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DUKE UNIVERSITY
Durham, North Carolina
“We Ain’t Gotta Dream No More”: The Wire
as Deindustrialization Narrative
Harry Liberman
March, 2013
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Undergraduate Critical Honors Thesis
Trinity College of Arts and Sciences
English Department
Acknowledgements
When I told my mother this past summer that I was writing a senior thesis about a
television show, she immediately asked, “They’re gonna let you do that?” As it turns out,
they did, and I do owe a great deal of thanks to the many people who allowed me to get
away with this. First and foremost, I must offer my sincerest gratitude to Professor Moses
for advising me throughout this process. He was always wildly generous with his time, and
somehow managed to provide incalculably valuable feedback even when I gave him far too
little time to prepare for our meetings. He made my arguments more focused, direct, and
nuanced, and for that, I cannot thank him enough.
I secondly want to thank the other English professors who have been so important to
me and my education during my time here at Duke, and who have influenced the way I think
about texts and criticism. Two of them have had to endure more of me than the others, and
so it seems only fair that I thank them now. Professor Metzger convinced me of the beauty
of the department first, melding student performances, films, and novels into one fascinating
introductory seminar that dealt with the issues of race, class and gender in ways I would
never have anticipated. He even managed to get me to dress as the Emcee from Cabaret not
just once, but twice, which surely is worth some sort of praise. More importantly, he was a
professor who reached out to me outside of the classroom, and inspired me to analyze film
and literature from a different theoretical framework.
Then, of course, there is Professor Ferraro, the man who taught me how to read for
the first time at the age of 21. His unusually great ability to make the classroom a
performative and collaborative space demonstrated the power of a traditional seminar in a
way I could never have expected. More than that, though, he instilled in me a belief in the
power of texts to illuminate the world around us, and a belief that even the smallest details
can alert the reader to issues relevant even today.
I also need to acknowledge the many other splendid teachers who helped me through
the English major. To Professor Donahue , Professor Aers, Professor Wallace, Professor
Vadde, and Professor Strandberg, thank you for the incalculably many ways you changed
my thinking.
I am also deeply in debt to Brenna Casey and Connor Southard, who both provided
feedback on my thesis that greatly improved the tone and substance.
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Finally, I’d like to address my mom and tell her, yes, they did let me write a thesis on
a television show. And although a lot of people guided me through the process, I owe a
much deeper thanks to your humbling love and support that you gave me throughout my
childhood.
Table of Contents
Introduction – 5
Chapter 1: Globalization, Digitization, and All Labour’s Lost – 14
Chapter 2: The Market, The State, and The Damage Done – 30
Epilogue: It’s Not (Just) TV…A Twice-Told Tale of The Wire’s Creation – 46
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“We
used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in
the next guy’s pocket.” – Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer), The Wire
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“Now, motherfucker, it’s our time. Mine and yours. But instead of just shutting
up and kicking in, you gonna stand there crying that ‘back in the day’ shit.” –
Calvin “Cheese” Wagstaff (Method Man)
“We Ain’t Gotta Dream No More”: The Wire as
Deindustrialization Narrative
Introduction
“The Wire…will be, in the strictest sense, a police procedural,” said David Simon in
the opening words of his leaked pitch to the executives at HBO, and his reminder that the
show is, at its core, an extension of the traditional cops-and-criminals drama is a vital one.
While The Wire’s unique mix of contemporary social commentary and long-form televisual
drama has received wide acclaim from sources both within and without the academy, the
show still owes a tremendous debt to older, “simpler” police dramas (Dragnet, Cagney &
Lacey, Starsky & Hutch) that followed a “case-of-the-week” structure. And one need look
no further than the show’s title itself for proof of the procedural structure embedded in each
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season—the “wire” of the title, which refers to the wiretap investigations that provided the
investigational backdrop to each of the show’s five seasons. Although the various
institutions of the city of Baltimore--from the school system to the press—weave their way
in and out of the show’s grander narrative, the seemingly perfunctory act of phone-tapping
remains the one constant in each investigation.
Television as a medium cannot, however, be entirely constant: shows are produced
over long periods of time, 6 years in the case of The Wire, and the programs must adapt to
the times. Actors grow older, the audience’s tastes change and, at least in the case of shows
set in the present-day, the world itself keeps on stubbornly turning. For all the advanced
planning David Simon and his fellow writers/producers put into The Wire (and judging from
the aforementioned pitch, it was substantial), they had to adapt to a world that looked a lot
different in 2008 than it did in 2002. Serendipitously, or perhaps simply inevitably, these
very changes ended up giving the titular wiretaps a thematic resonance the creators could
not have anticipated.
The almost immediately dated title of an early first-season episode, “The Pager,”
itself shows how technological development would become part of the show’s very
structure1. The episode was so named because, in the early episodes of The Wire, the police
force was fighting a group of drug dealers who used pay phones and pagers. Of course,
pagers would quickly fall out of favor as a means of communication in the general public.
Therefore, the second season’s narrative concentrated on the personal cellphones of several
Of all the telephonic coincidences of the show, none may be greater than the thematic epigram of “The
Pager.” It reads, “A little slow, a little late…” a warning that drug kingpin Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris)
gives about an inability to adapt in the criminal world, but could just as easily apply to the dramatic need for
The Wire to adapt to the technological changes in the world, i.e. transitioning from drug dealers who use pagers
and pay phones to those using cell phones.
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relatively well-funded individuals (drug dealers, union chiefs, etc.), presumably because
they were the ones most able to afford the luxury of a cellphone. By the time the third
season rolled around, however, the police had to figure out how to tap burner cell phones
that had become so cheap that drug syndicates could buy dozens a week to avoid being
traced. Later seasons required the cops to adapt to the proliferation of text messaging and
other technological advances, although the show managed to avoid what could have been its
largest complication by concluding production just a month before the release of the iPhone.
The point here is not, of course, to trace the history of cellular phones on television,
as riveting as that may be. It is, instead, to underline how the wiretaps, the namesake of The
Wire, became themselves a microcosm of two of the show’s largest themes: how
technological advancements were affecting the fabric of society, and the role those advances
had in the evolving relationship between the state and commerce, legitimate or not. Among
The Wire’s many virtues, it is a show that reflects the changing economic structure of the
United States as it is coming into the 21st century, emphasizing not just the ephemeral
debates of modern politics, but the underlying trends in both capitalism and governance that
continue to shape this country. As this country enters a period that is marked by
deindustrialization and digitization, The Wire serves as a particularly noteworthy text due to
its examination of these economic processes, and what effects they are having on societal
structures.
In examining the show, however, it is important not to treat the show as merely
“realistic”: although The Wire hews closely to reality, it is nonetheless a work of fiction, and
one that has purposes beyond the merely sociological. Even if the show very deliberately
aimed for a verisimilitude most television programs lacked, categorizing it as a quasi-
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documentary would lead one to ignore the subtext and metaphor that underline its thematic
concern, and the ways in which it utilizes the tactics of fiction in order to further thematic
ends. The show belongs, instead, to a class of American fiction heavily invested in
developing a narrative that describes the failure of the economic system. Simon himself
hoped that the show would depict “something O’Neill or Euripides2 might recognize: an
America, at every level at war with itself.” And as O’Neill positions the various unemployed
barflies in The Iceman Cometh as figures left behind, even deceived, by an economic system
that no longer required their labor, the creators of The Wire put in their stead the mass of
characters that populate 2000’s Baltimore, all of whom are constantly threatened by a global
economy that has, for several reasons, left the city in economic ruin.
Beyond authorial intent, there is another reason to consider the economics of The
Wire in the context of an American tradition. While most readings of the show have
concentrated exclusively on Simon’s intended depiction of The Wire as a grandly tragic
narrative of the 2000’s economic decay3, such an explanation is incomplete. To simply say,
Lucasi (2009) does, that season two of The Wire “critiques the neoliberal economic practices
of globalization” is to essentially reframe Simon’s own stated nostalgia for “a time before
capital had won a complete victory over labor. Before globalization.” Such reframing of
Simon’s own arguments is an endemic issue within academic criticism on the show across
the disciplines: indeed, Frank Kelleter notes that most writings on The Wire end up
“perpetuating the show’s own narratives and attachments.” Hopefully, this reading will
Put aside, for a second, the question of what America’s Euripides could ever recognize.
Specifically referring to two collections of critical essays on the shows, one edited by Kennedy & Shapiro
(2012), the other by Marshall & Potter (2009).
2
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depart from most of the critical literature4, by examining how the deindustrialized Baltimore
of The Wire unveils not only modern problems in the labor economy, but the historical
problems as well.
The show’s second season, which concerns the decline of unionized labor in the port
of Baltimore, begins with the epigraph “Ain’t ever gonna be what it was” to describe the
plight of those living and working in contemporary Baltimore. And while the characters are
certainly in an economically desperate place, a closer analysis of the text can also recognize
that the economic conditions of the Baltimore The Wire presents have led to injustices on the
levels of class, race and gender throughout the city’s history. Although the protagonists of
The Wire (and, judging from interviews with David Simon5, the show’s writers) may
describe a past that was far more prosperous than the present, a reading of the text itself
presents a more troubling alternative: both past and present have been terribly exploitative of
the labor class, albeit in very different ways.
Put more simply: although the more obvious message of the show is that of the city’s
contemporary economic problems, there is also embedded in the text a larger understanding
of the past than is commonly acknowledged. This complicates the show’s narrative of the
city’s decline by asking if the collapse of economic opportunity is a new phenomenon, or an
older one with newer dressings. This isn’t to deny the central observations The Wire proffers
on labor: that the postindustrial age has in many ways cheapened the value of labor and in
4
A notable exception to this trend is a piece on collective memory and nostalgia by Barton (2012), which
acknowledges questions concerning the veracity of The Wire’s dominant narrative on deindustrialization, but
in a more psychological context than the economic focus of this essay.
5
In an interview with PBS, Simon said, “unions and working people are completely abandoned by this
economic culture and that's what Season Two was about. It was about one of the forces, one of the walls that
basically make the corner culture. And, you know, that's heartbreaking to me.”
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turn those who perform it. Rather, it is to note the exploitation on both sides, past and
present, and to try and reconcile them in a manner that helps elucidate what the
transformation of an economy looks like as the forces of digitization and globalization
change the very nature of labor. Read in this way, the story of The Wire becomes not simply
about the Baltimore or even the US of the early 2000’s, but instead about the history of
American6 economics writ large.
The Wire has, from the outset, marked itself as such an overtly American enterprise,
and also one that is invested heavily in how the show’s chosen genre of the police
procedural can reflect back upon this grander national narrative. The pilot episode’s opening
scene is a staple and standard trope of the procedural: the arrival of a policeman to the scene
of a murder, and his subsequent discussion with a witness. This murder seems an especially
trivial one: Omar Isiah Betts, known as “Snot Boogie,” was shot after he attempted to rob a
small local dice game. Snot’s unnamed friend talks to the detective, Jimmy McNulty
(Dominic West), but is unwilling to give any evidence. The two men, however, do discuss
Snot’s history of petty criminal behavior, the same behavior that ended up getting him
killed:
KID: Like every time, Snot, he’d fade a few shooters, play it out till the pot’s
deep. Snatch and run.
