... against those tangled in The Wire
From 2009
A few of those 104 comments survive on emails…this was my final one in the thread.
if one had any doubt about the politics of the show, the fact that the climax of this bloodbath crescendo is the spectacle of that baby blowing the brains out of the audience "favourite" and doing so in a way instantly indelibly memorable not only because it's the "surprising" death of the one star who could have a spin off but because running in the already permanent groove of the fabulously famous Michael Corleone in the Arthur Avenue resto, settles the matter emphatically. The child (whose deed can't be supported by any appeals to verisimilitude but has to be defended as comedy or "poetry" of one sort or another) becomes the complete picture of all this carnage and cruelty, the figure of the historical movement of making worthless of human life - the image, the bearer and avatar of those forces; the scene's absurdity is disguised enough to pass because it is the beneficiary of the illusion of "realism" which precedes it, a justification that is a con from the start and only gets more flexible, and which spreads its protective wings over the quirkly unexpected and the pseudo-typical alike (because isn't real life just like that? with some things happening stranger than fiction?)...