How often have you heard a “period piece” praised for its obsessive detail and ability to “capture” the essence of the era it depicts? Probably more often than Kiera Knightley and Helen Mirren have visited the old-school wardrobe warehouse combined.

Now, how many times have you walked out of a theater and been struck that the movie you just saw totally captured what it meant to be alive in the world at that very second?

Not everyday. Not even every year, as far as I am concerned. More often than not, topical films either miss the window of opportunity (see: W.) or require several years removal from their chosen subject before hindsight can really be 20/20 (see: every other film by Oliver Stone).

In somewhat of a lackluster year for “prestige pictures,” two films stand out for their uncanny reflection and dissection of American life in 2009.

In style and presentation, The Hurt Locker and Up in the Air could hardly be more different.  The first, directed by action maestro Kathryn Bigelow (who made the greatest film of all time 18 years ago), rattles and crashes through Iraq as a booby-trapped maze of overwhelming suspense and shocking violence.  The second skates so smoothly over the thin ice of romantic comedy that it’s easy to forget just how much of real life that director Jason Reitman (from the maker of Ghostbusters) has hidden under the surface.

Yet, as distant as they are generically, they both deal openly with one of the two major issues that have come to dominate headlines in recent years: the war on terror and the global economic collapse.  Of course, Bigelow and Reitman could have easily found themselves in the Oliver Stone Home for Irrelevant Children.  Luckily for them (opportunists that they are), we seem to be in it for the long haul on both counts.

The power of The Hurt Locker lies in its intent.  The film does not seek, like so many of its predecessors, to show us war as a tragedy.  Instead, it depicts war as a job.  Like in most jobs, the employees have a love/hate relationship with the work place, with some loving or hating it more than others.  However, as these elite bomb disposal specialists come to know, tragedy is unavoidable when you work in the most stressful office on the planet.

Up in the Air is also about jobs, specifically the unemployment crisis, and it takes a keen look at both sides of the chopping block.  Somehow, someway, Reitman humanizes corporate suits while refusing to ignore the devastation wrought in the wake of massive downsizing.

They both reach the heights of their respective genres, with Up in the Air walking a comedy/drama tightrope impeccably and The Hurt Locker achieving constant levels of suspense and and visceral impact unprecedented in war pictures.  If that was all they did, these would still be two great movies.  What makes them better than great is their timeliness and ultimate timelessness.

Movies rooted in a specific time and bound thematically to an era will ultimately seem dated, usually faster than others.  However, that date will make them authentic.  Back to the Future feels like it could have only been made in 1985, but because that date is essential to the story, the movie will always feel fresh.  Someone watching Katherine Bigelow’s film in 20 years might say, “this looks so 2000′s” the same way we would cringe at watching a Def Leppard video from 1983. But if it feels like it was made in these years it documents (it actually takes place in 2004, but its all one big war anyway), that is because it so accurately shows life in these years.

No historical drama about the crash of 2008/2009 will ever ring as true as Up in the Air.  It is not self consciously about 2009, it is a true and undeniable product of its time.  The people that George Clooney fires are the same that really lost their jobs these past two years, and to watch the film will always be to watch what this year meant to millions of people.  It is a feeling that cannot be reproduced in retrospect, and that very feeling will make these films essential viewing for a long time.

If we Americans of 2009 are lucky, the images of Jeremy Renner sweating over a trunk full of explosives and George Clooney looking up at the Departures board will come to define 2009 cinematically.

If not, we might be better off forgotten.

Antichrist tells the story of a married couple suffering in the wake of their young son’s death.  While this scenario may resemble the basic outline of many of cinema’s most boring and depressing adult dramas, Von Trier establishes his unique intentions by opening the film with an explicit black and white love scene between the two parents (Willem Defoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) as their child wanders slowly towards and open window.  The director juxtaposes shots of sexual ecstasy with the child’s slow motion descent through the air to the snow covered ground below.  The first critical accusations of misogyny against the film come in response to this opening sequence, with claims that, “the creepy implication is that somehow she and her child are being punished for her taking pleasure in sex” (Tookey).  This response to the sequence seems not only entirely subjective and personal, but also selective in its use of the text to support the specific reading.  Yes, Von Trier does show the child’s mother enraptured in pleasure as her son dies, but he also shows the father in shots depicting a similar state during the sequence.  “This is the first hint of misogyny,” the critic Tookey writes, but the scene is only misogynistic when analyzed through his selective memory.  Perhaps Tookey is right that the mother (known as She) is receiving punishment for her pleasure, but this can only be read as misogynistic when one ignores the equal punishment inflicted on the father (He), who took part in the same sexual act and who has an equally dead son.  Tookey’s reading itself seems more misogynistic than the sequence it critiques, singling out the female’s enjoyment of sex as somehow more wrong or notable than her husband’s in the exact same scene.  It seems here that Von Trier attempts not to associate female sexuality with evil, but the act of sex in general with images of death, a thematic linking that the film returns to repeatedly.

