More on The Wire

I saw a leak of the last episode of The Wire last night and then just sat around devastated for a while. I’m not going to spoil it for anyone, but one thing I’ve thought about is how expertly the realism draws you in so that you kind of overlook the literary quality of the show, which is immense. Not only the fact that the fifth season played as a farce, but just in the way characters echoed other characters lines, how themes repeated themselves - leitmotifs that worked their way in and out of the story, how the end draws everything together in a way I’ve seen almost no TV shows do and very few movies. After The Wire, I don’t think there’s anyone who can denigrate the medium of television again (Jupiter’s Thunder!).

Anyway, I just wanted to post
Is ‘The Wire’ Our Best Ethnographic Text on the U.S. Today?

My friend Brian sent me this link, and it relates to something I wrote two posts ago, where I said The Wire is more affecting as a piece of philosophy than all Anglo/American philosophy and certainly a lot of whatever else is around. The person in the post above asks what might a class on the show look like, what texts might one read? If I was going to do one that dealt with the philosophical angle, there’d be Bourdieu, Wallerstein, Marx maybe, Chuck Dyke - especially the essay he wrote on identity with his son and his Foucault piece “Extralogical Excavations”, Alan Garfinkel’s Forms of Explanation, Foucault, Nietzsche perhaps…I kind of wish I was still at Temple and could apply for this one fellowship where you get to design your own interdisciplinary class…

Also, just to pass this idea along, David Simon and the other writers penned this short piece about civil disobedience and the drug war and what realistically we as citizens can begin to do:

Click here

It’s pretty smart and maybe The Wire will be instrumental in opening up a dialogue about this. Or, well, maybe I can hope it will, against all empirical evidence that most people don’t give a shit about anything but their own narrow interests. J/k, maybe.

Filed by andyb at March 7th, 2008 under Uncategorized