Realism and Utopia in <i>The Wire</i>

Abstract

Generic classifications are indispensable to mass or commercial culture at the same time that their practice in postmodernity grows more and more complex or hybrid. Is The Wire a police procedural, for example? No doubt, but it is also a version of the organized crime story. The majority of its actors and are black, which nonetheless does not exactly make it a black film (a film for black audiences). There is a political drama going on here, as well, but its nature as local politics reminds us that it is also very much a local series, one framed in Baltimore and very much about Baltimore (something not always to the liking of Baltimore's elites). It is, however, also the case that most detective or crime literature today (as well as its filmic offshoots or inspirations) is local and based on the con sumption of a specific landscape (whether a foreign country—Swedish detective stories, Italian ones, even Chinese detective stories—or re gional—Montana, Louisiana, Los Angeles, Toronto, etc.). The broadest categories would then be that of the thriller or that of the action film (al though there are few chase scenes, no cliff-hangers, few-enough mass ac tion or carnage scenes). Each of the five years of the TV series is a unit in terms of plot and theme; and there are at least a hundred deployed in each sea son, many of whom carry their own independent plotlines. It may be ar gued that there is a single major protagonist, the Irish American detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), even though his status fluctuates over the five years of the series and is often eclipsed by other characters. This is to say that a work of this kind challenges and problematizes the distinc tion between protagonists and characters (or stars and char acter actors), in ways most often described, I guess, as epic (War and Peace, Gone with the Wind)—a characterization that does not help to un derscore what may be a historical development in the evolution of this kind of plot (see Alexander Woloch on secondary characters). The episodes in each series are not separate and freestanding as they were in Homicide (screenwriter/producer David Simon's previous series,