Following this opening chapter, She, an academic, enters a debilitating depression that He, a therapist by trade, seeks to draw her out of through the technique of recognition and exposure to her deepest fears.  Her greatest fear turns out to be Eden, the provocatively named cabin in the woods where she had previously retreated with her son in attempt to complete her thesis work.  The subject of her research comes to light when She and He return to Eden in attempt to confront her fear of the place, and that very subject becomes the next lightning rod for critical cries of misogyny.  She’s research delves into the history of witchcraft and the accompanying “gynocide” of countless innocent women during the middle-ages up to modernity.  While the expected conclusion of such research (and that which that audience likely draws) is the overwhelming proof of centuries of violent male oppression towards women, She concludes that perhaps all women are agents of Evil, deserving the violent fates they have historically met.  Another critic, Dana Stevens, selectively misreads this subplot, suggesting that “He and She convince themselves and each other that women are at fault for all this,” implying that (were this what actually happens in the film), the characters’ general acceptance of this thesis indicates a validated and shared belief by the director. Firstly, the plot as Stevens describes it does not even happen in the film, as He in fact tries to convince his wife that the self loathing feelings of which she has convinced herself stem from her overwhelming grief and depression, not from any truth to the theories.  Secondly, even if the characters in the film really do come to believe in the idea that all women are inherently evil (which they don’t), this does not make the film or its director misogynistic.

“A line of dialogue is not a manifesto,” writes Jessica Winter in the film’s defense, pointing out an all too common problem in the reading of Antichrist and its creator.  A film about racism is not (necessarily) a racist film, and neither is a film dealing directly and uniquely with misogynistic notions necessarily misogynistic.  And finally, even if one somehow reads this passage of Antichrist as a whole-hearted endorsement of truth in natural feminine evil, one would be foolish and naïve to pin this belief on the director’s lapel.  Von Trier himself says, “one of my techniques is to defend an idea or view that is not mine,” a claim exemplified by his interest in making a film about “the human side of Hitler” (O’Hagan).  As this statement came during Von Trier’s press promotion for Antichrist, one could interpret it as a backtracking from his vow not to defend the merits of the film against its critics.  However, coming from the man who proclaimed himself the world’s best director in the Holy Land of international cinema (Cannes), the filmmaker’s statement rings louder as truth than an attempt to save face.  Even if the discourse on screen is 100 percent thoroughbred misogyny (which it is not), that cannot responsibly be used to conclusively condemn the film or its director.

While the above examples from the film have drawn high levels of criticism, the greatest controversy surrounding Antichrist circles around a graphic and now notorious scene of sexual mutilation in which the enraged She smashes He’s penis and testicles before clipping off her own clitoris with a pair of scissors.  Charges of excess, tastelessness, and sadism towards the audience are impossible to refute, as those lay squarely in the domain of personal preference.  The sequence is undeniably extreme, likely to ignite a firestorm of controversy regardless of which film is was attached to.  As a part of Antichrist, however, it inspires increasingly redundant cries of misogyny.

Certainly, female “circumcision” through removal of the clitoris has long been decried in the global community as an act of chauvinistic barbarism with little purpose but cruelty and sexual oppression of women at the hands of a ruling class of males.  Critics must realize, though, that no matter how real the act appears through special effects, Von Trier did not actually ask Charlotte Gainsbourg (courageous as her performance is) to mutilate her own genitals.  Once again, the presence of the image is not a ringing endorsement from Von Trier for the procedure as an effective treatment for the inherent evil of women, but instead an intentional catalyst for the contemplation and discussion of a challenging issue.  Additionally, the critics either forget the fact that He endures a similar act of debilitating violence or choose to focus on the role of a woman as the perpetrator.  To suggest that the acts shown in the film criticize women suggests that these are the unspeakable actions of an average everyday woman.  She is a mentally unstable and grief stricken individual, goaded on by her husband’s invasive “therapy” and forced through traumatic experiences to associate sex with death.  Von Trier does not suggest that she acts violently because of her sex (despite the complicating element of her thesis research), but instead because of her grief and emotional abuse at the hands of her self-interested husband.

