The Wire: Jimmy McNulty

If you were hard pressed to name a "star" of The Wire, it would be Jimmy McNulty. McNulty bounces around working in the Homicide Division of the Baltimore Police Department to being a detective on a Major Case Squad to being assigned to the Marine Unit, then back to the Major Case Squad, then choosing to work in the Western District as an ordinary patrolman to back at the Homicide Division.

There's a reason for all of McNulty's moving around - McNulty is a real pain-in-the-ass. To put it bluntly, McNulty's attitude towards authority is one of disdain. In most dramas, this would set up McNulty to be the real hero, a situation in cop dramas which is now even parodied on The Simpsons, the "rebel cop against his stuck-up supervisors", a trope which traces its way all the way about to Dirty Harry and earlier.

However, The Wire makes sure that we do not see McNulty as someone completely admirable. McNulty is a borderline alcoholic (and crosses the border somewhat in Season Five) and he has already burned through one relationship. His wife has divorced him due to his lying, his catting around and his drinking and raises McNulty's two children on her own. McNulty has visitation rights but his wife does not want him to see the kids, which might have been a deliberate choice by David Simon in order to foster some sympathy for McNulty. Whenever McNulty's wife, Elena, makes an appearance it is either to serve McNulty papers, or to deny McNulty visitation on some weekend, or to bump into McNulty while she's at a baseball came with her boyfriend, a successful lawyer.

However, alcohol and sex were only a few of the reasons the relationship crashed. The other reason was McNulty's role as a detective. Simon doesn't make McNulty the noble detective - Simon stated that McNulty is a detective more for the individual thrill of solving a case than for any other higher goal. This is probably true about a lot of our jobs, we do them because they give us personal pleasure or solve some ulterior purpose rather than loving our jobs for some truly altruistic purpose. As a result, McNulty is prepared to chase a case to the ends of the earth, and God helps who gets in his ways.

In the beginning of the season, McNulty has already worn out his welcome with his current supervisor, William Rawls, who is glad to dump McNulty into the Major Case Unit being formed by Cedric Daniels. Daniels needs manpower, and several departments have availed themselves of the opportunity to "dump their humps", i. e. get rid of their least productive detectives. McNulty is dumped into the Unit but proves to be one of its most effective members....

...but at a cost. Lawrence J. Peter proposed that there were two types of competence in this world, "output" and "input". "Output" is simply doing what your job requires - a widget maker who can't make widgets will be out on the street. "Input" is preserving the hierarchy, or the institution - a widget major who makes widgets very well but who keeps his superiors in an uproar will find himself out on the street.

McNulty, simply, cannot make the compromises that one must make in order to get along at one's job. If there's something that needs to be done, he'll do it and he doesn't care what kind of relationship he has to run over to get there. We see this in McNulty's berating of Lieutenant Daniels - his superior - in the first season when Daniels can't move fast enough on something to suit McNulty. Daniels has to juggle several balls to keep the investigation moving and keep the Unit alive, but McNulty frankly doesn't care. His needs have to take precedence over everyone else's, he has a case to solve.

Definitely, McNulty is recognized as being good at what he does. In Season Five, he is recognized by Sergeant Jay Landsman - nobody's "best friend pal" -as "real murder police", the highest compliment that can be given to any officer, an informal accolade which states that McNulty is a true detective in every sense of the word. Despite that, Landsman and McNulty's relationship is largely adversarial. When McNulty begins his work on the Red Ribbon Killer - a serial killer ostensibly killing Baltimore's homeless - Landsman is sick of McNulty's whining for more resources and treats McNulty's requests with apathy.

McNulty, meanwhile, deliberately strikes back. In Season Two, as a Marine Unit officer he creates a file related to a "floater", or dead body in the water, and through painstaking work proves that the body was murdered in the part of the Cheseapeake that is within Baltimore city limits, shoving an unwanted and potentially unsolvable murder onto the Baltimore Police Department, hiking up its uncleared murder rate. There would be 13 more bodies he would add to Baltimore's murder rate simply by showing that they lay within the BPD's jurisdiction, making him no one's friend at the BPD, where the crime rate stats and clearance numbers are worshiped.

In Season Four - where actor Dominic West was unavailable for much of the season - McNulty seems happiest. He has returned to the simple life of a patrolman and is beginning a relationship with Officer Beadie Russell. He has stopped drinking and it looks like he can recreate his former life again, with Russell's two kids partially replacing his own.

But in Season Five, it all falls apart. After a long investigation with Major Crimes that yields no results, the unit is closed down and McNulty is back with homicide. By now, the city is facing a budget crisis that has extended into every department, including the police department and the lack of money makes it very difficult to do effective homicide work. He begins drinking again - even more heavily than before - and his new relationship is in jeopardy. This sets up McNulty's fall as he goes outside of the rules for what would be the final time.

Someone once wrote about saints, and that there is a difference between saints and priests as it were. A priest preserves the hierarchy; the saint defies it. Saints are venerated, but what is forgotten is that in their societies, the saints were actually rebels.

McNulty is the rebel saint. Like real saints, he disrupts the hierarchy and his demands on the institution proved to be those that the institution will not meet - institutions will never dissolve or change themselves on the demands of one person, no matter how persuasive or influential. In the end, he faces the same fate that every other saint in the world faces - persecution. It could be said that saints bring all the trouble on themselves, and if they could just bend a little....!

