In a remarkable scene in the first season of The Wire, Det. Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) follows “Stringer” (Idris Elba) the consigliere to what turns out to be an NYU macroeconomics course. It’s an astonishing discovery — for the viewer, of course, but also for McNulty. When he checks the placard on the door, he has to take a minute to catch his breath.
What was supposed to be an in-and-out crack-down on an amateur operation has by this point already become, through discoveries like this one, hard proof of a carefully cultivated underestimation. The unit, as it were, has only been assigned to this case, after much resistance from above, to make it seem like something’s being done. They’re supposed to do a sloppy job, wrap it up quickly, and not ask too many questions. If “the money’s got legs,” as Det. Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters) likes to say, it’s because if you follow it, instead of the drugs, it will take you all over — to the unions, to city hall, and eventually to the very cops you report to.
McNulty’s unexpected discovery that Stringer is running drugs like Wal-Mart moves housewares suggests, in no uncertain terms, that the distinction between crime and business — or between legitimate ‘commerce’ and illegitimate ‘trafficking’ — is an illusion, an effect of the ‘true’ milieu of alliances. If criminal enterprises are run with the same logic, and according to the same business models (‘taking the same classes’), as a chain-store, then the only difference between a multinational corporation and a global drug cartel would have to be the product.
Throughout the first season we indeed see Stringer teaching his “staff”, in classroom form, the ins and outs of macroeconomic marketing. When they are forced to dilute their “product” to make up for a shortage in supply, which sheds market share to their competitors, Stringer lectures his dealers on the benefits of changing the name and the bag, to which Bodie (J.D. Williams) in turn suggests, much to Stringer’s delight, that they sell two kinds, one with the new name and one with the old, so as to create a false image of competition that will, by definition, push sales of the “new”, but in actuality only, product. This, of course, is the original economic definition of a cartel: the fixing of prices through syndication of seemingly autonomous brands.
Though this kind of calculated manipulation is reprehensible in all economic quarters, an unaccountable sympathy — for Stringer and for the dealers — is progressively cultivated. It’s as if just by accruing features tagged legitimate, illegitimate enterprises can be made to inherit certain unofficial moral allowances. That Stringer — or, I should say, Idris Elba — plays well the part of a professor — taking his reading glasses on and off, rubbing his eyes with thumb and index finger, to display a mentor’s disappointment — suggests, through his own self-delusion, that our carefully elicited sympathy with a businessman fallen on tough times is just as specious.
Now if Stringer’s business model differs from, say, an oil tycoon’s only in product, then the moral accusations heaped on the former start to seem excessive — and ideological, especially in light of the fact that Stringer’s money is directly connected to the politicians that publicly condemn his trade. It may be ‘right’ to criticize the drug trade for the evils it produces, but at the same time we have to be careful not to assign it too artificial a delimitation from ‘legitimate’ business, which can be just as criminal or even more criminal than ‘crime proper’. The Wire, clearly, is interested in the way crime itself is used — as a public smokescreen, as a political ploy, as an image of justice — by legitimate institutions to pursue their own illegitimate purposes.
This kind of blurring of boundaries between crime and justice, legitimate violence and illegitimate violence, is no doubt a hallmark of the HBO drama. A similar dynamic, for example, can be traced through The Sopranos. It’s a running theme of the show that Tony (James Gandolfini) could just as well have become a legitimate businessman living with comparable wealth in the same suburban home with the same nuclear family. He even seems to periodically delude himself into thinking this is the case, until something awful must be done (and the dream, if it’s to be summoned again, must be temporarily stowed away). It’s a little more complicated than I’m making it out to be — the American Dream, for Tony, is less an escape from reality than it is a complex alibi for all sorts of violations, — but generally speaking the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate is constantly in play.
In the final season, for instance, when Tony is in a coma, he takes on the mistaken identity of a Kevin Finnerty, an arms dealer in town for a defense convention. Would this life, inside the law, be any less brutal than the one without? Is Tony, the show seems to be asking, over-vilified and in a sense scapegoated — perhaps to comfort us in the shadow of much greater injustices? There’s a real value to introducing this question — it needs to be asked — but ultimately the greater danger lies in rendering the difference between the two a mere matter of rhetoric or ideology. And the show takes special pains to make precisely this point. Meadow, at one point, is shown wielding, as a lawyer would, this very argument, making her father out to be a victim and a scapegoat for society at large. The show in this way strategically stakes out the traditional, polemical answers — Tony is bad, defense contracting is good — only to refute them, leaving a deep, hazy ambivalence in their place. It is, of course, from within this space that Tony, and the family, become characters rather than simple representations of moral affectations.
So, to return to Stringer and business models, is the intuitive difference between macroeconomics and ‘the street’ worth preserving? The Wire‘s answer to this question departs significantly from The Sopranos‘. Where the latter tends to speculate, on this subject, from the vantage of the law — asking, ‘are Tony’s actions really any different from a defense contractor’s?’ — The Wire asks the opposite: namely, what is to be gained, for a criminal enterprise, from adopting legitimate business models? As an audience, we are, no doubt, well-accustomed to the figure of the businessman who is, despite his legal legitimacy, no less criminal than those known as such, but The Wire here introduces a crime boss with the reverse, and perhaps all the more dangerous, delusion that he is in function, if not fact, a businessman like any other. This isn’t a danger to the law; it’s a danger for crime, an existential confusion we don’t see expressed too often in art or on screen.
Stringer’s delusion seems somehow special to our age; there’s an occupational twist to this strange misrecognition of his ‘job’ and his place in society. In fancying his work a more intellectual, abstracted affair than it is in reality, he mistakes one set of mechanisms for another. Where a certain amount of physical violence is called for, which has no market correlate, Stringer discerns instead a ‘business cycle’ that will pass of its own accord. It is at this point that Avon (Wood Harris), the boss, reminds him [above] that the street is not the market, that the one does not quite map onto the other. Here one could say that what Avon, or The Wire, is really saying is that all market conflicts, legitimate or not, ultimately descend into a brutal clash of interests, and that Economics itself — the NYU class, the academic theories, the vocabulary of abstractions — only serves to mask this basic reality. And this is certainly true to an extent, but even if we settle for a more limited reading of this scene, its central point is paramount: namely that the law may enact a purely nominal, and oftentimes unjustified, difference between actions, but its effects are real, insurmountable, and anything but figurative. This would be obvious enough, the show seems to be saying, if those on either side were not so easily seduced into thinking otherwise.
And the same goes for those who indulge — for the novelty factor, it would seem — in the drawing of ‘seemingly inappropriate’ homologies. The economist Steven Levit gave a TED talk once, entitled “Why Do Crack Dealers still live with their moms?“, that drew much applause for its reasoned comparison of crack dealers to McDonald’s employees. Breaking down the division of labor and reward, he showed how, structurally speaking, the two are very similar: those at the top collect all the wealth, while the many at the bottom do the work for meager pay. Though there’s a value to bringing the two industries down to the same level — it helps make intelligible the drug business even as it reveals the criminal element of the legitimate one — it also serves to mask the constitutive violence, and relative lack of regulation, proper to the crack dealing industry. Only a network model of analysis, where every structure becomes analogous by virtue of being a structure, could minimize so successfully the more predominant, and by no means negligible, differences between dealing crack and dealing french fries.