MCNULTY: What, every time?
KID: Couldn’t help hisself.
MCNULTY: Let me understand you. Every Friday night, you and your boys
are shooting crap, right. And every Friday night, your pal Snot Boogie…he’d
wait till there’s cash on the ground and run away? You let him do that?
KID: We’d catch him and beat his ass, but ain’t nobody never go past that.
MCNULTY: I gotta ask you: if every time Snot Boogie would grab the
This essays uses the term “American” to refer to the United States of America specifically, understanding that
the imprecise colloquial term is adopted and commented upon by the show itself.
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money and run away, why’d you even let him in the game?...If Snot Boogie
stole the money, why’d you let him play?
KID: Got to. It’s America, man. (“The Target”)
Snot, here, becomes a punchline, the ironic response to the traditional narrative of
opportunity in America7. At the risk of entering into the realm of full-blown cliché, The
Wire is here attempting to show the gigantic ironic gulf between the “American Dream” of
economic prosperity and the American reality of economic exploitation. Snot, it seems, was
only given repeated chances to be a criminal, and an unsuccessful one to boot. They let him
in “the game,” a term The Wire often uses to refer to the drug trade, and cheat as he might
on every Friday dice game, the rules dictate that he’ll always be punished. And as with The
War on Drugs8, there is always someone there to “beat his ass” when he breaks the rules, yet
the powers-that-be always give him another chance to fail. Until, of course, the day that
everything goes too far, and Snot becomes merely the first of many corpses Jimmy McNulty
will discover on the streets of Baltimore, the victims of both vicious capitalist behavior and
state neglect. The Wire argues, in essence, that the death of Snot is representative of the
more common, “truer” story of America9, an argument that is undermined not even by the
British actor Dominic West’s inability to pronounce the name “Snot Boogie” correctly.
7
Although this essay presents the opening scene of the show as allegory for the War on Drugs, Marshall &
Potter (2009) read it slightly differently. They argue that Omar Isiah Betts’ bleakly comic death foreshadows
the equally random fate of Omar Little (Michael K. Williams), one of the show’s most beloved characters.
8
The term “War on Drugs” was coined by the Nixon administration in 1971. The term refers to a general
policy that emphasizes arrests and prosecutions of drug dealers and users as the best method to combat drug
addiction. However, while Nixon may have come up with the terminology, the true explosion in drug arrests
that characterizes the “War on Drugs” did not occur until Reagan’s stronger enforcement of drug policies the
1980s. (Alexander 2010)
9
This idea is a recurrent one. Later in the season, Bodie Broadus (J.D. Williams), after learning the rules of
chess, comments that “the game is rigged,” another literal game that serves as an allegory for the War on Drugs
and the violence surrounding it. Bodie repeats this statement to McNulty in the show’s fourth season, mere
hours before he ends up a corpse on the pavement of Baltimore’s streets.
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The idea that the promises of American opportunity are all too often empty is nearly
as old as the country, and it is perhaps the most well-worn ground in all of American fiction.
Yet because of the idea’s very simplicity, the concept remains useful, as its popularity over
time means it can help us connect various texts over the course of history. The Wire does not
exist simply to reiterate that the structures of capitalism and government fail the worst off in
society, or those who have to operate outside the boundaries of the law: that is work that has
been performed before by many novels in the U.S. literary canon, from Huck Finn to the
Great Gatsby10, The Godfather and onwards. Instead, The Wire’s role within this tradition is
to recontextualize the narrative of economic failure in a new historical context, where
technology and globalization have altered societal structures and changed the economy.
Importantly, this choice of a common theme throughout American narratives also allows the
show to perform its aforementioned work in connecting the contemporary with the past, and
through the act of comparison illuminates the nature of the economy in both time periods.
The specific contributions of The Wire to an understanding of economic failure will
be examined in depth later, but there are other ways in which it can distinguish itself from
past versions of this tale. Of particular note here is The Wire’s position as a necessarily
commercial work, by virtue of it being produced in the medium of television. Novels, too,
are certainly commercial items, but they require substantially less investment than does
television, nor are they constantly reappraised on largely commercial grounds after each
season (or chapter, if the comparison is to be properly extended), as shows like The Wire
are. This places some restrictions on the material, as even groundbreaking shows like The
Instructively, season one’s protagonist D’Angelo reads Gatsby during his prison sentence in the second
season. His takeaway: “The past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go
through it; all this shit matters." Later in that episode, D’Angelo is murdered.
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Wire occur in heavily populist genres, but this accordingly allows The Wire to point out the
assumptions of those works. A traditional police procedural would have spent the pilot
uncovering the identity of Snot Boogie’s killer: The Wire never even mentions Snot, by
name or otherwise, again. Instead of trying to trace the causes of the specific crime of Snot’s
murder, The Wire spends its time on a wholly different investigation, an investigation into
the societal forces that created the callous and desperate environment that killed Snot. By
implicitly showing the limitations of the traditional mass-produced TV drama11 created for
more overtly commercial means, The Wire is able to indict more directly the failures of the
economic system in which it is operating.
This suggests an important fact: economics is fundamental not only in understanding
The Wire’s position vis a vis other works of television, but also in understanding its more
overt thematic messages. This is a show, after all, that starred a drug kingpin who took
macroeconomics classes at a local community college and kept a copy of The Wealth of
Nations by Adam Smith in his library. The Wire was constantly in dialogue with several
areas of academia (David Simon even admitted that he based the show’s second season
largely on the work of Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson. On what is surely a
completely unrelated note, Professor Wilson taught one of the first major college courses on
The Wire), and the show has itself received a substantial amount of critical attention from
the academy, including collections of critical essays published by the University of
Michigan Press and others.
The economic circumstances behind The Wire’s creation will be examined in depth later, but it should
briefly be noted that HBO, which aired The Wire, offers substantially more freedom than the traditional
networks of broadcast television (CBS, NBC, ABC).
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Unsurprisingly, The Wire therefore displays a distinct knowledge of several branches
of economics. An early episode uses Chicken McNuggets to describe something like the
Marxist idea of capitalist exploitation of labor (why, the show asks, would Ronald
McDonald pay the inventor of the Chicken McNuggets anymore for success if he can just
keep him working for the same wage?), and explicates other classical economic terms like
“market saturation” and “information asymmetries” through the funhouse-mirror version of
business that occurs in the drug trade. A text that borrows, in ways both subtle and overt,
from the disciplines of sociology and economics almost begs for an interdisciplinary
analysis reliant at least partially upon the ideas of those disciplines. Hopefully, it will prove
fruitful for readers of either background.
This thesis will, in two parts, explore this economic transformation that the United
States faced at the turn of the millennium, keeping in mind the ever-present specter of
Baltimore’s past while examining its present. These two chapters will not directly
investigate the idea of the American Dream itself, but rather the forces that constrain
economic opportunity for the many. While the first chapter will focus on the shifting nature
of labor itself, the second chapter examines how the corruptibility of the state worsened the
already unjust outcomes of the capitalist system. What emerges, hopefully, is a deeper
understanding of a show deeply in touch with the economic shifts this country continues to
face today, and the sophisticated way in which it portrayed an America yet again failing to
care for its denizens in the most need. By concentrating on the show’s second season, an
investigation into the union of longshoremen who work the Port of Baltimore, one can see
how technology and globalization affects communities of labor, and how both the state and
the capitalist system responded in a manner that was not only inadequate, but almost always
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entrenched the dominant powers at the expense of the vanishing middle-class. This, in turn,
presents a portrait not just of contemporary America’s economic failings, but an explanation
of the ways, from old to new, in which economic structures fail to bring legitimate
opportunity to those who seek it.
Chapter One: Globalization, Digitization, and All Labour’s Lost?
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“…Searching for the ghost of Tom Joad” – Bruce Springsteen
What is the economic past of the City of Baltimore, and what is its future? This is a
question that hangs over much of the second season of “The Wire,” and the decline of the
American middle class, as represented by the unionized longshoremen led by Frank
Sobotka, is certainly vital to the answer. But, as the viewer can see in the seventh episode,
“Backwash,” their story is not at all the whole story. The episode sets up Frank Sobotka as
the ostensible mouthpiece for the writers, bemoaning the effect of technological change on
the American worker, but it undercuts that narrative, or at the very least tempers it, by
calling into question the nostalgic viewpoint he takes. Specifically, by illustrating the
dangers of working on the docks of Baltimore, the show presents a more nuanced portrait of
economic change, a type of change that is neither wholly good nor wholly bad (if not for any
other reason than both the past and future seem so bleak). When taken along with
contrasting narratives of workers who are “free” to switch industries, the show is instead
doing a far more complex job: attempting to describe how human labor functions after the
economy shifts from an industrial one to a postindustrial one defined largely by digitization
and the shift of laborers away from manual labor and into service industries. It is a story
about how those workers may alternately prosper and perish in the new world, and what
sorts of behavior is incentivized by this new system, viewed alongside how those issues
were faced in the past.
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Near the beginning of “Backwash,” Frank Sobotka, along with fellow union superior
Nat Coxson, attend a presentation on the developments that have occurred in Port
technology worldwide. The presenter, the corporate suit to end all corporate suits, begins the
presentation, saying, “Gentlemen, the future is now.” The future he is discussing, it turns
out, is Rotterdam, the largest port in the world, and the shifts (advances would be too
ideological a word) in technology there. Unsurprisingly, a presentation that began in cliché
continues in that mode: using the classically corporate lexicon, he notes that all of the
changes are done in an attempt to “bring goods to a dynamic, exploding economy,” and to
“deliver those goods faster, cheaper, and safer” via a process that is described as “state-ofthe-art,” and is the “the future of cargo management.”
Although most of the stakeholders in the room, presumably businessmen involved in
shipping, are excited, Frank and Nat are more concerned with a thrown-off clause in the
middle of the speech. The Dutch, we are told, “ship more cargo with less man-hours,” and to
Frank Sobotka, that is the biggest problem. When he asks for exact numbers, the presenter
avoids the question with a smirk and feigned ignorance, but he does inform Frank and Nat
that there are 4,000 people working at Rotterdam. Nat realizes that this is a tremendously
small amount of laborers for a port of Rotterdam’s size, but when he pushes further, he is
told “That’s efficiency, Nat,” and shrugged off. The tension between the union men and the
business types is made even more obvious by the positioning and attire of Nat and Frank:
they sit across from everyone else, and also are wearing a more traditional “labor” outfit
with rolled-up sleeves and denim jeans. Of course, the surface of what is happening here is
simple: shipping, as an industry, will require fewer and fewer union workers going forward,
which is causing tension between the union workers and the capitalists controlling the
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businesses. It is an example of what is called “labor-augmenting” technology change, where
the same goods and services can be produced with less labor. The term has an interesting
ideology, as while it is the sort of technology that augments labor as a process, it also has the
capacity, even the tendency, to harm the class of workers labeled as “labor.” These potential
harms to the longshoremen’s union are numerous, including, but not limited to, reducing the
number of workers needed on the docks, reducing the demand employers have for those
workers left (and thus reducing the wages of those workers), and generally decreasing the
bargaining strength the union has on a variety of issues. Indeed, this very trend is the reason
why Frank Sobotka has engaged in criminal activity throughout this season: his union needs
substantial capital in order to finance any hope of a future, and in its current state can raise
almost no money.
