THE FISHERY: a diary of the Loose-Fish Project

As we get ready for the start of the fifth and final season of The Wire, I think it’s fitting to say a few words about just how much this show, and much of David Simon’s work, has had an impact on me.

Chuck Palahniuk, writing about Amy Hempel says:

When you study Minimalism in the novelist Tom Spanbauer’s workshop, the first story you read is Amy Hempel’s The Harvest. After that, you’re ruined… every other book you ever read will suck.

This is how I feel about The Wire.  It makes me hate most every other show on TV.  It makes me cringe at easy resolutions, dumbed-down problems, and any character who isn’t simultaneously a saint and a bastard.   It makes me furious at a nation of stroy consumers who havbeen and continue to be trained to accept simple explanations to their infinitely complex world.
I recently rewatched the first four seasons in preparation.  They are so dense and satisfying I could watch them all over again from the beginning.

Bawlmor slang has crept into my everyday vocabulary, and I find myself calling people “Bunk” and “Shitbird.”

There are several people in the building where I work who have Emmy Awards, and every time I see one, I’m tempted to snatch it and hand deliver it to Andre Royo.

Simon and his collaborators have been doing this to be for years.  I was a devoted fan of the show Homicide, and its brilliant performances - particularly Andre Braugher, Jon Polito and especially the seven-year journey into the heart of darkness undergone by Kyle Secor’s character Tim Bayliss.  (Sadly, I’ve been rewatching the early episodes of this show, and next to the Wire, they look forced, unreal, positively quaint.)

The book and later miniseries of The Corner is so unsettling, that years later I get chills just thinking about it.

Behind all of these, Simon’s first book - Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets - stands as one of the three of four best books I’ve read in my lifetime.  I was raised in a staunchly liberal/lefty do-gooder home.   One of the things I picked up along the way was a complete distrust of anyone wearing a police uniform, and the unhealthy attitude that anybody in a position of authority was solely and simply a tool of the powerful.  Simon’s book obliterated that notion, and forced me to try to look past my prejudice towards people who I perceived to be on the opposite side of my interests, or at least recognize and be uncomfortable when I don’t.  I’ve carried that lesson with me.

I’ve seen the first two episodes of the final season of The Wire, and I’m greedy for the rest, even though I know there will be no more.  There’s a moment in the beginning on the second episode (not a spoiler, don’t worry), in which Bubbles walks to the front of a group of people.  The light through the window is gleaming, brilliant, and for a second as he walks into it, it looks as if he’ll be bathed in its healing glow.  But then the light overpowers him, leaving him an island of darkness, emphasizing the shadows which cling to his body.  It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen on a television screen.

Thank you, David Simon - the Great Shitbird of the Galaxy.

It’s become clear to me that at some point, my idea of what makes a good story has diverged from the mainstream. I have a hard time with many movies these days, where it seems that no matter how interesting it is in the beginning, the end degenerates into twenty minutes of blowing things up, mayhem, or chaos that rises to the level of absurdity. Take the ending of the recent remake of “3:10 To Yuma,” with its never-ending gunfight and ridiculous, concluding “moral” choice which defies all logic. Now contrast this with the climax of “Gone, Baby, Gone” which is a conversation between two people where the outcome will alter many lives.

I guess what I’m trying to get at it that a conversation can be more interesting, more dangerous, more fraught with peril that any action sequence.

And while were on action sequences, I’ve come to regard most of them as little more than pornography.  Continue Reading »