If the labeling of the film’s elements as misogynistic can be so simply discredited or the elements themselves explained as intentionally provocative ambiguity, it might seem strange that the cries have come so loudly and maintained ever since the film first screened in May 2009.  Perhaps, more so than declaring Antichrist a misogynist work, the critics seek to certify the film’s director as a consummate woman hater.  One would think, given the director’s pedigree for serious and quality filmmaking (he took home Cannes’ top prize for 2000’s Dancer in the Dark), that the usually progressive international film critics would seek to give such a prominent figure the benefit of the doubt.  However, when Antichrist stands next to its maker’s other works, it seems to continue a pattern in the director’s treatment of women.  In Dancer in the Dark, a benevolent blind woman is framed for robbery, forced into murder, and ultimately executed by hanging.  Like Antichrist, the film on its own seems to illicit sympathy for the female lead and her apparent martyrdom.  However, its predecessor, Breaking the Waves (1996), features another sympathetic female lead forced into prostitution before being gang raped to death.  The emerging pattern seems obvious.

Von Trier admits that he repeats the same film over and again, a “melodrama in which a passive, vulnerable, often mentally unstable woman is gradually driven crazy, and sometimes killed, by the gaslighting of a sadistic man,” an apt summary of Antichrist (Stevens).   For critical viewers, then, the question must be, “which one of these characters is Von Trier himself?”  Bjork, star of Dancer in the Dark, had an infamous on-set bust up with her director and later denigrated him as an “emotional pornographer” (Winter).  Von Trier’s Dogville (2003) star Nicole Kidman allegedly shared similar sentiments with Bjork, asking the director, “Why are you so evil to women?” and refusing to reprise her roll in the sequel (ibid).  These women, both of whom worked closely with the director over a period of months, seem to have felt on set like the characters they were playing, goaded to extremes by this “sadistic man” behind the camera. In the unlikely case that either Bjork or Kidman watched Antichrist, one might easily guess which camp they would come down in.  Von Trier’s reputation for misogyny, as supported by these two actresses, seems to have precipitated the response to Antichrist, whose critics see the director himself on screen behind the guise of the callous He.

However, Von Trier’s latest leading lady, Charlotte Gainsbourg, paints a very different portrait of the filmmaker.  “I find it unjust when people say he hates women,” she says in an interview, “I really have the impression that I was playing him, that he was the woman, that he was going through that misery” (O’Hagan).  Indeed, Von Trier’s depression when creating the film has been well documented, himself calling the process “a kind of therapy… filmed without much enthusiasm, made as it was using about half my physical and intellectual capacity” (Hernandez).  In those words, the filmmaking experience sounds very much like She’s journey’s to Eden, unable to finish her thesis and diminished to self-loathing under the crushing pressure of her grief.  Perhaps, then, She’s violent outbursts act not as a criticism of the woman or women in general, but as a kind of visceral release for the director on film.  Like Von Trier’s previous heroines, She’s journey concludes in death at the hands of man, but unlike the others she gives the man a dose of his own debilitating medicine on the way.  Why then, if She represents Von Trier, does he write the roll as a woman rather than a man?  “My main characters are built on my own person,” Von Trier says, “I think women are better, more understanding” (Winter).  Despite these words coming from a known woman-hater, they somehow imply a profound respect and identification with femininity and the female gender.  If he does hate women then maybe, like She, it results from his own self-loathing.

All too frequently, the critical community breaks controversy down into oversimplifying binaries.  A piece of art must, more often than not, fit into one category or another.  Good or bad, right or wrong, true or false, the systemized grouping essential to the critic’s job frequently hinders any thoughtful discussion of a work.  In the case of Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, the film must be misogynist or not, bad or good respectively, and pornographic or artistic as respective to the judged quality.  The truth, as it usually prefers, lies in none of these simplified labels.  Perhaps Antichrist contains elements critical of or hateful towards women, but in likelihood Von Trier seeks rather to exorcise his own demons and prod the minds of his viewers than to provide audiences with a didactic treatise on his own views of gender politics.  An assessment of the man’s oeuvre certainly indicates some possible issues with women, but maybe they result more from personal issues of self-identification and corresponding depression than any true prejudice.  “I am an American woman,” the male Danish director once said (Winter).  Clearly we deal here with a complicated man who produces complicated art, deserving of discussion not over what ill fitting critical umbrella it can be stuffed under, hateful or not, but over what unique box its creator has made for it himself and where exactly its bizarre boundaries could have come from.