However, the episode’s denouement complicates this narrative of development by
demonstrating what type of work, exactly, is being replaced by this technological change.
The longshoremen, who are drinking at the local pub, are alerted that there has been an
accident on the docks. A worker on the night shift, known as “New Charles,” has had his leg
crushed by some falling cargo. We learn his full fate the next morning, when Nat explains a
little bit of his backstory by telling Frank:
You know how he got the name New Charles? First day at work was the
same day the Paseco dropped a hatch cover on Charlie Bannion. Had to clean
up old Charlie with a shovel. Ever since then; New Charles…He’s going to
lose the leg. (“Backwash”)
Oddly enough, the once-empty words of the corporate presenter now have a much more
tangible meaning. New Charles’s injury, as well as his history, reflect a very simple fact
about the type of labor that occurs on the docks of Baltimore: it is brutally physical, rather
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dangerous, and it very well might be better if the work were left to machines instead of
longshoremen.
New Charles is the unfortunate keeper of this legacy. His name itself is a reflection
of how workers are often treated as machinery, damaged and replaced, in an industrial
economy. After “old Charlie” died, “New Charles” was immediately brought in to replace
him. Notice the way in which Old Charles’ death is described. They needed to “clean up old
Charlie with a shovel,” making him more an inanimate part of the dock’s workings than a
person who once worked there. Perversely enough, the only actor in the quote above who
acts is a non-living one, the Paseco, which given the context refers to a cargo ship. “The
Paseco dropped a hatch cover” on Charles Bannion, Nat says, giving the ship a sense of
agency denied to the once-living dockworker.
In essence, technological advances replace men with machinery, but it seems fair to
say that these men were de facto machines before they were replaced, laborers used as cogs
in the industrial process. The labor they provide is intrinsically mechanical, as they use
physical power to move objects from place to place. Look, too, at how the workers are easily
replaced, much like the interchangeable parts that were at the center of the Industrial
Revolution: when one Charles is taken out, a literal New Charles takes his place. New
Charles himself is broken, loses a part, and is replaced, and presumably the cycle will
continue down the road. Given this, it is perhaps unsurprising that someone like Charlie
Bannion would be described in simple, mechanical terms, even in death.
The story of the technological development of the Port of Baltimore thus has two
sides, neither of which is entirely pleasant. When workers are replaced by machinery, the
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work that humans perform in the economic sphere tautologically treats humans less like
machines (as machines are, appropriately enough, doing the work of machinery). This would
seem to suggest that the shift away from an industrial economy necessarily humanizes labor.
Unfortunately, it is also the case that once machines take the place of humans, there is no
place left for many of the human laborers, as the jobs they were trained for no longer exist.
It is the grander economy, and not the job per se, that denies them a sense of autonomy. This
specific problem is less a total dearth of employment opportunities, and more the ways in
which society entrenches the members of certain communities into certain roles, granting
mobility to some while removing it from others. Frank Sobotka has a peculiarly intriguing
way of explaining this concept, using an anecdote about a local stevedore who stole the
wrong case of cargo off the docks one day. He says:
Except when he gets it [the case] home, it ain't cognac, it's Tang. Just
invented. TV was saying it's what the astronauts drank on their way to the
moon. You drink it, well...[you could be an astronaut too]. All summer long,
that shit was all the hair kids drank. Tang with breakfast, Tang with lunch,
Tang when they woke up scared in the middle of the night. Well, what do you
think they grew up to be? Stevedores. What the fuck you think?
(“Backwash”)
The more obvious point Frank is making here is that the next generation of kids are
inevitably going to end up in the same career as their father, but the choice of what has been
stolen is also an interesting one. Instead of getting cognac, a type of alcohol generally
associated with the upper class, the dockworkers get Tang, a low-cost fruit-flavored drink
marketed primarily to the lower classes through the pipe dream of ascending to the heavens.
This sets up, even before we arrive at the punch line, the idea that the longshoremen’s
children are not going to achieve their grander dreams, like becoming a astronaut, but rather
are destined for a simple life, like that of their parents.
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Notice, too, the nostalgia couched in Frank’s statement. He speaks about spending
“all summer long” drinking Tang, and his words are said in a wistful tone for much of the
recollection. Even though Frank later insists that he’s not “talking history, I’m talking now,”
the physical space his statements occupy suggest otherwise. The entire office is faded, with
older wood-paneling and nary a digital device in site, in keeping with the nostalgic feel the
scene sets. While meeting in the office, Frank distracts himself by throwing darts at, and
later destroying, a picture on a dartboard. It is a picture that, as seen in a close-up, is one of
Robert Irsay, the football owner who, 20 years earlier, moved the then-Baltimore Colts to
Indianapolis, “exporting” jobs from the declining metropolis of Baltimore to the more
prosperous Indianapolis. As Frank begins to get madder and madder at Bruce DiBiago, the
lobbyist who embodies the changing face of capitalism, he takes his anger out on Irsay’s
picture. Irsay is, among many things, a symbol of those that have taken away from
Baltimore’s cultural history. And while Frank may very well be talking about the modernday, it is clear that his thoughts about the present are still coming from the past.
If Frank Sobotka is living in the past, who is living in the future, or at least in the
now? The most obvious answer is Bruce DiBiago, the well-paid lobbyist for the union who
also more broadly represents the service industry in the new, digital/service-based economy.
The idea behind combining the two seemingly unrelated terms is that, if digitization is
replacing human labor in the industrial process, labor becomes less concentrated on the
production of durable goods and more on the provision of those things that necessarily
require human influence, which largely consists of the service industry. Frank, of course,
bemoans this shift, as it is destroying the viability of the union. Of Bruce’s job, he says,
“Talk is your fucking job description. Yak, yak, yak, blah, blah, blah,” and it’s a point well
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taken. Bruce’s economic “value” is a matter of debate, as the influence he claims to have
only comes through occasionally: while he is successful in lobbying to build a grain pier, he
cannot get any funds allocated to dredge the Chesapeake Bay’s waters so that more ships
can come into Baltimore. The problem with a service-based economy is that, as Frank hints
at, its results are much harder to quantify than in the production of durable goods.
Bruce, however, rejects this notion, that the newly developed industry he works in is
somehow a less worthwhile one. When Frank argues that Bruce’ son, a Princeton student,
“will grow up and squeeze a buck the way his old man did,” he derisively implies that the
DiBiago legacy is one of greed and corruption. In his retort, Bruce explains his family
history:
My great-grandfather was a knife sharpener. Yeah. Pushed a grinding stone
up Preston Street to Alice-Ann, one leg shorter than the other from pumping
the wheel. And since he didn't want his sons to push the goddamn thing, he
made sure my grandfather finished high school and my old man went to any
college that would take him. (“Backwash”)
Again, there is a reference to the physical toll of labor, as Bruce’s great-grandfather had to
push a grinding stone up and down the streets of Baltimore. He also damaged one of his
legs, which parallels the loss of Slim Charles’ leg later in the episode due to similarly
arduous labor. But in Bruce’s narrative, the entire point of such labor is that it happened so
that the next generation wouldn’t have to do the same, not so that it could continue. In the
same way that his family’s actions gave him the ability to pursue a job as an educated
political figure, Bruce’s actions make him financially capable of sending his son to
Princeton, which means that his son can do “whatever he wants to.” There are certainly
tremendous holes in this narrative, as we see Bruce accepting what looks to be a substantial
amount of illegal cash at the scene’s end, indicating the possibility that both narratives,
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Frank’s and Bruce’s, are far off. “The Wire” does not stray away from pessimism, and it
may simply be arguing that the situation is so bad now that the next generation of Sobotka’s
and DiBiago’s can neither follow in the paths of old nor morally try to find their own way. It
can simultaneously be the case that Frank is living in a past that isn’t as good as he
remembers, and that Bruce is acting as a staunch defender for a new order that doesn’t work
all that well either.
The final insinuation to be drawn from Bruce’s words, however, is the importance
education has on the labor mobility within his family. He tracks the progress of his family
by their educational attainment, from his grandfather who just finished high school to his
son who is attending one of the nation’s most prestigious universities. In a service-based
economy, education acts as an important signal to potential employers that a person has the
non-physical capabilities to do whatever job is necessary. When assessing laborers,
employers now care less about physical capability and more about finding a candidate who
can easily adapt to a new job’s intellectual demands.
This idea, of education’s importance on the job market, dovetails with an important
point of conflict in the season’s earlier episodes: which of the policemen, exactly, would be
free to leave their jobs?12 The answer, as it turns out, is rather simple. In the first of two
(nearly) consecutive scenes, Jimmy McNulty lays out his life plan, which is to work his
miserable job in the Marine Unit for “11 more years of whatever bullshit they throw at me.
I'm gonna put in my papers, take the pension and walk” (“Collateral Damage”). Given his
economic needs13 and his status as a dropout of Loyola College14, he really has no other
At the season’s beginning, McNulty, Daniels, and Greggs are, for various reasons, inundesirable positions
within the police department, and all contemplate leaving the department.
13
He has to pay a substantial amount in both child support and alimony to his ex-wife.
12
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choice. Lieutenant Daniels, meanwhile, is convinced easily to leave the department by his
wife, who tells him “you’ve got the law degree…you’ve got options” (“Collateral
Damage”).
Although future events alter both men’s plans, the takeaway from their dilemma
remains important: the modern economy requires substantially more education than does the
industrial one of the past. While this idea itself is not tremendously bold, that does not make
it unimportant in the economy’s development. If the economy is functioning away from the
industrial economy of physical labor, it must be shifting towards a form of labor more
reliant upon human capital development (that is, the development of human skills through
investment in workers), and this is borne out by the increased value placed on education in
the economic sphere.
Of course, this is an example where the language of economics becomes limiting and
even dehumanizing. To describe what occurs in the second season of The Wire as merely an
issue of forms of labor and forms of capital obfuscates the stakes of what is occurring. It is
not as though the benefits and costs of technological change break down equally along
cultural boundaries. These boundaries are often quite complicated, with effects varying even
within ethnic groups: indeed, even though the heavily Polish15 community of union workers
suffer increasing economic problems as the waterfront of Baltimore, the largest beneficiary
is the Polish land developer Andy Krawcyzk (Michael Willis). Nonetheless, a portrait of
deindustrialization that ignores all types of cultural changes would be woefully incomplete.
14
Although it may seem a minor detail, the specific college becomes important to this reading at a later point.
Complicating this much further is the realization that the union seems to be in equal parts Polish and
African-American, with a de facto agreement that leadership be shared between the two groups. Were it not for
this fact, The Wire’s second season could be more succinctly described as being about the plight of white
laborers in Baltimore, as it is the only season where the majority of main characters (the Sobotka’s, among
others) are not African-American.
