Author Archives: mass_andy

In watching Episode 6 of Generation Kill, it seemed to me that the overall thematic point of the episode was viewer’s changing perceptions of many of the characters, but that in the end this changes nothing.  This theme is very prominent in a few scenes of this episode, and I’d like to discuss them further.  First, in the scene with the supply convoy (and the first American woman the soldiers have seen in a while), the sergeant with the odd accent demonstrates that he is not as “hickish” as he initially seems.  When the men start cat-calling at the female soldier he admonishes them for acting like a bunch of junior high aged boys.  This role reversal is reinforced again when Brad goes “flying.”  He’s always been the no-BS all business leader of his squad, but his running around with arms out (and possibly giant colorful lower back tattoo??) seem like the actions of a hippie not a marine.  Finally, although this isn’t even nearly all the examples, our view of the reservists fluctuates back and forth.  At first we hear how they are “cowboys” and then see them act as such when they accidentally start shooting at Americans.  However, after Captain America tortures a prisoner a leader of the reserve unit rightfully calls all of the marines “motherfuckers” for abusing the prisoner.  Now it seems that it is the Marines that are the cowboys and the reservists that are the measured fighting force.  Unfortunately all these changing perceptions don’t culminate in any meaningful change for the characters though.  The command structure is still out of touch, demanding everyone be “team players,” and commending Captain America for his bogus capture while chastising Nate and his men for killing a civilian in compliance with the ROE.  Finally, while most of the Marines are ready for the war to be over, the commanders are out politicking for one last mission.  These characters might go through personal changes, and personnel changes, but the system will never change.

After critically viewing The Wire, I see Generation Kill in a whole new light.  David Simon’s stamp of auteurship is clearly present in the thematic elements of Generation Kill.  For this post I’d like to focus on Simon’s take on bureaucracy in the military.  In The Wire Simon demonstrated the way systematic problems hinder those both in the police department and the drug gangs.  In the department one of the key issues Simon focuses on is the inept handling of everything at the management levels.   This is embodied best by Commissioner Burrell.  To me, the most analogous character to Burrell in Kill is the officer nicknamed Encino Man.  Over the course of the first two episodes he has demonstrated his idiocy time and again.  Multiple times he has failed to inform his lieutenants of orders from “Godfather” leaving his teams less time to prepare and plan.  In a real moment of genius, he also decides to tape over the windows to his Humvee (so the enemy can’t see the light of his laptop) but all he ends up accomplishing is getting the team lost just as they are entering Iraq because he misses a turn.  This motif of commanders’ ineptitude is also represented by “Captain America.”

Captain America is equally as dumb as Encino Man, but in a much more entertaining way.  Just as The Wire was a completely new take on the police procedural, Generation Kill is a unique look at the war genre, and Captain America serves to mock all the absurdities that have become commonplace in war films.  He makes overly dramatic and pointless statements about how “we’re all gonna die” or “we’re sitting ducks out here” (possibly the most tired war movie cliche).  In a commentary on the overemphasis of macho violence in war movies Captain America is referred to with disgust by others when he fires his  AK at a civilian car for no reason.  Overall, it seems Simon has been successful at transferring his style and commentary to a new genre.

Obviously the common thread across this week’s readings is the man and the mind, David Simon.  Over the course of this class we have been mindful that we are quick to almost worship Simon after examining such a large, and for the most part quality, body of work.  “Oh his work is so smart and nuanced” etc. is only a natural reaction after weeks of careful dissection.  But the more we learn about Simon, the more and more unlikeable he becomes.  In his interview Nick Hornby, he even seems to acknowledge this himself.  I also found this interview revealing because Simon shows off his arrogance.  In listing off the history lesson that he gives, and acknowledges is pointless, Simon is simply just trying to say see how smart I am, I know X, Y and Z.  In this aspect Simon reminds me a lot of McNulty, and I’m wondering if anyone else had a similar thought?  Like Simon, McNulty also feels that he is constantly inhibited by his superiors, and as Bowden noted there is a character named Marimow in The Wire that is a cop, not a journalist.  Is McNulty at least partly based on Simon, and does viewing the character in this way offer anything to our understanding of Simon or the show?

