The Wire And Disrupting the Othering Process

If you haven’t had the chance to watch HBO’s TV show The Wire I highly recommend you take the time and begin watching. It’s in its fifth and final season, so there’s plenty to keep your Netflix queue busy for quite awhile. While it may not a good show for the family or follow the sitcom-styled story line (where the narrative begins, climaxes and resolves in thirty minutes), it is the perfect show for those of you who like TV shows that feel like a good work of literature. It is a very elaborate story, with very intricate characters and development, but then again the show was written for five seasons from the start. This means the narrative in this show really takes its time to develop and you have a chance to watch the characters grow and change (or not change as the case may be).

One thing I really like about this show, and one main reason I recommend it to you, is that it is a great exercise in “disrupting the ‘Othering’ process” to use a fancy phrase from culture studies. ((Johnson, Practice of Cultural Studies, 2004)) The narrative that we as viewers follow in the

is not the simple black and white binaries of good and evil, bad guy versus good guy, racism versus humanist liberalism, etc. No

is much richer than that. In this story we hear (and see) the lives of policemen and women, lawyers, government officials, gang-bangers, urban youth, felons, murders, drug addicts and much more. But none of these characters neatly fit their archetypes. The cops are sometimes ‘good’ and sometimes ‘bad,’ the same is true for the drug dealers, the pushers and the users. Each character symbolizes a real person, one who has conflicting interests, needs and desires. There are ‘bad’ cops who, on occasion, do something good, and ‘good’ gangsters, who get caught up in their own personal affairs and forget ‘the game.’ There are gangsters and drug Lords who have unwritten codes they follow even sometimes to their own demise, while other groups have their own unwritten codes (that there are no codes), put these groups together and it makes for an interesting social commentary on integrity, greed and hedonism.

Understanding That Goes Beyond Romanticizing

“‘Understanding,’ by comparison, recognizes the

of knowing the other, but listens, taking on something of the reality of what is said. In this process, the ‘I’ is changed.” ((Johnson, 47))

We can miss this ‘understanding,’ when we go to the extremes on either side of the binaries, when we demonize or romanticize those different from us. The temptation in deconstructing binaries is to create such a pure form of the Other that they become so pure (so undeconstructable) that they are rendered detached and completely inaccessible to us. ((Zizek, The Puppet and The Dwarf, 2003: 139-141)) This can leave them unintelligible (at least in any helpful way). But here you have a TV show that helps us look into the lives of people on the streets as well as those spent in offices, and we can begin to see just how messy these situations really are.

I wouldn’t normally put so much stock in the accuracy of a TV show, but the

has not only been called one of the top 100 Television shows of all time, but it was created by former Baltimore detective Ed Burns. It has received “has received critical acclaim for its realistic portrayal of urban life and uncommonly deep exploration of sociological themes… [Wikipedia]” All of this said, we love the show, we find it entertaining and educational and feel like while we may not personally relate to the lives daily disturbed (and destroyed?) by such violence, hopelessness and corruption, we can seek to ‘understand’ and maybe through understanding something else will come.