15
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Specifically, the paucity of opportunity for pure “laborers” brought about by the
shifting dynamics in the economy necessitates changes that are not purely economic. The
story presented in The Wire’s second season is one of general, large-scale economic decline,
but there is within this a more specific narrative of the decline of masculine communities,
like the International Brotherhood of Stevedores, that is taken along with a relative ascent of
female workers in the general economic sphere. “The Wire” clearly emphasizes the former
over the latter, as does this essay: the “ascent” that women experience in the economic
sphere is, at least in the context of “The Wire’s” Baltimore, a joyless one that comes first
and foremost out of necessity, usually a necessity for females to provide for a family that is
created by the paucity of male economic opportunity. Nonetheless, especially considering
how the show, it is interesting to consider the subtle economic developments experienced by
the more minor female character in addition to the slow-burning tragedy that unfolds to the
male laborers at the Port of Baltimore.
Return to the end of Frank Sobotka’s conversation with his political lobbyist, Bruce
DiBiago. Bruce and Frank have argued heatedly about the value of the work both men do,
with Frank accusing Bruce of giving up truly virtuous labor to peddle political influence,
while Bruce maintains that his career is merely the result of him standing on the shoulders of
his male ancestors, who sacrificed so that Bruce could go to college and make something
“better” of himself. Frank has a different take on how fathers pass on familial legacies to
their children:
You're talking history, right? I'm talking now. Because down here, it's still
"Who's your old man?" 'Til you got kids of your own and then it's, "Who's
your son?" But after the horror movie I seen today... Robots! Piers full of
robots! My kid'll be lucky if he's even punchin' numbers five years from now.
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And…it breaks my fucking heart that there's no future for the Sobotkas on
the waterfront! (“Backwash”)
Frank is clearly concerned about the vanishing jobs on the docks, but his concerns actually
extend further. When he says that the best-case scenario is that his son is “even punchin’
numbers five years from now,” notice where the “even” falls. It isn’t the case that he would
be working “even five years from now,” which would indicate that Frank’s first concern is
how much longer there will be jobs on the docks. It is that he’s “even punchin’ numbers,”
speaking to the type of labor that might exist in the future. Frank’s dialogue then implies that
not only is he worried about the shrinking number of jobs in the port, but that he is also
preoccupied by the shifting nature of the longshoremen’s profession from physical to
clerical work, i.e. “punchin’ numbers.” The audience is indeed led to identify Frank Sobotka
with intrinsically physical labor throughout the entire season; for example, after Frank gets
into an argument with his brother Louis (Robert J. Hogan) about allowing Nick and Ziggy to
engage in illegal activities, the unemployed Louis says to his brother with equal parts envy
and derision, “Uncle Frank, with the big shoulders,” and leaves Frank the arrest warrant for
Nick on narcotics charges (“Bad Dreams”). Although the insult is left ambiguous, it seems
that Louis resents that Frank has let Nick engage in illicit behavior in order to preserve the
economic viability of an idea of masculinity attached directly to manual labor.
What’s interesting about Frank’s speech about the future of the docks, however, is
that it also provides an explanation as to why he would value physical labor to such an
extent. It comes from the community “down here” that asks the questions, “Who’s your
son,” and “Who’s your old man.” It seems reasonable to say that the community is the union
itself, or at the very least an extension thereof, given that the conversation happens down at
the union office of the port. Success for the union, then, is dominated by a concern of
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masculine secession. Note also that while Frank voices his own concerns about the future
with the non-gendered “my kid,” but when he is speaking for the community’s questions, it
becomes a deliberately male concern, about an “old man” and his “son.” If the community
speaking is the union, the masculine focus should not come as a surprise: the union is allmale, and is even called the International Brotherhood of Stevedores (I.B.S.), emphasizing
masculinity in its very name16.
This hypermasculinity of the union, and the attachment of this masculinity to the
type of labor being performed, can be seen most clearly in the season’s numerous scenes at
Delores’ bar, a post-work (and, occasionally, pre-work) drinking hole for the union men.
After older longshoremen Little Big Roy (Richard Pelzman) and Horseface (Charlie Scalies)
begin reminiscing about how they used to unload boats with “wooden shovels,” the younger
generation mocks their nostalgia in such a manner that indicates that they’ve heard these
stories before:
HORSEFACE: You ain’t gonna see another grain ship here in Baltimore, my
friends.
NICK SOBOTKA: Can you believe these fuckin' dinosaurs? Sit around all
the damn day talkin' shit about how they used to off-load with shovels, carry
fuckin' railroad cars on their backs.
YOUNG DOCKER #4: And drink whiskey through a firehose.
JOHNNY “FIFTY” SPAMANATO: And go home and fuck their wives silly
'til breakfast. They was some fuckin' heroes back then, wasn't they?
HORSEFACE (after laughing): What can you do? This generation, they just
don't know.
LITTLE BIG ROY: Ain't never gonna be what it was. No indeed. (“Ebb
Tide”)
16
Although the I.B.S. is not an actual union, many real-world unions, like the Fraternal Order of the Police,
emphasize a masculine familial bond in the same manner.
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The mockery here is reliant upon a familiarity the younger workers have with the types of
stories older men like Horseface and Little Big Roy tell, if not the specifics. Even if they
poke fun at the elder longshoremen for fancying themselves strong men who “carry railroad
cars on their backs,” it is important to remember that while this is said in mockery, in many
ways they are embracing that myth as well. The idea of “drinking whiskey through a
firehouse” may sound like hyperbole, but the young Johnny “Fifty” Spamanato (Jeffrey Pratt
Gordon) got his nickname by drinking fifty17 beers on his 25th birthday. A masculinity
associated with feats of physical strength clearly has an appeal to the younger
longshoremen, even if the jobs that require such labor are disappearing in the age of
digitization. This is because the younger generation of longshoremen grew up hearing these
types of stories, confirmed later by Ziggy when he tells his father that what makes him keep
working on the docks is that he “remembers you... All sittin' around the kitchen table talkin'
shit about this gang and that gang. Who's better with the break bulk. Who could turn it
around faster, who's lazy” (“All Prologue”). A shift in industry is certainly a possibility for
people like Ziggy and Nick – indeed, Frank mentions in a throwaway comment that he has
another unseen son who “went to community college” – but a nostalgia for a job they only
knew second-hand makes doing so rather difficult.
Johnny “Fifty’s” joke about the workers who would “go home and fuck their wives
silly til’ breakfast” contains a note of bitter irony for Nick Sobotka. Nick has a daughter
through his relationship with Aimee (Kristin Proctor), but is unable to provide economically
for either of them because he is a young, but not that young, longshoreman who receives
minimal amounts of work. This indicates a tremendous blow to the masculine model
17
He actually drank fifty-three, but Frank says they rounded it off to “be poetical” (“Hard Cases”).
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represented by the older union workers, a model centered around the viability of a domestic
household in which men provided for their wife and children by performing manual labor.
Although the ability to provide for a family is obviously a huge part of the union’s idea of
masculinity in and of itself, Johnny’s joke shows how the sexual identity of a heterosexual
union worker is reliant upon economics too: if you can’t go to a home of your own, you
can’t be a viable sexual partner to a wife.
A later scene shows the ways in which Nick, because he lacks the financial
resources to afford a home or a rented apartment of his own, is indeed in some way denied
the power to have sex with his partner in any domestic space, denied even, borrowing from
Johnny’s description, the power to have breakfast with her afterwards (of course, their
economic status also denies Aimee the power to do the same with Nick). In a somewhat
humiliating encounter, Nick is forced to make Aimee, who has stayed the night with Nick,
leave out the basement door of his parent’s house. When Aimee asks why his parents would
disapprove of them sharing a bed even though they know Nick and Aimee have a sexual
relationship (they do, after all, have a child), Nick replies “They’re decent people” (“Bad
Dreams”). The humor of Nick’s response is that while his parents tacitly concede the
evidence of Nick engaging in pre-marital sex – although they probably aren’t thrilled that
their son had a child out of wedlock, there is no evidence of them harboring any resentment
towards Nick or Aimee – what makes them “decent people” is that they can’t allow it in
their home.
Nick’s words may be an admission that his parent’s viewpoints are hypocritical, but
they also reflect the generational differences that make it very difficult for people like Nick
to embody the union’s masculine ideals. A good example of this is how the union relies
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upon a system of seniority to allocate the increasingly scarce dockwork. This policy, too, is
a relic of an older system, where younger workers could safely assume that there would be a
relatively constant or increasing amount of work over their lifetimes, and therefore they
would be compensated later for what they sacrificed in the present. This ends up being
something of a Ponzi scheme, as work continues to vanish and younger workers get less and
less out of the system. Nick’s received masculine construct, which demands that he both be
a man who can economically provide for a family, and a man who performs physical labor,
has, in the age of where technology has greatly reduced the value of manual power, become
internally contradictory. Nick’s desires, and seemingly Aimee’s, are to replicate the model
of the older longshoremen in terms of domestic gender roles, as he admits early on in the
season to Ziggy that he can’t stand the lack of consistent work because “he’s got a girl who
wants to get married,” but the economics of the situation deny him the opportunity to do so.
In spite of the nostalgia characters like Nick have for this union model of masculinity
based upon physicality within the workforce combined with a traditional male-led
household, there is evidence at the periphery of the season that this model already had
tremendously negative effects for both the men and women involved in it. It comes largely
from Frank’s final conversation with his son Ziggy in the season’s penultimate episode,
“Bad Dreams.” The situation is as dour as can be: Frank has just been released on bail after
the union’s corruption was exposed, and Ziggy has already confessed to a murder he
impulsively committed more out of a lifetime of being mocked than anything else. Ziggy,
upset, lashes out at his father for being “too busy…buying another round for the house. I
always used to think you were working all those hours you spent away.” This casts the scene
at Delores’ bar in an entirely new light: it recognizes that men who spend their time working
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and then “sit[ting] around all day talkin shit” with each other can’t expect to have a
satisfactory domestic life, can’t then proceed to satisfy their family by merely going home
and “fuckin’ their wives silly to breakfast.” This idea, that a husband can’t create a healthy
relationship merely through having sex with his wife and that he needs to invest his
emotions and his time in his family, shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone, but it
serves as a reminder of what the viewer hasn’t yet seen: the home lives of Ziggy and Frank
Sobotka. More specifically, it instructs the audience into what the unseen effects are of a
union that begins (yes, begins) and ends most days in the bar, and then spends the rest of it
working.
The conversation then shifts focus to Ziggy’s previously unmentioned mother.
Suffice it to say, Ziggy and Frank are not the only members of their family who are in dire
straits:
FRANK: It was all work Zig, even when it wasn’t. For you, and for your
mother.
ZIGGY: I bet you didn’t even tell her I was in here. Maybe you did, and she
took three Nembutal. Sleeping the day away.
FRANK: Leave her out of this.
ZIGGY: She’s out of it, don’t worry. (“Bad Dreams”)
Ziggy’s last response, “She’s out of it,” is striking on a number of levels. On the surface,
he’s commenting that she self-medicates18 to disconnect herself from reality. But the quote
also serves as an acknowledgment that she is external to the primary concerns of the
dockworkers. Frank has built his life and his identity around the union, to the extent that he
engaged in large-scale illicit activity to keep the local afloat. This union identity, however, is
necessarily one that prevents women from having an economic role in society, as it is an
Nembutal is a sedative used primarily for the treatment of anxiety and insomnia. Presumably, Ziggy’s
mother uses this, and other prescription drugs, often.
