By Barry Maupin
Proposition Joe (Robert F. Chew) has been trying for the better part of two seasons of The Wire to get Marlo Stanfield (Jaime Hector) to join his New Day Co-Op, a coalition of Baltimore’s drug honchos, but his various approaches all fail until he demonstrates to Marlo what’s in it for him, the magic equation that runs through all the show’s ad hoc alliances.
The co-op was devised as a way for the city’s drug wholesalers to operate in a mutually beneficial environment, sharing intel, muscle, and supply connections on the understanding that they stay away from each others’ established markets and the spotlight of violence that always accompanies beefs over corners. The arrangement is undermined, though, when Marlo, the biggest player on the West side, opts out, stealing real estate with old-school strong-arm tactics. Prop Joe’s arsenal of carrots (his superior dope that comes straight off the boat uncut, and the umbrella protection of influential associates) holds no sway over Marlo, who doesn’t need the good stuff when he’s got all the best corners and the muscle to protect them himself.
Prop Joe, with his trademark brevity, patience, and savvy, turns to his remaining asset--human intelligence--in a complex scene where he gives Marlo a far richer understanding of what an alliance might yield. Prop Joe tells Marlo that he knew ahead of time that Marlo’s high-stakes poker game would be robbed, but withheld the information, coyly explaining, “A man learns best when he get burnt.” He then offers evidence more tangible than street-level hearsay of his intelligence network, showing Marlo a packet of confidential grand jury summons for the crew of an unaffiliated rival dealer to be executed in the coming days. Piqued by the high-grade goods, Marlo inquires whether Prop Joe has heard anything about the video camera an underling found trained on Marlo’s outdoor meeting space. Prop Joe seizes the upper hand: “Had no incentive to listen.” Marlo’s eyes flash with recognition of the moment’s arrival: “You do now.”
Allying with rivals to thwart a third party is the cold calculus of the city’s politicians as well. With the primary a week away, Councilman Tommy Carcetti (Aidan Gillen) is running second in a three-way race for mayor when he learns that the investigation into a murdered witness has been hindered by the replacement of a veteran detective with Shakima Greggs (Sonja Sohn), a rookie homicide detective only recently transferred in from the wiretap squad. Obviously, Carcetti wants to leverage the scandal against the incumbent, Mayor Royce (Glynn Turman), who is already vulnerable on the issue of witness protection; but the tricky mathematics of demographics lead him to feed the scoop to his third-place opponent, Councilman Tony Gray (Christopher Mann), who can take the bigger bite out of the mayor’s base as a fellow black candidate (addition by subtraction). Gray is suspicious of the gift, having been burned before when his former friend Carcetti jumped into the race, but Norman (Reg E. Cathey), Carcetti’s deputy campaign manager and the self-confessed “devious motherfucker” who hatched the scheme, sets Gray straight: “Look, Tony, you ain’t gonna win, so the only question is whether you want to lose with 24% of the vote or 28%. You bring the numbers up, you look good for the legislature, maybe a congressional run.”
