television authorship

The most interesting thing I took from class discussion today was the distinction that the article was making an argument for homo-erotic undertones in male relationships on the show, not necessarily implied homosexual relationships between male characters. I initially had trouble separating the two, figuring that if there was some homo-erotic tension between male characters there was some implied relationship there, but thanks to class discussion I can see you can have one without the other bubbling under the surface of the show.

Still, I think this article is from the perspective of an author who is seeing what he wants to see. That’s fine, but I just don’t know that I see it to quite the extent he does. Actually, I’m pretty confident I don’t see The Wire quite to the extent he does but at least now I’m more open to noticing if there are homo-erotic undertones between characters. More importantly, understanding that because they might exist they by no means signify either character is gay or desires a relationship. Instead, maybe the show as a whole is just commenting on why the same characters feel the need to use homophobic slurs and jokes to reject the potential of even acknowledging that these confusing relationships exist.

After leaving today’s class discussion, there was one question that continued to linger in my mind throughout the day. It was the question of what is the purpose of homosexual ambiguity on a television series. The example that comes to my mind immediately is the characters Lenny and Carl from the hit series The Simpsons.

Lenny and Carl are almost seen together when either of them appear on screen. Residents of Springfield acknowledge that there is homosexual tension between the characters but rarely do they directly say that the two men are homosexual. I remember an episode where Marge told Homer not to push Lenny and Carl into anything because they have to work it out themselves. In an episode that parodies VHI’s Behind the Music the actor Bart Simpsons said that he had paid people to kiss for entertainment. Immediately the character zooms in on Carl and Lenny sitting down outside Moe’s Tavern. Carl tells the camera that Bart was going around the city asking people to kiss. Then Lenny turns to Carl to say, “Hey, did we ever get that money.” The camera moves on to a different subject matter.

I think that sexual preference status of Lenny and Carl is left ambiguous for comedic purposes. Viewers get hints that can help them indicate an answer to what Lenny and Carl are to each other. The series has produced shows where Lenny and Carl live in separate apartments with their “girlfriends”. What I agree with most of what was said in class is that if a viewer is looking for homosexual hints in any series they can probably find it. That’s true for the Simpsons because Lenny and Carl don’t always perform feministic actions that might portray them as homosexual. Their actions almost mimic those of Homer Simpsons who might be considered the most stereotypical “man” on the series. (Although there is an episode where Homer thinks he might be gay and moves into an apartment with two other homosexual men.)

Even one of the most anticipated episode where the a character was going to come out of the closet as same-sex marriages became legal in Springfield did not comment on Lenny and Carl. The bets were high on Lenny and Carl being the couple that would come out about their sexuality. Instead it was Patti, Marge’s sister, who proclaimed her love for another woman. (But if you have seen this episode you will remember that the woman turns out to be a man.)

Do Matt Groening and the other creators of the series use Lenny and Carl to make a statement of men being forced to keep their sexual preference a secret if they are homosexual? Are they really gay?

Comparing The Wire to the works of play write August Wilson was an interesting thought for me. I am a huge fan of August Wilson, his ten plays are perhaps my favorite, and until Nelson Gorge mentioned him in comparison to The Wire I hadn’t thought about it. For those of you who don’t know, Wilson is a playwright who wrote ten plays about the African American population of Pittsburgh, called the Pittsburg Cycle. Each play in the cycle represents one decade between years 1900 and 1990. These are his most prominent works. I’ve had the pleasure of watching two of his plays at the Seattle Reparatory Theater, which is the only theater to produce all plays because of the relationship it built with Wilson after the playwright moved to Seattle. These plays are great, and if you haven’t seen any you should. They all discuss different issues that affect the African American community.