“But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” – Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944)

“Excuse me, I don’t see any Courry Brand cat food here.”– Phillip Marlowe, The Long Goodbye (1973)

“At this point in my life, I just really feel like I could destroy some mother fuckers.”- Ronnie Barnhardt, Observe and Report (2009).

Raymond Chandler opens his 1944 essay “The Simple Art of Murder” with a claim: “Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic.”  In this spirit, Chandler goes on to systematically demolish the formula and conventions of the detective story up to this point, directing specific ire at the dominant English school of whodunits for their obsession with plot contrivance and negligence for the truth of real life.  Chandler praises a group of authors led by Dashiell Hammet, who “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse,” for recognizing the potential for art in the detective story.  For Chandler, the nature of art rests in the presentation of human truth, achievable only by slavish attention to life-like characters, rather than through the intricacies of twisted conspiracies.  Hammet freed the detective story from the traps of “an exhausting concatenation of insignificant clues”, and Chandler latches upon this freedom to dissect “a world in which gangsters can rule nations…the world you live in” (ibid). To achieve any truth about this world inhabited by his reader, then, the author required a protagonist belonging to the real world in which he lived.

Phillip Marlowe, Chandler’s hardened private detective with a heart, if not made entirely of gold, at least of real human tissue, presented readers of the period with a detective character they could respect.  Marlowe’s first appearance came in 1939, a year that found America sandwiched between the last legs of the Great Depression and the hanging dread of the impending World War.  His hard-nosed realism, resourcefulness, humanism, and intelligence resemble what one must imagine to be the ideal American of this time.  Chandler imbues his hero with all these qualities but denies him perfection, keeping his work grounded in reality through dead ends, beat-downs, and comeuppances throughout his navigation of the underworld’s unanswered questions.  Marlowe resonates because he is admirable but relatable, and the popularity of Chandler’s work and the rise of film noir in its wake demonstrate the brilliant compatibility of the character type with the time period, and the strength with which Chandler tapped into the values of his society.

As Chandler writes, the detective “must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man,” and a reader harbors rare doubt about the presence of these qualities in his Marlowe.  However, as repossessed by subversive independent film director Robert Altman in 1973’s The Long Goodbye, Marlowe comes to scarcely resemble any but the unusual.  Altman presents his Marlowe with the basic plot from Chandler’s 1953 novel, but the character as portrayed by Elliot Gould navigates the labyrinth with a style and technique seemingly exclusive to 1970’s film.  Especially when juxtaposed with Humphrey Bogart, the definitive screen actor of Hammet and Chandler’s detectives, Gould can’t help but appear sloppy, downtrodden, and nonchalant in his manner.  Perhaps one could imagine Bogart’s Marlowe keeping a cat in his home, but the cat sending him on a late night shopping trip for a particular brand of cat food seems out of the question.  Gould’s Marlowe not only obliges his cat’s every whim, he does so in the film’s opening scene, immediately establishing him as a very different sort of P.I.  The Greatest Generation-era masculinity and cool of Chandler seems to have vanished with the 60’s and the World War II victory lap of Eisenhower’s presidency.  While the novel’s Marlowe lives alone with no qualms, Altman’s version seems loathe to function without his feline companion, asking neighbors if they’ve seen his cat every time he returns home.  The ownership of the cat itself, in particular compared to a dog, seems a concession to general notions of subtle femininity and sensitivity.  A dog is a man’s best friend; a cat just keeps a person from being alone all the time.  When, in the final scene, murderer Terry Lennox tells Marlowe he’s a loser and the detective responds, “Yeah, I even lost my cat,” one senses an admission of weakness and pain, masked thinly by a half-hearted attempt at Chandler-esque verbal humor.  Gould’s Marlowe inhabits an America on the verge of defeat in Vietnam, an unelected president, and an all-out descent into national agency panic.  Who wouldn’t feel a bit down with hints of that coming down the road?

