Photo: A rare Bay Area thundercloud, sour orange tree in my backyard in the foreground.Sometimes, when I become engrossed in a particular work of fiction, I feel as though my reality is somehow merging with the fantasy world being presented on film, paper or television. This has become the case with the HBO television series, The Wire. Recommended to me by a friend and former co-worker, The Wire came highly regarded, a must-watch. And so it has become for me, as I near the end of Season 4. Recently, The Wire concluded its final episode of Season 5; since I don't have HBO, I wasn't able to watch Season 5 as it aired on television. This may have been for the best, since I haven't made it through Season 4, and The Wire is certainly not the show where you can skip seasons or even episodes. I've watched every episode, from Season 1, in order.
When I seek entertainment, like many other people, I am often looking for an escape, to leave my reality and enter into another. The Wire does indeed accomplish both. After almost four seasons, I feel like I really know many of the characters as people, that they are more than just actors from a TV show. I could imagine running into them at the corner store, the halls of a school, seeing them pass by in a patrol car, or an SUV with tinted windows. The Wire portrays a world that is both very similar and very different from my own. I have very little experience with police or the drug trade--the two main themes of the show--but the setting in the gritty streets of Baltimore bears some similarity with the sights and sounds of the neighborhoods in the East Bay where I live, work and pass through. The central dilemma that The Wire delves into--the role of individuals in institutions--is painfully real. As a teacher, this last season has come a little too close to many of the issues I am grappling with in my own work life. Though my students in Hayward don't experience nearly the same levels of violence and poverty as the students in West Baltimore, they still face many obstacles to their education. Although it is a bit exaggerated in its portrayal in The Wire, the standardized testing of the No Child Left Behind Act has been a real blow to providing a quality education to students. As Prezblutsky (sp?) negotiates the world of education, he finds that world doing the same kind of 'jukin' the stats' that bothered him when he was policing. As I consider my own potential departure from the world of education, what kind of 'jukin the stats' that bothers me so much about teaching to the test will I find in the next field? The Wire so aptly and painfully displays the ethical dilemmas that we individuals face within the institutions we work for. Even though the Baltimore that the show depicts is a departure from my own reality, it is the decisions that the characters must face that seem more and more like my own.
Even though The Wire presents a pessimistic point of view when it comes to institutional change--a point of view that my own experiences more and more validate--it is really the humanity of the characters that keeps me coming back to the show. Omar, someone whom society would pin as a cold-blooded killer, becomes a real human being that I find myself rooting for. We sympathize with drug dealers because we can see the constraints of their lives and the difficult choices they must make. We may hold politicians like Clay Davis in disgust, but understand that he's no exception. We see characters change while we hope for change in our own lives and in the world, even though we see that the barriers to that change are difficult to surmount. The Wire has so beautifully presented a world where everything is in shades of gray, and where we can move beyond labels and boundaries to better understand the humanity of people from all occupations and walks of life.
In short, I love The Wire, even though entering its' world for a few hours is less of an escape and more of a stark reminder of the realities we are trying to leave behind through entertainment.
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