18
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identity predicated upon men being the sole providers for a family. It also compounds the
negative position it places women in by emphasizing intra-masculine bonds, like those that
form in Delores’ bar, over the domestic space. In a social community that is ordered in such
a manner, can it be any surprise that Ziggy’s mother resorts to medication as a form of
escape?
“The Wire,” incidentally or not, is particularly adept at acknowledging the flaws in
its bitter and often nostalgic take on societal trends, and the collapse of the masculine union
community is no different. It not only recognizes, as it did with Ziggy’s mother, that these
masculine communities necessarily exclude and in many ways harm the women, but it also
demonstrates the ways in which the lack of a received feminine economic model may
actually aid women in an age of globalization. Beadie Russell (Amy Ryan), the humble Port
Authority officer who discovers the 13 dead sex traffickers, is the best representative of this
trend. When asked by Detectives Bunk Moreland (Wendell Pierce) and Lester Freamon
(Clarke Peters) why she is a detective, she gives an answer that directly positions her as a
response to the plight of the longshoremen. She says:
RUSSELL: I patrol. I write traffic tickets. If we got an open container, or a
damaged container, I take a report. We got something stolen, I take another
report. …
FREAMON: That's the job, huh? …
BUNK: What'd you do before that?
RUSSELL: I took tolls from people at the Fort McHenry Tunnel, which I'm
happy to say, wasn't nearly as much fun. Made 22,5 and went home tired
every night until I walked by the office bulletin board one night, read the Mdot job postings. Port Authority officer, schedule one, starting at 33 with
benefits… I wasn't gonna make it on 22,5. Not with kids, I wasn't.
BUNK: Did you even want to be a police? (“Hard Cases”)
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The idea that technological change has made manual labor less valuable is a major concern
for the union workers, yet it is not exclusive to them. Notice Beadie Russell’s old job: she
was a toll collector at the Fort McHenry Tunnel until approximately 2001. This was the
same year that EZ-Pass, a digital method of paying for tolls, was implemented in Baltimore,
presumably costing many toll collectors a job. Even if that was not the stated pressure that
forced her to leave, surely Beadie must have realized that the writing was on the wall. This
means that Beadie Russell faced the same societal pressures that the Sobotkas did, but
instead of attempting to preserve her old way of life, she sought out a new one.
A potential reason for Beadie’s ability to adapt comes at the end of her conversation
with Bunk, where she responds to his question about wanting to be a policewoman with total
silence. Beadie, of course, has no expectation that a female in the public labor market19
ought to have the right to a job that intrinsically interests them, as there exists no tradition
comparable to that of the male union workers. While this may sound dreary, it is exactly
what allows her to be mobile in the economy. The men of the union would find it almost
impossible to make themselves perform a job as clerical as Beadie describes, with its focus
on “writing reports.” The labor Beadie performs is not about its intrinsic value, nor is it
about a sense of identity. Instead, labor is simply instrumental for Beadie to provide for a
household. By virtue of women not having a long public labor history, they are not tied into
some social identity that is related to her profession. In an age of rapid technological change,
such a flexibility may be the only way to obtain a salary sufficient to raise a family on. By
the failures of masculinity, such as those of Beadie’s absent and unemployed ex-husband,
women like Beadie are able to advance somewhat in the labor force.
The caveat “public” is important, as the structures of capitalism have traditionally required uncompensated
labor from women in the domestic sphere.
19
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Chapter 2: The Market, The State, and The Damage Done
“In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don't
mean the criminals…I mean the leaders”- Saul Bellow
“Why would anyone want to leave Baltimore, that’s what I’m asking,” says streetlevel drug dealer Bodie Broadus towards the beginning of the first episode of “The Wire’s”
second season, “Ebb Tide.” Bodie, it turns out, has only left Baltimore once in his nearly 17
years of life, and was completely unaware that radio stations fade out when a person drives
far enough away from their signal, forcing him to listen to the distinctly non-local sounds of
Garrison Keillor on A Prairie Home Companion. Baltimore is the entire world to young
Bodie, with other locations having a barely marginal effect on his existence. Yet, in spite of
Bodie’s insistence that no one would have want to leave Baltimore, the remainder of “Ebb
Tide” sets up how these other locations, notably centers of government like Annapolis and
Washington, D.C., have a profound impact on the lives of those in Baltimore, through
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processes both political and economic. If the narrative of the decline of the Baltimore
longshoremen’s union is viewed as microcosm for the corresponding decline of the middle
class, “Ebb Tide’s” use of Washington, D.C. and, to a lesser extent, Annapolis as locations
situated in opposition to Baltimore paints the picture of a government that is either
unconcerned with or directly complicit in the very same collapse. These areas instead focus
on carrying out legislation on behalf of a politically/economically privileged class.
“The Wire” makes a habit of using each season’s opening scene as an allegorical
encapsulation of the thematic concerns of the season almost completely divorced from the
overarching plot, and “Ebb Tide” begins no differently. Jimmy McNulty, a former Homicide
cop working in the Marine unit, responds to a stalled ship caught in the middle of the Port of
Baltimore’s waters. As Jimmy and his partner Claude (Jeffrey Fugitt) make their way out to
the “60-foot private vessel,” the camera alternates between shots of Jimmy’s eyes and
buildings along the shore, using the eyeline-match to ground the scene from McNulty’s
perspective. The images are striking, both on their own merits and in contrast to the normal
visuals of “The Wire.” The viewer sees, by turns, abandoned lighthouses, huge amounts of
flotsam and jetsam drifting along, a skyline of disused cranes and, finally, a gigantic
abandoned steel-mill. Taken as the whole, the images clearly reflect a picture of industrial
decay in Baltimore. Images of urban decay are common throughout “The Wire,” but the
show’s cinematography normally is much more focused, using short- and medium-range
shots of Baltimore, and as a result much more documentary-esque in style: here, they are
much wider and cinematic, literalizing through physical size and scope the scale of
Baltimore’s economic collapse.
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The dialogue, too, reflects David Simon’s concern with the collapse of labor in
2000’s Baltimore. Claude and Jimmy’s simple exchange about one of the buildings they see
makes explicit the imagery’s thematic goal:
McNULTY: My father used to work there.
CLAUDE: Beth Steel?
McNULTY: In the shipyards there, yeah.
CLAUDE: I had an uncle who was a supervisor there. Got laid off in '78,
though.
McNULTY: '73 for my dad. Party boat? (“Ebb Tide”)
The matter-of-factness of the dialogue underlines the economic plight of Baltimore. Both
men, who barely know each other, share relatives who worked in the Port of Baltimore,
indicating that the loss of jobs there is common. But the clipped dialogue and McNulty’s
nonchalant transition to the task at hand (“Party Boat,” he asks immediately after discussing
the end of his father’s career with a simple “’73 for my dad”) go even further, suggesting
that being laid-off from a job on the docks is so common that it requires no elaboration to
either character nor even to the audience. This story is not merely one of two men distracting
themselves at work: it is a universal story of decline. Economic data bear this out: The
Economist reported recently that manufacturing jobs in the United States have declined 75%
since 1970 in proportion to the size of the labor force20.
However, instead of only bemoaning the plight of industrial Baltimore, the opening
scene qua allegory also serves as a potent criticism of those who are in some way
responsible for the rusted, empty shipyards Jimmy McNulty works near. McNulty comes
20
Interestingly enough, this is not specifically true for the longshoremen of the East Coast, suggesting that
while the shipbuilding Mr. McNulty engaged in is in decline, checking cargo and moving it off of ships, as
Frank Sobotka’s union does, is not necessarily a dying employment sector, just one that is struggling in
Baltimore (Journal of Commerce).
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upon the broken-down ship, and the camera lingers on a shot of the ship’s stern that bears
the yacht’s name. It reads, “Capitol Gains, Washington D.C.” The owners are clearly
politicians who aren’t from Baltimore, and the boat serves as a representation of the nation’s
capitol itself. But the name also speaks to several anxieties about the policies originating
from Washington. The name itself is a play on the phrase “capital gains,” referring to
income made from a salaried job, but rather from income derived out of investment profits.
By conflating the “Capitol” gains of the city of Washington21 with the idea of “capital
gains,” the show is not too subtly hinting at how wealth and politics are intertwined in 21st
Century America. This is, after all, a craft that is both “private” and run by political figures.
Bear in mind the timing of the reference: as “The Wire’s” second season premiered, the
Bush-era cuts in capital gains taxes, which were proportionally much greater than the
corresponding cut in income taxes that had occurred two years earlier22, were just signed
into law. Extending the logic further, David Simon and the creative team behind “The Wire”
must be arguing that Washington DC is itself acting on behalf of capital by treating income
derived from capital with substantially more favor than income derived from labor. This is
presumably because, as seen earlier, those with capital intrinsically have a greater impact on
the political process.
When McNulty boards the boat to determine the situation, he is confronted
immediately by a character the script credits as “Party Girl”, who drunkenly offers him a
21
Washington DC, for much of the 2000s, experienced a period of economic growth and gentrification that
stands in direct contrast to the decline that occurred in Baltimore during the same period (Kotkin 2012). It’s
infrequent appearances in the show serve as a reminder: deindustrialization may cause tremendous problems to
some regions, but the story of The Wire is not the story of every American city.
22
For clarification’s sake: George W. Bush in 2001 signed into law a major tax cut program that primarily
reduced the labor income tax rate for all income brackets. In 2003, the year when the second season was aired,
he implemented a second series of cuts that primarily focused on reducing capital gains taxes. The two laws are
collectively known as “The Bush Tax Cuts.”
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glass of champagne even as she spills her own. McNulty, bemused, declines and realizes
that the ship will probably need to be towed out of its current location as it is dead in the
water. The ship’s owner, a politician, speaks with Jimmy to see if there is any other solution
to the problem.
POLITICIAN: Any chance you can hold off on bringing us in? Lot of
partying going on now, and I wouldn't want to cut it short for a little engine
trouble.
McNULTY: Well, you're in the shipping channel.
POLITICIAN: (taking out a wad of cash and handing it to McNulty) You tow
us somewhere out of the shipping channel and the band plays on a while
longer. (“Ebb Tide”)
Note McNulty’s concern: when he says “you’re in the shipping channel,” he is saying that
ship is acting as a barrier to the commerce of the Port of Baltimore. If the boat is itself a
representation of the governmental power vested in the city of Washington, D.C., then it is
the very same power that becomes a literal barrier to economic activity in Baltimore. The
politicians on the boat are having a grand ole’ time, but their party comes at the cost of the
trade that provides jobs to men like Frank Sobotka and the other checkers in Local 46. These
politicians are not merely aloof, partying while the middle class vanishes: it is their partying
that is at least partially responsible for the suffering caused by this economic transition.
Interesting, too, is the politician’s statement that “he wouldn’t want to cut it
[partying] short for a little bit of engine trouble.” Economists of all stripes and eras, from
John Maynard Keynes to Paul Krugman, have used the idea of the “economic engine” to
describe the forces that drive economic growth, and the metaphor seems rather apt here.
“Engine trouble” describes the problems facing Baltimore’s economy quite well (“it can’t
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seem to get going,” “it has stalled,” “it needs a jump,” and many other metaphors relating to
engines would all make sense). The politician, meanwhile, is apathetic, more concerned with
his party, a term that can be taken either literally or as a reference to his own political
“party,” than the fate of the economic engine.