In his piece “The Lost Boys of Baltimore” James S. Williams argues that The Wire has a running motif of homoerotic interactions between its characters, making particular note of occurrences of this motif involving the African American characters.  I have to say that watching the show previously I did not pick up on this aspect, and I’m still not sure if Williams is just reading to much into The Wire.  While there are clearly overt references to homosexuality involving Omar, Greggs and as Williams mentions one funny scene with Rawls, I hesitate to agree with Williams that many other scenes were intended to invoke thoughts of homoeroticism in the viewer.  First I think it is a stretch to argue that The Wire evokes imagery of  “black homo-thug gay porn websites” as Williams does on 59.  While he is correct that many of the characters seem replaceable, I don’t think these characters were intended as eye candy.  I also think the inclusion of one of the pictures of Stringer on page 60 is instructive on the stretch Williams makes.  The first picture of the second column shows Stringer sucking on his thumb.  In the scene he is simply licking some food off of his finger, but taken slightly out of context it is easy for Williams to give the picture a homoerotic slant.  He also brings up the scene of Stringer and Avon wrestling.  I find the connection of the two, equating wrestling with homoeroticism, troubling because I’ve been a wrestler myself and tried to break this connection.  I think this scene is powerful because it is a climax in the character dynamic between Stringer and Avon, not because there is a homoerotic undertone.  In summation, I believe Williams’ argument has some weight, but that the scope of homoeroticism in The Wire isn’t nearly as large as he would like to believe.

While reading Derek Kompare’s piece on the DVD Box set I couldn’t help but feel that the Box sets are already somewhat obsolete.  I remember reading an article a couple months ago about  Arrested Development and the popular streaming site Hulu.com.  Hulu, for those that don’t know, is partly owned by FOX and NBC and uses ads before and during shows to gain revenue.  The article discussed how the second season of Arrested had been taken down by Fox, ostensibly to help promote sales of the DVD Box set.  The logic of doing so seems pretty straight forward, namely that the executives at Fox were worried that having the show available for free on the web would make people less likely to buy the DVDs.  However, this article made the argument that Fox was actually losing money by doing this.  The author noted that DVD sales of the Box set did not spike dramatically once the show was removed from Hulu, so all Fox managed to do was deny itself the ad revenue it would have received from Hulu, as well as deny Hulu revenue, some of which would have trickled up to Fox.  To me this helps to demonstrate how DVD box sets are already on the way out.  The convenience of being able to watch shows off the internet is not defeated by consumer’s preference for possessing a tangible product.  The iTunes Store has demonstrated that consumers are willing to buy music without any tangible possession to go with it, and this will be true of television sales as high speed internet becomes more widespread, making it easier for all people to have quick and easy access to television downloads. Finally, I have two more small things I’d like to add.  First southparkstudios.com seems to demonstrate that the producers of South Park deem internet advertising profitable enough to allow the entire series to be streamed for free.  For this to be true it must mean that lots of people watch lots of episodes on the internet who wouldn’t buy seasons of the show on DVD.  Secondly, the costs associated with producing a box set i.e. shipping, designing and constructing a case for the DVDs, are much higher than the costs of distributing the show on the internet.  For this reason the profit of the future for television sales is over the internet.

In my last post I discussed the way Price opened the novel, letting us inside Strike’s head.  I was interested in how Price set up Strike as a mature, even-headed, and experienced clocker.  I wondered how Spike Lee was going to try to do this scene, and whether he would employ some sort of internal monologue for Strike.  Basically, how was Lee going to let us know what Strike was thinking, as Price did?

