By Zachary Wigon
[An audio version of the "Making The Wire" panel is now online at the Moving Image website. Click here to access.]
“When I was at The Baltimore Sun, there were 500 staff members there,” David Simon remarked. “Now, there’s 220. I took the third round of buyouts; they’re on round eight. The paper’s gotten smaller, but the city of Baltimore hasn’t. The Internet’s a great source of opinions, but it’s not producing journalism.”
It was an important observation on a topic familiar to many, and especially relevant to those who read websites like this one. The House Next Door saturates a film-nerd niche in a way that print publications have never before been able to do. For an entity with a low profile in relation to, say, Film Quarterly or Film Comment, THND enjoys a surprisingly large readership. Meanwhile, Premiere magazine no longer exists in print. The little guys are putting the big guys out of business.
On July 30th, Simon, along with other members of The Wire’s creative team (actors Seth Gilliam, Clark Johnson, Clarke Peters, and Wendell Pierce, and writer Richard Price) participated in a panel discussion at (ironically) The New York Times’ new building on West 41st street. The official focus of the discussion, presented by the Museum of the Moving Image, was not the death of print media, but it might as well have been. Throughout the evening’s proceedings, it haunted the event like a specter.
The discussion was entitled “The Making of The Wire,” and much of the evening was spent relaying behind-the-scenes trivia. We heard about how ex-cop Ed Burns tirelessly obsessed over the scripts, how the actors knew nothing of their characters’ futures, how David Simon and Richard Price met the night of the Rodney King riots, etc. It was the sort of conversation that makes for amusing anecdotes and juicy entertainment for the fanboys, but it was hardly the stuff of earth-shattering insight. What was enjoyable, however, was the tone of the evening. The atmosphere of the discussion was unmistakably that of a late-night, darkly-lit newsroom bullpen reeking of smoke and booze. There were seven men onstage and zero women; one could have mistaken the evening’s proceedings for an (only slightly) updated version of The Front Page.
Things became a bit more interesting when David Simon brought the audience through the seasons of The Wire, explaining how he chose the changing areas of Baltimore city life to focus on. Simon was frustrated that, after four seasons of The Wire, none of the problems the show explored were receiving enough attention in Baltimore. He asked himself, “what are we paying attention to?” The answer, of course, is the media, which became the subject of the fifth season’s inquiry.
“All of the things that happened in the first four seasons of The Wire, those things happened in real life,” Simon said. “I mean, maybe not the dramatics, but a mayor cooking the books to become governor, schools lying about test scores in order to pass no child left behind, police captains lying about the crime statistics—these things all happened—but you wouldn’t read about them in The Baltimore Sun.” The Wire’s skill for municipal observation was, by contrast, quite skilled. Simon pointed out that, six months after Season Two aired, the very docks The Wire shot at were demolished and turned into condominiums; this is exactly what was prophesied on the show, which had been scripted before the actual plans were ever set in motion.
After (presumably) becoming frustrated with The Baltimore Sun, Simon moved into the world of television, utilizing it as a means for both social critique and artistic creation. The Wire has gotten an enormous amount of attention, but as Simon mentioned, it has mainly remained in the pages of the “entertainment” sections of newspapers. But not entirely. The Atlantic Monthly did an enormous story on the series a few months ago. Every major media outlet or publication has published on it to one degree or another, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Has Simon gotten heaping critical praise in a vacuum, or has he been able to make the kind of pointed observation with The Wire that he felt unable to make in his years as a newspaperman? Is television or cinema a medium superior to journalism in terms of suitability for social critique?
It would be absurd to say that television or films are ontologically better suited to support social critique than journalism; journalism has played an integral role in the development of modern America. Simon reminisced about being young in the mid-70s, seeing what Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward had done, and realizing that the profession of newspaperman could be a truly significant one. If Simon’s story—of failing to find satisfaction in the newspaper industry, and finding it in film and television—is indicative of anything, it’s that journalism’s time as the cultural instrument of choice for social analysis is ending. When one looks at the current and future work Simon is producing—a miniseries about the Iraq war, another project on New Orleans post-Katrina—it becomes clear that he’s using film as a means for cultural journalism and observation in the way that great journalists, from Upton Sinclair to Nicholas Kristof, used newspapers.