            Like I said comparing it The Wire did not occur to me. The discussion of the African American community is so different between the two. There is no corner in the Wilson plays; there aren’t any white cast members either. Wilson also spends more time discussing female characters and their position in the class structure of the African American community. Further more there is emphasis on a community outside of crime, which is all that I am aware of in the wire having only seen seasons one and two. I think it would be interesting to line up a more detailed comparison between the two works and find anything that is similar. In fact, the only comparison besides the African American community that I can think of off the top of my head is that both worlds are in large eastern cities that aren’t New York and deal with Metropolitan issues.

I loved reading this article. I had been wondering throughout the duration of watching the show how much the fact that two white men who had many experiences with black people were capable of writing a show that was dominated by black characters, let alone thugs. It didn’t really bother me to have that knowledge but I definitely questioned the authority with which they wrote about and for drug dealing in West Baltimore.

My favorite points George mentioned was Chris Rock’s “nigga vs. black people” categories. There is certainly a stigma about discussing these “subcultures” within race, and it’s an issue that is part of every racial category. What I find even more interesting is how “thug” subculture appears to be disparaged upon within other racial groups, while the focus on glorification of that lifestyle occurs primarily within Hispanic and Black racial groups. Is this an unfair claim about what gang members (and their portrayals) are like? Considering characters like Stringer Bell and D’Angelo Barksdale, what is The Wire trying to say about what the definition of a thug is?

I’m glad to know that Stringer Bell’s wife-beater t-shirt, among other things, elicited critical analysis that focused on the spectacle of the black male body as well as the homoerotic aspects of that spectacle as portrayed in The Wire. The boys locker room is a story older than the Greek lyceum and much more titillating when color is added (ala Caliban, Othello, and Crusoe’s Friday to name a few). Simon’s focus since Homicide has been on more than drugs, the ravaged inner-city and its prey and predators. The all too obvious side show is one of white patriarchal spectacle that culminates in the critically acclaimed conflation of The Wire as ground-breaking television and searing comment on urban communities. James S. Williams’ detailed article delineates and reduces The Wire to an ethnographic and anthropological “visual novel” with “elegantly choreographed and discrete scenes [that] stand out dramatically from the rest of the action” (59). Williams confirms that “Only young black male characters receive this degree of visual investment [in The Wire] which at times achieves a Cocteau-like intensity [perhaps a reference to Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast] and sensory rhythm” (59). Williams casts the obvious gay blade thug in the persona of Omar, murderous thief that he may be, as such a “half-mythical figure living in the shadows that he attracts a cinematic glow whenever he appears” (61). Maybe Omar does exude an aura that I can’t see, but he appears more on the screen, especially at night, as a Batman like figure. In the daylight, he looks like a broken down thug. I do, however, agree with Williams’ conclusion that The Wire provides “one of the most far-reaching formal explorations yet of the relations between race and spectatorial desire and opens up the possibility for new forms of gay realism in both television and film” (63). The question remains as to Simon’s intent, or was this homoerotic portrayal a side effect of aiming the camera on this slice of life? Do we have Simon to thank for gay organized crime members like Vito in The Sopranos and the cowboy lovers in Brokeback Mountain? Is this how the literary and filmic patriarchal pyramid will collapse in on itself?

While I cannot say that I am in totally agreeance with William’s notion that The Wire features gay undertones, the presentation of sexuality in general is interesting. When one turns on a television program today they are generally immediately blasted with elements of sexuality of some sort or another. Even in cop dramas today such as CSI there is a plethora of sexual content present, though it is not always just heterosexual. However, in The Wire there is little sexuality present, aside from the homosexual. It is rare that we see a man and a woman together in a sexual way, but we are allowed to see both a lesbian and a gay relationship. While this does not mean every character in The Wire is secretly gay, it is interesting to note the lack of heterosexual sexuality within the representation of coupledom. I would argue, however, that the point of this was to forward Simon’s ideas of a ‘new sort’ of program that would push boundaries. Perhaps heterosexuality was just another controversial element he chose to include to ensure this program was distinct from classic cop dramas. Regardless, I think these intentions were somewhat lost on us as viewers of the program today as we are so used to seeing these subjects come up in our television shows that the majority of us might not have even noticed these undertones, were it not for Williams’ article.

