The Wire - Metaphor and Prologue

I wrote in a previous post about the power of cinematic metaphor and, following on from that, I want to look a specific and superb case study of cinematic metaphor in long-form episodic TV. David Simon’s much celebrated Dickensian TV series The Wire is arguably the definitive portrait of an American city. Moreover, what is so fascinating in The Wire is how it avoids the traditional event driven season opener in favour of a much deeper conceptual setup.  The opening prologues of The Wire are not plot-based, indeed most often they have no connection to the series plot at all. They do not setup an inciting incident or call-to-action for a protagonist. Rather they present visual, thematic and conceptual metaphors as representations of the series to come; a microcosm of the bigger issues about to be explored over the next 12 hours of screen time.

Series 1 -

“If snotboogey always stole the money, why didya let him play?….”
“Got to. This is America, man.”

The first scene of the first episode of The Wire sets up the essential conundrum of the very idea of America itself - the price of freedom and the dilemma of self-destruction.  Detective Mcnulty interviews a witness to a street murder. The tale the witness tells concerns the fact that every night he and his boys would gamble at dice, every night the now dead man would steal the money, get caught and roughed up by the other players. When Mcnulty poses the question of why let him play if he always tried to steal the money, the witness responds that “this is America, we gotta let him play”. Conceptually the ironic conundrum of America is framed - where the right to ‘play’ overrides all other logic. This coupled with the irony that even ghetto games in the street adhere to the same American capitalist social values that the affluent and business end of town conforms to.

Series 2 -

“My father used to work there…”

In Season 2 we open on a humbled Mcnulty now demoted and working as a harbour police. From the boat he surveys what was once a working harbour now abandoned and enjoyed only for pleasure by the few rather than industry by the many.  A party boat with engine trouble blocks the shipping lane but this is of no real consequence since there are no ships anymore. And as the boat’s owner offers up a bribe to Mcnulty to not tow them in and end the party early we are confronted with the microcosm of a broken and divided city where bribes seem harmless and inconsequential.

Series 3 -

“You live in the projects you aint shit. But you sling product there, you got the game by the ass, man”

Problems and Solutions. They may demolish the project towers but this does nothing to address the actual problem of dispossession, poverty and drug use. Subsequently the problems once contained in the towers now spill out into the rest of the city. Visually this is shown directly in the huge cloud of dust from the demolished project towers washing into the city streets when the dynamite goes off. This is what the season 3 explores, what happens when the problem isnt addressed with anything but band aid solutions, when the problem spills out into the wider community.

Series 4 -

“gun powder activated, 27 calibre, full auto, no kickback, nail door mayhem, man.”

Series 4 deals with the education system and the dysfunctional gap between the reality of the life children lead and the structures of government and schools. A young teenage girl buys a nail gun from a hardware store sales assistant and the language each is using is at entirely cross purposes. On one level they speak of a nail ‘gun’ and the virtues of a tool driven by gun-powder - the sales assistant oblivious to the girl’s role as a gangster hit-man. Similarly the mis-interpretation of work and ‘contracting’. The wry humour in this exchange where one party is failing to see the true meaning of what they are discussing speaks to the divide between the world of the gangs and the drug trade and the rest of society. Parallel worlds that are simultaneously radically different yet alarmingly similar.

Series 5 -

“Americans are a stupid people by and large. We pretty much believe whatever we’re told”

The prologue of the 5th season is premised on the classic philosophical paradigm The Prisoner’s Dilemma - the idea that that two people might not cooperate even if it is in both their best interests to do so. The classic example of The Prisoner’s Dilemma as articulated by Albert Tucker goes: 

“Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated the prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies for the prosecution against the other (defects) and the other remains silent (cooperates), the defector goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full one-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only one month in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a three-month sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act?”

In season 5 of The Wire, the detectives not only perpetuate a ruse to coerce one suspect to confess but also employ a photocopier as a mock lie-detetcor machine. The scene depicts a constructed fiction that relies on the ignorance of the suspects in order to be accepted as truth. This metaphor goes to the heart of the subject matter of The Wire’s final season which concerns the fourth estate - newspapers, the media, journalism and a fictitious serial killer used as a distraction to divert resources to solving real murders.

What we see across the 5 prologue season openers of The Wire is a profound shift away from the traditional plot-driven introductions that would ordinarily cement an inciting incident from which the subsequent dramatic action is triggered. Instead The Wire employs a powerful and compelling conceptual metaphor as prologue largely without direct connection to the plot. The imagery, concepts and analogies of these prologues become the framework for the viewer, a prism through which they will see the rest of the season. 

And its this kind of detailed sophistication and richness of thought that makes The Wire one of the great works of storytelling of the past 100 years and relegates so many other TV series to an eminently forgettable list of forgotten narratives.