Perhaps I am years behind the cinematic zeitgeist but I have come to the conclusion that feature movies are rapidly becoming obsolete. Reading has already been dead for about a decade but that is the subject of another essay. Think of this essay as the obituary for movie theaters and the feature film. It has been a good run, about one hundred years, but the end is in sight.
The first nail in the coffin of movie theaters and feature films that play there is the incredible advancement in home entertainment centers. Big screen, high definition televisions with surround-sound audio now rival the movie house experience and you aren’t subjected to over-priced and lousy movie theater food. There is also the pause button for any necessary interruptions. But mvoies have even bigger problems than their lack of convenience.
I just finished watching the final episode of season 4 of The Wire. I thought that this serialized police drama was brilliant from the opening scene which had Officer McNaulty (sp?) sitting on a Baltimore stoop talking to a little thug about the homicide of another little thug known as “Snot Boogy.” The Wire made me realize that television has far surpassed the artistic reach of feature films.
It is difficult for me to watch a movie without lamenting the detailed character development that is so much a part of the good television series like The Sopranos, The Shield, Rescue Me, and Deadwood, among others. The 2-3 hour time constraint of feature films now seems like an almost overwhelming liability that few directors are able to overcome.
Whatever criticism anyone may have about The Wire (I can think of very few), you can’t say that it relies on formula. The fact that every season has somewhere around 12 hours of screen time to get the story across completely frees the writers from the crippling burden of economy. Before these HBO series came along, TV never took advantage of the luxury it enjoyed of almost limitless time, choosing instead to reinvent the wheel week-to-week, seldom carrying a single story line for more than one episode.
It was only towards the end of this final season of The Wirethat I realized that it was the television equivalent of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, a novel that portrayed life in New York City from the highest strata to its lowest depths. The dozens and dozens of characters introduced in the series are all given extremely complex lives. Some of the minor players probably have more speaking lines than leading actors in feature films.
Most movies don’t have time for routine police work yet this is the very foundation of The Wire, which takes its name from the most mundane of police procedures, a wiretap. It is also difficult for movies to flesh out good guys and bad guys. The Wire serves up a series of villains that are a mix of Machiaveli’s The Prince and the metro crime blotter of The Baltimore Sun. The Darwinian world of inner-city drug kingpins is laid out in violent detail. The first season begins with the duo of Avon Barksdale and Springer Bell, two frighteningly ruthless sociopaths intent on creating an empire from the drug trade. A couple of seasons later the writers hatch a criminal that is Barksdale and Bell’s worst nightmare, the nihilistic and cold-blooded upstart, Marlow Stansfield.
Short of a National Geographic documentary, you will not hear such attention to linguistic detail as you do from the characters in The Wire. Every character’s dialect has a unique stamp. I don’t know how anyone could write this type of dialogue so I assume that the fine actors on the show put a lot of individuality to their speaking roles.
Perhaps simply for the sake of expediency, movies and TV shows have relied on the tired cop show cliches that have been with since the genre was invented. Cops in movies and TV have been living off themselves for so long that most of their actions seem more apocryphal than believable. How many times have you seen a movie cop snarl about how the “Feds” are messing up his case or how roughing-up a suspect is the only way to obtain information? This is probably due to the fact that the people who write this tripe have nothing to base their stories on but other cop movies. The Wire side-steps this creative cannibalism by going directly to the source and showing an insider’s view of police work.
I can probably count on one hand and still use chop sticks with the number of movies in which the criminal is actually arrested at the end instead of mowed down in a hail of indignant bullets. In The Wire, it’s all about putting the criminals in jail. In season 3 you feel the pain the police feel when they learn that one of their major suspects has been murdered just as they were about to indict him.
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