David Mills, who I think wrote on The Wire season 4, interviews series creator and old friend David Simon. Here's Simon on the institution:
So much of American drama – Look at “The Shield.” Not to get into “The Shield” specifically, but nothing is more the quintessential American dramatic impulse than to make the individual bigger than the institutions which he serves. Vic Mackey, he is the id that rages well beyond the L.A.P.D. It’s “What is he capable of? What is he not capable of?”
“The Wire” has not only gone the opposite way, it’s resisted the idea that, in this post-modern America, individuals triumph over institutions. The institution is always bigger. It doesn’t tolerate that degree of individuality on any level for any length of time. These moments of epic characterization are inherently false. They’re all rooted in, like, old Westerns or something. Guy rides into town, cleans up the town, rides out of town.
There’s no cleaning it up anymore. There’s no riding in, there’s no riding out. The town is what it is.
Naive question: how do institutions become institutional? Presumably, it's an inherent characteristic - an effect - of that weird separation/togetherness of group-forming.
In a dvd commentary on the first episode of series 1 Simon talks about how you can't avoid compromise because it's inherent to engaging with or being born into social institutions - you adopt some of the institution’s patterns of behaviour, even as you exert your own, microscopically minimal influence on them (which also explains the seductions of the maverick trope):
It seems to be a cop show: blue lights flashing. But we were actually trying to mask something different within a cop show when we created this. This show's really about the American city and about how we live together, and it's about how institutions have an effect on individuals. And how, regardless of what you're committed to - whether you are a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer or a politician, a judge, a lawyer - you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you've committed to.
The reason that The Wire works brilliantly is partly because it seems to be honest about showing that drug dealers eventually get jailed or whacked - those that retired safe are invoked as legends to the Barksdales. But more importantly it shows you, without lecturing, that this is how the whole of life works, isn't it? (Series 2 has a moment that anatomised my work - and hinted at its failures - with brutal efficiency.) For the most part you can only be Jack Bauer at your own, human, scales. You engage with massive institutional organisms and they're bigger than you - they aren't out to get you, there are no conspiracy theories, they're just massive and indifferent by virtue of their pulling in many directions. The Game, whichever one you chose, isn't there for you to win, it's just there.
Aside: I'd like to see more tv and writing on the office as institution, particularly as for a large swathe of the middle-class it seems to be replacing the family as the most complex and significant social institution people belong to.
The Wire, great tv.
