The wire and the world: narrative and metanarrative

Rarely, if ever, has a television drama constructed a narrative with such a strong thrust to metanarrative. Its intricate and interwoven storylines dramatise the dialectical interaction of individual aspirations and institutional dynamics. These build into a story of a city, not only the story of Baltimore in its particularity, but with a metaphoric drive toward the story of Everycity. Every character and storyline pulses with symbolic resonance radiating out to a characterisation of the nature of contemporary capitalism. While the text itself does not name the system, the metatext does so with extraordinary clarity and force. David Simon, the primary voice of this collective creation, has engaged in a powerfully polemical discourse articulating the world view underlying the drama. This paper will explore that world view. It will examine how specific plots open into an analysis of the social-political-economic system shaping it all. It will moreover argue that The Wire has demonstrated the potential of television narrative to dramatise the nature of the social order, a potential that has long been neglected or inadequately pursued in the history of television drama. In probing the parameters of the intricate interactions between individuals and institutions, The Wire excavates underlying structures of power and stimulates engagement with overarching ideas.It bristles, even boils over, with systemic critique. While it offers no expectation of an alternative, it provokes reflection on the need for one and an aspiration towards one. Indeed some commentators have raised the question of whether The Wire is a marxist television drama. While David Simon has explicitly stated that he is not a marxist, the question remains. What would a marxist television drama look like? It would look very much like The Wire, this paper contends

"From Here to the Rest of the World": Crime, class and labour in David Simon's Baltimore

Despite the systemic societal critique apparent in The Wire, David Simon rejects the label of marxist. However he defines himself, he is worthy of analysis as a dramatist, by virtue of the relative coherence of the left-leaning arguments expressed within his work. This thesis explores, and attempts to define this worldview, through analysis of three dramas based in Baltimore, Maryland. Homicide: life on the street and The Corner are based on books of narrative journalism,respectively authored and co-authored by David Simon. The books also inform the narrative of The Wire. I attempt to track the worldview expressed through their intersecting representations of crime, class and the nature of work. All dramas are critiqued from the perspective of textual analysis rooted in literary and television studies, and influenced by, but not limited to, left critical theory. As a secondary thread, I consider the historical and political economic context of US television, and limitations placed on such expansive dramas by the television crime genre. These narratives are part of a worldview that develops as each text builds upon its predecessor. They reveal a worldview critical of the existing economic and social order,defined by David Simon as “unencumbered capitalism”. The conclusion attempts to define this worldview and its evolution, as expressed through these connected dramas, and also briefly considers Simon’s more recent dramas, Generation Kill and Trem

Not Your Feminist Daddy

Writer/director Joss Whedon occupies a prominent position in cult film and television, from his creative role in the seminal Buffy the Vampire Slayer to more recent mainstream success with the Avengers franchise. Receiving considerable adulation for the female characters that figure prominently in his work, he has in addition made well-publicised discursive interventions into the wider narrative around gender representation, including the response to his own imagined query as to why he writes such strong female characters: “because you keep asking me that question”. While acknowledging the positives in Whedon’s contributions to film and television, this paper argues that his representations of women have long been problematic in their monofaceted nature, centred on a limiting focus on physical strength and “kicking ass” or the conflation of assertiveness and mental instability. This paper explores the problematic nature of Whedon’s characterisations, and considers the extent to which these representations are bounded by the accommodations made with media networks, in a manner which has undermined whatever progressive role may be claimed for the narrative. It also explores whether Whedon’s attachment to an ‘uncontroversial’ white, liberal, affluent feminism not only denies the movement its name, but erases the history of feminism and the multiplicity of its expressions