By Barry Maupin
On The Wire, everyone’s in school. But when it comes to learning, Baltimore’s cops, teachers, street hustlers, politicians, and students all have at least one thing in common: they reject instruction they deem irrelevant to the job at hand. A sequence early in Season Four’s premiere, "Boy of Summer," bounces between training seminars for public school teachers and police officers, who listen impatiently as droning bureaucrats with slick slide show graphics offer news they can’t use. The teachers and cops, fed up with the charade, pelt the speakers with real-world problems and derisive wisecracks about the value of the lessons. At the precinct house, when the government envoy prattles about emergency procedures in the event of biochemical agents, Sgt. Carver (Seth Gilliam) interjects a dose of perspective. “Them al-Qaedas were up on Baltimore Street planning on blowing up the chicken joint,” he volleys to guffaws from his fellow officers, “but Apex’s crew jacked ’em up, took the camels and robes, buried their ass in Leakin Park. Least that’s what I heard.”
Those who bring the specialized knowledge to deal with a complex environment, on the other hand, engender quick respect where it might not otherwise be forthcoming. Early in the episode, a group of 13- or 14-year old boys gather in a vacant lot to try to capture what they think is a white homing pigeon, which they hear might fetch several hundred dollars from Marlo Stanfield, an emerging drug kingpin with a bird habit. They’ve tied a string to a stick that props up a box over some food, and the bird they desire comes near the bait but flies away when a bottle breaks nearby. The boys accost Dookie, the runt of the group who threw the bottle to squash a bug, and batter him with insults. When they walk away, Randy (Maestro Harrell) stays back to give Dukie a chance to explain himself. Dukie (Jermaine Crawford) tells him that their prey wasn’t a homing pigeon, and when he elaborates by describing the metal band around the leg of actual homing pigeons, Randy’s posture shifts from one of disdain to pride that his friend possesses such valuable information. Elsewhere in the neighborhood, Snoop (Felicia Pearson), one of Marlo’s assassins, shops a hardware store for a more reliable nail gun, which she uses to board up her victims in vacant houses. She describes the drawbacks of her current tool to the salesman, who patiently details the merits of various nail guns until Snoop knows which one best suits her purpose. Hearing that the price is $669 plus tax, she peels off eight hundred-dollar bills from a roll and tells him to take care of the sale and keep the change. When the salesman, flummoxed by her generosity, hesitates, she declares, “You earned that bump like a motherfucker.”
If useful knowledge on The Wire is valuable currency, then those who know what can’t be taught sit in high demand. In another juxtaposition of the public schools and the police department, middle managers make stopgap personnel arrangements in back-to-back scenes in a losing battle to cover the holes in their fading institutions. As the principal and assistant principal of Edward J. Tilghman Middle School try to figure out who can supervise lunch, much less teach math and science, former detective Roland Pryzbylewski (Jim True-Frost) reports for duty as the new math teacher. Prez lacks certification to teach, and the beleaguered assistant principal doesn’t even bother to introduce herself until he informs them that his last job was as a cop in the city. No matter that he left the police force in disgrace; his experience dealing with violent and unpredictable elements automatically vaults him to the head of the new crop of teacher recruits. A parallel scene goes down at the police department as Maj. Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick) and his top assistant, after a meeting spent bemoaning the lack of qualified officers, practically beg one-time detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) to abandon his uniformed radio car patrol and join a short-handed special case squad. McNulty politely declines, having found temporary peace as a beat cop after growing disillusioned with detective work’s 24-hour grind, oppressive chain-of-command rigidity, and powerlessness against the top brass’s penchant for folding cases that reach too close to Baltimore’s power elite. Daniels knows McNulty’s disgust, having been burned himself by McNulty on multiple occasions, and yet he’s still desperate for his services, because McNulty possesses a passion and genius for tracking down the city’s top criminals that few others can muster.
Throughout the course of the show, The Wire has charted with a wary eye the role of institutions in the life of Baltimore, and none has been skewered with as much pure cynicism as the city’s political theater. Councilman Tommy Carcetti (Aidan Gillen), having decided in Season Three to launch a bid for the mayor’s office, now finds himself four weeks out from the Democratic primary in a race against incumbent Clarence Royce (Glynn Turman) that is beginning to look unwinnable. Royce is imbedded in the pocket of the city’s real estate developers and raising money at a staggering clip, including under-the-table contributions well beyond the legal limit. 