The police department is itself rife with cynical political maneuvering, as anyone within sniffing range of a better job toadies up to city hall. The higher they rank, the more odious the affront to their better instincts. Commissioner Ervin Burrell (Frankie R. Faison), whose tenure depends on Royce's continued employment, is behind the attempt to sabotage the witness investigation as political cover for the incumbent. Deputy of Operations Rawls (John Doman), Burrell’s “loyal subordinate,” positions himself to succeed the commissioner whatever the outcome of the mayoral election, first by whitewashing the scuttlebutt over the detective switch with sure-handed damage control on behalf of Royce, then later by privately informing Carcetti that the mayor’s most influential grassroots organizer has broken with the campaign (the latter tidbit coming courtesy of Rawls’ spy within the mayor’s security detail). Maj. Stan Valchek (Al Brown) leaks company secrets to Carcetti since he has no truck with Royce, telling him with a wink after his latest revelation, “Remember, anything you need.” Sgt. Thomas “Herc” Hauk (Domenick Lombardozzi) abandons his post on a stakeout to make campaign calls for Royce, Herc’s meal ticket ever since he saw the mayor getting blown by his secretary. Herc brings enthusiasm, if none of his superiors' chops, to his pandering, asking a black likely voter over the phone, “When do you think the last time a white man voted for a black man when there was another white man in the race?” Sgt. Jay Landsman (Delaney Williams), ever amused by the gamesmanship, chomps on his fast food lunch as he explains bureaucratic reality to Kima, who feels humiliated by getting assigned to the murdered witness case, only to be replaced by the original veteran detective and told to lie about it as the scandal breaks. “Now, I didn’t like it when they came to me and told me to dump Norris,” Landsman admits with rare seriousness, “but dump him I did. And it’s not like I want to carry water for them now that they’re pretending they never told me to do any such thing, but carry the water I will. And in the end, when everyone else in this unit is buried and beshitted, this detective sergeant will still be standing.”
“Carry the water” is also how Rawls describes to Carcetti his role in the current administration, a term suggesting grunt work that’s beneath them but necessary. Landsman and Rawls, like most of the grownups on The Wire, understand what they want from the world around them and will bend over to get it. The kids, on the other hand, know neither, sucking them into the self-fulfilling dichotomy of “corner kids or stoop kids” proposed by Bunny Colvin (Robert Wisdom). Their options leave them in a sort of self-respect Bermuda Triangle, as when Zenobia (Taylor King) gets reprimanded in math class for not doing her work. “I want to,” she tells Prez, her teacher, “but I ain’t got no pencil.” Prez (Jim True-Frost) hands her his stubby pencil from behind his ear and turns back to the chalkboard with a satisfied grin. Zenobia briefly regards the pencil then shoves her desk clean in a spasm of disgust, declaring, “I don’t want no damn welfare pencil.”
The kids don’t understand what’s happening around them, so they fill in the blanks with their imagination. In the opening scene, several boys sit around at night in an urban version of the campfire story and theorize about what becomes of the people who get marched into vacant houses by Marlo’s enforcers but never come out, their notions ranging from zombies to spies to dead. “Nah,” Donut (Nathan Corbett) counters with equal assurance, “there’s dead and there’s special dead.” Nearby gunshots provide a respite from the mystery as they analyze by ear the weapon’s likely caliber, a subject about which they actually know something. Having worked each other’s fears to a hair-trigger, they bolt at the approach of a “zombie” lumbering down the alley, who turns out to be nothing more than a runny-nosed addict with a junkie shuffle.
So far in Season Four of The Wire, each episode has closed with a shot of one of the quartet of eighth-grade boys at the center of the show trying to wrap his mind around his reality. In the final scene of the season’s fifth episode, a trio of the boys investigates one of the vacant houses in question on a rainy night, led by Dukie (Jermaine Crawford), the one with both the worst life and the best grasp of his existence. He pulls off a piece of plywood marked with a reminder (“If animal trapped, call 410…”) that an animal, unlike the moldering bodies inside, has some recourse. Dukie illuminates a body by candlelight, which the others examine and acknowledge is dead. “He dead, they all is. Feel better?” Dukie asks sourly. “Donut wrong, yo. Ain’t no special dead. There’s just dead.”
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Barry Maupin is a contributor to The House Next Door. Wire recaps run after each episode's Sunday night cable premiere. For more writing about the series, see "On The Wire" in the sidebar at right.
Sunday, October 08, 2006
The Wire Mondays: Season 4, Ep. 5, “Alliances”
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14 comments:
Congrats to you guys for the mention in Newsweek. Check it:
http://heavenandhere.wordpress.com/2006/10/06/quarterly-report/#comments
Thanks, bcgirl247. It's always nice to be recognized. Unless, of course, you're on the lam or something.
