A Film Canon

The Wire represents the point at which crime becomes untenable as either a cinematic or televisual subject, instead requiring the radical sprawl that remains creator David Simon's most enduring aesthetic signature, and the viewer confusion, disorientation and even oblivion that it engenders. Although each season deals with a particular facet of post-industrial Baltimore - the ghettos, the docks, City Hall, the schools, the media - these gather into what is effectively a sustained attempt to pursue and contain a single flow of capital, seamlessly connecting the most apparently disparate moments and figures: "I know you don't want to hear this lieutenant, but the money is real, and it's everywhere." Despite its recollection of Homicide: Life On The Streets, this call to 'realism' can now only be answered once the movements of late capital are translated into fantastic terms, and deflected into the narrative and affective economy of the series itself. Here, the insatiable, amorphous, free-floating desire that these movements generate queers pleasure and morphs identification far beyond the performative homosociality typical of the police drama, fusing each character's attempt to escape a world in which they are irreversibly implicated, even, or perhaps especially, at the peak of entrepreneurial autonomy - again, to a far greater extent than the more conventional analogies between civil and criminal bureaucracies might seem to attest. As a result, the "documentary" criterion seems as anachronistic as the procedural and criminal archetypes that linger around the edges of the narrative, inadequate for a mode of spectatorship that ultimately eludes the linearities and constrictions of narrative altogether, and approaches the increasingly refined digital omniscience around which the series revolves, and its fleeting, infinite epiphanies cluster; the most radical assumption of spectator autonomy, or even interactivity, since Twin Peaks.

The most overrated series of the 00s, Sex And The City is less about feminism than commodity fetishism, less a liberating elaboration of sexual positions than a neoliberal elaboration of consumer positions. As such, it correctly identifies the image as the new millenium's foundational commodity, with a radically denuded script, characterisation and narrative trajectory leaving nothing but a series of poses to be co-opted and memorised. Not only does the preponderance of breathless close-ups trap the viewer between the four central women and whatever consumer object happens to be within the purview of their gaze - the claustrophobia of late capitalism - but the majority of each episode is taken up by Carrie Bradshaw's (Sarah Jessica Parker's) inane monologues, which, like the column that she writes, and from which the show derives it's name, invariably analyse or even simply describe what is happening in a clumsy, absolutely redunant way; idiotic discursion. Even the show's own sly recognition of itself as trash isn't redemptive, insofar as all four women work in a quaternary sector whose central recognition is that trash constitutes the most appealing, seductive, and ultimately marketable surplus value. Admittedly, the frankness with with sex is discussed, and brutality with which men are objectified, is novel, and occasionally delightful, but series creator Darren Star too often falls short of Seinfeld's repellent foursome - upon which the women are surely modelled - and, more specifically, that show's magnificent ability to offset the banality and even repellence of the characters' conversational content with the ingenuity and generosity of their conversational style itself.