or loan a little money for a fix.
Ethnographer George Marcus argues that there is an inherent problem with the ethnographic method when it concentrates solely on a specific location of study. How do you indicate the existence of the larger system that affects the micro-level of the community studied? To do so, he argues, ethnographers of a "single site" inevitably have recourse to a larger whole that has not yet been studied in so deep or systematic a fashion. As a result, researchers do not have data for the whole, which is often more assumed than observed. Marcus calls this recourse the "fiction of the whole," and "the whole" usually amounts to some abstraction: "the state," "the economy," "capitalism," and so on. This fiction enables the telling of the ethnographic tale; it enables some kind of closure: "However slightly developed or imagined ... the fiction of the whole ... exercises powerful control over the narrative in which an ethnographer frames a local world." Even the most scrupulously factual of ethnographers must presume that the micro-worlds of (say) homicide cops or drug corners exist within a larger system—a fiction of the whole that the micro-level community illustrates. Thus Marcus and others have developed the ambition to undertake a "multisited" ethnography—one that can approach the system as a whole by studying more of the sites that compose it.
Since the 1980s, multisited ethnography has expanded traditional single-sited ethnography to give greater breadth and scope to the discipline. In place of the classic concern with the unique perspective of local cultures (especially those of colonial subalterns or the underclass), some ethnographers have sought to identify a more "diffuse time-space" of study that expands beyond the single site. This method maps a more complex thread of interconnected cultural processes in a related world system of geopolitical interaction. Through the discovery of the relations between various communities, the ethnographer attempts to "bring these multiple sites into the same frame of study and to posit their relationships on the basis of first-hand ethnographic research."
The only problem, as Marcus freely admits, is that no single ethnographer has enough knowledge of enough worlds or enough time to map this constantly evolving world system. Admitting that multisited ethnography might be more of an ideal than a reality—the sort of imaginary "world enough and time" to which the poet Andrew Marvell long ago alluded—Marcus and his colleagues nevertheless hold out an ideal of an "ethnographic imaginary." He writes, "I am looking for a different, less stereotyped and more significant place for the reception of ethnographically produced knowledge in a variety of academic and nonacademic forms.... Tracing and describing the connections and relationships among sites previously thought incommensurate is ethnography's way of making arguments and providing its own contexts of significance."
Given the word "imaginary" and the ambition to reach beyond "academic forms," it may not be surprising that the place where the knowledge of the world of cops and the world of the corner converge to provide their own "contexts of significance" proves to be Simon's unique fabrication of ethnographically informed serial television melodrama, The Wire. Here, at last, there is "world enough and time" to make the arguments and set up the contexts that could not be managed in journalism. Serial television melodrama makes possible the larger canvass of the ethnographic imaginary.
When Simon found a way to combine the factual, ethnographically observed, and detailed worlds of cops and corners into one converged fictional world, he had discovered the genius of the series, already glimpsed in the 2000 script he peddled to HBO, entitled The Wire: A Dramatic Series for HBO. There had been plenty of long-running police procedurals on television, both episodic and serial. There had also been plenty of movies about gangsters or "boyz" in the hood, but with the exception of Spike Lee's 1995 adaptation of Richard Price's fine novel Clockers (1992), there had never been a film or a television series that had given equal time to both sides of the law and that had compared them as systems in and of themselves. Indeed, not even Price or Lee's Clockers had managed to capture the day-to-day workings of law enforcement and lawbreaking over a sustained period of time.
In the first season of The Wire, cops and drug dealers/users inhabit the first two worlds of the series's initial frame. Unlike most traditional genres, in which cops are posited as either morally better than the "robbers" they police, or occasional bad apples, here both sides are equally caught up in the contrasting procedures and disciplines of their work. The first is a homicide investigation, though one that does not seek the "solution" to that crime. In it we observe the routine of Detective Jimmy McNulty, who casually stops in on an unrelated court trial in time to catch a state's witness who fails to testify against a defendant in the dock. So far, this is what we might expect from a single-sited police procedural: the handsome (white) detective keeping an eye on cases involving black defendants and witnesses. What we don't expect is the episode to ignore the investigation of the crime scene with which it began, nor do we expect the focus to shift so thoroughly to that of the cop's antagonists: the drug dealers.
