David Simon is a social force unto himself. Noted journalist, writer and producer, Simon has the uncanny ability to find the story in the lives of common people. First coming to national attention with his work on Baltimore Maryland's Homicide Department, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, Simon converted his words into a critically acclaimed television series, in which, Simon defined his technique and revealed his intentions. Simon's intentions were and are simple and obvious, he believes the audience should understand the lives of those that live at the margins of a carefully crafted bourgeois delusion. The lost the forgotten those that struggle and those that no longer have the strength to struggle are the focus of Simon's work. In the television show Homicide we see the corrosive world of violent crime through the eyes of Homicide Detectives and even then Simon makes us feel not only the despair of the detectives looking for perpetrators but the perpetrators themselves.
Simon's work constantly examines people navigating systems. Whether those systems are the criminal justice systems or in his little remembered prelude to The Wire, The Corner, the underworld of drug addicts. Focusing on the actual McCollough family of West Baltimore, the book and television series charts the effects of the drug trade and addiction on the lives of Baltimore's citizens.
By examining one family's fall, Simon's gives us a fractal of drug life in contemporary US cities.
The Corner's power is its attention to the details of the lives of its characters and how they recognize the system in which they live. Whether, formal or informal, all of Simon's characters recognize themselves as a part of a larger process of gains and losses (systems) and make use of the resources at hand to fulfill what they believe their needs to be. Certainly one has to credit Simon not just for his intention but as well his attention to issues that affect the lives of African Americans. Whether in his writings or in his television work, a hall mark of Simon's work is the preponderance on Black people in the worlds he creates. Unlike most televison writers, Simon understands there are spaces where the occasional white face is just that occasional. Accordingly, just as powerful as the depiction of the clusterfuck around the US "War on Drugs", the deterioration of the US urban space as a result of the "war", and more than the chronicling of decay through the atrophy of US political, cultural and social spaces, Simon's epic series The Wire, inverts the conventions of normativity. The world of the Wire is one that functions under the weight of the rules of its needs. Like the manner in which gravity warps time and space, the gravity of the rules of "The Game" in The Wire warps the rules of mainstream ideology and television morals (Note: Simon's depiction of the "Game" is not just the drug game but any act of vying for power and control in a competitive system. Hence any and all can be players because life itself is a/the "Game"). It's a world wherein those ground under the heels of power determine what is right and sound and relevant. It is a world where those subject to the rules of others create their own rules. It is a world viewed through the eyes of society's overlooked and forgotten folk. Like Frankenstein's "monster" the genius of Simon's attention to these characters is the clarity of their understanding of the circumstances into which they have been thrown. Game peeps game and they are well aware of the hypocrisy, callousness and parasitic nature of those that would rule them.
However this does not override Simon's central concern of telling untold stories of people existing in circumstances beyond their control. Simon's 2008 HBO project Generation Kill is a revisiting of the George W. Bush Iraq War (not to be confused with the George H. W. Bush Persian Gulf War. I swear you can't make this s*** up). Documenting the Road to Baghdad as experienced by a Marine platoon, the series constantly confronts the ambiguity and ambivalence of the foot soldiers' perceptions of the war and its hype. Simon delivers a powerful anti-war message not through jingoism and pedantry but just by introducing the viewer to the realities of those fighting the battles.
Simon's most recent project documents what have been argued to be America's truly forgotten people, the New Orleans survivors of 2005's Hurricane Katrina. Ill prepared for the storm by government incompetence and under-served in its recovery by party politics, New Orleans serves as a perfect example of Simon's condemnation of the forces that dis-serve American life but his celebration of the tenacity of those lives. In its 3rd season, Treme, named after the neighborhood in New Orleans that developed many of the cities most distinctive cultural forms, the show follows a group of New Orleans residents as they rebuild their post Katrina lives. Musicians, cops, lawyers, teachers, carpenters and business people, Simon focuses on the the folk who have decided to work within the boundaries of the system. Unlike The Wire's cast, Treme's character's don't flirt with the underground or prey upon others for power and position but are as Omar Little would call them, "citizens". This attention to workers in "straight" life is what makes the story so much more shattering, as even those loyal to the rules of the formal order, even after its breakdown, are betrayed and exploited. Treme is the other side of the The Wire, as the 'citizens" get their voice in the midst of the chaos, mendacity and corruption that is New Orleans repairing itself.
Reality tv should be the depiction of the real lives of real people. Crassly materialistic noveau riche divas pursuing empty headed lives in Atlanta or "I should have gone to college" media monsters drunk on the Jersey Shore are not exemplary of the way people live their lives. It's not real. David Simon takes reality serious. David Simon takes the American conscience seriously. David Simon takes politics and culture as instruments of power, expression and human enhancement, seriously. If you want to know what topics the presidential candidates should be answering questions about, if you want to get a sense of what issues need to be front and center in the national dialogue, than you should be watching reality tv as David Simon understands it.
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