I get a new and deeper sense of The Wire every time I watch an episode or read a related assay. James Williams, in his essay “The Lost Boys of Baltimore”, picks up the homoerotic nature that the men in The Wire are depicted in. He looks at the male body, and how it interacts with other male bodies in the series, as well as with the series within itself. Williams uses a whole lot of formal elements such as camera angles and editing technique to back up and validate his claim.

The main gist of his argument that I picked up was that he said “What I will attempt to do, therefore, is focus on the specifically visual and stylistic features that recur in the show, no matter the different directors, directors of photography, and editors involved” (58; 2008-9). And those stylistic features were the vocabulary that was ‘crude and often sordid’, and of ‘homoerotic innuendo and homophobic machismo’. Visual language ‘The Wire evokes at times the imagery of black homo-thug gay porn websites which revolve on the daily turnover of virtually indistinguishable fresh hot dudes’ (59; 2008-9).

It is interesting how Williams says that what he will attempt to do is to ‘…focus on the specifically visual and stylistic features that recur in the show, no matter the different directors, directors of photography, and editors involved’, because Nelson George in the second article says something similar. He said that ‘The Wire achieved this’ [poignant critique of black life in Baltimore] ‘with a writing staff dominated by white males is a miracle only if you believe, as many blacks and whites do, that it’s impossible for non-blacks to truly understand our experience here in America’, I think that ties in with William’s statement above, that The Wire achieved something great in strange odds.

“Homosexuality can never be simply a laughing matter in the ghetto, and the corner boys frighteningly in advance of their years are always watching their backs, literally.”

And with that quotation, my already wavering ability to take Williams’ article seriously was shattered. If I am reading the above statement correctly, James Williams is actually suggesting that the homoerotic narrative undertones of The Wire can actually lead one to believe that the slew of drug dealers on the show are in constant fear of sodomy as a result of their inherent homophobia.

“Homo-thug gay porn”? “What is one person’s urban nightmare is another man’s fantasy”? How can such assertions be taken seriously in the context of such a profound and captivating show? Does Williams actually believe that in the scope of the horrors and hardships of living in complete poverty, there is sexual pleasure to be found?

Williams’ description of the season 3 episode in which Stringer “moves and ‘flows’” breaches on implied racism and represents a flagrant and pointless reading of the text. I re-watched the scene in order to try and grasp Williams’ point but I could not discern any of his argument from the simple scene on screen. As much as I am sure Williams would like to believe David Simon instructed actor Idris Elba to homoeroticize his body through exaggerated “flow,” it is simply a preposterous argument.

My diatribe doesn’t end there however, as Williams doesn’t hesitate to read into Marlo’s fascination with birds as a signifier for “the phallic birds of Ancient Greece” or Mike Nichols’ The Birdcage! Part of what defeats Williams’ argument is his juxtaposition of actual homoerotic imagery contained in the show with other images marginally related to homoeroticism at best: Of course Omar’s relationship with Renaldo is homoerotic…IT’S BECAUSE THEY ARE ACTUAL HOMOSEXUALS IN LOVE WITH EACH OTHER. That fact does not stop Williams from comparing Omar and Renaldo’s relationship to that of Avon and Stringer’s.

Williams exemplifies arguably the worst elements of media theory–overanalyzing to an offensive degree, and I would not be surprised if there were those who actually could take legitimate offense to his argument in this well-written, but poorly conceived article.

And I’m spent.

While I admit that in all five seasons of The Wire, there are some homoerotic oddities, I am not quite sure what Williams is responding to in his essay.  I drew a sense that he saw the show to be a spectacle for viewers already because it deals with inaccessible characters engaging in activities that are sensationalized by the media (local news, gangsta rap, etc.) yet ignored as a social reality on the whole.  So I interpreted his addition of homosexuality to the list of privileges that The Wire grants to be based upon this idea.