But Carcetti’s main hurdle in his mind is being a white candidate in a majority-black city. A pair of exchanges with Norman (Reg E. Cathey), his black deputy campaign manager, disavows Carcetti of his victim status. In the first, Carcetti rides in the back of an SUV after a long day campaigning and fishes for hope. “You really think they’re gonna vote for the white guy?” Norman, from the front passenger seat, replies bluntly, “Black folk been voting white for a long time. You come correct, we listen. It’s y’all that don’t never vote black.” Later, exasperated by his handlers’ positive spin on his tepid poll numbers, Carcetti fumes, “And by the way, who can tell me when the fuck did the sixth district become 64% black?” Norman again sets him straight. “’About five years ago in the last redistricting. Mostly, as I recall, to give your ass more white votes over there in the first (district).”
Candidates or cops, the characters leaven the stress with a running braggadocio, usually jokes about sex acts with each other they’re going to have, could’ve had, or have already delivered. Carcetti comes home midday to change his sweat-soaked shirt, and when he gets back in the SUV, his driver scolds him for burning six minutes of valuable campaign time. “Six?” Carcetti ponders in disbelief. “Shit, I coulda got laid.” Over in the homicide division, Detective Bunk Moreland (Wendell Pierce) watches ex-partner Lester Freamon walk away after conferring on a murder case. Bunk turns to his new partner and boasts, “Look at that bow-legged motherfucker. I made him walk like that.”
The stories may be bullshit, but the affection is real, not least because Lester (Clarke Peters) gives Bunk the name of his shooter, gleaned from a separate wiretap investigation. The victim is Fruit, one of Marlo’s top lieutenants in his growing drug empire, a turn which perplexes the detectives, since they haven’t been able to tie any bodies to Marlo’s syndicate in several months, and the first related victim is one of his own men. Bunk wonders, “How do you hold that much real estate without making bodies?” The answer is that Snoop and 
her hit-man colleague, Chris Partlow (Gbenga Akinnagbe), run a disciplined shop, minimizing blood splatter and decay odor and entombing the bodies in Baltimore’s omnipresent vacant row houses with the aforementioned nail gun. Marlo keeps his profile low by applying a lesson learned from the demise of his predecessor, Avon Barksdale: it’s the bodies that bring the police. When Fruit’s crew vows to avenge his death by wiping out the whole crew of the shooter--an independent dealer named Lex whose beef with Fruit was over a girl, not business—and taking their corner, Marlo (Jamie Hector) shakes his head at their lack of foresight. “What I want with some off-brand hilltop corner?” he theorizes. “And why I need to be stacking bodies when everyone know no one trying to war with us?”
Marlo’s acumen for knowing who not to kill and hiding those he does has kept him out of the sights of the police thus far, but Lester, the resident master of the wiretap’s possibilities, is building a case against Marlo from the street level up, puzzling out the drug operation’s web of conspirators by tapping their cell phone network. Lester, unaware of the rotting corpses in the vacants, views the investigation as a pedestrian one with a mathematically inevitable conclusion. He and Detective Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn) are essentially running the unit themselves under the nose of their clueless lieutenant, whose head is already in retirement, and they exploit the freedom by chasing the Barksdale money trail from a year ago on the sly. The two principals from that case are out of the game (Barksdale in jail, Stringer Bell dead, betrayed by each other), but their assets reach into every corner of the city, including key political figures, and Lester can’t stomach letting the case die with Bell.
Off the grid sits Bell’s protégé, Bodie Broadus (JD Williams), virtually the only street-level soldier left from the Barksdale enterprise. He oversees a dead corner and a ragtag team of castoffs and nepotism hires, who execute what business they see with an imprecision that drives Bodie nuts. He learned the game in West Baltimore’s low-rise housing projects and jumped through the ranks to run the tower projects by showing tight managerial skills and savvy even his police adversaries grew to respect. Now, driven from his previous real estate by Marlo, Bodie is grinding to reenter the action at the echelon he’s earned.
Though Bodie may be relegated to the bush leagues for the moment, the game swirls on, sucking in passerby whatever the innocence of their intentions. Randy sells candy bought at a discount from a Korean grocer, working a cart near drug corners or dice games. One of Lex’s crew buys some Skittles and bribes him with the change to go tell Lex that his ex-girlfriend (the one he shot Fruit over) wants to meet him at the playground. Later that evening, Randy learns that Snoop and Chris killed Lex on that trip to the playground. That night, as Randy sits on his front stoop on an otherwise empty block, a slow zoom captures his look of cold resignation at where this summer, and life in this neighborhood, is heading. One day he’s throwing urine-filled balloons with his pals--the “Boy of Summer”--and the next he’s setting someone up for murder.
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Barry Maupin is a contributor to The House Next Door. For an organizational chart of recurring characters, click here. For more writing about the series, see "On The Wire" in the sidebar at right.
