The Wire
David Simon
Ultimately, I found I didn’t believe it
Yesterday I watched the last episode of Season 5 of The Wire. Well, it was good. Obviously, it was good. It has won all kinds of awards, and everyone on Earth will tell you how great it is.
What I mean specifically is that it's good entertainment. The plots are intricate and engaging, and the characters are charismatic and well drawn. But I find myself reluctant to confer on it the mantle of greatness that almost everyone else does.
Here's how I felt after watching the last episode. Many threads were brought to satisfying ends. We end up with a lot of vivid characters: the corrupt politician, the pushers, the international drug traffickers, the dope fiend, and murder police, murder police, murder police. And you know what? I didn't believe in any of them. They were all obviously fictional constructs.
Well, I hear you saying, what did you expect? They are fiction. You knew that going in. But the best fiction transcends itself. You don't strain to believe -- you have to fight not to. Maybe my problem is that I'm old and I've read a lot of books. The Wire just feels familiar to me. Fictional Realism is as much a literary genre as, say, Urban Fantasy. It has its own conventions and clichés. The most prominent of these is that it eschews beauty. The word "realism" has a technical meaning in the arts, and also a meaning in ordinary English, and those meanings are different. In the ordinary English meaning, beauty is just as realistic as ugliness. Yes, there is dirt and corruption in the world, but there are also snow-capped mountains, Yeats poems, and bright-eyed children -- those things are real -- I have seen them with my own eyes.
Ultimately I didn't feel that The Wire presented a truer picture of America than, for instance, Neil Gaiman's fantasy series American Gods. W Somerset Maugham wrote, “A true story is never quite so true as an invented one.” Now, let's be clear: both The Wire and American Gods are invented stories. But I certainly get the feeling that The Wire is posing as less invented and more true than American Gods. I don't think it is that. The truth of American Gods is more metaphorical and less literal than The Wire, of course. But it is not the les true for that.