Richard Price, the sometimes-Wire scripter and novelist (Lush Life, Clockers), touched upon an aspect of The Wire that makes it almost a meta-news article. “The wonder of The Wire,” he explained, “is going from a down on his luck crackhead to a State Senator in five minutes, without breaking the tone or world view at all.” The effect of that transition is not dissimilar from going from one front-page article to another right next to it, and sensing the common thread of journalistic inquiry in each piece.
However, there is a major difference between journalistic critique and what Simon has done with The Wire. Whereas journalism’s ethical code necessitates that it go no further than observe, The Wire, especially in its final season, took something of a political stance. Clarke Peters (Lester Freamon on the series) explained that he was excited by how McNulty’s manipulation of “the system” in the final season amounted to saying, “if the system doesn’t work, you must save the homeless by any means necessary.”
The political stance referred to here is not anything specific to the homeless, but a broader stance regarding “the system,” or “the game,” as it is so often referred to on The Wire. The role of journalism has always been to stand outside the game, to observe from an objective viewpoint and report “unbiased” news with the best possible ability. What this approach fails to take into account is that everything is always, already a part of the game—if it wasn’t, it couldn’t exist. Throughout the first four seasons of The Wire, Detective Jimmy McNulty fights and fights against the oppressive bureaucratic system that runs the Baltimore Police Department, trying to do the best job that he can, despite the fact that the game is rigged against good police work. In the final season of the show, McNulty wises up. When he becomes frustrated with the lack of funding for the homicide unit, he decides to create a fake serial killer, which will draw press attention, and therefore, funding from the government. Rather than fighting against the game, he’s playing it beautifully.
David Simon’s career trajectory illustrates a path similar to McNulty’s in terms of coming to an understanding of the game. He may not have been able to find a suitable home for his brand of social critique in the newspaper industry, for numerous reasons (if the newspaper subplot in Season Five is any indication, "fighting against the system" would certainly be one of them), but in the field of entertainment, Simon managed to play the game, fooling a bunch of HBO executives into thinking they’d be funding a cop show from the guy who wrote the book that inspired the NBC series Homicide: Life of the Street. In fact, they ended up funding a truly unique experiment in sociology.
David Simon’s works are the fake serial killer. What do we pay attention to, he asked. The answer was “newspapers” in Season Five, but television is a form of media with a far bigger audience than the dwindling print industry. As Simon continues to pick topics and genres that are bound to provoke interest—the war in Iraq, the rebuilding of New Orleans—he is forging an original career, feeding us our medicine in the form of entertainment like no other before him. Whereas some “Trojan horse entertainments,” as I like to call them, get the audience in the theater (or living room) with a premise that is basically a trap—political or social commentary disguised as something else (in the case of Michael Haneke's Caché, a thriller), with Simon’s work there is no trick—you get a miniseries on the war in Iraq, you get a TV show about drugs and politics in Baltimore. It’s simply seriously intellectual and seriously entertaining at the same time—like the greatest muckraking.
“The Internet is like a parasite, in a way,” Simon said, in the headquarters of the most important newspaper in the world. “It provides opinion on the news. But it’s a parasite that is killing its host.” He may be right about this, but what he may not have fully grasped is that the host is no longer the host.
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Zachary Wigon studies Film Production and Comparative Literature at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, where he is the editor of the film studies publication, the Tisch Film Review. In addition to writing and directing short films, he also writes film criticism for FilmCatcher and maintains a cultural theory blog, Between Fear & Commitment.
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
The Parasite Is Killing The Host: “The Making of The Wire”
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11 comments:
I love David Simon, but man he is starting to sound like Buzz Bissenger (he late of that great 'Costas on Sports' anti-blog tirade) when it comes comes to the internet. If anything blogging has allowed for deeper, more varied and wider appeal when it comes to news without physical page size and space limiting content. Eventually, the boys upstairs will figure out an economic scheme for it. Dave, get with the 21st Century.
I agree that at some point somebody will figure out a way to monetize shoe-leather journalism again, but with a generation conditioned to expect content for free, it's going to take some seriously original thinking.
Simon's newspaper background might be coloring his take on this situation with end-of-the-world hues, but I do think he has a point when he distinguishes between reporting and opinion. This very early phase of Internet journalism has produced some superb editorial and critical writing but very little breaking news that I can think of (outside of celebrity gossip and Matt Drudge reporting the content of newspaper stories in advance of their publication). Follow the "parasite is killing the host" formulation to its conclusion and you're looking at a future in which there is no more "mainstream media" to speak of, with the old-school exemplars having all died off or mutated into a new form that tries to co-opt new media techniques. Once that happens, bloggers will be deprived of the crutch of bitching about how poorly the dreaded MSM covered this or that story. At that point they'll either have to step up to the plate and become the new MSM, or find some new institution to serve as their go-to target. Maybe other bloggers?