And McNulty is no saint. To McNulty, the end partially justifies the means. He's not out to become a version of Dirty Harry, and is not the kind of policeman that wants to be judge, jury, and executioner - he just can't see why all these details have to get in the way. At first, you think "well, at least he won't do anything truly dishonest" but in the end he even crosses that final barrier. His ends were the noblest, but they threatened the very heart of the institution he worked for and finally got the attention of powers even McNulty couldn't work his way around.

In the end, despite the fact that he might have been their best detective, the Baltimore Police Department could not compromise itself enough to work with Jimmy McNulty. But McNulty could also not compromise himself, could not "go along to get along". In the end, one institution remains and one detective is out on his ass. Such is the way of the world.

The Wire: The City of Baltimore

"The suspect is most likely a white male in his late twenties to late thirties, who is not a college graduate, but feels superior to those with advanced education, and is likely employed in a bureaucratic entity, possibly civil or public service. He has a problem with authority and a deep-seated resentment for those that have impeded his progress professionally. The sexual nature of the killings is thought to be a secondary motivation and the lack of DNA or saliva in the bite marks suggests possible postmortem staging. He may be struggling with lasting relationships and potentially a high functioning alcoholic with alcohol being used as a trigger in the crimes. The suspect’s apparent resentment of the homeless may indicate a previous personal relationship with a homeless person or the targeting may simply be an opportunity for the killer to assert his superiority and intellectual prowess."

-FBI profile on the (phony) "Red Ribbon Killer"


There are generally two kinds of television shows: those that you like, those that you respect, and both.

For example, I liked Star Trek in its various incarnations. It was enjoyable, and it had an extensive and complex backhistory. However, I never really respected Star Trek. Yes, I loved the show but I realized that Star Trek: Whatever required suspension of disbelief, very much so at times. There were several annoying tropes upon which the episodes rested, namely technobabble and the reset button being the worst of those. It became preachy when the quality of the episodes wasn't high enough to give the franchise the right to be preachy. It was entertaining television, and might have been decent science-fiction in its 1960s incarnation, but by the 2000s it had become a cartoon and was abandoned by its former audience. I used to watch every episode; now I have no use for the franchise.

There are also the shows you respect: most of them can be found on Masterpiece Theatre, usually a BBC production of one of the Jane Austen novels. You know that the show is probably quite good and the acting is superb. Watching shows like that, however, is something like eating the broccoli on your plate. It's good for you, but you realize that the investment you put in is going to be a difficult one. There's not a lot of entertainment to be found, you'll come away impressed with what you see but it's just a hard slog all the way through.

Then there are shows that are both. I'd like to think that Daria is one, although some of the episodes of Daria are quite week. I like Daria because in the late 1990s it was sort of a trope-busting show. Its protagonist was an intelligent female who wasn't at all "girly" but at the same time not a tomboy. Her life not only didn't revolve around the stuff of your typical teenage girl protagonist drama - dates and popularity - but the show's message was that the protagonist rejected the culture as shallow and insufficient. At the same time, the show was not really meant to be an adult show or a serious examination of the issues in teen life. (I think My So-Called Life got closer.) Daria is a show that I think about frequently. Was it one of the great unsung comedy-dramas or is it a massive waste of time?

The other show I want to write about is The Wire. Ostensibly, The Wire is your standard cops-and-robbers drama - the show gets its name from wiretaps on drug dealers. The main character of The Wire, however, isn't any one person but a city, the city of Baltimore. In particular, the main character is the institutions that shape the city and shape every hierarchy in the city, from the police department to the drug game to the unions to the schools to the mayor's office. The theme - if there is one - is that these institutions take on a life of their own, and instead of human beings bending the institutions to serve their purpose, the reverse is true. The institutions warp people to preserve themselves.

I believe Robert Pirsig in Lila wrote that the city might actually be a form of life in the way that a colony of ants is a form of a life - there are the needs of the ant, and then the needs of the colony. People like to believe that they're independent agents but their actions fulfill what the institution needs; if they do not, the institution strikes back to preserve itself. As Pirsig put it, we might believe we can function independently and do what we want in society but that would be like two white cells speaking with each other and one saying, "I can't imagine anything out there more complex than we are."

At the "white cell" level the show is about the many agents who play a role in the life of Baltimore. These agents include:

- the men and women of the Baltimore Police Department, in particular the "murder police" or the Homicide Division
- the chain of command of the BPD from its sergeants to its highest levels
- the Baltimore school system, particularly the inner city schools: both the teachers and the students are examined as agents
- the street, in particular the corner-level drug dealers, hustlers, and other figures
- the drug kingpins, both inside and outside Baltimore
- the mayor's office and the politicians who have power de jure and the ones who have power de facto
- those in the court system
- the union workers on the docks
- the journalists of the Baltimore Sun, from the beat reporters to the editorial staff

I believe it might have been UU who turned Scissors MacGillicutty on to The Wire. Snips, in the meantime, turned me on to it. So as a reward, I'm going to give my random thoughts about various wire characters over the next few months.
Stay tuned.