Kafka and the HBO series 'The Wire'

Spoiler alert: I will be mentioning plot lines that occur in the last season of The Wire. So if you haven’t seen the last season, you might not want to read this.

In the final episode of the Wire, Bubbles quotes Kafka:

“You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps the holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.”

I was so enthralled with this quote that I decided to do some research on Kafka. My research led me to an essay written by Milan Kundera about Kafka. Although this essay was written about Kafka, it could have easily been about the wire. Whereas many fans have likened the wire to Dickens and Dostoyevski, I think the most apropos analogy is Kafka. In order to do this, I am going to expound on Kundera’s comments on Kafka and relate it to the wire.

Kundera: “[Kafka] has transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job (which is actually the store of The Castle) into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.”

Sh-eee-it, if that doesn’t encapsulate much of the allure of the wire, I don’t know what does. What makes the wire so amazing is that it makes the complexity of American bureaucracies so intriguing and entertaining. It doesn’t fall prey to sterile Hollywood clichés such as over-the-top car chases and/or unrealistic superheroes who swoop in to save the day. They weave this web of all this interconnecting elements but instead of connecting them through typical plot devices like a handsome lead actor or the closure of killing the bad guy, they connect it through the city. Kundera points to this: “Novelists before Kafka often exposed institutions as arenas where conflicts between different personal and public interests were played out. In Kafka the institution is a mechanism that obeys its own laws; no one knows now who programmed those laws or when; they have nothing to do with human concerns and are thus unintelligible.” Instead of putting the bureaucracy in the background, the wire places bureaucracy iin the foreground, constantly dictating the plot’s progressions, digressions, and regressions. And it is in the constant frustrations with bureaucracy, the creative ways around bureaucracy, and the inevitable reconciliations with bureaucracy that makes the show so amazing. Even though I might use the word ‘bureaucracy’ and ‘city’, the show itself is able to point to the nameless without ever giving it a name. It visualizes the claustrophobic nature that societal/institutional logic has wrought upon us without ever being explicit. It is as if the bureaucracy is the steady back beat of the base drum, acting as metronome to the city. That even though each part of the city might be dancing to its own tune, if you can capture the light just right, you can see that everybody is dancing to the same beat. The Wire attunes itself to the city of Baltimore and arranges the bureaucratic complexities, the different constituencies, and contradictory impulses into a minuet to be danced.



Kundera: “There are tendencies in modern history that produce the Kafkan in the broad social dimension: the progressive concentration of power, tending to deify itself; the bureaucratization of social activity that turns all institutions into boundless labyrinths; and the resulting depersonalization of the individual.”

The Wire captures the Kafka-esque qualities that Baltimore has come to take on. In the case of the public officials, it is the deification of the election cycle. For the public officials, everything comes down to the need to get elected. It is the need to get elected that transforms an idealist into an instrumentalist (Carcetti); forces a reformist to become a defeatist (Daniels); turns a good cop into a corrupt cop (McNulty). For the people on the street, it is the deification of the drug game. It is what motivated Cheese to kill Prop. Joe; it is what brings Marlo back onto the corners; it is what makes Snoop Snoop. This gravitational pull of this power is captured yet again by Kundera: “wherever power deifies itself, it automatically produces its own theology; wherever it behaves like God, it awakens religious feelings toward itself; such a world can be described in theological terms.” This is what brings Marlo back; it is what brings Omar back; it is why people can never leave Baltimore.



Kundera: “In the world of the Kafkan, the comic is not a counterpoint to the tragic (the tragic-comic) as in Shakespeare; it’s not there to make the tragic more bearable by lightening the tone; it doesn’t accompany the tragic, not at all, it destroys it in the egg and thus deprives the victims of the only consolation they could for…Indeed, a joke is a joke only if you’re outside the bowl; by contrast, the Kafkan takes us inside, into the guts of a joke, into the horror of the comic.”

McNulty’s alcoholism and adultery is meant to be comical, along with Bubbles’ drug addiction and Senator Davis’ corrupt dealings. And within the very core of this comicality lies the horror; the horror that any and every good cop is bound to be licentious; the horror that drugs are so inevitably engrained within the fabric of this society; the horror that political corruption is so normalized and accepted. Every laugh is subsequently followed by a cringe, if only because it takes me a second to unpack what exactly is it that is so comical. The more the depravity, the bigger the laugh.



Kundera: “In the Kafkan world, man’s physical existence is only a shadow cast on the screen of illusion…shadows without even the right to exist as shadows.”

This seems spot on to describe how the Wire is trying to describe the plight of young black men growing up in Baltimore. What perhaps best personifies this is what happens to Omar at the end. Not even the Robin Hood of Baltimore can get a byline in the paper, let alone the correct name on his body bag. Also, when Dukie is reminiscing with Michael and Michael won’t even allow himself to remember, that just says it all. Not even allowed to be remembered; not even allowed to have memories. It is perhaps best summed up by Marlo when he found out Omar was after him: “my name is my name.” I take that to mean that his name is all he got. Without that he is nothing. This is somewhat ironic since being the drug kingpin, publicity is the last thing you’d think he want. And yet, even that was taken away from him. The one thing that made him a shadow was taken from him from his most loyal subordinates. Sh-eee-it.


Thus, to call the wire Dickensian or even Dostoyevskian is to do an injustice to the primacy institutions and social structures play and the subsequent comedic depravity and the concomitant depersonalization of a whole race of people that that comes with. The Wire captures the beauty of America’s depravity in much the same way a eulogy can capture a loved one’s life. It is an artistry steeped in bitterness and sorrow that can be too personal for some and too distant for others. But for the rare few that it does strike a chord with, it resonates long after the final credits roll.