Also, to be fair to Simon, I beleive H.G. Bissinger was complaining that the net was full of unqualified amateurs writing about sports, and that it was all about tawdry gossip, "cruelty" and "speed," whereas Simon finds much opinion/criticism on the Internet worth respecting. The former was dismissing an entire medium, the latter complaining about a specific deficiency -- apples and oranges.
I don't think Simon was saying that he is anti-blog. But he is saying that a blog can't replace a beat reporter. A blog, more often than not, is a voice for editorial or opinion pieces. To Simon, that is of less value than a reporter who is, as an example, looking into corruption in a city government. And if the internet takes over and completely puts the beat reporters out of commission, will anyone be left to watch out for corruption?
I see your point. As for original news content, the internet has been light, though I think internet-only sites like Salon.com and Slate.com (both I believe owned by major media companies? I know that the Washington Post has a line on Slate.com) among other lesser known sites have tried to work that angle to various degrees of success.
Established print news sources are still the primary producers of in depth news content, web or otherwise. One great benefit of the internet is that its allowed my to find and read better writers from other parts of the country, a feat that was hard to accomplish prior to the internet. Frankly, there are better writers for national, entertainment and case specific news elsewhere than the current Baltimore Sun (my "paper of record") frankly, and I've found I turn to those writers more and more via links or RSS feeds.
Blogs and the internet have also allowed a certain amount of print competition that had been previously killed off when the last round of newspapers closed up shop (in Baltimore, that would be the death of the News-American and later the Evening Sun). Smaller niche publications with specific focuses (business weeklies, law dailies, altnerative weeklies, focused political blogs) are stepping up their game via the internet while providing a different, unique perspective.
Ah, but to make people pay for it.That's the question, and the urgency to find an answer is immediate. A major fear now is that, across the board, it's relatively cheap for original source content to be produced, so why go to a middleman like a newspaper anymore. The NFL and MLB are arleady doing this, and other major Fortune 500 companies won't be far behind. Why produce a press release when you can hire someone to write a blog, produce a video, etc. that is psuedo journalism but still gets the point across.
Media is slowing returning to its early 20th century origins, when publishers started newspapers to push their business and political agenda, with a little news mixed in. I wonder sometimes if the area of the 60s-80s, when newspapers could pursue big time stories without issue because of the big time advertising bucks that were rolling in, was a the exception and not the rule.
"And if you don't think The Wire is the most brilliant, towering cultural artifact since Bach tickled the ivories at Easter, you're a racist."
Sorry. I stopped watching because Simon and Pelecanos got on my nerves like a couple of squawking hens reading Norman Mailer's The White Negro.
But, isn't Simon saying that no one -- internet or print -- is, or ever really has (save a few exceptions) covered the "real" news? Has he ever actually said that The Sun did more of it when they had a staff of 500?
Anonymous: As much as I've complained here about certain aspects of The Wire, "squawking hens reading The White Negro" is unfair. Notwithstanding even the cruder (in my opinion) 5th season, one of the incredible triumphs of the show was its ability to present a social/political critique with such nuance and beauty and respect for the audience's intelligence that even those (myself) who would normally run the other way could not.
I just find it a bit ironic how Simon's next TV project, the excellent Generation Kill, was initially a work of journalism published as a series of articles online.
Anon: "And if you don't think The Wire is the most brilliant, towering cultural artifact since Bach tickled the ivories at Easter, you're a racist."
What is this in reference to?
The Internet media is fantastic at some things in ways it doesn't even really understand yet. Harnessing a collective to go over one of those huge government document dumps thoroughly actually bests the ways newspapers and TV stations have done it in the past (since you have a large group of people searching for that needle in a haystack), but once you get past the research stage that can easily be done on Google or at the public library, the Internet media just doesn't have a motivation for going out to interview people or call government officials on what's been discovered. Someone will figure out a way to mold this so-called "citizen journalism" into something closer to thorough reportage, but it's going to take a while and there will be a lot of false starts.
I think the real future is in being a syndicator, especially as things like the Kindle become more ubiquitous and closer to actual paper. I keep meaning to write a blog post on this and keep not doing it.
Postscript: A recording of the event just went up at the Museum's web site. Link is here.
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