Aspects of Dickens

(Diary entry: The Wire Season 5: Episode 6 - The Dickensian Aspect).

Ostensibly an episode which elects “homelessness” as its prismic glass through which to refract the multifarious story arcs and thematic concerns, in fact it operates as a perfect mosaic piece denoting the finely sketched habitats of each protagonist and their institutions – their own psychogeographic homes. This cold, darkly ironic subversion of expectations is typical of the Wire.
Taking the “traditional” notion of Dickens’s writing of being largely representative of poverty, misery and social deprivation in Victorian London, a writer at the Baltimore Sun is encouraged by his cynical superiors to capitalise on the public’s morbid and voyeuristic hunger for stories of social horror within Baltimore’s homeless community. (This is conducted under the spectre of a fictitious serial killer, in reality an invention of the Baltimore homicide unit, who is “killing off” vagrants).
Of course one level they are right, Baltimore’s East and West sides subsist in dilapidated squalor. High and low rise blocks, entropic and decaying, lie disused and patched over with nail-gunned, rotting chip-board. Drug runners on every corner hide their packages in the cracks of the substandard concrete, the very fabric of the city itself. This is an urban wasteland, wild and savage, marginalized by capital investments which have been dispensed elsewhere. The harsh, sociopathic mentality of its inhabitants is entirely indicative of their barren immediate environment. All very Dicksensian, of course, but with perhaps a few more drugs.
However elsewhere in this episode the viewer can connote another, oft neglected Dickensian tract, that almost “travelogue” ability to deftly paint the different social strata, the institutions and their respective milieux. Take the Baltimore Murder Police for example: usually obese, male and uncomfortably dressed, the detectives are consistently framed as the bulk of the televisual image. They are not just hemmed and crammed in by their clothes (which threaten to spill out at every available opportunity), but also by the frame which chops off the top of their heads or only manages to squeeze in half the body of Bunk, for example. Moreover, they find themselves in cramped quadratic open plan offices of cellular form where chairs are too small, lighting acidic and doors dysfunctional. The sound, as is often the case with the Wire, is dead air smothered by muffled phone conversations, the odd terse exchange in the background and, crucially, the perpetual atonal ring of the telephone. This habitat accurately recreates the procedural, professional and psychological strait-jacketing of the state the detectives are in.
Just as the episode begins to wind down, we are violently re-introduced to other sounds to slap us out of our sonic torpor. The vicious bang of Omar’s sawn-off unbalances the sonic equilibrium through the rest of the episode, appropriating a totally different rhythm change to which the viewer is helpless. The character Omar, of course, is the only truly homeless character in the Wire. His habitats are the shadows, nooks and alleyways of the streets he calls his own. Omar, too, we remember, is the character most prone to Dickensian aspects of speech. His weirdly anachronistic syntax is often well out of sync with his modern gangsta stylings. And it is he who continues to operate away from the architectural, institutional and psychological parameters the rest of the characters find themselves within.