 The wire is a visceral depiction of a society failing and it zooms into the most vulnerable and the hand that they've been dealt. The story of bubbles as one of the series' focal points is so necessary because we often avert our eyes to the homeless. We often avert our eyes to those at the bottom because it's easy to do so. It's easy for us to have clear cut heroes and villains in stories, but it's hard to sympathize with the canard or the stringer, even Marlowe. The wire forces its audience to grapple with these moral qualms. Is canard inherently a bad person, an evil child perhaps, or is he but a symptom of someone like Omar, who is also a symptom of the bigger problem? They all stem from one place, capitalism and the greed of man. In this vein, this is a series that deconstructs the American dream. Crater David Simon believes that it's two myths that their series breaks down. The first myth that America preaches is anyone who innovates in some way, anyone who improves on an already existing product will be rich, as America is the land of opportunity. And the second is that even if you cannot innovate, if you work hard and are committed to being a decent, family oriented person, there is a place for you. It's a story, as Simon writes, about the decline of American society and the prospect of two Americas that are bonded under one general reality. It's capitalism and how the failures and the false promises of capitalism, or the gain, exist in these two realities, this division between the permanent, often black, underclass, and the rest of the world. In the fifth season, Dookie asks Cutty, how do I get from here to the rest of the world? This idea could be explored through D'Angelo Barksdale. D's story opens up with his release from prison. The way D'Angelo is spoken of and how he acts upon his introduction, there is a sense of recklessness to him, childishness even. He talks about business in the car when he's not supposed to. He gets bailed out by his uncle when he killed a man. He seems like just another heartless criminal, a monster even. But as we learn more about him, like when he sheds tears for Gant and his family, or his kindness to Wallace, there is a level of vulnerability that D has walled up in order to be a player in the game. However, when D' gets further caught up in the schemes of the game and gets arrested, he's forced to take a 20 year prison sentence for a mistake that Avon made. D' had been nothing but a loyal soldier, a loyal servant to the family, and this is his reward. Though before he can accept the sentence, the police offer him a way out. The entire season, D' has yearned for a chance to start over, to start fresh. He wants to breathe, he says. D' claims that he was freer in jail than he was outside of it. We learn that D'Angelo is the grandson of Butch Stamford, a big time Baltimore drug lord. His uncle, of course, is the Avon Barksdale. His own mother introduced him to the organization from such a young age. He was born into all of this, sentenced to it from birth. D'Angelo never had a chance or a choice, and now he wants what Wallace wanted, a fresh start, and a chance to breathe. Though before anything could happen, he is persuaded by his mother to stay loyal to the family, and he accepts the 20 year sentence. In prison, D' begins his journey towards his new path, accepting his past sins and actually being able to breathe, only to get murdered, a hit ordered by his own uncle's right hand. Time and again, D'Angelo was led to believe that his loyalty, his hard work, his commitment to his family would bring him somewhere. There's that myth, right? But there is no redemption for D'Angelo. From birth, he never had a real chance. These myths trick us into believing that there aren't any forces greater than an individual. This idea of the permanent underclass chokes those at the bottom. It strangles their dreams and their desires. Eric Olin Wright writes that underclass as a segment of society marginalized by the capitalist economic system, which excludes people economically, leaves people structurally disadvantaged due to their limited access to stable employment and resources. William Julius Wilson takes a different approach to this idea, emphasizing the importance of social and spatial factors in the emergence of the underclass. Where concentrated poverty in urban areas, coupled with a decline in job opportunities in inner cities, led to the social isolation and deprivation experienced by people living in this class, the underclass. Together, these forces leave many American and urban centers trapped in the cycle of poverty. Not by their own doing or moral failings, but due to the many systemic pressures that continue to allow these people to suffer. From Marx's labor theory of value, poverty exists only because of the quote, exploitation and the impoverishment of larger sections of labor. The very concept of class must be seen as a dynamic and antagonistic relation of production between capital and labor, not a static category of income, education, occupation and lifestyle. What has happened to the black people of America is more than just a division, it is a calculated attack. It's not happenstance that unemployment in black youth has plummeted, in fact it's that semi-skilled and unskilled jobs relocated to the suburbs out of the inner city. The few jobs that are given do not pay enough to survive, so essentially it becomes unpaid labor. It's not happenstance that drug and crime rates grew, no, it's that those who live in poverty must have the money to buy food, clothes, child care and health care to become moral upstanding citizens. They must be given the opportunity. One of the reasons the wire works so well is because it accurately depicts morality in this series as something that can easily be warped through desperation. Through the quote material reality, Frank Zabotka is another of these tragic characters. Characters who have this desperation that poverty brings. Frank only joins the drug trade to try to save the port and uses that money to help out those in need in their union who are slowly losing their jobs to the city's development. In this second