Sunday, September 10, 2006
The Wire Mondays: Season 4, Ep. 1, "Boys of Summer"
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In terms of getting the big picture right, few shows can touch The Wire. For Simon, Burn et. al., the problems are systemic, whether it be politics, education, law enforcement or the courts, all appear to be based upon faulty premises and run at the highest levels by people far more interested in consolidating their careers than solving social ills. The fourth season opener drives those themes home quite explicitly, with the focus apparently falling upon those who have the very least recourse within this system: inner city children. No voice, no visibility, almost no advocacy ("kids don't vote" says one character later in the season) and pretty much no hope. It's a dire situation, and kudos to the makers of The Wire for refusing to sugar coat it.
Dan: Also, as Barry points out, The Wire is filled with juxtaposed scenes that show how different social institutions are afflicted by similarly dire problems and bogus solutions--as evidenced by that crosscut sequence in the Season Four premiere where cops endure bullshit terrorism seminars while the teachers endure bullshit teaching tips. Both institutions are undermanned, underfunded, misdirected in certain ways, and eaten away from within by nepotism, turf wars and cover-your-ass compromises. The obsessive attention to acronyms, mantras, charts and graphs is the bureaucracy's attempt to impose order and meaning on institutions that increasingly seem to possess little of either.
The juxtaposed scenes are also delivered with a delicious punchline. McNulty takes several of the binders full of anti-terrorist material off his fellow officers' hands. For a moment, they (and we) wonder if McNulty is buying into the b.s., until he dumps all the material in the garbage. Later, we see that he has given the binders to Beattie's kids for school. At least they served some small purpose.
Of course, that should read "Beadie" not "Beattie" ([played by Amy Ryan).
Alan Sepinwall's recap is a must-read, citing lines, images and situations from the Season 4 premiere to break down major themes that will be revisited throughout the season. A sample:
"Worlds passing in the night: There are two Baltimores (two Americas, if you want to get really poetic): the one the Hardware Barn salesman lives in, and the one Snoop lives in. Snoop may have been briefly raised in the salesman's world and the salesman may have heard of Snoop's on the news, but they have no common frame of reference beyond that. The salesman looks at the nail gun as a tool for building something; Snoop looks at it as a tool for destroying something (or, at least, covering up evidence of that destruction). A lot of this season's political storylines will deal with Carcetti and Royce and Tony Gray trying to raise up Snoop's Baltimore without ruining the salesman's in the process.
Teaching one thing, learning another: Education is the dominant theme this year. Whether it's Prez at the middle school, Cutty at his gym or Marlo on the street, you're going to see a lot of attempts at educating kids, but what they take out of those lessons isn't always what's intended. Again, the salesman is trying to teach Snoop how to use the nail gun for one thing, and she's going to use it for something else entirely. And when she comes out to show her new prize to Chris, she tells him, "I'm in school, dawg" (or, possibly, "I been schooled, dawg" -- like I said, with Felicia Pearson, it's hard to say).
The right tool for the job: We all know David Simon's theories about flawed institutions, and how The System is now too large, old and unswerving to fix all the problems it's supposed to. Time after time, we've seen and will continue to see cops and politicans and other well-meaning types try to do good and fail because of a bureaucratic snafu or some other chink in The System. But with our expanded look at Marlo's operation, we're seeing a perfect opposite to The System. Marlo is focused on one thing and one thing only: staying the strongest, baddest slinger on the West side. And he will do whatever it takes to hold onto that, in the most cold-hearted, efficient way possible. In that way, he's even better than Avon and Stringer, because Avon's pride and Stringer's desire for upward mobility created chinks in their armor. Marlo, with the help of Snoop and Chris and that nail gun, doesn't appear to have any weak spots. You're going to see a lot of people get boarded up into vacants for sins a lot smaller than Lex killing Fruit, but in Marlo's eyes, those people are potential problems, and this is the simplest way to be rid of them. No fuss, no agonizing, nothing: just kill 'em and nail 'em up in a place nobody's ever likely to look."
To read the whole column, click here.
Alan rightfully highlights the performances of these young kids who are gonna be one of the show's most important plotlines this season. There is a lack of self-consciousness and naturalism to their work that is (a) crucial to making this storyline work (b) generally found wanting in most kids' work in movies and tv. This is particularly important and impressive when considering how large this cast of teenagers is on the show. What are the odds that all of these kids would be so damned good?
There was so much to love about that episode. The familiar characters were spot-on, and the new characters were introduced with real wit and vision. Funny as hell, too.
I especially loved Carcetti going bugfuck crazy in a hell of his own devising. Definitely too bad they couldn't spin his story off.
I also liked how when Prez walked into his classroom, they played it just like when he first walked into the Major Case Unit building, with him looking at the disarray and seeing nothing but possibility, while someone watched him being moved by his surroundings. Yeah, pitch-perfect.
Bet that salesman had no idea he was talking to a woman.
