Thursday, September 14, 2006
(9:42 AM) | Adam R:
These Walls Can Talk
The Wire is making connections ("no other program has ever done anything remotely like what this one does, namely to portray the social, political, and economic life of an American city"). But sometimes I wonder if the show is compelling in a way that makes people think that something positive is happening about a crisis, when really people are just being entertained by it. Forget Cheers -- today's TV tourists can take trips through the Bawmor ghetto, which I guess means the inner city has become another layover site for The Ugly American. There was an article about these tours in Baltimore's City Paper, in which they actually discouraged people from entering the neighborhoods without guides. (It's strangely pleasing to note that this is where I live, and that yesterday four police cruisers formed a perimeter around my car and searched it -- because "the doors were unlocked." Um.)It just seems like the situation in Baltimore is so bad that it should be a center for real scrutiny, but what we get is an HBO drama. Is our tendency for Dramatic Representation Of Problems As A Catalyst For Change ever at risk of becoming some kind of Deleuzian homogenization? So after Super Size Me hit it big, McDonald's started serving salads -- a success. And after Hotel Rwanda there is world peace. But is it likely that someday merely knowing about a problem and thinking about it in a clever way will become an end in itself? For years I plied myself with the assurance that reading Chomsky was activism enough (what else is there, marching?), but knowledge is merely comforting; power is power. Sure, HBO has a little power, too, but mostly it's bedtime entertainment. It's great that it's good, but is it good that it's real?
Hells no.