season opens the world up to the larger matters at play here. The Greeks are smuggling these drugs through the ports, the very drugs that the streets are killing each other over, and yet they are never pursued, not by the police or the FBI. Frank feels as though he has no choice but to quote accept the dominant systemic logic, using the proceeds of the smuggling operations to bribe politicians to save their ports. And all of this comes crashing down, Zabotka fails and ends up sacrificing himself for his nephew, all because he wanted to help. The American myth stated that if you put your head down and you work and you are committed to being a family-oriented individual, you will be enough in this society. That was a lie. Frank was forced to look to outside sources to save his people, and he failed because of it. In the grand scheme of things, people are numbers. They are tools to produce and to create. Once their worth can be replaced, once they are no longer needed, they will be shelved and discarded, like garbage. Just like the children of Baltimore, just like the port workers, just like the homeless. These are all people to be exploited. Only those who understand that the game is the game will survive. It's a game of compromise, right? You sacrifice your own values and morals to climb the ranks, or you remain knee-deep in the quicksand that is capitalism. You'll fall slowly and slowly until there's nothing left but the greedy upper class feeding on the carcasses of the poor. Stringer Bell is another victim to American myths. The first myth in his case, the myth of creation and innovation. Stringer desires to ultimately leave the drug game, leave the streets, and invest in properties and legitimate businesses. Have his money work for him, he says. String goes to college, takes economics classes, and he uses that to try to improve and further understand the business. And he also uses it to make plans for the future. In the words of Flamend, he tries to quote, rationalize the drug game by applying orderly rules of governance and market logic. I believe red, you believe green. That would ultimately be his undoing. His belief and trust in the system, in an American myth that capitalism, that innovation, will make him rich, has him trust people like Clay Davis. People who steal his money. Stringer is one of the few who's had a glimpse of the rest of the world. And he is trying to reach it, but he doesn't recognize the larger forces at play. The more and more these characters place their faith in capitalism as an honest, clear cut path to get where they desire, the quicker they end up losing everything they once had. They've placed their faith in the American myth of pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps in the drug world and in the world of capitalistic institutions, two worlds that don't follow any rules to begin with. Stringer believes the game in the underclass is the same as the game within the rich. Capitalism has no such rules, and Stringer found that out personally. The game once had rules, a level of respect and community. Rules that Omar and even Avon followed. East and West Siders being able to put their differences on hold for community events like basketball tournaments or barbecues. They had the Sunday packed. To quote Bunk. As rough as that neighborhood could be, we had us a community. But this sense of community is lost as the violence in these neighborhoods worsen. Marlowe is a byproduct of the game. These rules of the game are slowly disregarded because people have become increasingly more desperate. And kids of the street now grow up seeing the game as the only way to live and survive. They see the bark stales, the prop joes of the world and glorify them. No one sees Avon and Stringer as victims of the game. Marlowe sees the iconicity, the weight these legends carry, the weight their names carry. Everybody knows Omar or Avon. He wants Marlowe to be added to that list. He wants to wear the crown. This life is all he knows and he doesn't see anything past it. Baltimore is so far gone, so far away from everything else, that he does not even desire the rest of the world. Marlowe is but a creation of capitalism. His laser focused mission on the money, even if it leaves a trail of fire behind him, is a consequence of the world he was raised in. It's what makes him a, quote, natural businessman. His brutality and lust for the crown is a consequence of society's neglect. Him, Chris, Snoop, they are a new generation of men, of people without a code. There is no code for the corrupt. There is no code in capitalism. That is why they win. Marlowe understands that. As much as we can point to the newer generation lacking a sense of decorum, there isn't any honor in the way any of these institutions operate. The legal system, the police system, in many ways, they are worse than the criminals they pursue. Ethridge writes that in this series, the police and the drug organizations are similar in the way that they nurture and then consume and destroy individuals. McNulty is often juxtaposed with D'Angelo throughout the first season. I find McNulty to be a fascinating character in this series. He has an incredibly long list of flaws, but what I am most interested in is the anger that he often talks about when he works with the homicide unit. It's an anger that he can barely understand or explain, and to me, I've always seen it as this growing frustration towards the institutions. By the time the fourth season rolls around and McNulty is working as a beat cop, he's instantly happier because he rarely has to interact with the judges, the feds, or any external system. There's a sense of comfortability in being a complicit cog in the machine. And at that level, he's able to turn a blind eye to it all. His home life improves tremendously. He stops drinking. He settles down with Beatty. But in homicide, he is not only hands on with all the different corrupt services, but he also has to face down the consequences of these greedy organizations. He looks eye to eye with kids like Wallace, with Bodie, people like Omar. So he becomes a volatile wrecking ball in his personal life, possibly as