Additionally, where Chandler’s protagonist skates along the L.A. underbelly with a combination of tough grit and smooth wit, Altman’s seems to bumble about, lacking subtlety in his movements or his questioning and scarcely feeling the need to comb his hair.  If Chandler is known for one thing, it is the darkly evocative first person narration that would come to identify hard noir.  In the film, Altman parodies this (by then) cliché by having Gould speak mostly through often-unintelligible mumbles, throwing out hard-boiled insight for eccentric casualness.  Altman recognizes that a modern viewer would laugh at a line of voice-over like, “it was so quiet at Victor’s that you almost heard the temperature drop as you came through the door,” dialogue in which Bogart would feel at home (Chandler LG 160).  Indeed, where Chandler’s hero could command a room with his tongue, Gould’s labors to command his own thoughts.  Altman here comically highlights the absurdity of the genre’s conventions, showing how the less-eloquent (normal) American of the 1970’s might go about narrating his life to himself, continuing his mission to destroy an audience’s ideal of detectives on film.  At the same time, perhaps the obvious deficit in verbal prowess shows Altman getting a little serious with his subject, opining a cultural decay and lapse in pride felt since Chandler’s stories saw their high point in the post-war 40’s and 50’s.  That he chooses to do so while making his viewers laugh at the hero rather than cry seems symptomatic of the forced emotional detachment of post-modern art, itself a symptom of the barrage of epistemic violence inflicted on the liberal American by the historic evens unfolding around him in the late 60’s and early 70’s.

Furthermore, while Chandler himself belittles the importance of plot in favor of an emphasis on humanity, Altman seems totally fed up with even the diminished aspects of contrivance conceded by Chandler for plot-hungry mystery readers.  While Chandler’s Marlowe meets up with his (innocent) friend Lennox for a long-winded and Holmesian explanation of the story’s events, Altman jettisons the relatively happy ending for a blunt conclusion and swift justice.  Gould doesn’t explain to (the conveniently guilty) Lennox how he found him or why he cares, he simply takes out a gun and shoots him in the chest, wrapping up the loose ends before they’re even apparent with the twitch of a finger.  While Chandler’s convolutions suggest plot doesn’t matter, Altman’s disposal of them through violence suggests, rather bleakly, that maybe nothing matters.  Marlowe has lost his cat, his restraint, his friend, and his patience for moral nuance, skipping away from his murder victim down a street lined by palm trees.  The President is a crook, inflation is rising, and Cambodia is burning. “Hooray for Hollywood!”

If Altman’s Long Goodbye expresses the frustrations of a post-modern artist with Hollywood and the violence in the world surrounding him, Jody Hill’s Observe and Report depicts a man raised on and reveling in the violence of post-modern Hollywood.  Ronnie Barnhardt, Chief of Mall Security (as he insists on being called) represents the detective as distilled to the concept’s lowest common denominator: he solves, or at least desires to solve, crimes.  The nature of the film’s central crime presents the first indicator of the changing of the times since Chandler conceived Marlowe or even since Altman re-imagined him.  In this film, the detective is called into action not by a murder, but by a pervert in a trench coat flashing unsuspecting women on mall grounds.  Although Hill does not probe the psyche of the flasher, one suspects that he, like Hammet’s killers, commits his crimes for a reason, not just to provide a cock.  Hill chooses perhaps the defining public act of the 21st century, the psycho-sexual compulsion to expose one’s self to as many people as possible, as the launch pad for Ronnie’s investigation.  However, like most of his counterparts in post-modern detection, the mystery he’s investigating may be his own.

In The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler observes that, “in reading The Maltese Falcon, no one concerns himself with who killed Spade’s partner (which is the only formal problem of the story) because the reader is kept thinking about something else” (Chandler 991).   In using Chandler’s basic plot, Altman follows this lead, and Hill does the same in Observe and Report.  The investigation more or less book ends the true story, which is the pursuit of agency by Ronnie Barnhardt.  Unlike many of the genre’s protagonists, including Altman’s Marlowe, Ronnie cannot be said to suffer agency panic, as his entire life experience up to the pervert’s rampage has consisted of a total lack of personal control.  He suffers instead from a reversal of that plight, in which the breakdown of his environment presents the illusion that an entry into society as a responsible human might be possible.  As Ronnie says in the film, he “never really wanted to be a cop before [the flashings],” attaining this desire only after witnessing the respect and control awarded to a real detective, Harrison.

When Harrison arrives to “assist” Ronnie in the investigation of the flashings and a robbery, the latter seeks to impress the true cop with his television-based knowledge of the trade, telling a shoe-store employee to “bag and tag” a shoe laying on the ground.  Despite the wealth of media in which such phrasing is thrown around, even the viewer feels embarrassment for Ronnie in his self-conscious search for approval from an actual expert of a field he truly knows nothing about (despite what he’s seen on TV).  While Marlowe is probably a cultural echelon too high for Ronnie to recognize, he has been entrenched, like most modern Americans, in imitation after imitation of the detection process through nightly programming on CBS and NBC.  Ronnie’s desire to solve the crime is a transparent sheet over his real desire for the respect and admiration due to a TV hero, and the specific rewards that come with stardom.

