By this point, you have either seen and loved David Simon’s The Wire or haven’t and are sick to death of everyone telling you that it is the greatest TV show of all time. Well, I’m sorry, but it is and you should go watch it immediately. David Simon’s latest show, Treme, about the rebuilding of New Orleans post-Katrina debuted last Sunday and has received enough acclaim it has already been picked up for a second season.
Over at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, David Simon penned an editorial to head off the nagging nabobs of realism that inevitably crop up about any fictional book, film or show, and explains the powers of fiction and drama. This seems worth reading given all the recent debate about fiction and non-fiction.
You can read David Simon’s piece here.
True, the Hubig’s bakery in the Marigny did not reopen until February 2006, and true therefore, any such pastry found in a woman’s purse should by rights be a pre-Katrina artifact and therefore unsuitable for anyone’s dessert.
But what you fact-grounded literalists clearly fail to understand is that the pie in Janette DeSautel’s purse is a Magic Hubig’s. Much in the manner of certain loaves and fishes in the New Testament, or several days worth of sacramental oil in the Old, this Hubig’s somehow survives months of post-Katrina tumult and remains tasty and intact for our small, winking moment of light comedy. We know this because we, the writers, imbued the pie with its special powers. We created it. We stuck it in the purse — or more precisely, the propmaster did. We left it there, waiting for its special moment.
[...]
Why? Why not depict a precise truth, down to the very Hubig’s?
Well, Pablo Picasso famously said that art is the lie that shows us the truth. Such might be the case of a celebrated artist claiming more for himself and his work than he ought, or perhaps, this Picasso fella was on to something.
By referencing what is real, or historical, a fictional narrative can speak in a powerful, full-throated way to the problems and issues of our time. And a wholly imagined tale, set amid the intricate and accurate details of a real place and time, can resonate with readers in profound ways. In short, drama is its own argument.
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While I’m at it, back in 2007 The Believer ran a great long interview with David Simon. It is available on their website in full. He offers a fascinating take on what makes The Wire different:
Another reason the show may feel different than a lot of television: our model is not quite so Shakespearean as other high-end HBO fare. The Sopranos and Deadwood—two shows that I do admire—offer a good deal of Macbeth or Richard III or Hamlet in their focus on the angst and machinations of the central characters (Tony Soprano, Al Swearengen). Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind—particularly those of us in the West—finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. We don’t accept our gods on such terms anymore; by and large, with the exception of the fundamentalists among us, we don’t even grant Yahweh himself that kind of unbridled, interventionist authority.
But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces.
Lincoln Michel
Lincoln Michel keeps a personal blog at lincolnmichel.com and tweets @TheLincoln. His work appears or is forthcoming in Tin House, Oxford ...
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