The Wire Revisited

The Tragedy of Frank Sobotka

By tracing Frank Sobotka’s tragic struggle to preserve a dying labor order, Stringer Bell’s pathetic attempt to impose board-room logic on the street, and Season 5’s descent into pure fabrication, The Wire exposes three distinct fates that await individuals when institutions break down.

A Living Canon

We recently rewatched The Wire, with the kids. That in itself is a remarkable event. It shows that the medium of the long form television drama has reached a new level of maturity. Parents pass them on to children as part of the children’s education into a world of sensibility and a repertoire of reference points for reflection. We do this with novels to some extent, but this happens more in school and museums and concert halls in certain cultivated families.

But the mark of a living form of art is the spontaneous transfer across generations, where both sides want the transfer to occur. No pulling teeth to read Joyce, it just happens as if on its own, and we all want it to happen, we make time for it, and we talk about it at other times not specifically dedicated to it. They, the kids, bring it up with our friends, who are excited and impressed they know The Wire, Lost, BSG, Breaking Bad, Friday Night Lights — and they, the adults, want to share that with them, not out of obligation, but pleasure.

In turn the characters provide a repository of tropes and types for thinking about ways of dealing with the world, and other people. Our world, our people. They also take on new meanings each time one returns to them, both because you notice things you missed before, see them in the light of the whole, and also encounter them in a new time and with a new generation and with new people to discuss it with.

The Tragedy of Frank Sobotka

I have noticed two big changes in my own perception of The Wire. First, I see the Frank Sobotka character as a real tragic hero. His situation was impossible but also demanded action. He has to save the union, and he exploited all available solutions. Dredge the bay, build some new ports, smuggle drugs and stolen goods. Every decision makes sense, and springs from an admirable urge to preserve a form of life that had been the basis for a sense of dignity and comradeship.

Yet every decision, because it was the right one, turns out to be wrong. That’s not a failing on his part; the world itself was wrong, it has no place for a person like him, or more properly the form of existence which produces men like him. This is fate, and why when looking back on his demise it seems foreordained. The tragedy is that even though it was fated, it had to happen by his own hand. Auto-tithemi: autonomously. He freely brought his own form of life to its completion, and that completion was its self-destruction.

The fact that his bumbling son was his undoing adds some pathos and is no accident: the next generation is a pale version of the previous one. But even Frank’s more competent nephew keeps failing no matter how hard he tries or how smart he is. The problem is not their judgment or skill; there is nothing to be done, but something must be done. Hence the aesthetic quality that permeates the season: each moment relentlessly calling for the next.

The Comedy of Stringer Bell

Frank now seems to me more like a fully realized tragic hero, who in his own self and activities and world embodies the tragic fate of a doomed form of life. Stringer Bell by contrast seems simply pathetic. By this I don’t mean he is a loser or sad or dumb or anything else of that sort. I mean the primary aesthetic response he generates is one of pity. He isn’t always making the right decision.

We all see this. He is wrong about how to deal with Marlo, and Brother Mouzone. The street requires strength, it is not and cannot be run like a business. Marlo will never see reason, or rather, his reason is not one of buying and selling; it is one of respect and recognition. His name rings out, as Bubbles says. When Stringer asks Mouzone who attacked him, Mouzone immediately realizes Stringer is off the rails. Avon tells him: you don’t ask that kind of question to a soldier. The drama is telling us through these other characters: Stringer is not seeing the situation rightly, he is continually misjudging in ways that others immediately see.

This is not the nature of a tragic hero. His character and actions are not the realization of fate carried out in the best way possible in the situation handed to him. Rather he has his own view of life that he is trying to impose on his situation, even if the situation is not suited to it. This is the meaning of the fact that he is taking economics classes at a community college. It is book learning. That’s why it is comical, and of a piece with imposing Roberts Rules of Order in the drug gang meetings. It is a clash between character and world, driven by the subjective taste and will of the character, not from out of their unity. Absurdity is the only result.

Stringer goes beyond the absurd though since he is not alone. Others follow him, and have to react to the objective results of his subjective desire to force the world into a fantastical economic logic that only holds in the chalkboard. His significance therefore primarily emerges in his relationships, most crucially with Avon. Without going into too much detail, it is clear that Avon does and always will act according to the codes of recognition and respect. That is his great virtue, but it also means he will never ever escape the street. For him, that is no problem: he has no desire to do so. Standing tall among his peers is more than enough for him.

This is what enables him to have such cutting insight into who Stringer is. Not strong enough for the street, not smart enough for the world beyond the street. This is a damning judgement on Stringer, because it is true. But the question it raises from a higher level has to do with the desire to go beyond the street. This also relates to the tragedy of Frank Sobotka. The tragedy comes from the fact that the only form of action is from within the available structures open to a dockworker union boss.

One might imagine that a new form of action that goes beyond the existing ones would be the only proper solution to such a doomed situation. You need to go outside the existing systems. Stringer is one path in this direction, seeking knowledge and connections that are simply beyond the reach of the street. But he gets chewed up and turned into a mockery in doing so. Part of this is because he does not really go beyond the existing possibilities, but instead seeks to fit himself into the already existing forms of action characteristic of the capitalists and the politicians. What looks like stepping out and going beyond turns out to be just a form of subjection to a game he can never properly play, precisely because he is trying to span too many worlds at once.

Season 5: Fantasy, Fraud, and Broken Institutions

Frank’s tragedy is bringing his world to its fated doom through making all the right decisions that the world makes inevitably wrong; Stringer’s comedy is making no impact on his world at all through making all the wrong decisions which seem right according to the standards of a different world. This in turn has helped me to see more in the seemingly weird plotline in Season 5, build around McNulty’s fake serial killer and the fabrications of the young journalist.

The key is that both represent what happens when existing institutions completely fail to create systems of accountability and validity. In the case of McNulty, he sees a system that will not investigate 25 murders. The system is not performing its functions, and there are no mechanisms for holding it to account. Therefore he feels entitled to work outside the system. He has always had some maverick tendency in this direction, but has looked to agents connected to the system to do this, such as a friendly judge or FBI agent. But there is nothing left. So he goes outside.

We are likely disposed to cheer him on, in that we like outsiders who take down and work beyond the edges of corrupt systems. But what the show shows us is that this too is doomed. Beyond functioning institutions lies fantasy. The institutions, when working, hold us accountable to others. They create reality, or at any rate confirm a shared sense of reality. Once you’ve stepped beyond that, there is nobody to hold you to account, and reality becomes totally up for grabs.

From the side of the young journalist, the same thing is happening, but not quite in the same way. The newspaper industry is collapsing, and with it the mechanisms it has offered to sustain credibility and conviction. What is left is the story, the narrative, without its anchoring in being rendered valid through mechanisms of accountability. Nobody will take the time to track down his stories, since nobody cares that much outside of a functioning institution.

He and McNulty feed into one another, and it is fitting that they do so through distanced interaction, without really knowing what the other is doing or why. Their transition into a completely virtual reality is a depicition of what it looks like to operate “outside the system,” and it isn’t pretty. Stories and narratives disengage from a system of accountability – this is the world in the wake of a set of functioning institutions.