Folk politics, folk psychology and TV drama

David Simon:
“If we had anything right in the first four seasons as to the nature of the city, its problems, and why those problems seem so insolvable, why is it that we're not intensely aware of those problems?”



The montages that close each season of The Wire, although inseparable from the episodes preceding them where the relationships between these disparate scenes are explored, the “money” is followed and so on, they can also be viewed in themselves as pieces of popular art concerned with a Real that isn’t that of folk politics, of naïve-realistic cause and effect. It’s tempting to refer to The Wire’s attempt to map a more complex reality in terms of Metzinger’s ‘convolved holism’ in which “objects of experience are made up of other objects in a nested hierarchy.” In these montages it’s always an ‘individual’ who, momentarily, becomes the nexus of the events of the series. These montages mirror the opening credits, which are impersonal, depersonalised – no faces, no selves, just the money, drugs etc going round. On the most functional level, these moments end the series with a nice update of where the main characters are and what the state of play is in Baltimore. They can also be read in the conventional terms of character psychology as moments of realisation ie the character becomes conscious of the fact that they are caught in a web that is not of their making (with, in the Season 2 montage above, Nick Sobotka clinging to the fence with eyes closed, as if plugging into the network - I chose this one specifically because, via the container port, it has a scope that extends beyond Baltimore and the US). And yet the montages contain scenes which those characters could not have direct knowledge of, so that what we are also being shown is a sample, a taste of the what lies beyond an individual’s phenomenal experience. Simon’s “if we had anything right…” is an important qualification – although, as a journalist, I think Simon sees a lack of proper reportage as the most pressing issue to be addressed (the thrust of the fifth season) – it perhaps indicates a sense that, in philosophical and neurobiological terms, he and the other Wire writers were attempting to map the unmappable. But with its vision that ‘contains’ folk politics and folk psychology, The Wire’s message is that if we don’t try to look at the world in this way, we won’t learn anything. It also makes a serious case for fiction and art (albeit supported by a great deal of journalistic groundwork) being the best means of trying to apprehend the real of neo-liberal capitalism.

In a Sight and Sound article, the BFI’s Mark Duguid goes on the defensive for British TV drama, claiming that UK efforts have been overlooked in the rush to praise the American ‘golden age’. Some of his points ring true (the shallowness of British TV criticism for example) but is still forced to concede that “we might have to accept that sprawling, authored work isn’t a natural British form, just as our novelists don’t perpetually strive to write the Great British Novel. Anyway, how realistic is competing with America?” and mentions the budget for the latest HBO series. Budget issues aside (but see an earlier blog post for comments on how HBO is funded, and also hasn’t the quality of previous HBO projects then attracted big money producers like Tom Hanks?) but this relativist approach (ie both US and UK shows are good in their own ways) avoids the issue of whether it is precisely the scope of certain US dramas that accounts for the richness that so many admire, this sense of the form attaining a new maturity. Duguid also concludes “Though American drama may deal with universal themes, we also need drama that reflects our specific lived experiences and social problems, drama that can help to combat the alarming deficit of empathy that distorts public understanding of, say criminality, abuse or injustice (something that I’m not convinced much American television, however, sophisticated, does).

In other words, British drama should remain synonymous with social realism and kitchen sink psychology. Meanwhile, one of the defining features of the key US drama series is the way they transcend, or at least complicate, folk psychological (and by extension, folk political) interpretations of reality.

More is likely to follow on this subject.