a way to cope with the fact that he truly has no power. McNulty has been nurtured by this work and then destroyed by it. He, Lester, Bunk, Daniels, Bunny, Colvin are juxtaposed with Rawls, Valcek, and Burrell, two sides of the same coin. They are all rough around the edges and each have their own motives. The former, though, have a moral anchor that grounds them. A moral obligation to the people and to the communities they live in. And even if it forces them to make harder decisions, if it forces them to do extra work, they are dedicated to being decent police. They are the ones trying to make actual change happen. They are mortals trying to take down gods. Whereas the latter have proven that they have the capability to be decent police, but instead they are self-interested. Climbing the ranks are their only goals. The entire third and fourth season is the Baltimore police and their attempt to quote Juke the Stats. With Rawls at the head of this operation, the reasoning for being such selfish individuals is rather simple. These lawyers, policemen, politicians, even the drug kingpins, all of these institutions prey on violence and poverty and actively encourage it because it brings them money. The institutions are the real winners. For the rich to exist, they must exploit the unpaid labor of others. Of the poor, that's the game in a nutshell. Everybody's got their hand in someone else's pocket, Frank Zabarka says. Burrell himself says that this is Baltimore. The gods will not save you. You have to find a way to fight them. This is the very same quote that Omar has. But the game is out there and it's either play or get played. That is why Burrell, Rawls, Valchik, Royce, do what they do. The game becomes especially cruel once characters become aware of its presence, when they become aware of their own powerlessness in it. When they become aware of who they are and their complicity in all of its evils, their potential questions about their own morality evaporates when compared to what these institutions have done. The power of the system is far too grand, far too embedded into society for any individual to have a real impact on it. So individuals become twisted and warped to reap as much as possible materialistically, even if it costs them their own morals and values. That's the only way to win in this game. Think about the winners at the end of this series, Herc, Clay Davis, Rawls, Levy, Vandes and the Greek, Karketti. They've all won, but look at the type of people they are. One scene that will always stick with me is the cross examination between Levy and Omar. Omar is called a parasite of society, leaching off the drug game. To it, Omar replies, I've got my shotgun, you've got your briefcase. It's on the game though, right? Everyone loves Omar. He is lauded among fans as a mythical hero. I love Omar, my favorite character by far. His moral complexity is one of my favorite aspects of his character. His morality is created through desperation, but he also has a code. The wire will always ground those who fly too close to the sun. It will always remind its audience of the true gods. He, much like Burrell and others, understands that in order to survive, and in his case, carry some sort of code with him, he has to become a parasite, profiting off the drug game that has killed so many others. He is both victim and offender, and his death is a consequence of his own doing. Of his own creation. Omar's livelihood, his schemes, his plans. Had Tasha killed. He had Brandon killed, and ultimately created Canar. Things that were never his intention of course, but his morality is not without question in this series, much like every single character. But ultimately for Omar, like so many others, capitalism has created his environment and it has fostered his desperation. He is lauded because of his humanity, despite his environment. His unremarkable death just shows us that even the mighty Omar is not bigger than any institution. And speaking of institutions, there's one more demographic, one more institution, that is highlighted in the fourth season that ended up being my favorite season of the wire, the children and the schools. In the fourth episode of The Wire, after Wallace tips Stringer about Omar's boyfriend, we see Wallace's life in a squad or apartment. The 14 year old is the oldest in their home. The way they live is jarring. Five kids to a room. Wallace wakes them up and they each get a bag of chips and a juice box for breakfast. Wallace doesn't even go to school anymore. Once he steps outside, he sees the tortured body of the boy he ordered to kill. This is what these kids are born into, the reality of their everyday lives. A few episodes later, Wallace is gunned down inside the very apartment we watch him wake up in. On a different show, Wallace would have gone down to his grandmothers, he would have transferred schools, and he would have gotten that chance to breathe, to live, to be brilliant as he saw him. But this is The Wire, in this America, making it to the rest of the world is rare. Your fate is essentially sealed from the day you're born. By the end of this series, the only corner kid who still stands from the beginning of the series was Pute. Capitalism has made it so that the road to the quote, rest of the world, the road to the other America is a road that feels like it doesn't even exist on their side. These people are abandoned at every level, and The Wire's fourth season, with Dukie, Michael, Randy, and Naaman, really hammers home this feeling of determinism that starts from their birth. Dukie is a brilliant kid, and with confidence instilled into him by prez, he even gets bumped to the ninth grade. At home, though, all of his family are either drug addicts or alcoholics, who use everything that belongs to him, and they even sell his clothes. By the twelfth episode, his family gets evicted, forcing him to stay with Michael. And later in the series, he becomes homeless when he can't stay with Michael anymore. Michael Lee is forced to take care of his younger brother, while his mother, an addict, uses all the money they have for groceries on drugs. Michael is a very intelligent