From the What's Alan Watching? recap by my colleague Alan Sepinwall: "Someone's been wearing out the grooves in their "Stand By Me" DVD, no? From the ghost stories around the fire in the teaser to the field trip to see the body at the end, the boys' journey in this episode played out as a cracked mirror image of the journey traveled by Gordie Lachance and company. The difference is that, in "Stand by Me," the trip represents the beginning of the end of their innocence, where Namond, Randy, Michael and Dukie barely have any innocence left. "
From Heaven and Here:
"Watching The Wire, we sometimes get a little too comfortable with the milieu it depicts. We accept that black middle schoolers drop out and start on their way to full-time criminality. I love Bodie as much as the next man, but we’re so used to rooting for him that we forget the sad truth about his life. Randy is almost the inverse of Stringer, the mastermind of corruption who realized he could never go straight; in Randy’s case, we’re forced to see that shedding innocence is by no means a natural, or painless process. And that in some, especially sorrowful cases, there’s a chance they might even be felled by the transition itself. Wallace was older, more otherworldly, stunted and a little dismal. If he wasn’t a lost cause, he was at least someone already on the verge of collapse. Randy, by contrast, is a bright, energetic, likeable kid, a far cry from the inner wreckage of his friends. That he too is compelled to change, and that he simply can’t, might end up being this season’s decidedly unexotic emblem of tragedy."
From Edward Copeland on Film: "Before we dive into the alliances, it's worth noting that this week's episode begins like a ghost story told around a campfire as Namond, Randy, Michael and Dukie are gathered on the dark, depressing streets where Namond tries to convince his friends that Marlo's chief henchman Chris is a 'zombie master' who transforms the many missing Marlo victims into zombies to do his bidding, suggesting that the late Lex, who Randy unwittingly set up for his demise, could be the latest example of the living dead stalking around Baltimore -- a concept that frightens Randy who fears he's next on the list, especially when Chris and Snoop show up later in the show -- not to make zombies, but to try to recruit Michael as a soldier."
Further thoughts on the invocation of zombies at Heaven and Here: "Regarding #42, which was a little on the slow, set-up-before-the-storm side: I nearly jumped out of my couch last night when Chris started getting equated with some voodoo shit. Double that for Namond’s mention of C’s “country-ass clothes.” You see, since we first met the Dread Partlow in Season 3, I’ve been saying he looks like a Haitian militiaman. Maybe this marks me as intolerant, but the emergence of this trope in #42 allows me to feel like I always had my finger on the show’s pulse of evocation."
Well, Namond's ghost story turned out to be true, didn't it? The appearance of the junkie, which terrified the kids for all the wrong reasons, merely confirmed it. One way or another, whether as a buyer or a seller, this appears to be their collective futures. Too bad they can't simply run away from it.
"... who turns out to be nothing more than a runny-nosed addict with a junkie shuffle."
Bubbles, actually.
jon: Wow. I've seen that episode twice and I didn't catch that -- dunno if it was the duration of the shot or the generally dim lighting. But now that you mention it...
I remember reading an interview with Simon (I think on the hbo.com site) where he responded to a question about doing some sort of prequel of how Avon and Stringer got started. Simon said no, but that we should look at the rise of Marlo and Chris as perhaps similar to the earlier rise of Avon and Stringer. Obviously, this is not a one to one parallel (for one thing, Marlo and Chris are much more trigger-happy than Stringer ever was. In fact, based on Avon’s Season Three comment about taking a life, I wonder if Stringer ever actually killed anyone himself).
If the parallel of Marlo and Chris to Avon and Stringer holds true than at some point this season or next we should start to see their decline. In my opinion, this will set up the ultimate rise of Bodie, from a pawn in Season One to a King in Season Five. I think the writers have sketched this out all the way from Season One, with Bodie’s “smart-ass pawn” comment.
