The beauty of bad language

So I’m now in Wire withdrawal, having just gorged on Season Four, which followed four teenage boys, all students at an inner-city school, as they came of age in ways that were sometimes funny, sometimes sad and sometimes shocking, but were always unpredictable. It’s a testament to the brilliant writing in this show that the four boys covered between them most of the familiar bases of disadvantage – their backgrounds included criminal, drug-addicted, neglectful and abusive parents – and yet they were real boys first and foremost. In the end just one of them appeared to have escaped the street corner spot he had initially seemed destined for, and you had the sense that he’d always hanker after it.

That was the only note of hope in the conclusion; otherwise it was pretty unrelievedly tragic. Ultimately, tragedy is what The Wire excels at – the complicated, quotidian tragedy of unfulfilled promise. Life is likely to be nasty, brutish and short; destiny – whether that boils down to character or environment, or the interaction of both – is inescapable; and then, possibly sooner rather than later, you die. It’s not all bad of course – the old-fashioned male virtues of honour and camaraderie might not save you, but they’ll ensure that you’ll be missed.

To be more precise, it’s like the Jacobean revenge tragedies in its darkness and humour, its compelling villains, its high body count and its interest in corruption. Also in the great death speeches it sometimes allows its characters before they go down, as if approaching the exit gave them a sudden boost of sagacity.

Characters in The Wire sound sage more often than characters in any drama I’ve ever seen. It’s not all in the writing – much of it is in the delivery, and it’s inimitable. The writing works by being sparse and punchy and funny; the delivery gives the words their exact right weight. It’s the inverse of the fast-patter, ultra-verbal style of a show like, say, Studio 60.

And it really does elevate swearing to an art form. Who could forget the scene where Bunk and McNulty pace out a crime scene and figure out exactly how a murder was committed, their manoeuvres punctuated only by an exchange of astonished exhortations: ‘Fuck me.’ ‘Fuck me.’ ‘Fuck me!’

Back down in the hole

Back to The Wire, and the latest incarnation of the bluesy theme song, with its warning about how you’ve got to keep the devil down in the hole. Impossible task, that. This is a show about working life, and one of the things it makes you realise is just how crap being a drug dealer is; the boredom, the violence, the bullying bosses, the lack of legal protection, the risk of imprisonment, injury and death. An above-board office job may have its Bartleby moments, but you’re unlikely to end up assassinated by staple-gun and covered in quicklime.

The Wire also makes you realise – not that you doubted it, but you prefer not to think about it – how entrenched the drugs industry is, and that ending the prohibition on the end product, at least at a local level, might be the best way to limit its capacity for damage. The other thing it makes you think is: what a dump. The shittiness of the drugs districts is matched only by the inimitable gun-totin’ languor of the way the characters express themselves.

This was an expert introductory episode to season four, with plenty of deft humour: the piss-bomb vengeance attack that backfires, happy Jimmy McNulty nicking a spare folder to take home for the kids, sweaty Carcetti needing to keep a spare suit in the car and enduring the awfulness of being obliged to solicit funds for himself while shut up in a small room with sick yellow wallpaper, a titty-girl poster and a darts board.

There were also two great inappropriate training montages. Prez sat in a room full of teachers who were exhorted to think of themselves as lovable when they were about to face Armageddon. Meanwhile, Sydnor, McNulty et al were urged to be aware of soft targets for terrorists, and laughed at the counter-suggestion that the work of terrorists would probably pass unnoticed, and that the terrorists wouldn’t stand a chance anyway.

Probably most of the US population has no idea what it might be like in the inner cities where street corners are retail outlets to be fought over, and don’t want to know, any more than Daily Mail-reading Middle England really wants to have to think about Peckham, Brixton and other boroughs where people get stabbed or shot on a regular basis, other than to allocate blame and condemn the outcomes. This sort of moralising laissez-faire ensures that it’s business as usual; misery for the punters and pushers and vast, invisible profits for the untouchable few. Sounds familiar, don’t it? And nothing’s quite as dangerous as people who have nothing but their status to lose.

Post-apocalyptic pastoral: eat, shoot, leave

Oooh! The final, cliffhanger episode of season one of Survivors brought me out in a sweat. I have a very low resistance to suspense. It really was very good – genuinely gripping, chilling and thought-provoking. The thoughts it provoked, for me at least, went something like this:

• What on earth would I do in this situation? I have no useful practical survival skills. I don’t know how to trap and skin a rabbit, fix up an engine or use a gun.
• Oh yes... that’s exactly the kind of shitty behaviour people would probably indulge in if the social order fell apart. That irritating prick who’s enjoying shoving a rifle into people’s faces and throwing his weight around – yup, that’s what you’d have to put up with if you made it through to the grim new world. I’m not sure any of our current ministers or politicians would actually really end up wielding any authority over their fellow men when the chips were down, though. Our generals, maybe. Or maybe any surviving politicians would be in their element, conniving and bullying their way back to the top. Just one unpleasant possibility among many.
• ...Yes! Yessss! Shoot him! He’s an irritating prick! (The post-apocalyptic scenario does away with one’s willingness to give people the benefit of the doubt and deal with threat in a peaceful and diplomatic fashion.)

Guns are crucial in the post-apocalyptic world. So are old-fashioned huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ countryman-type skills. Perhaps you’d end up with a sort of peculiar civil war with urban guerrillas and well-armed yokels fighting it out over who gets to be lord of the manor.

One thing’s for sure, the manor’s the place to head for. Cities always turn nasty very quickly when the social order goes into meltdown in the aftermath of plague. The whole post-apocalyse genre is a sort of perverse pastoral in which there’s no option but to go back to the mean old serfdom of tilling the soil, probably with a bunch of thugs and enforcers living off the fat of your labour and deploying you to fight turf wars with the neighbouring badass...

Anyway, roll on season two. Next up: season four of The Wire, which has just become cheap enough to be eligible for purchase. Happy Christmas Eve!