Although the entire sequence is laden with wordplay and double entendre, it is the
concluding action, not dialogue, of the scene that comments most directly on the season’s
overarching concern with the political system: the reliance on financial influence in politics.
Jimmy McNulty, who of all policemen on “The Wire” is probably the one least willing to
accept the entrenched institutions of Baltimore, is bribed to keep the current order in place
by towing the boat out of sight, and does so. The police are the state’s enforcement agents,
and if even a “good” cop like Jimmy McNulty is not beyond financial self-interest, it would
seem that no one else on the force is either. While McNulty’s sins are essentially venial
here, they illustrate the larger point: the state, by its nature, succumbs quite easily to political
pressure, and this usually comes in the form of financial pressures from a class of people
invested, economically or otherwise, in the effects of a governmental decision.
This scene, however, mostly keeps the influence of government in the metaphorical
sphere. This makes a good degree of sense: even for a show as dedicated to drawing out the
unintended consequence of each decision as “The Wire” is, tracing only the impact of
federal policy on the Port of Baltimore would be a tremendously intricate task that goes
beyond the decidedly local scope of the show. However, in the season’s introduction of the
longshoremen’s union, the episode makes it clear that the state’s influence on commercial
behavior comes from both the state and the federal level. When speaking with fellow union
leader Nat Coxson (Luray Cooper), Frank tries to explain why he is trying to gain enough
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political capital to get state funding to dredge the canal23 leading into Baltimore, over Nat’s
objections.
SOBOTKA: The canal gets dredged, it means we all work. Your people, my
people. The canal's the key, Nat, you know this.
NAT: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you know how much money you gonna spend to
even get them talking about that shit?...No, you get 'em to rebuild the
grainery pier, you got a hundred ships right there…you might actually come
away with something. You go down Annapolis asking for the goddamn canal,
you gonna come back with nothin' but your little shriveled-ass dick in your
hand. What's more, if the grainery pier don't get fixed up soon, some asshole's
gonna fuck us by building condominiums all over it. (“Ebb Tide”)
When Frank says, “we all work. Your people, my people,” he is referring both to the
different locals the two men belong to, but also to the racial divide between Frank, of Polish
heritage, and Nat, an African-American. Frank’s contention is that the plight of labor in
Baltimore is one that affects both races equally, something he more explicitly states later
when he remarks to Nat that “Until we get that fuckin’ canal dredged, we’re all niggers”
(“Backwash”). Frank, here, is using the traditional rhetoric of economic oppression on racial
grounds to describe the problems the unions face in 2000’s Baltimore, using the pejorative
of “niggers” to refer not only to blacks, but to the entire longshoremen’s union.
And the parallels to segregation certainly exist in the plight of the longshoremen,
even if the racial malice that underlay those laws is absent. The government’s official
defense of most segregation laws was that it provided services and systems that were
“separate, but equal,” a condition mandated by the Supreme Court case “Plessy v.
Ferguson,” even though the facilities provided to the politically disenfranchised AfricanAmericans were almost always inferior. The laborers of Baltimore face a similar problem:
23
Dredging the canal would have the effect of deepening the canal, thereby allowing bigger ships into it. This
would in turn bring more trade activity into the Port of Baltimore.
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multiple episodes remark upon how the port of Hampton Roads, in Virginia, has flourished
at the expense of Baltimore (“Hard Cases”). Although the connection is not explicitly
drawn, Hampton Roads is also the most heavily subsidized Port in the US, with 80% of the
economy based upon federal spending. This is spending that also leapt in response to the
military buildup for the War on Terror. Unsurprisingly, the facilities in Hampton Roads far
outstrip those of Baltimore’s, largely because of the differences in government spending on
infrastructure for the port. While disparate federal spending certainly does not amount to the
discrimination that occurred in Segregation-era US, it does have a similar effect: certain
groups of workers are given an unfair set of rules to play by, forced to compete against those
classes deemed privileged by the power of the state, and given an inferior set of tools to do
so. Racial biases in Baltimore are not irrelevant (even though they are struggling, the white
characters living in Southeast Baltimore are doing noticeably better than the predominantly
black ones living in the Western half of the city), but the failure of various institutions has
left laborers, white and black, all in a troubled situation.
Returning to Nat’s words, the viewer sees that his primary concern is whether Frank
“know[s] how much money you gonna spend to even get them talking.” When he says
“them,” he has not yet been explicit in who this distant foe is, although his words later make
it clear that it is “Annapolis” itself, the city again standing in for the political machinations
that occur within. And while political lobbying may not be a necessarily corrupt enterprise,
Nat’s words indicate that, in Maryland, the only manner in which a substantial amount of
funds will be allocated to a certain project is directly proportion to the amount of money one
is willing to spend. In that sense, large government allocation of funds and resources are
determined not by the general concerns of the electorate, but by those who invest the most
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money into politics itself, with money in many cases replacing the normal signal of votes in
determining which policy ought be adopted If Frank were to “go down Annapolis asking for
the canal,” he would wind up, if Nat’s turn of phrase can be altered slightly, nearly emptyhanded because merely asking, or engaging in non-financial political speech, would never
work. Nat prefers to focus on going to the district council and encouraging his men to call
their representatives, indicating that Nat believes that on smaller issues the voice of the
average citizen may have an effect.24
Nat’s concluding words, that “some asshole’s gonna fuck us by building
condominiums all over it,” unfortunately end up being his most prescient. Andy Krawcyzk,
a man who is only referred to in this episode as someone who “has city hall’s ear,” ends up
building condominiums on the land. Obviously, financial influence has won out in the halls
of government again, but it goes further than that. The centers of government, Annapolis and
Washington both, have tremendous amounts of power over the city of Baltimore. The state
controls levels of spending for many public goods that are vital to private interests, like the
canal in Baltimore, and if it fails to adequately perform its job, it has tangible effects on
people like Frank Sobotka. Baltimore, to the viewer, is the location where the entire human
focus of the show resides, and thus represents the plight of the citizen. Washington, and by
extension government policy, serves not to improve the situations of the characters in
Baltimore’s narrative, and indeed serves as a literal and figurative impediment to the very
same characters. Washington may only be 40 miles away from Baltimore, but the distance
between the two places goes far beyond geography.
The season’s narrative does not support Nat on this point: the funding for the grainery only comes from
some of the political allies Frank Sobotka supported with his ill-gotten money.
24
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Although the show rarely moved the action outside of Baltimore, the ports offered a
thematic opportunity for the show to connect with other areas of not just the country, but the
globe, and in so doing contextualized Baltimore’s sad role in a greater narrative. “Collateral
Damage,” the second episode of “The Wire’s” second season, begins with a gaze from
above onto the covered corpses of thirteen25 dead women, Eastern Europeans who were
shipped across the Atlantic for the purposes of prostitution and suffocated to death in route
as the air vent in their cargo box was broken. We never will learn their names, nor see their
faces, throughout the entire season, even though they remain central to the plotline. This
idea, that these “girls” are somehow less than human, especially in death, is vital to a crucial
through-line of the episode: how, by a combination of official state authority and the
intentions of the criminals who controlled them, the women become merely ruined property,
slaves in everything but name. Like what happens to the dead women, Baltimore’s myriad
social ills are largely the result of not only criminal greed, nor exclusively government
corruption, but rather the validation of the former by the latter.
The average police procedural would begin an episode with the homicide unit onsite, but it is telling that none of “The Wire’s” many homicide detectives show up until later
in the episode. It’s a “death investigation,” as the medical examiner reminds us, and most of
the policemen at the scene are more concerned with making their own lives easier than
uncovering the truth. At the scene, the coroner, who will need to deal with these bodies
regardless of what happens and is therefore resigned to the horrible bureaucracy of the
whole thing, asks which agency of the several present (Baltimore City police, Maryland
A fourteenth, found in the waters of Baltimore’s harbor, was killed in the same incident, although the
connection between her and the other 13 is not yet known.
25
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State Police, US Coast Guard, etc.) will be investigating the crime. This provokes the first of
the several agencies to shirk any potential responsibility, saying:
If they were alive, they'd be illegals, and that’d
mean immigration. But they're dead, so they're
cargo (“Collateral Damage”).
Even the grammatical structure of his words dehumanizes these women. Looking
first to the end, the clause “so they’re cargo” represents, both in meaning and in form, the
process of humans becoming property. It is the decision being made by the state authority to
classify these women not as murder victims, but instead as goods destroyed by the shipping
process, and that decision is mirrored by the transitive changing the word “they,” a personal
pronoun, into the inhuman “cargo.” And it is not the case that this process happens only
after these women have died. A similar thing happens in the first sentence, as the women
would have been described, if they were alive when they got here, as “illegals.” The use of
the adjective as a substantive is not coincidental: they are not “illegal,” with the words
“aliens” or “immigrants” being implied, but are instead “illegals,” defined fully by their
position in the eyes of the state.
The concluding sentiment that they are “cargo,” is an important word choice, and
one worth investigating further. Although the slavery metaphor is not perfect, it certainly
comes close to getting at the whole picture. Choosing the word “cargo” not only calls
attention to the economic value of these women, but also to the process by which they
arrived in this country. The idea of shipping human beings for economic ends26 was how the
African slave trade functioned, and it is of course how the sex trafficking industry functions
Especially to the Port of Baltimore, which was “one of the leading disembarkation points for ships carrying
slaves to New Orleans and other ports in the deep South” from 1815 onwards during the period of the interstate
slave trade (Clayton 2000).
26
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today in “The Wire”. Think, too, about where the economic value of the prostitutes lay. It is
an almost completely corporeal value, a value determined not by anything but how their
bodies could be used by others. In some senses, it is the purest form of labor, value
stemming from pure physicality. Although the bodies of African-American slaves were
used, at least in most cases, in a very different manner, both sex workers and African slaves
are valued based on their bodies (sex workers by their capacity to have sex, slaves by their
capacity to do physical work).
The slavery analogues are vital to understanding the situation the docks occupy
within the show’s narratives. Baltimore’s Inner Harbor serves to connect the city with the
rest of the world, surely, but this idea of connection goes further than mere place. The docks
are also the idea that connects that past with the present, where Baltimore’s industrial past is
rubbing directly against the condo developments of the future. Yet, and apologies for the
cliché, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The Port of Baltimore was
responsible for the delivery of human beings in the 19th Century, and it remains responsible
for it in the 21st. Of all the seasons of “The Wire,” this is the one most concerned with
Baltimore’s past, and with the idea of the American narrative27. The docks, then, connect
Baltimore, not only to its past, but by extension to the grander narrative of American
development.
Before the show even reaches it’s opening titles, the thirteen dead women will be
equated one more time with inanimate objects, although this time it has nothing to do with
their economic value. The representative of the Maryland State Police, who after a minor
27
The Inner Harbor, after all, was the home of perhaps the greatest mythical figure in all of American sports,
the orphan George Herman “Babe” Ruth (Clayton 2000).
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debate agrees that the case is under his jurisdiction, decides not to open up a case file on the
discovery of the thirteen bodies. When Beadie Russell, the somewhat innocent detective
who discovered the bodies, questions how the deaths of 13 girls could go unexplored, he
responds, “No crime, no investigation. All you’ve got right here, Officer Russell, is a lot of
paperwork” (“Collateral Damage”).