Sure, it is a show that deals with mostly male characters, so we are bound to see all sorts of relationships between men.  I found his argument that the “homosocial spaces” of the show produce homoerotic “buddy” relationships and father figure competition to be too much of a stretch.  He is overemphasizing locker room, armed services, and prison cell fantasy tropes.  The Wire is certainly not Oz: the guys in The Wire are only really separated from females while in their working environments.

The “buddy relationships” provide some of the best moments in the show.  All of Bunk and McNulty’s drunk nights at the train tracks, their hangovers (Bunk is the best), and taking turns bailing each other out: their antics lighten the mood of the show that could so easily be too depressing to watch.  In seasons three-five, the relationship between Carcetti and Norman eases the tension between white and black: Carcetti’s whiteness does not make him a hero or an outcast.  The relationships between Michael and Dukie, Nick and Ziggy, Bubs and Sherrod, and others, draw upon parental instincts.  Michael protects Dukie not much differently from his little brother Bug, Nick tries to help Ziggy “grow up” though he only makes his problems worse, and Bubs channels his own disappointment in himself into motivation to help Sherrod stay in school.  When all three of the “child” figures in these relationships fall (Dukie w/ drugs, Ziggy w/ jail, Sherrod with overdose), this failure takes on a stronger meaning in the overall context of the show: the authorities fail those they are supposed to be leading.  Suppose this could be because their “father figures” failed them, as well.

This article has caused just about as much controversy on this blog as I had anticipated (by which I mean a decent amount). Williams article, for me at least, was…interesting. The article starts out promising, as williams accurately claims that “The Wire…[has] success in not only exposing the fatal ideology of racist thinking and profiling but also critiquing and transcending it” (Williams 58). The Wire does a great job of representing innercity life (at least from what I’ve been told in newspaper articles, books, etc.–I’ve never actually lived in the innercity so all assumptions I make about The Wire come from readings rather than personal experience). After this, Williams asserts his desire to explore “the representation of black masculinity and sexuality in the Wire” (Williams 58). This is where the article gets a bit bizarre for me.

Don’t get me wrong, I agree with some of the points Williams makes, such as his claim that “The Wire is propelled by the crude and often sordid vocabularly of homoerotic innuendo and homophobic machismo” (Williams 58). Indeed, the wire has a few homosexual characters and many of the hood characters do have a “destructive, almost primitive fear and paranoia” of homosexuality. However, I have to disagree that the show’s film style sexualizes black characters. The few examples Williams gave (including screenshots) seem to me like normal television camera work from a Simon show. Sure, the jump cuts from Homicide are absent, but when the visual style is very similar between the Corner, Homicide, and The Wire (handheld camera, documentary feel). I did not notice any hypersexualization of black characters like Williams says, but maybe I just was not looking for it.

I also, like eerie, have a problem with turning close male relationships on television shows and movies into pseudo gay relationships. Ever since Tarantino made his famous point about the homoerotic tension in Top Gun, it seems all critics have to bring this up in any text with a close male relationship (Sam and Frodo, etc.). When two women have a close friendship this point is never brought up, I simply don’t understand why it’s different for men. So in that sense, I disagree with Williams entirely.

However, I do agree with catbread that the Wire gives the audiences a broad array of black-male experiences, but like the article says, it may represent all types of black male experiences, but not necessarily with a lot of depth. “We never enter ‘naturally’ into all-black private spaces outside gangsta hours, as we do, for instance, in the case of the white dockers where we are invited almost too easily into the extended family home of the Sobotkas” (Williams 63). Ultimately, the white writing team for the Wire wants to represent all forms of black life (which Williams has interpreted in strange ways); however, they cannot fully pull it off Simon and Burns could not know the full experience, they can only observe it at certain times. As interesting and probably accurate as the Wire is, I still have trouble fully immersing myself in a world that is supposed to be entirely accurate when it was written by people who didn’t live the life. I guess I’m of the belief that you can’t really know how things are unless you live it, which although Simon tried to do, he could not have possibly known entirely what it was like.