Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities

3. The Block Is Hot: Legibility and Loci in The Wire

87 3 The Block Is Hot Legibility and Loci in The Wire Thirteen years after the thirteen episodes of A Man Called Hawk aired on ABC, The Wire debuted on the cable television network HBO. By then, HBO had established itself as the premier cable network, largely on the strength of groundbreaking hour-long dramas like the cerebral Mafioso series The Sopranos; Six Feet Under, which focused on a family-owned funeral home in Los Angeles; and the prison drama Oz. Arguably HBO helped redefine the possibilities of the hour-long drama format, in the process carving out a small niche for original African American programming. Exploiting the failure of network television to develop quality and compelling original programming and the tepid support for serious black cinema from Hollywood studios, HBO has produced feature-length films like The Tuskegee Airmen , Cheryl Dunye’s Stranger Inside, Boycott (which depicted the events of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955), and documentaries such as When the Levees Broke (directed by Spike Lee) and Unchained Memories. The Wire represents arguably the best that the network had to offer in the realm of original drama that captured the fluid complexities of black life in working-class urban America. At the core of The Wire are a cadre of characters who can best be described as outliers to mainstream America, as well as centerpieces of some of the most complex, sophisticated, and potentially progressive readings of black identity in contemporary popular culture. The Wire was based on the writings and experiences of David Simon, a Baltimore beat writer, and Edward Burns, a former homicide detective and public school teacher. The duo is also responsible for other critically acclaimed Baltimore-based dramas such as 88 The Block Is Hot Homicide and The Corner. Simon and Burns initially met when Simon was covering the case of Melvin Williams, a notorious Baltimore drug dealer, who decades later would play the role of a local minister on The Wire. Simon and Burns’s very first encounter at a Baltimore County library is instructive to understanding the value of “deep” knowledge that their series traffics in. “When I first met Ed,” Simon recalls, “he was sitting by the checkout desk, a small pile of books atop the table in front of him. The Magus, by Fowles. Bob Woodward’s Veil. A collection of essays by Hannah Arendt.” He said to Burns, “You’re not really a cop, are you?”1 The very crisis of legibility that framed this initial encounter became a hallmark of the series. I am particularly interested in issues of legibility/illegibility in the series, as related to location and urban spatiality. In other words, what happens to the legibility and illegibility of black masculinity in the world of The Wire when some of the characters, notably Russell “Stringer” Bell (Idris Elba), transgress the boundaries of the urban landscape both literally and metaphorically? What happens when black drug dealers are no longer simply drug dealers? In that cops and robbers—good guys and bad guys—serve as a lingua franca for television drama, the American viewing public has regularly viewed heroic characterizations of law enforcement that often reinforce notions of American men as mavericks . Series as varied as Hill Street Blues, Law and Order, the CSI franchise, and Miami Vice have offered compelling and complex views of law enforcement; very rarely has that complexity been extended to the bad guys. It was the “intricate bureaucracy” of drug crews, which Simon and Burns encountered in the Williams case, that the two men, with the show’s writers, reproduced in The Wire.2 This was not an empty gesture or gimmick on their part; as Simon told the New Yorker, “The Wire is dissent. . . . It is perhaps the only storytelling on television that overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable.”3 Nevertheless, The Wire, like A Man Called Hawk before it, needed to navigate the whims of corporate executives. As Simon describes the show’s relationship to the HBO network and its parent company, Time Warner, “Our 35mm misadventure The Block Is Hot 89 in Baltimore—for all its self-professed iconoclasm—is nevertheless sponsored by a massive media conglomerate with an absolute interest in selling to consumers. And yet on the conglomerate ’s premium cable channel, the only product being sold is the programming itself.”4 Reading Simon’s comments...