Indeed, we can measure the exact moment when The Wire becomes multisited and ceases to be an ordinary police procedural. At 24:04 minutes into the first episode of the first season ("The Target") the black defendant in the previous courtroom scene, D'Angelo Barksdale, who has just been acquitted, is driven to a strip club by Roland ("Wee-Bey") Brice, his uncle's main enforcer, in order to celebrate his freedom. While a typical cop show might allow us to glimpse the exultation of the acquitted party as a brief interlude before returning to the procedures of the cops, we now pay equal attention to the procedures of the recently acquitted defendant and the gang to which he belongs. On his way to the bar where the celebration will take place, D'Angelo violates the rule against speaking of business in a vehicle that might be bugged (the first introduction of the theme of "the wire"). Wee-Bey stops the SUVand out on the sidewalk lectures D'Angelo on the rules of silence. In the following scene, twice as long as any other in the episode, we are introduced to D'Angelo's uncle, kingpin Avon Barksdale, at the strip club that fronts for his drug-dealing organization. Here D'Angelo receives another lecture about discipline, in this case about the unnecessary murder for which he was just acquitted. Two scenes later, we learn that for this lack of discipline D'Angelo has been demoted to work drug sales in low-rise apartments instead of the more lucrative high-rise projects he once worked. The equally important procedures of cops and dealers are thus established, from this moment on in the first season, as the two fundamental "sites" of the series.
The ethnographic knowledge of the worlds of cops and drug dealers comes both from Simon's reporting for the Sun and from his two books of long-form journalism—Homicide and The Corner. However, the parallel unfolding of these microsites, which this season as a whole carries out, enables a rich thematic comparison of the two institutions: cops who try to be "good police" and cops who just want to bust heads; and drug dealers who either possess or lack the discipline to avoid capture. The paradox of Simon's expanding ethnographic imaginary in The Wire is that the move to fictional storytelling allows him to abandon the "fiction of the whole" by instead building generalizations grounded in the procedural knowledge of his two initial sites. In other words, by moving to the form of serial fiction, The Wire itself, by multiplying "sites" from season to season, adding to the contrast in cops and dealers, builds its own "fiction of the whole." Serial fiction, based upon the contrasts of two related institutions, thus solves the problem of single-sited ethnography by building larger multisited (albeit fictional) worlds.
Each new season of The Wire accretes a new ethnographically observed world to the initial one of cops and corners. The following season adds the world of a predominantly Polish dockworkers union (the only narrative thread not continued throughout the series). The third season adds the world of city politics to that of cops and drug dealers and builds further parallels between the efforts of city government, police, and drug dealers to reform themselves: a reformist (white) candidate runs for mayor; drug dealers form a cooperative, and one rogue police major undertakes his own brilliant reform of a drugs-permitted zone ("Hamsterdam"). A remarkable fourth season focuses on a new generation of corner boys and drug dealers within the added institutional site of Tilghman Middle School, where a former cop now teaches. The fifth season keeps all but the docks of the second season in play, adding the new world of the Baltimore Sun and its persistent failure to report the real city news while cops continue to police a more ruthless new generation of drug dealers.
As the series cuts from one site to the next, rarely stopping to recap or reiterate, it approaches what the ethnographer could only dream of: a multisited ethnographic imaginary that no longer needs to depend on allusions to abstract ideas of "the state," "the economy," or "capitalism" as its "fiction of the whole." Its many sites add up and reveal a vivid picture of that whole that needs no economic theory of neoliberalism to be self-evident. The vivid and accessible interlocking stories from so many concrete ethnographic sites is what fiction affords, what ethnography aspires to and what newspaper journalism can only rarely achieve. What, then, enabled this former journalist to make the leap from reporting fact to a fictional ethnographic imaginary? Simon himself would like us to think that he was inspired by both tragic and novelistic forms. I argue, instead, that it would be two experiments with television that would hone the skills of this dyed-in-the-wool journalist and allow him make the leap from reporting fact to writing fact-based multisited fiction. But for this to happen Simon had to quit the business he loved and turn to a certain discipline of television that he has never quite admitted embracing. To this day, he remains furious at the newspaper business for rejecting his brand of reporting, but he must know by now that it was the best thing that ever happened to him.