kid, but this is his reality. When his sex-offending stepfather shows up, he turns to the street for help, which ends up being his indoctrination into Marlowe's gang. Michael becomes a stone-cold killer. Randy is the orphan, living with a strict foster mother. His naivete gets him to expose to the police information about Lex's murder, information that he was given involuntarily. As revenge, his house gets burned down and he is later put into a group home, because of the failings of that system. Naiman's mother pressures him into becoming the man that Webe was. When he shows that he isn't built for the game, he begins to cry over it. Delanda challenges his masculinity constantly. She sees him as the man of the house now, and for him to prove to her, and to his father, and to himself, that he is indeed a man. He has to go and sell drugs, to be a corner kid. He has to provide for his family at 14 years old. On top of all that, these kids have to go to school. These classrooms are overpopulated, the schools are underfunded, the teachers are underpaid, and they are forced into moral conundrums created by the system. Either they sacrifice their jobs, and genuinely socialize, and teach these kids real, applicable lessons, or they follow the inapplicable curriculum, bore these kids to death, and ensure they reach the passable score of 30%, so they keep their livelihood, 30%, so the state can say these schools are improving. Leave no child behind, right? Moreover, this season introduces a social work program that Bunny Colvin's a part of, where the kids who are potential violent offenders are segregated from the rest of their peers to socialize them to the point of being in a classroom once again. The fact that these kids need to even be taught these things means that at home, they are not getting the attention or the love required. Their needs from the get-go are not being met. A lot of these kids are physically, sexually, and mentally abused, or they have to deal with addiction plaguing their home. They then disrupt the classroom because of their troubled home lives, and the teachers then neglect these kids because they can't spend entire days reprimanding a few students. As a result, many of these children gain a harsh view of themselves. They know their teachers have no faith in them, so they lose faith in themselves, and their value in the world. In this show, many of these kids feel as though they'll be dead in a few years or at most become corner kids or soldiers for local gangs. And the saddest part about it all is that they are not wrong. Randy, Michael, and Dukie all forfeit their youth in order to adapt to their newfound realities. The rest of the world is absolutely foreign to them. How sad is that? And Bunny Colvin, or Lieutenant Carver, or Prez can't save all these children. Hell, Carvin Prez can't even save one. All of these kids were talented or adept at something. Dukie and computers, Michael and his great street smarts, Randy the natural businessman, Naaman the talker, only one made it out. Naaman is simply one of the lucky ones. The permanent underclass is so restrictive that the only way to truly escape that sector is either by being supremely talented at something that can take you out, sports being the most common, or by being given a lifeline. Naaman had that in Bunny Colvin. Every child deserves this opportunity. Cuddy's response to Dukie is that he has no idea how to get to the rest of the world. We go through five seasons of Baltimore drugs, Avon, Stringer, Marlowe, Prop Joe, all off the streets, yet the drugs continue to flow as if nothing happened. Homicides will be back up, Michael is the new Omar, Dukie is the new Bubbles. It's cyclical at this point. There is no growth, no improvement because that is the game. Simon likens this series to a Greek tragedy in which the gods are the institutions, gods who are indifferent to those who are simply caught in the crossfire. The wire is not a drama about individuals rising above institutions to triumph and achieve redemption and catharsis. It is a drama where those institutions thwart the ambitions and aspirations of those they perpetually exist to serve. It is a drama where individuals with hubris enough to challenge this dynamic are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed by forces indifferent to their efforts or to their fates. It is a drama where truth and justice are often defeated as deceit and injustice are rewarded. McNulty, Lester, Bunny Colvin, Frank Sabatka, Karketti, even Stringer and Prop Joe, they all have the hubris, the belief that maybe they could break through, maybe they could change or innovate the system, maybe they could help, whether it was by solving the big case, bolstering the power of the working class, or even having the right intentions and goals as mayor. None of them were even able to dent the system. Some of them got caught up into the myths and lies of America. Lester once said, a case where you show who gets paid behind all the tragedy and fraud, where you show how the money routes itself, how we are all vested, all of us complicit. I could die happy. But in this series, like in life, the institution will always overpower the individual. Lester, McNulty, Daniels, Colvin, again, they were mortals trying to take down God. They are never able to ride off into the sunset, exposing the greedy underbelly of their city. They instead ride off into the sunset without their jobs. Omar will never get his revenge or his peaceful ending, his own livelihood gets in the way of that. He ends up as a misidentified body in the coroner's office. Bodhi's loyalty as a soldier is all for naught in the end. In the second last episode of this series, Dukie asks Michael if he remembers throwing piss balloons at the terrorist boys. For us, the audience, this happened just a season ago, maybe a year or two years have passed in the series, but his innocence is lost. One could question, given the circumstances he was born into, did he ever really have it? Did any of these kids ever really have a chance? That's the game. At least in the end, the one consolation we do have is that Bubbles made it out the basement.