Ronnie’s interest in the investigation, which he describes as his “chance to be great,” stems entirely from his desire for the two quintessential foundations of 21^st century entertainment: sex and violence.  Upon first learning of the flashings, Ronnie warns the object of his desire, cosmetics merchant Brandy, that she could be next.  Here Ronnie does of his own accord what his predecessors couldn’t help but be drawn into: he creates conspiratorial drama around a nothing incident for his own personal (read: sexual) gain.  He has been raised on films and television to such an extent that he even guarantees Brandy that the pervert will come back and kill her, reveling in clichés of cinematic hysteria to increase her dependence on him.  A large portion of the film deviates entirely from the investigation plot to show Ronnie’s pathetic romantic pursuit of Brandy, a character study of which Chandler may or may not have approved.  That her reluctant dinner with Ronnie culminates in a sexual consummation resembling date rape (although consent is implied) demonstrates Ronnie’s complete reliance on popular culture for his cues.  Just like in a 90’s film, a romantic night out to the mall’s Mexican joint must end in sex.   In his essay, Chandler is “quite certain [his hero] would not spoil a virgin,” and while Brandy is no virgin, Ronnie certainly walks down a street too mean for either of the Marlowes to tread. Ronnie’s outrage at the site of Brandy having sex in the mall parking lot with Detective Harrison signifies the ultimate pedestal on which he places sex (and the total objectification with which he views women), a stark contrast to his predecessors and a clear result of his upbringing in the American decade that opened with Pretty Woman (1990) and closed with American Pie (1999).

While the dominant romantic subplot most directly grounds Ronnie’s motivations as a detective in his disaffected sex obsession, it can be linked through his subconscious with the ultimate motif of detective masculinity: gun fixation.  While perhaps Ronnie would not admit his obsession with sex, he would feel no shame in expounding on his fascination with firearms and his intense desire to carry one legally.  Ironically, this hobby of his (one shared by many a fictional law-man) exposes his most Freudian sexual insecurities.  When Ronnie visits the shooting range with his fellow security guards and opines for the authorization to carry a weapon on duty, the three may as well be complaining that their occupation repulses potential sexual partners.

That Ronnie longs to become a real cop has more than a little to do with that job’s association with guns, and his animosity towards Detective Harrison ultimately amounts to a chronic bout of penis envy.  This is a trait shared with both of the Marlowes, but their different means of dealing with it separate them distinctly into their eras.  Chandler’s hates cops, but not because they have a bigger gun than him, and though he carries a firearm, a classy man of his generation wouldn’t just pull it out in front of anyone. He’d rather use his fists.  Similarly, Altman’s audience never sees or hears of Marlowe’s gun until the final scene, unsurprising for a man seemingly disinterested in sex in an era fed up with the saturation of real-life violence.  That he ultimately kills his friend in cold blood only serves to highlight the pronounced ambivalence of the era and the clouding of notions of masculinity in the 70’s.  When Ronnie follows Gould’s lead and shoots the pervert in Observe and Report’s climax, he really just wants Brandy to know, finally, who has the biggest dick around.  It is this profound sexual insecurity that defines Ronnie Barnhardt as a true product of his time.  In a time when the saturation of the mainstream with pornography’s outlandish proportions has never been higher, men need their own virility validated.  And that is why Ronnie must become a detective.

“In these times, people need something to believe in. I believe good will win out in the end…History will remember my name… Right now, the world needs a fucking hero.”-Ronnie Barnhardt, Observe and Report

Since the creation of detective fiction, the detective and his cases have constantly adapted to the times.  When post (World) war America needed the “greatest man in the world” to walk its mean streets, Raymond Chandler responded in kind with Phillip Marlowe.  In the 70’s, Robert Altman and Elliot Gould were fed up with the bombast of Hollywood and the destruction at the hands of America on the world stage, and their Marlowe embodies the confusion, outrage, and directionlesness of an era with no end in site.  Jody Hill gives post 9/11 America a sleuth from amongst their own: overweight, sociopathic, and irreparably self-conscious.  Despite their differences, a good detective of any era accomplishes one thing in the end: catching the bad guy and causing his death.  Even if this villain commits no crime outside of indecent exposure in front of adults, America needs a man unafraid to shoot to kill.  In this sense, Ronnie Barnhardt is a detective in a class of his own, and who needs class when you carry deadly steel?  As Barnhardt’s performer Seth Rogen states in another law enforcement roll, “having a gun is like having two dicks,” and any detective, no matter how good, can always use a side-kick.

