i'll be gone, in a day or twoooo

[lauralh]

The only problem I have with The Wire is that it's very, very, very plot-driven. And I prefer stuff that's character-driven. But other than that I'm enjoying it a lot; we saw ep. 6 last night. Actually it seems that the "good guys" are far less sympathetic than the "bad guys" and I guess it's supposed to make you THINK, but I already think the war on drugs is a big fat waste of time, so maybe I'm not exactly the focus audience.

Anyway. Last official day of work. I want to buy a new pair of shoes.

Comments

when you walk in the garden...

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

Well, there are so many characters. It's like a Russian novel. It is true, though, that one point of the story is that D'Angelo is easier to relate to than many of the cops, and McNulty, while trying harder to do the right thing than many of the other cops, is kind of a dick. My guess is that the point is not so much to make you think as to get you to see that the players on both "sides" are cogs in their respective machines. Not that they don't have motivations, but they are greatly constrained in what's possible by the rules of the game, rules that no one wrote but that everyone knows and has to work within. In that sense the "bad" actions are usually more stupid than evil.

David Simon (the show's creator) wrote a couple of crackerjack books about drugs and Baltimore. He doesn't so much take a position on the war on drugs as try to show what taking it to its conclusion does to the areas affected. In season 3 one of the lieutenants de facto legalizes drugs in part of his district, and you see that crime overall goes down, but the lives of many of the addicts get worse and it's politically unsustainable. So I think the overall point is something like, "things are more complicated than you think," which I like.

"What the fuck did I do?"

[ernunnos.livejournal.com]

Actually, the lives of the addicts get better. There's one scene where some aid workers are talking about the fact that with all the addicts centralized in "Hampsterdam" it's easier to get them food and medical attention and so forth. The cops even levy an unofficial tax on the dealers to pay for sports supplies for the kids at one point. Life as an addict still isn't good, but how good could it possibly be?

I think the show is mostly character driven. Nobody's really following the rules. The politicians and cops are all playing politics, even McNulty, the guy who's doing the right thing is doing it for his own ego. The criminals want money, or revenge, or respect. You put all those motivations together and you get a hell of a complicated plot, but the driving force behind it is the characters.

Either way, it's the best TV on TV.

Re: "What the fuck did I do?"

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

Their lives kind of get better, though it takes a while for the cops to institute the needle exchanges and other services needed. Also remember that the one or two families still in the neighborhood are not too well off. I think they didn't want to glorify Hamsterdam: it was a kind of demonic place, even if it benefited the neighborhood as a whole. Left unclear is how long such a thing could last, since it depended so much on the cops arranging the truce (and going to great lengths to preserve the fiction that no murders took place there). But it definitely was an improvement in the short term.

Can't wait for season 4...