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.