Again, the idea that the girls are manifested simply as object, here “paperwork,”
comes up, but this is a slightly different case that the previous ones. These women are no
longer being thought of terms of economics: they are now problems for the government
bureaucracy. Throughout its run, “The Wire” goes to great lengths to explain how
organizations, governmental and otherwise, are hindered by the various bureaucratic
concerns that drive them, and the classification of these girls as victims of an accident is no
different. It isn’t malice that drives the state policeman, but simple self-interest as this is a
tremendously difficult-to-solve case that would require substantial resources and time, and if
left unsolved could hinder his career.
These dynamics come up more clearly within the Baltimore City Police
Department’s Homicide Division later. Jimmy McNulty, who was once a Homicide
detective but now has been stuck in the undesirable Marine Unit, rather easily proves that
the suffocation was a deliberate act of murder by a crewman28. When explaining to the head
of the Maryland State Police why he won’t take on the murders even though it seems like
Baltimore City is better qualified, Colonel Rawls’ explanation has nothing to do with
McNulty harbors a substantial grudge against Homicide’s chief, John Rawls (John Doman), because of his
transfer. The reason he’s the only person in the department who wants to correctly label these deaths as
homicides is because he’s also the only detective attempting to make the lives of his fellow policemen more
difficult.
28
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solving crimes and everything to do with the institutional incentives he faces as a
commanding officer within a highly political department. He says:
Robbie, I have fought and scratched and clawed for four months to get my
clearance rate above 50%. And right now it stands at exactly 51.6%. Do you
happen to know what my clearance rate will be if I take 13 whodunits off
your hand? 39.4%...We did not get to be colonels by being complete fucking
idiots, did we? (“Collateral Damage”)
The numbers may seem unimportant, and boring to look into (they even have decimals!), but
the failure to look into the facts obscured by these numbers is the exact reason the police are
less concerned with doing what the show often calls “real policework,” and more with
saving their own hides. The omitted fact here is that, if the department did solve the
homicides, their rate would skyrocket to about 63.8%, which would, on the surface, be
great…but Rawls doesn’t seem to care about that. It may be because he is risk-averse, or
that he believes that these murders cannot be solved, but there is a subtler insinuation in all
of this. His mentioning of the arbitrary 50% benchmark perhaps indicates a goal set by the
department, meaning that there is every incentive to do exactly what the bureaucracy
demands29, and no incentive to do anything more. And such political machinations seem to
work: Colonel Rawls, largely because of the political acumen he displays here, is last seen in
the series finale being sworn in as Superintendent of the Maryland State Police.
“All the pieces matter,” Detective Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters) reminds us in the
titular episode of “The Wire,” and although the statistical benchmarks set by the government
may seem innocuous, they have real effects. The mayor of Baltimore, or perhaps an
In the show’s third season, Rawls’ boss, Commissioner Burrell (Frankie Faison), is given a politicallymotivated ultimatum by the Mayor to keep total murders under 300 for the year, and the tampering of statistics
for the sake of appearance is a running theme in “The Wire.” Therefore, assuming Rawls’ decision is
motivated by the same concerns is not merely speculation.
29
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underling who set these benchmarks, has no idea that his plans lead to the de facto
endorsement of sex workers as property, yet the connection is certainly there. One of a
government’s primary responsibilities is defining property rights, and when the police are
penalized for having unsolved murders, some will inevitably find ways around classifying
crimes as murders. The bureaucratic language becomes the official description of these
women, and although the rationale and total logic is shrouded by layers of paperwork and
embedded in certain numbers, it still has the same effect as if the decision was intentional.
Pausing here before continuing to the role the market plays, this statistical logic is
what separates the state’s bureaucratic apparatus from the markets, even as it creates the
horrific complicity between the two institutions. In remarking upon the futility of the War on
Drugs, Sgt. Ellis Carver (Seth Gilliam) notes that, “They [drug dealers] fuck up, they get
beat. We fuck up, we get pensions” (“Sentencing”). In the characteristically blunt language
of The Wire, Sgt. Carver is noting the difference between the state and the market, and the
horrors of both. The market’s incentive structure is simple, as will soon be seen, with
performance being evaluated upon the profit incentives. This causes, of course, some
horrific acts themselves; while there may be some levity in the remark “they get beat,” the
show demonstrates everywhere how those beatings bleed all to easily into murders and other
atrocities. The performance incentives for the state, however, rely upon perpetually
obfuscated statistics and manipulations of fact, both here in the police departments and in
the show’s fourth season exploration of rigged test scores in the post-“No Child Left
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Behind”30 world. The agents of the state, then, simply needs to keep up appearances,
statistical or otherwise, in order to remain employed.
Of course, the state is not responsible for the murder of these women itself, nor the
enlistment of them into the sex trade, so it may seem mildly unfair to place all the blame at
the feet of the police. And that’s absolutely correct: the police are not the ones who decided
to ship these women across the Atlantic for the purposes of prostitution, nor are they the
ones who murdered them. The man directly responsible for 13 of the murders is an unnamed
Turkish sailor, who was attempting to cover up a murder of the fourteenth. He was in the
employ of a gangster known only as “The Greek,” who is busy investigating what, exactly,
happened to all 14 of the girls. After all, even if the girls were just financial assets to him,
they still were tremendously valuable financial assets.
The Greek (Bill Raymond) sends his underlings Spiros Vondopoulos (Paul BenVictor) and Sergei after the sailor, who is subsequently tortured by Sergei. After the severe
beating, The Greek emerges from the shadows to receive the sailor’s confession of
suffocating the 13 girls. He says:
We popped the can to let them [the girls] take a bath, get some air. You gotta
understand my crew, they’ve been pulling on their πέος [penises] for
weeks…these girls they looked pretty good. The men had cash to spend. I
admit, I saw the business, but no more…One of the putanas [prostitutes]
decided she didn’t want to be a putana no more. This one guy got rough with
her. The whore died. The other ones saw, I didn’t know what to do…
(“Collateral Damage”)
30
Referring to the 2001 federal law that mandated increased testing of schoolchildren throughout the United
States. It tied funding to these statistical benchmarks, which season four of The Wire argues provided an
economic incentive to “teach to the test.”
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The sailor’s telling of events demonstrates the necessarily coercive nature of the sex trade,
where both financial desperation and physical force often convince women to make
decisions that they would not have made otherwise. Yes, 13 of the women “chose” to
engage in prostitution, even discounting for a second that they all are at least in somewhat
dire financial straits, given that they were all willing to travel illegally across the Atlantic in
a small tin can with limited oxygen. But the murder of the fourteenth girl, the one found in
the Inner Harbor’s waters, demonstrates that they lacked any meaningful sense of choice in
terms of their career. In almost any other job, what the “putana” was attempting to do was
quit, but her attempts to exercise that freedom ended in her murder.
Look, too, at the wording of the Turkish sailor’s story. He uses two separate
sentences, “This one guy got rough with her” and “The whore died,” to describe the murder.
By divorcing the two thoughts, the Turkish sailor is trying to separate the unnamed man’s
violence towards this women from her death, even though it is clear that what actually
happened was this other man brutally31 beat her to death. He also spends more time
describing the sexual needs of the sailors, who have “been pulling on their πέος,” than he
does describing what exactly happened to the fourteen women who died. A lack of sexual
release is an obviously terrible excuse for fourteen murders, yet in his mind the business-like
nature of what has occurred makes it seem as though the men, by virtue of their willingness
to pay, exerted some sort of property rights over these women bodies.
Spiros and The Greek conclude the episode disgusted, although not by any of the
now-15 people who are dead. The Greek asks his associate, “In a year, each whore would
In the previous episode, McNulty discovers her face beaten to a pulp, with both of her legs broken (“Ebb
Tide”).
31
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bring in a quarter million, what is that?” After realizing they’ve lost 4 million dollars32,
Spiros curses the Turkish man, saying “Malaka.” The odd thing is that they are the ones
most interested in the lives of these girls, but only so far as they have economic value.
Although it may sound (and indeed is) morally perverse, they have every incentive to protect
their property, sound businessmen they are, and therefore have no reason to hurt these girls.
There can be little doubt that Spiros and The Greek, murderers both, are more
morally heinous individuals than the apathetic police officers who decline to investigate the
crime. Yet, the problem here was not the usual economic failure of rational self-interest
leading to the abuse of the powerless. Instead, it was bureaucratic failures, both in the
market and in the state. In terms of legitimate commerce, Spiros and The Greek were poor
“managers,” unable to provide the correct incentives convince their employees to work for
the benefit of the entire corporation. It was merely a costly miscalculation, and one that any
“worker” would be loath to make again. The police force, by contrast, has set up a system
where the bureaucracy rewards “less” murders, because from a political perspective the term
“murders” carries more weight than “accidental deaths.” The crimes of the market are
certainly worrisome, but they become heavily compounded when surrounded by a state
apparatus designed to avoid confronting problems in anything more than a cosmetic manner.
And while the grotesque window-dressings of the economy have changed (in a postindustrial world, the type of diversionary labor Eastern European women can provide is
more in demand than that African men could have provided), the fundamentally corrupt
incentive structures within both the apathetically inefficient state and the brutally efficient
market remains in place, making the show’s narrative more universal, and perhaps
32
The math isn’t perfect.
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universally cynical, than a simply contemporary view of the show’s would otherwise
provide.
Epilogue: It’s not (just) TV…A twice-told story of The Wire’s Creation
The Wire premiered in 2002, and in spite of abnormally low ratings33 managed to run
for five full seasons over the course next the seven years. That would be considered a
success even for highly-rated shows, but for a show with The Wire’s ratings, such a lengthy
run must count as a nearly Biblical miracle, as unlikely as a day’s worth of oil burning for
The show’s final season averaged just under a million viewers, which is less than 1/8 th of its HBO
stablemate, The Sopranos.
33
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eight. In other words, the show’s very existence seems to run counter to its brutal economic
message, where newspapers, factories, and other businesses are shuttered for being
unprofitable as an ethos of rational self-interest sets in more heavily at nearly every
institution. However, The Wire’s existence comes not from the grace of that God who has
left Baltimore behind, but instead from the very changes in economic structure that have
been described so far. By understanding the changes that occurred in the medium of
television, the reasons for The Wire’s survival become much clearer, and in so doing
elucidate and expand upon the show’s thematic concerns and, perhaps, its position as an heir
to the many American texts that preceded it.
The last decade of American television has been an interesting study in contrasts.
Between think-pieces about how Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo and 16 & Pregnant represent
the basest forms of entertainment this nation has ever seen34, there have also been respected
novelists like Salman Rushdie proclaiming, “[in television] what you can do with character
and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.” Given these sentiments, the
question becomes: is television getting smarter, or dumber? The best answer is simply
“both,” as contradictory as that may sound. Or, at the very least, television has become more
able to cater to both high and low impulses, due to a variety of technological changes in
television.
A full description of the changes that led to a show like The Wire35 becoming
economically viable would begin with battles over basic cable and FCC regulation that
started in the 1950s and continued through the 1980s, but the breadth of changes that
34
E.g. Genzlinger (2012)
Much of the discussion that follows could also apply to other low-rated, highly acclaimed premium cable
dramas like Deadwood and Girls and, to a lesser extent, basic cable shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad.