After watching the film version of Clockers I feel that the introduction of Strike as a mature, even-headed, and experienced clocker wasn’t the main focus of the opening scene.  However, there are still some elements of the feel of Price’s opening chapter that are noticeable in the movie.  As the credits end we fade into an empty courtyard in Brooklyn as rap plays in the background.  We see Strike strut up, something I didn’t imagine the Strike of the opening chapter of the book to be doing.  However, when he sits down we catch a look in his eye that seems to suggest some introspection or deeper thoughts, and this attitude carries over to when Strike goes to sit down with his friends.  As his friends (and later we learn employees) argue over who the best rapper is, Strike mostly stays out of the argument, not contributing much besides nodding along to something others say.  We get the feeling that Strike is above the fray, that he is better than this simpleton pointless argument.  The argument ends with Strike chastising everyone else for engaging in the disagreement, especially one man that was supposed to be acting as a look out.  However, the way Strike talks to his subordinates doesn’t seem as even-headed as the Strike from the book.  He is more angry, and seems to be angry only because “we gots to get that money” (7:00).  The Strike in the book, while clearly business-minded, didn’t seem to start out with as brazen an attitude as Strike in the film.  I think this change was made because it starts the character development a little further along.  In both the book and film Strike starts to seem less and less like he is on top of everything, having it all thought out.  If he starts out as less even-headed and mature, it makes sense for the descent to happen in a shorter time frame.  Also, the fact that a book would be read over many days in all likelihood allows the author to draw out Strike’s descent and thus make it more believable.  Lee only has two hours to take his audience along the entire character arc, so starting a little further along means he has to spend a little less time explaining and justifying the changes Strike’s character experiences.

The opening twenty or so pages of Clockers are very interesting to me because they created a character in my mind that was very different from who the character is shown to be after the first twenty pages, and I’m interested to see how this scene is accomplished in the movie, if it is even attempted at all.  In the first twenty pages, we come to figure out that we are privy to Strike’s thoughts and point of view.  The scene, first and foremost, is meant to provide the setting, as Strike looks around at the drug market that surrounds him.  However we get to learn a lot about Strike as we read his thoughts as they are inspired by what he sees.  Strike helps us as readers make sense of what is going on around him, and this positions Strike as wise, and they way he talks about his underlings gives the reader the sense that Strike is older.  In my mind I imagined a middle-aged man surround by younger teens and twenty-somethings, but after the first scene it is revealed that Strike is only nineteen.  The point of this is clear, the street, being a clocker, ages you.  We weren’t wrong to see Strike as wise, it’s just that in the drug dealing game you can be the streetwise veteran at nineteen.  I’m interested to see if a similar scene is in the film production.

In my mind the scene would be best preserved by a long steady shot from Strike’s POV, with the sounds from the surrounding muted to only leave Strike’s thoughts in the auditory foreground.  This would help to situate the viewer inside of Strike’s head, like we are in his head peering out rather than getting a brief glimpse into his thoughts.  However, as we’ve read, long monologues of internal dialogue are often seen as somewhat of a cop-out in film and television, as it is supposed to be the showing medium and leave the telling up to literature (although we also read a good critique of this cliche of television studies).  Barring this strategy however, I don’t see how the scene could be faithfully portrayed conveying both the plot points and emotional environment within Strike.

In the first three episodes of The Corner, the action and plot of the episode is framed by interviews conducted by a character named Charles Dutton.  I find it interesting because it has the immediate effect of making the entire program feel like it is a documentary, adding a sense of realism that could never be achieved just by filming in Baltimore and referring to local street corners.  For me one of the most powerful effects of this documentary style comes when characters inject heroin.  Since I was a kid I’ve been a little afraid of needles, and the idea of IV drug use makes me unsettled.  The way The Corner emphasizes and repeats scenes of characters shooting up is designed to make viewers feel uncomfortable.  This same uncomfortable feeling is supposed to carry over to the negative effects the sale and use of drugs clearly has on the community. The viewers are supposed to view the drug problem as an entrenched status quo.  Fran, a heroin addict, tries to get into rehab giving viewers hope for her redemption, but she gets told to wait another week, and is forced to move back in with the temptation of using again constantly staring her in the face.  A veteran patrolman remembers when the neighborhood was better, but becomes defensive when the interviewer points out that only a small fraction of drug arrests in Baltimore lead to successful convictions.  This patrolman is refusing to believe that the same “bustin’ heads” won’t and hasn’t worked.  The messages that The Corner conveys about drug use are greatly enhanced by the documentary feel lent to the entire program by the framing interviews.