By grounding the show in the genre of a police procedural, the creators of The Wire establish a representational framework from which radical experimentation is possible.  Aside from the sitcom, which hasn’t grown an inch since All in the Family, no TV genre is more standardized and predictable than the cop show.  Audience familiarity with the form works in the favor of these programs, evident from the 15 procedurals on Fall 2009 prime time major network schedules, as mainstream America turns to these repetitive tales of violence and justice as a sort of comfort viewing.  When tuning into one of these programs (generally recognizable by their acronymic titles), one can expect, nearly without fail, to encounter a series of standard elements.  First, the main police characters will model ideal intellectual and moral righteousness in their crusades against crime and pursuits of true justice.  While the criminal may have sympathetic moments, he will be evil opposed to the unassailable good of the police and the victims.  Additionally, the plot will follow a standard episodic formula, in which a crime is committed (on-screen or off) and the police interview a series of suspects leading to a bait-and-switch, in which the audience is led to believe in one suspect’s guilt before the true guilty party is exposed in the final five minutes.  Nearly always, the police bring the criminal to justice in the end.  Given these elements, the comfort derived from such programs seems easily explained.  Police shows confirm notions of right and wrong, reward faith in the justice system, and get the blood flowing strong before wrapping it all up in an agreeable manner.  The Wire is a cop show by appearance and definition, but it does none of these things.

Through the juxtaposition of a truly realistic depiction of the process of law enforcement with an audience’s expectations for the genre, The Wire criticizes not only the form of television drama but also the real life politics of the subjects it depicts.  The first major element of realism distinguishing The Wire from generic police shows (heretofore known as Lawyers and Officers: Comforting Intent, or LAO:CI) is the depiction of the police department itself as an active institution, rather than a moody setting for tense interrogations and convoluted revelations.  The word “active” here applies only in its most basic meaning, in that the Baltimore Police Department affects the characters and plot of the show.  It does not mean that the department “actively” does its duty to “serve and protect,” but instead that its institutional uselessness systematically prevents individual officers from doing so.  The Wire presents an ancient organization corrupted to the core, not by the inherent evil or stupidity depicted in the “bad cops” of LAO:CI but through the constant clash of irreconcilable self-interest.  If The Wire’s focus lay solely on individual character interactions, as with LAO:CI, it’s intended themes might not seem so unique.  The presence of nearly as many budget meetings as criminal interrogations, however, shows the creators’ slavish devotion to real-world relevance.  Certainly, daring detectives solve crimes through ingenuity and empathy in the real world, but not if no one pays them for it.  As stated on each season of The Wire, cases “turn green before they turn black [solved],” and when green must sneak its way through a massive bureaucracy, it seems that black rarely turns up.  Most cop shows neglect such systematic function entirely, and The Wire’s respect for its central role adds a level of realism wholly absent from the major TV landscape.

Because of it’s emphasis on the futility of real-world institutions, The Wire cannot function dramatically in the same way as the traditionally representational LAO:CI.  Since Dragnet, these shows have operated on the basic structure of the crime, the investigation, and the solution.  The Wire, as a narrative critiquing the institution, depicts many crimes and investigations but many breakdowns on the road to the solution.  The procedural aspect is present, and thus comments on the failure of traditional cop shows to represent reality.  The detectives almost resemble their LAO:CI counterparts, interviewing witnesses, tearing up, kissing girls and reviewing case files.  They usually even solve the “mysteries” of the crime accurately, but find themselves unable to achieve convictions because of the system’s small print and political soft stepping.  The characters grow in their outright disgust, not towards the criminals they investigate (like LAO:CI), but the hierarchy (established through a series of unworthy promotions) that prevents any true justice.  The audience shares this frustration with the characters, allowing a point of accessibility in a work that subverts the traditional areas of emotional entrance.  While LAO:CI maintains a massive audience by comforting the viewer with warm and cozy blood and guts morality, effective criticism cannot be comfortable, and as a serious indictment of the failure of law enforcement and society, The Wire seeks to infuriate the viewer.  The anger that The Wire inspires emanates not only from what the viewers see on screen, but from how closely it resembles what they read in the headlines of their local paper (or what they should read, as the show’s fifth season addresses), and how often their favorite “realistic” shows forget about it.

