The Sopranos Vs. The Wire

YES -- fucking blase Poot just coasts along through thick and thin with that dopey look on his face and then winds up with a normal job

NB I think I said "Wesley" up there, meaning Wallace -- I always think "Wesley" first and then consider that that really doesn't sound right

^^ i don't know if this makes sense w/r/t the timing of wire-hype season to season but that always played to me like a shout out to sudhir whatsisface, the "drug dealing is less renumerative than minimum-wage work for most ppl ps i love the wire" guy

xp

poot locker

One thing I enjoy about this show is how much, by the end, you get to have annoyed reactions to characters as if they're actually in your social space or something, so there will be mundane scenes of Cheese being an asshole or Poot being Poot and your reaction is just that "this fuckin' guy" head-shaking -- true of lots of long shows, obv., but especially for me with this one

I guess there's also the admiring "this fuckin' guy" response, e.g. when Clay Davis responds to hardship by being Clay Davis

athlete's poot

Sudhir Venkatesh, is who i meant

he's paid tribute to by the college guy who helps out Bunny right?

less examined, though sometimes shown, are slightly wealthier people coming into the city specifically for drugs, who would kinda constitute a significant wealth-transfer mechanism in terms of bringing money from elsewhere into the inner city

white-clients-listening-to-Dead-Meadow scene in season 2 (or 3) to thread!

maybe it's just a given to me, but anyone who has ever bought drugs in America knows that you can go to the nearest "bad" neighborhood (across the tracks!), or housing project, to buy drugs. also never known as the ideal way to get them...

i was reading an article about the Robert Taylor homes and Cabrini Green and a key reason those places became so infamous was because each were conveniently located near major highways and rich neighborhoods (respectively) which made it easy for wealthier people to use them as drive-thrus. Clockers goes more into it, too. great book for any fan of The Wire, btw. i agree that it could have been interesting to explore this redistribution though.

i wonder if they were concerned about it being too similar to 'traffic'

the original 'traffik' is classic shit.

i wish that channel 4 had had the resources of hbo and had really gone with it, coz that had the potential to be the wire of the late 80s.

You're absolutely right that The Wire is mostly interested in the "work" people do,

Can we cross-reference Michael Mann fandom with Wire love?

The people listening to Dead Meadow were McNulty's boys, weren't they?

yes altho i guess there may have been someone else. dead meadow are from baltimore, right?

Can we cross-reference Michael Mann fandom with Wire love?

― My vagina has a dress code. (milo z), Monday, June 8, 2009 11:50 PM (59 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

crime story is another antecedent: significant amount of attention paid to the bad guys; bad guys/good guys symbiosis.

it's not as good as the wire.

i think there may have been two different scenes with Dead Meadow, but i could also be confusing other scenes.

i think they're from D.C.

xp

Whereas the drug dealers are also hard-working and good-humored and driven by ... not a code you'd call "moral," but kind of moral system nonetheless. I guess what I mean is that it always seemed to me that part of the point of this show was to portray both sides of this from similar perspectives (...)

This street 'code' - well, everyone purports to believe in it and follow it and they sure do talk about it a lot, but in reality it's pretty clear that very few people aren't willing to break it under the right circumstance. In this sense it's a good parallel for the detectives and the law. Neither of these are moral systems, just...agreed upon rules. (Breaking agreed upon rules = where morality comes in.)

but in reality it's pretty clear that very few people aren't willing to break it under the right circumstance

wait waht - don't you mean they ARE willing to break it?

it's only omar doesn't break the code i think. but it's a code he made up himself. he made up his own rules not to break. he doesn't really care about the street 'code' i think.

double negative - few people *aren't*, almost everyone is

+

I always interpreted the "the streets just aren't like they used to be - people used to play by the code" talk as a sort of naiveté - people are always gonna cheat. And it's hard to imagine that the drug trade is actually nastier in the 00s than the 80s. Marlo is someone who gets ahead by cheating, which you can do in any field - and he's not gonna be there forever (*SPOILER*: which is what the last scene suggests.) But he's not necessarily a symbol of a long-term downward trend in the drug trade.

+ (this is more 4th and 5th season stuff, sorry shakey)

On both sides, a lil bit of law/code breaking is accepted - but, when things start getting serious, you have mechanisms that are there to stop them (you'll get fired, you'll get shot.) But these mechanisms, although they usually work, are not perfect and don't always go off in time. There's not one single institution in charge of enforcing the rules on either side - somebody always needs to step up. Marlo and McNulty both manage to avoid this happening early enough - and on both sides this leads to a dangerous point of no return situation.

what I was getting at is that the two opposing sub-groups in the first two seasons (the drug dealing crew vs. the detective crew) by and large the individual detectives are hard-working, morally driven, good humored guys. The individual drug lords - Stringer, Avon, D's mom (basically anyone that isn't D'Angelo) - are shown to be ruthless, greedy, and violent.