35
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occurred in this time period would be beyond the scope of this thesis. A more productive
focus would be the unusually rapid rise of the Home Box Office network (HBO) in the late
1990’s/early 2000’s. Although the show had some original programming before this
period36, it wasn’t until37 the premiere of The Sopranos in 1999 that it began to achieve
acclaim on a scale that was bigger than any channel, cable or broadcast, on television. Many
more critical and commercial successes followed, including The Wire. In short form, this is
the history of what happened. This success, however, was undergirded not just by several
executives with good creative instincts, but also by a shift in how television was being
distributed.
The biggest technological change television face during this time period was
digitization in its purest form: the invention and proliferation of the Digital Video Disc, the
DVD. DVD rose to prominence in the very early 2000’s, and among its many virtues, it was
able to hold large amounts of data in a relatively small amount of physical space, unlike a
VHS. This meant that television could now not only be shown at home, but also sold next to
movies at the local Circuit City. Dedicated viewers could now watch large amounts of their
favorite programs at their own convenience. This provided not just an additional revenue
source for television, but a revenue source specifically derived from the most passionate
viewers. DVD’s financially privileged shows that inspired not just a passive willingness to
watch, but instead a deeper attachment that would make viewers willing to spend substantial
money on a program. In terms of form, they also encouraged shows to more heavily serialize
36
Shows like The Larry Sanders Show and Tales from the Crypt enjoyed some success, either critically or
commercially, but it was on a noticeably smaller scale than what would come. This was followed by the much
more successful Oz, but its success too was dwarfed by the juggernauts of The Sopranos and Sex and the City.
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their narratives, as shows could now be consumed at one time. This allowed for a level of
narrative complexity heretofore unseen on television, especially on a show like The Wire.
The Wire survived not only on the backs of DVD’s, but also on the specific
economic model that HBO used. HBO is a premium38 cable channel, which means that it
does not rely upon advertising for revenue, and instead exclusively upon subscription fees.
This means that the network’s calculation is somewhat more difficult than, say, NBC. NBC
needs simply to decide which show will have the largest audience, or at least the largest
audience within key demographics, in order to determine what show will receive the highest
advertising revenue. HBO has to decide which shows most viewers would subscribe to
watch, which requires a further calculation of how much a viewer enjoys watching the show.
Like DVD’s, it rewarded shows with smaller yet passionate fan bases like The Wire. The
rise of this model occurred nearly contemporaneously with the rise of DVD, mostly by
coincidence, due to more gradual changes in the medium.3940
So as not to ignore the second chapter of this thesis, the government too indirectly
(always indirectly) played a role in the rise of HBO. Due to a quirk in regulation, the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) has the power to regulate the content of all television
shows except those on premium cable. This meant that shows like The Sopranos and The
Wire could use as much profanity and show as much nudity as they felt necessary, and not
have to comply to the decency standards shows like NYPD Blue spent every week trying to
The word “premium” refers to networks like HBO and Showtime. “Basic” cable, by contrast, includes
channels like ESPN, TNT, TBS, Comedy Central etc. that are partially reliant upon subscription fees for
revenue, but still need advertising revenue to stay afloat.
39
Namely, HBO began digitizing its content in the mid-1990s, and HBO began to offer more channels to more
cable providers throughout the decade.
40
The effects of DVD and HBO’s subscription model on The Wire have been noted elsewhere; see Mittell
(2012).
38
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evade. The lack of regulation gave the writers and directors of the shows the creative
freedom that their basic cable and broadcast lacked. One of The Wire’s most memorable
early scenes is of Detectives McNulty and Bunk investigating a crime scene and deducing
what occurred while saying nothing but the word “fuck” with different intonations. Profanity
might not make a show high quality on its own, but the freedom to use it made HBO unique
among the producers of television in the early 2000s, and differentiated them in a market
that could offer no similar products.
This tale of The Wire’s creation, however, can be put in different, more “human”
terms. Imagine a personal story of “The Wire” from the perspective not of David Simon’s41,
but instead of co-creator Ed Burns. Burns, who many have argued was not only the template
for protagonist Jimmy McNulty42, as well as the driving force behind the show’s widely
acclaimed fourth season. This story will of course be a simplified one, yet its shape
comments back upon The Wire’s economic themes. After serving as a policeman for twenty
years, he retired to take a job as an inner-city schoolteacher. Never a writer by trade, he is
offered the opportunity to co-write a book about the drug corners of Baltimore. The book is
quite successful, adapted into an HBO miniseries43 without any direct involvement from
Burns himself. From there, he gets his first job in the television industry as a writer and
producer of a new show. He is credited on every script, and writes or co-writes the teleplay
of many episodes, including the show’s finale. This show, of course, just happens to be The
41
Although Simon was in many ways the driving force behind the show (occupying the role as showrunner),
Burns also played a vital role in its creation. The reason this essay has tended to use Simon as the voice of the
creator has as much to do with his outspoken public persona, as well as Burns’ public silence, as it has to do
with the issue of attributed authorship.
42
Wilson (2008)
43
The Corner (2000)
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Wire. In the span of a mere 10 years, Burns went from a cop forced into retirement, innercity school teacher to the writer of one of the most acclaimed texts of the last decade.
The story of Ed Burns is the type of rags-to-riches story Frank Capra44 would have
been proud to tell. Himself an unlikely and grand success, Ed Burns’ life is in many ways
the prototypical example of the American Dream in action. This is all well and good for Mr.
Burns himself45, but becomes problematic when one realizes that Ed Burns’ story of success
is in many ways at odds with the very story that made him successful. The same holds,
although with less compelling details, for the show itself. Does this, as Linkton, Russo &
Russo (2012) argue, make the show “complicit in the capitalist structures” it is attempting to
critique? After all, if one reads the show as simply being the story of labor’s utter collapse
during the 21st century, a collapse both market and state forces have played a role in, then at
the very least the successes of Burns and Simon do seem a bit odd. Not only did they create
a piece of art that was successful, but it was a distinctly commercial piece of art, influenced
at many levels by the same structures of contemporary capitalism it was replicating in its
narrative.
Complicity, however, is not the ideal lens with which to view the story of The Wire’s
creation. The usefulness of The Wire is not merely in its pessimism, but in the modern
specificity of what has gone wrong, and indicting individuals like Burns and Simon seems to
run counter to the greater thematic concerns of a show so heavily concerned with
institutional problems. Ed Burns’ career path is more interesting, instead, as an extension of
Director of such films as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s A Wonderful Life. Capra’s Great
Depression-era films are often thought of as wildly sentimental and idealistic, although there certainly is a case
to be made that his oeuvre is much sadder and attuned to the horrors of everyday life than is often understood.
45
Obviously, this is a heavily surface-level reading of Ed Burns’ life, and since few interviews have been
conducted with him it is difficult to determine much beyond these. This shallowness is meant to be deliberate,
and hopefully instructive.
44
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the show’s thematic concerns themselves. For example, in his pre-Corner days, when he
worked within the state, he moved from a job that gave preference to physical labor (the
police department) to a job that required more of an education (the school system). More
important than the direction itself, however, is the contrast between him and his fictional foil
Jimmy McNulty, which is especially illustrative in describing the idea labor mobility.
McNulty, recall, was a dropout of Loyola College, and unable to leave his job in the police
force because of it. Burns, contrastingly, was able to quit his job on the force and become a
teacher46 because he actually graduated from the same college.
Surely, other parallels between Burns’ career and the economics of The Wire can be
drawn out (as a writer, he transitioned into the digital medium of television, for example),
but that seems less vital than explicating what complications these stories of The Wire’s
creation introduce. The Wire may seem to be misleading the audience, showing them only
the exploitation that occurs in the postindustrial age while willfully ignoring any potential
upsides, yet that clearly ignores the subtle details in the text that have already done some of
this work in nuancing the narrative of economic decline. One may be tempted to see the
second season of the show only through Frank Sobotka’s eyes, as the story of irrevocable
decline in the labor market. Recall, however, the minor successes of police officers like
Beadie Russell, and one can see that such pat descriptions of the show irresponsibly reduce
the show’s economic themes to their most obvious components, ignoring the disparate
effects change has upon different groups.
46
Public school teachers are normally required to have a degree in higher education, and Baltimore is no
different. http://www.baltimorecityschools.org/cms/lib/MD01001351/Centricity/Domain/18/PDF/TAP.pdf
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Snot Boogie (or the 14 dead women, or the Sobotka family, or the slaves who once
entered Baltimore’s ports centuries ago, or…the list of potential alternatives goes on) and Ed
Burns are the two very different sides of the same coin. Their fates are intrinsically bound
together, governed by a set of economic laws and incentives determined completely by
institutions external to the people they affect. The postindustrial era’s true tragedy is not
defined by the universal impossibility of success, but instead in the ways the deck is stacked
against certain groups. The overarching structures of power in America, the nexuses of
capital and state, always have an incentive to let players like Snot and Ed Burns into “the
game.” As in any game of chance, the player may have an outside shot at winning, as Burns
did, even as so many others lose under the exact same system. This description, however,
has left out the fundamental rule of gambling, and one that informs the economic structures
of The Wire’s America deeply.
At any casino, the odds are stacked in the house’s favor. And if not always, more
often than not, the house is going to win.
Works Cited
Michelle Alexander. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
(New York: The New Press, 2010), 51.
Barton, Ruth. "Contested Memories: Representing Work in The Wire." The Wire: Race,
Class, and Genre. Ann Arbor: Michigan, 2012. N. pag. Print.
Burns, Ed. "The Wire." The Wire. Prod. David Simon. HBO. 2002. Television.
Clayton, Ralph. "A Bitter Inner Harbor Legacy: The Slave Trade." The Baltimore Sun 12
July 2000: n. pag. Print.
"East Coast Ports." Journal of Commerce. N.p., 2012. Web. 2013.
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The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001)
(2001). Print.
"FCC Consumer Facts". Fcc.gov. Retrieved 2012-10-05.
Genzlinger, Neil. "TV Where Too Far Is Never Far Enough." New York Times 28 Dec.
2012: n. pag. Print.
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Kotkin, Joel. "The Expanding Wealth Of Washington." Forbes. N.p., 19 Mar. 2012. Web.
Linkton, Sherry, John Russo, and Alexander Russo. "Policing the Borders of White
Masculinity: Labor, Whiteness, and the Neoliberal City in The Wire." The Wire:
Race, Class, and Genre. Ann Arbor: Michigan, 2012. N. pag. Print.
Marshall, C.W., and Tiffany Potter. ""I Am The American Dream": Modern Urban Tragedy
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York: Continuum, 2009. 1-14. Print.
Mittell, Jason. "The Wire and Its Readers." The Wire: Race, Class, and Genre. Ann Arbor:
Michigan, 2012. N. pag. Print.
Office of Human Capital. Interested in Being a Teacher? Baltimore: n.p., n.d. Print.
Simon, David. The Corner. HBO. 2000. Television.
Simon, David. "David Simon." Interview by Bill Moyers. NPR. NPR. 17 Apr. 2009. Radio.
Wilson, Michael. "After ‘The Wire,’ Moving On to Battles Beyond the Streets." New York
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