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Culture war retrospective: We Own This City
I have a habit of not consuming contemporary media. There are so many TV shows, movies, video games, books, etc., and their number is ever-growing. There's an endless list of things you could or would enjoy, and a finite number of hours in your life. Trying to keep up with new releases is practically a hobby in itself. You can just have faith that the cream will rise to the top: quality will endure 5 or 10 or 50 years later, whereas conversely new releases tend to often attract uncritical praise and hype.
So over the Christmas break I watched We Own This City, a 2022 miniseries from David Simon, creator of The Wire. We Own This City was hailed as a sort-of companion piece to that show, a non-fiction story about Baltimore's infamous Gun Trace Task Force: a police unit that took it upon itself to beg, borrow, and steal as much money from the citizens of its city as it could. The show jumps around chronologically and across multiple plotlines, following both the development and deeds of the Task Force, its ultimate investigation and prosecution, reform efforts in response, and the investigation of a murder related to the Task Force. It got glowing reviews at the time, but that was to be expected given its critique of American policing and the bonafides of Simon. I decided to save it for a rainy day.
The show is really pulled together by a magnetic leading performance by Jon Bernthal as a sort of idiot savant corrupt cop Wayne Jenkins, replete with a fabulous white working class Bawlmore accent. He is the axis around which the whole show spins, and it’s hard to see the show working without him being so entertaining. He is simultaneously status-obsessed, disdainful of authority, resentful about a perceived lack of respect, and delusional about his own fallibility. But he also has a canny instinct about who to press and how hard, and things are going great – until they fall apart.
In stark contrast, the show grinds to an awful screeching halt whenever his counterpart (in every way) appears on screen. This is Nicola Steele, a (fictional) envoy from the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department to the city of Baltimore sent to spearhead police reform. She is in many ways an embodiment of the peak of “woke” politics in the United States, and given that I am not one to normally complain about these sorts of things that is an indication of how grating this part of the show is. It’s hard to judge exactly how on the nose this was meant to be, given that David Simon was and is very much not “woke” in the standard progressive sense, but it’s hard not to see a wealthy fat black woman (of course, played by a Nigerian!) delivering trite monologues of 2021-flavour social justice and fight off the urge to roll your eyes back into your skull. Ironically her role in the show as the deliverer of exposition and receiver of Long Monologues About What is Right makes her unintentionally seem like a naïve idiot who sucks at her job. But this itself is a trope of progressive art.
The contrast between her character and Wayne Jenkins appearing in the same show feels very bizarre in terms of how apart both the storytelling styles and quality is. The former is the embodiment of the worst of David Simon’s impulses: moral grandstanding, lectures to the audience, unimpeachable righteousness. The latter is proof of his genius: exciting, propulsive, complex storytelling with great characters and incisive social commentary. The other cast of characters are generally solid, though it doesn’t quite pop with the same kind of rich minor roles that Simon’s other great television work has. Some viewers and critics apparently had trouble following the show’s chronology, which I didn’t: there are a number of inventive ways the show informs you when a given scene is happening from the interstitials, appearance, and background details (something Simon’s shows have always excelled at).
It’s hard not to wonder whether the show turns out better if it’s made even a year or two later. The tidewaters would have receded just that extra little bit to take the edge of the moral righteousness. Certainly it would have been an interesting parallel to draw at the time as the US as a whole was experiencing the same pullback in policing that Baltimore had experienced 6 years previous that resulted in the Gun Trace Task Force being able to escalate its actions. Of course on the flipside, with the looming possibility of another Trump presidential run, things might have turned out worse. Simon has a particular loathing for Trump that makes for bad art (have I ever shared my thoughts on The Plot Against America here?) and he might have been tempted to make things more polemical.
My recommendation: if you enjoyed The Wire you should definitely check We Own This City out, and feel no shame in fast-forwarding through any of the Justice Department scenes. Regardless of the quality, you already know how that story ends! And if you don’t think you want to watch it, definitely still go to youtube and watch a bunch of scenes of Jon Bernthal as Wayne Jenkins. It’s a lot of fun. Here’s an example.
Good review.
There's also kind of an unintentional self-own. During the riot scene, when Jenkins gets everybody food, rallies the troops, and says something like "Everyone goes home tonight!" it's hard not to feel solidarity with the police as a horde of barbarians encircles them.
One of the things about the Baltimore setting that has helped Simon and his works avoid being trite social justice fodder is that in a significantly majority black city the racial dynamics aren't oppressor/oppressed. The cops are black, the politicians are black, the wealthy are black, the criminals are black. So while the Gun Trace Task Force (and the Baltimore PD) victimize mostly black men, the GTTF itself is also majority black, and is ultimately investigated and brought to justice by (at least in the show) an all-white team. The white police commissioner who gets sympathetic treatment is fired and replaced by another corrupt black one. Simon has always seen the drug war and policing primarily through a class lens.
100% Agree and Simon is the kind of "lefty" that I will spend extra time and effort trying to engage with because of his own self-discipline and refusing to adopt the easy but wrong (and, worse, intentionally deceptive) sentiments of the woke / progressive sphere.
But the class lens is still a difficult circle to square because of its high dependence on chronology. In Season 2 of the Wire, we're exposed to the plight of the dying dockworker industry in Baltimore. These are quite literally the almost mythical "working class" of the 1950s and 1960s who, on one high school education level income, could buy a home, a car, raise 3 - 5 kids (the Polish are Catholic!), enjoy BBQs and little league etc. They did this through comically illegal political patronage, state sanctioned segregation, and, following that program's demise, strongly self-enforced neighborhood segregation. If ever there was something like "systemic racism" and an "oppressor class", it was boldly exemplified by just these sort.
But in the early 2000s, they're so economically displaced that a major subplot of Season 2 is how the younger generation (Nicky and Ziggy) involve themselves willingly in the drug trade in order to (again, literally) move out of their parents' basements.
So, where exactly is my sympathy supposed to lie with these classes? Sure, rich people are always generically evil in some sense or another. But where does one class begin and end? Where does one single group of the same people (i.e. Frank Sabotka) stop being oppressor and become oppressed (or vice versa?)
This is one of my macro problems with the broadest possible "left" - despite their professed hatred of hierarchy and social group demarcation, they explicitly base their worldview on a static grouping of people based on criteria that is inherently dynamic! They even build wild hacks to get around this by creating mental "concepts" like "poverty mindset" and "whiteness is a state of mind."
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