Although The Wire establishes an experimental mode through uncommon levels of realism and commentary, the show’s boldest experimentation comes through plot choices that not only illustrate the flaws of society, but also question how things could be different.  While the first two seasons model the adherence to reality discussed above, subsequent seasons build a sort of informed fantasy on top of the foundation of realism, creating social experiments whose results play out with respectable believability due to the apparent veracity of what has come before.  Like the LAO:CI special effects artists who convince the audience of the accuracy of their organ splatters, The Wire’s viewers believe that a controlled legalization of narcotics might resemble the drama shown on screen.  Such a plot development is fantasy, a trial utterly unlikely to exist in the political landscape of present day America.  It is a fantasy, however, based in the spirit of realism, using characters that exist believably in as complete a real world as television has seen, to ask questions about real society.  Although the creators fictionalize dramatic answers, the viewers know that the truth lies in the very asking of the question.  Mainstream society won’t ask, and neither will its television programs.  Indeed, the only significant (and believable) fictionalized answer the show presents is that those who dare to ask will be punished accordingly.  The LAO:CI networks, perhaps, don’t covet the position of The Wire’s mayor, stuck in charge of the few system cogs willing to turn the other way and see what might happen.

Television police dramas follow the blueprint so closely that their “art” seems to worship the establishment it depicts.  That a vast audience eats it up and swallows it all as “realism” sticks hard in the sides of the creators of The Wire.  While Lawyers and Officers: Comforting Intent “represents” very little with accuracy and still sits as mainstream’s definitive view of law enforcement, The Wire plays on this common acceptance with some representation of its own, striving to capture the disturbing big picture that the formula leaves out.  Crimes are committed, crimes are solved, and criminals go to jail.  These things often occur in reality, but the crime is all too often followed with nothing.  The Wire shows how the complexity of the system allows and even causes this nothing to follow, indicting the institutions of America and suggesting that even when the most well-meaning individuals come together, self-interest remains the unavoidable saboteur of progress.  LAO:CI cannot achieve these levels of critique and experimentation.  It must support the institutions that The Wire tears down, because the mainstream must retain its faith in their functionality.  The Wire has no comforting intent.

On October 4^th, 2009, my father finished mowing his lawn and lit a stogie in his sitting room before suffering a circulatory failure that gently closed his time with us on earth.  A poetic coda for a man who took pleasure in few things more than those that punctuated his life.  He loved to cut grass, loved cigars, loved to stretch out his overheated limbs on the cold ground as he caught his breath.  And then it was over, cell phone untouched in his pocket and no signs of pain.  Just shy of 62, that final Sunday moment came much too soon, but could not have come much more perfectly.

The events in the days that followed certainly would have given him a heart attack.  On Thursday, his Missouri Football Tigers blew a 12-point lead in the second half against hated Nebraska.  On Saturday, the St. Louis Cardinals ended their thunderous season with an embarrassing whimper of a 3 game sweep to the LA Dodgers.  On the Friday in between, Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace prize.  With his children thriving and his work a success, a man like him needed things to be angry about, and no conceivable sequence of events could have possibly turned his face more red.  All of it’s now a punch line to a dark joke his ghost won’t ever stop laughing at.

The day before my father’s mother died, she told someone nearby of her dream the night before.  She dreamed that she was sitting on the porch in Memphis where she grew up, and saw her Grandmother walking slowly down the old street towards her.

On October 4^th, 2009, my father told my mother on the phone about his dreams.  They were strange dreams, he thought they meant something.  He saw his own mother and father in the places of his past.

Then he cut the grass and lit a cigar.

Loretta Bell: How’d you sleep?
Ed Tom Bell: I don’t know. Had dreams.
Loretta Bell: Well you got time for ‘em now. Anythin’ interesting?
Ed Tom Bell: They always is to the party concerned.
Loretta Bell: Ed Tom, I’ll be polite.
Ed Tom Bell: Alright then. Two of ‘em. Both had my father in ‘em . It’s peculiar. I’m older now then he ever was by twenty years. So in a sense he’s the younger man. Anyway, first one I don’t remember too well but it was about meeting him in town somewhere, he’s gonna give me some money. I think I lost it. The second one, it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin’ through the mountains of a night. Goin’ through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin’. Never said nothin’ goin’ by. He just rode on past… and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin’ fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. ‘Bout the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and he was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

October 27, 1947 – October 4, 2009