However, watching the storyline of the four boys this season I wonder if the writers have similar parallels in mind for the boys. Is Randy a future Bubbles? Is Michael a future Omar, or Wee-Bay, or even (years down the line) Cutty? Is Namond a future Poot or Wallace? Is Dukie a future Johnny? Again, not necessarily a one to one parallel, but clearly these boys are headed down similar roads that some of the adult characters have already traveled.
I thought the junkie might be Bubbles, but says it wasn't crystal clear, I didn't identify it as him. I'm only through episode 7, but I've had the nagging feeling that not all the kids are getting out of season 4 alive.
Re: Ed's comment above -- Watch out for spoilers. Some of our contributors have seen more episodes than the general viewing public has, but even though we try to exercise caution when alluding to future plot developments, sometimes stuff slips through anyway. In other words, read at your own risk.
Switching tracks, if I could make one general observation about Season Four as a story -- beyond noting the near perfect grasp of rhythm and proportion (i.e., showing us as little as they can of each character and subplot without being too confusing or rushed) -- it's that for the first time, in my opinion, the street crime and government storylines seem smoothly integrated, so that you rarely feel that anything's being shoehorned in. That was not always the case in Seasons Two and Three -- as terrific as they were. There were times in the middle two seasons where I felt that certain points were being a made a bit too strenously (the dockside white ethnic drama of Season Two, as Simon notes, was undertaken partly to illustrate that drug-related crime wasn't just a black thing) or that the sociology and cultural anthropology were calling too much attention to themselves (Season Three, with its Hamsterdam storyline, was bold but not always believable, and there were moments when I felt like I was watching a position paper in dramatic form). That's emphatically not the case this time. Now and then there's a moment where the writers hit the nail on the head a bit too hard -- Prez remarking that nobody wins, one side just loses more slowly, for instance, and some of the street characters' patter about their place within the global economy. But only now and then. And throughout, you really do feel as though all the storylines are equal; the mayor's race is as interesting as the Marlo vs. Omar by way of Prop Joe stuff, and the individual storylines of the kids, and Prez and Bunny's odyssey within the public school system; all the threads seem interwoven, and when pressure is brought to bear on one thread, another one unravels across town. It's really magnificent stuff -- certainly the best, most perfect and deepest Wire season yet.
In my heart, I'm still a Deadwood man -- probably because my tastes run more towards opera and allegory, toward big emotions and swing-for-the-fences improvisations rather than the Wire specialty, a kind of Hemingway-esque terseness and an accumulation of small moments. But if Deadwood still strikes me as the bolder and more innovative series -- albiet one with a permanent creative asterisk next to it, thanks to HBO's premature cancellation, which left a lot of threads dangling and a lot of character evolutions unfinished -- I can't deny that Season Four of The Wire is the most perfectly wrought drama on TV right now.
And the stuff with the kids by itself would make a great series. Certain situations and moments remind me of The 400 Blows; the combination of workaday realism and deep sadness is something to see.
When Dukie led the other kids into the condemned house to show them the dead body, I got the strong feeling that either Randy or Dukie had sealed his doom.
For me, The Wire and Deadwood are like apples and oranges. I love them both, but if you put a gun to my head, I might have to pick The Wire, just because it seems like the one that needs the most bucking up and that I warmed to it immediately whereas Deadwood took me a few episodes to get into the spirit. The most amazing thing to me is that as someone who worshiped The Sopranos, while it's still one of my favorites, its extended hiatuses and coasting at the same level for a few seasons has slipped it behind both series in my mind.
I've had the nagging feeling that not all the kids are getting out of season 4 alive.
I'm watching a season of The Wire for the first time in real time (having TiVo'd the third and caught the others on DVD). If I have one complaint about S4, it's the vaguely pornographic nature of the set up, which makes it seem like we're sitting around waiting for one (or more) of these kids to die or meet some other horrible fate.
Of course, this is probably a criticism that should be reserved until after more than just 5 episodes.
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