The Extratextuals

I’m still reeling from the penultimate episode of The Wire, and thus I’m feeling the need to write about it. For all you not up to speed, look away now, and don’t go below the fold.

It’s episodes like this that prove Simon and co’s supreme skills as writers. They like foils and doublings in particular, and this episode is full of them. Daniels becoming Burrell, Freeman becoming McNulty, etc. But it’s the Marlo/Michael and Bubbles/Dukie pairings in which I’m especially interested.

First, I think we need to twin Marlo’s monologue in jail with Michael’s failure to remember throwing piss balloons. Marlo’s always seemed disengaged and removed, a man of very few words, and someone who seems to just be going through the motions, as though he doesn’t know why he does what he does, but there’s not much else to do, so he continues. Yet his speech in jail is electrifying, sparkling with menace, anger, and determination. I’m sure he said more in that one speech than in the season so far. So, late in the series, we finally see why you don’t fuck with Marlo Stanfield, and why people fear not just Chris and Snoop, but him. Penultimate episodes would seem to be for denouement, but here we are learning so much more about the character. Yet I was also struck by how completely blinded or uncaring he was to his situation: sitting in jail, with many of his lieutenants there too, seemingly down for the count, yet what bugs him? The fact that someone’s been taking his name on the streets, and he wasn’t able to respond to it. He’s lost sight of anything but “the game,” living so completely in it. And thus, just as his perennial unmotivated disinterest suggests, here too we’re invited to see him as someone who knows only the game, and cares only about the rules of that game. There’s a corporeal disembodiment going on – his body is imprisoned, and might be there for a long time, but it’s his name that he cares most about. And why? I don’t think he knows.

Meanwhile, in Michael’s short exchange with Dukie, we see the inklings of Michael going that way too. Whether he’s chosen not to remember or whether he simply can’t remember a playful moment is unclear. But either way, he’s moving towards becoming Marlo, living wholly in the game. What self-respecting teenage boy would forget throwing balloons full of piss?! I’d be giggling about this well into my nineties. We see Michael on the precipice here: forgetting his past, but also forced to sever connections with his younger brother and his only remaining friend. It’s for their sakes that he cuts them loose, a noble and loving gesture (the shoebox full of money seems to be his entire earnings [from a boss who isn’t likely to want to retain his services, no less], and selflessly it goes to ensuring his brother’s well taken care of), but it’s ultimately the one that severs his ties to anything but the game. As opposed to Marlo’s predecessor, Barksdale, a man with a family and family duties, Marlo’s notable for having no family, no story, no friends, just, as his speech insists, a name. In Michael, then, we see the birth of Marlo, and in Marlo we see Michael’s future.

Yet as if this wasn’t enough to make Dukie and Michael’s closing scene heartbreaking, we also see Dukie leaving to become Bubbles. Though Tristan Wilds was spectacular as Michael in this episode, the kid that’s impressed me the most all along has been Jermaine Crawford’s Dukie. Simon had to show us Namond’s success story, and had to begin the episode with a rousing takedown of the Stanfield operation, to provide a tiny bit of joy, since all along he’s been absolutely gutting us with Dukie’s story, and here he foreshadowed what will surely be Dukie’s final step into a life as Bubbles. Dukie’s remembrance of playing with piss balloons is all the more crushing not only for Michael’s failure to remember, but for Dukie’s realization that his brief respite from destitution is over. He grasps onto a lone moment of happiness in what’s been an otherwise miserable life.

Flashback a few minutes in the episode to Bubbles, whose one year clean anniversary speech focuses on exactly that: lone moments of happiness. His speech is a moment of personal triumph, but this isn’t Dead Poets Society, and nobody gets up on their seats to applaud him. His sister doesn’t come, since, as he says, he’s left “a trail of fire” in his path. He’s surrounded instead by a room of people who don’t even know his real name (“My name is my name,” though, as Marlo reminds us in his speech. Only an anonymous reporter knows Reginald’s). His sponsor wasn’t there to help him, since he was off with friends. And the woman who interrupts his speech to say that she would’ve helped if he called her, if anything just serves to remind him and us that he may well need her and others like her in the future still. He’s utterly alone, left only with brief memories of happiness. And his only friend is lost. After spending my life watching the Movie of the Week / Saved by the Bell version of what this speech should look like, I watched this one through tears, since his grand triumph seems so fleeting, so mitigated, so desperately lonely, nothing approaching the feel-good, heartwarming pronouncement that many a lesser writer would have made it.

Flash forward back to Dukie leaving the car and approaching the junkman, only to see him loading up, and it’s hard not to see Dukie moving towards Bubble’s life.

Given how remarkable both Marlo’s and Bubbles’s speeches were, upon rewatching the episode, I wanted to get my wife to watch them. I’ve been trying to convince her to watch The Wire, unsuccessfully so far, but I thought that these might show her what she’s missing. Yet I then realized that neither speech would seem all that massively impressive to a newbie. They’re both so captivating, so emotionally wrenching, because they come at the end of a remarkably series. They’re valedictories of a sort, pregnant with contextual meaning, and one needs to have been on the voyage to appreciate them.

And so this is where Simon will leave us? With Michael becoming Marlo, and Dukie becoming Bubbles. Personally, I couldn’t care less about the Sun storyline, and at this point I almost don’t even care much about whether the Stanfield case falls apart at the seams. Whether Templeton is fired or promoted, whether McNulty stands or falls, whether Daniels, Carcetti, and Marlo triumph or perish, we know what will become of each of their institutions. The city, the drug trade, the education system, city hall, the police, the courts: none of these will fundamentally change. McNulty and Beatty won’t have a grand old white wedding on his ten year anniversary of sobriety. Daniels won’t change the city from the ground up. Clay Davis won’t be replaced by a shinier, better type of politician. And so, as we approach the final hour, all Simon leaves us is the Bubbles and Dukie strategy of trying to find isolated, lone moments, of hope or of happiness. Yet with Randy, Dukie, and Michael where they are, even that, it seems, has been taken from us. Something tells me this Sunday’s going to be painful. Yet damn good.

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