Do you mean to say the drug dealing crew that is black? Nicky Sobotka is a pretty sympathetic character.

i don't remember Nicky being a drug dealer

nicky is how they und up connecting the case they have been told to investigate (frank) and the drug case they're all interested in

right, he was one guy who took money to let people ship shit through the docks without knowing what it was. i know he got caught up in Ziggy's whole thing for a little bit, but i don't know if that makes him a "drug dealer". i guess it's sort of beside the point anyway. most of the petty street dealers, powerless cops - the "pawns" - are sympathetic characters.

the individual detectives are hard-working, morally driven, good humored guys. The individual drug lords - Stringer, Avon, D's mom (basically anyone that isn't D'Angelo) - are shown to be ruthless, greedy, and violent.

i really feel like shakey was watching a different show than me.

he gets way more into street level dealing than ziggy ever was, and not just because he's less of a fuck up -- he makes the connection through the greeks for his package. he watches his corner(s?) and is surveilled by herc and carver.

xp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB-wRxSNU7o

u guys have to remember shakey sees all police as constant violent aggressive alpha male alcoholics who love beating protesters & common folk at every opportunity purely for the visceral joy of torturing another human being

i mean im from jon burge's chicago so i know there are some torturous awful excuses for human beings in the police dept but the idea that the entire staff of national pds are a murderous hate patrol is shakey's operating perspective here

^^^

btw congrats omar littel.

^__^

you're right, caek. i stand corrected. forgot how deep into it he gets.

Well Stringer and Avon, especially the former seem much more sympathetic once they're gone. One aspect I've noticed about the Wire is that they make it clear that as long as there's drugs there's drug dealers (and vice versa) and everything that comes with, and thus it's not a simple question of taking down those charge and thus ending drug trade. So, when Marlo comes, Stringer's attempts to manage the drug trade, for instance, put him into a whole other light.

Also, there's often a fine line between nuanced character and self-consciously counter-conventional "look at me, I'm not a type"-ism.

u guys have to remember shakey sees all police as constant violent aggressive alpha male alcoholics who love beating protesters & common folk at every opportunity purely for the visceral joy of torturing another human being

and?

yeah i always wanted to know more about the girls (in a jetta, even?) who come into Hamsterdam to buy

*SPOILER*

sorry way way xpost but one of these girls ends up in rehab w/ bubbles in season 5. she's the girl who goes on about how deep into prostitution she got to feed her habit.

wow, never made that connection!

many xposts

the main guy in Dead Meadow is David Simon's son, if you didn't know. Hence their occasional inclusion in the series....

...damn I such a geek.

"it's only omar doesn't break the code i think. but it's a code he made up himself. he made up his own rules not to break. he doesn't really care about the street 'code' i think."

― Philip Nunez,

Slim Charles never breaks it either. He's one of the few characters that never bends the rules, except for maybe shooting Cheese. But Cheese was such a stupid, double dealing pain the the ass that it's questionable whether Cheese counts.

In the first season, it seems less like cops=good, drug dealers=bad, than workers=good, bosses=bad. D'angelo and his crew are sympathetic characters, while Stringer and Avon and the muscle are less sympathetic - besides the fact they kill people or give orders to kill people. In the cop sphere, it's similar, the bosses - Burrell, Rawls, even Landsman and Daniels at times, are not as sympathetic as Bunk, Lester, Kima, McNulty.

As the seasons progress - starting in Season 2 and esp. in Season 3 - you see the trials and tribulations of being a boss.

^ I haven't gotten to season 2 yet but that is OTM ^

finished Season 2, sorta on the fence about continuing with this

it seems to be deliberately unsatistifying, the way things never really get resolved - there's a whole tone of no matter what happens, things continue more or less as before, there's a kinda futility/fatalism to the whole thing

The other seasons felt way more like things continuing futilely than season two, which was at least about the ending of a particular way of life that provided people with a decent living, more like the Sopranos with how the good old days of the Mob were ending and it was getting harder to get by doing the same jobs that your parents did.

no more than in the sopranos imo xp

shakey if you stop watching the wire will you stop talking about it

probably

I wouldn't say 'a tone' as much as a point, personally.

Would've come down on Soprano's side before I started season 4 of the Wire, now I'm not sure. The former is more morally complex, poetic and well-acted, but the Wire is actually trying to do something very different. In terms of pure narrative it's much denser, tighter and more propulsive.