Rifle-Shot Journalism
As a journalist, Simon evolved in the direction of New Journalism's more novelistic way of reporting. The New Journalist is so "saturated," as Tom Wolfe has put it, with the situation of a given subject that he or she feels entitled to get inside characters' heads—to say what they think. Of course New Journalism is no longer new. It is well entrenched in journalism and is not only represented by a figure like Wolfe but by some of the best nonfiction writers now working. Structurally, however, it is often more like a movie than a novel: it "proceeds scene by scene, much as in a movie"; it incorporates "varying points of view, rather than telling a story solely from the perspective of the narrator."
"Whole scenes and stretches of dialogue" are precisely what we get in Simon's September 3, 1995, Baltimore Sun story "The Metal Men"—the story that would cause him to quit journalism. Unlike a much earlier five-part story on the drug kingpin, Little Melvin Williams, this one is New Journalism through and through. It begins by setting the scene of a crime and establishes a point of view: "Kenny wipes his mouth, passes the wine and stares into the shopping cart, his mind managing a quick calculation." He calculates how much he and his brother Tyrone might get for certain quantities of copper pipe and other pieces of metal scavenged from a vacant house. Kenny and Tyrone are in the middle of a heist, ripping out metal from a Fulton Avenue row house in West Baltimore. Tyrone goes deeper into the guts of the building with a hacksaw, thinking, "Get the metal now or someone else comes behind you to grab it." He and his brother emerge with a shopping cart full of stolen metal. In their rattling cart they "shoot down Fulton and cross Fayette where the corner boys are touting a fresh heroin package.... There is no way to sense the speed involved unless you're with them, cantering beside a full shopping cart, making for the scales in absolute earnest."
That's our excited reporter "cantering" right alongside them. And this is our reporter in the next section, pronouncing upon the meaning of the scene:
Behold the ants.... Day after day, they rattle back and forth with their shopping carts, crowbars and mauls at the ready, devouring Baltimore bite by bite.... Right now they're taking the downspouts from Westport's public housing, and the metal handrails from a Wilkens Avenue rowhouse.... On Lafayette Square, there's a church that closed on Friday with copper flashing adorning the room; come Sunday, it rained in the house of the Lord.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from On The Wire by Linda Williams. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viiIntroduction 1
Part I. World Enough and Time: The Genesis and Genius of The Wire
1. Ethnographic Imagination: From Journalism to Television Serial 11
2. Serial Television's World and Time: The Importance of the "Part" 37
Part II. Justice in The Wire: Tragedy, Realism, and Melodrama
3. "Classical" Tragedy, or . . . 79
4. Realistic, Modern Serial Melodrama 107
Part III. Surveillance, Schoolin', and Race
5. Hard Eyes / Soft Eyes: Surveillance and Schoolin' 139
6. Feeling Race: The Wire and the American Melodrama of Black and White 173
Conclusion: Home Sweet Baltimore 211
Notes 223
Bibliography 247
Index 255
What People are Saying About This
"I must admit being skeptical of Linda Williams's thesis that The Wire is best understood as melodrama. But after reading her convincing and compelling analysis, I not only came away with new insights into a series that I knew very well, but have fully revised my notions of how serial melodrama applies to contemporary television. This vital book is essential reading for scholars and viewers of both The Wire and television drama more broadly."
"Linda Williams's kaleidoscopic study compellingly considers The Wire as art, as rhetoric, and as political intervention. Her absorbing argument for the series as 'institutional melodrama' upends conventional discussions not only about this narrative but about the broader practice of contemporary television drama. We understand The Wire not as tragedy, not as a novel, not as a piece of journalism; rather, we see and feel the show at the intersection of home and the world, as the orange couch in the courtyard of the low rises."