I gotta give it up to Felicia Pearson's Snoop. Chilling stuff, this androgynous sociopath, and Pearson plays it perfectly. I'm struck by Simon giving the character the actor's real name; I don't know what to make of that, but it's interesting.
Like Sepinwall, I struggled to understand Pearson's line readings, but it was evident that Simon had found something remarkable in Pearson, and that in going with her his gamble payed off big time. As I replayed it, after having seen the entire episode, I thought of Omar, equally deadly, who happens to be gay, and Pearson's, the character, that is, though I should just say Snoop's, own equally troubling persona. Troubling because Simon has created a female character, then erased her femininity, then inserted her right in the middle of a deeply violent world as a straight-up killer, no less. And there is no winking here, no quotes surround her. She is no joke. She is very definitely for real.
As Snoop said to Chris in the parking lot, "You're laughing, but I'm in school, trying to teach you, dog." No joke.
kj: Good catch on Snoop's character's real name being the actor's real name. I had to do a double-take when I saw that on her index card on Lester's big board, listed with her BPI #. Simon/Burns started out using character names as shout-outs to esteemed colleagues and Baltimore icons of their past (culminating in Ed Burns getting one himself when McNulty goes off on his self-serving screed about how few "swinging dicks" the department can muster out of a staff of thousands). The realness ratchets up as those icons get walk-ons as actual characters (the real Jay Landsman as Lt. Mello, Melvin Williams--the Avon Barksdale of the eighties--as Deacon, Robert F. Colesberry as Ray Cole, Dennis Lehane as the disinterested supply officer). After that, I guess the next level is to just start using actors' real names, though I hope in this case that Felicia Pearson is playing "Felicia Pearson" and not Felicia Pearson.
KJ and everyone else: I'm defintitely on board the Felicia Pearson bandwagon. She reminds me of a Pauline Kael observation about Tim Robbins' direct-from-Pluto performance in Miss Firecracker: that his character seemed to be having thoughts that no character had ever had before. I don't think she's just riffing on some aspect of herself, either; this is a meticulous physical characterization (check out her stare, at once vacant and alive). Like Omar and Brother Mouzone, Snoop is as stylized as can be without seeming cartoonish. This is one of my favorite performances of the TV year thus far, along with Gerald McRaney on Deadwood.
Barry writes, "After that, I guess the next level is to just start using actors' real names, though I hope in this case that Felicia Pearson is playing "Felicia Pearson" and not Felicia Pearson."
This has been common practice in NeoRealist filmmaking movements that have sprouted up all over the world at various times -- postwar Italy, the 1960s American underground, 1990s Iran, the Dogme gang. The Wire always did have a very strong NeoRealist vibe, from the natural locations to the easy mix of professionals and newcomers who pop onscreen because they have a performer's instinct.
With the talk of Felicia Pearson's performance as Snoop, I also would want to point out Gbenga Akinnagbe's Chris Partlow. He stood out to me in my rewatching of Season 3; though the stoic enforcer isn't exactly something new in crime fiction, Akinnagbe's performance reminds me more of Delon's Jef Costello than the other post-Tarantino equivalents. A good thing in my book. He often became a calm center of the scenes he was in, especially those revolving around Marlo's ultimately fatal interactions with Barksdale's trap (I forget the characters name). I'm not seeing any other credits for Akinnagbe, so is he another of the newcomers who pop onscreen because they have a performer's instinct? Cheers!
I hate to sound self-promoting, but I posted a recap as well. It's not as good as Barry or Alan's, but it's my first try at doing this so I should improve as the season goes on.
Edward: Sorry about that. I always try to link to any relevant articles on other sites, particular ones written by contributors.
No problem -- yesterday was a day I think everyone had a lot of things on their mind besides The Wire.
Love the blog and "The Wire". Good thing that they have decided to give us another, final season.
Link: http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117949949?categoryid=1417&cs=1&s=h&p=0
Was wandering if any of you chaps caught who was doing 'Way Down in the Hole,' this season? on the HBO site they have it listed as Tom Waits on the episode music guide for 'Boys of Summer.' I tried to catch it in the credits but they rolled by too fast or I blinked at the wrong time. Of all the great things about the show, the scope of the show, the usually spot on acting, the great writing, it is kind of comical that it is not the Wire to me with out that song about keeping the devil way down in the hole. After the first season, when they moved from the Tom Waits version, I did not care for it, then slowly realized over the course of these seasons that the way the song is performed sets the tone.
I believe that it is a Baltimore choir of teenagers singing this season's theme, which, given the show's focus in s4, is appropriate.
Thanks Dan Jardine,
I thought they did a pretty good job on the song. I wonder if the chiors' version will make it to the iTunes music store?
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