Assignment 2: Realism and Surrealism

If your friend asked you to describe The Wire and Ghost Dog, on a certain level they would sound pretty similar to one another.  Because they do have a lot in common.  They are both gangster movies.  They take place in desolate urban settings. They feature African-American males in leading roles. Copious amounts of gunplay?  Check.  Plenty of R-rated language?  Check.   But... what do they really have in common?

My contention is that, despite many generic similarities, The Wire and Ghost Dog represent two very different modes of telling a story.  (Generic here means: related to genre - the genre of the noir gangster film.)  The Wire has an ensemble cast, a linear plot that moves forward towards the future, and it develops this plot through dialogue-intensive sequences.  It is a modern realist drama: a fictional story that attempts to both convincingly depict unjust social conditions: and it occurs in the aftermath of the urban economic segregation described by Ta-Nehisi Coates.   It uses the  popular modern genre of the police procedural to make more general social commentary about inner-city Baltimore.  For this reason, Linda Williams argues that it extends this genre in certain important respects, that it represents a new type of narrative about race in the US that we have rarely seen before.  Finally, many have understood The Wire to be allegorical: it represents a neighborhood in urban Baltimore, but attempts to make this setting represent conditions in the United States more broadly. 

On the other hand, Ghost Dog - well, ancient Japan was a pretty weird place.  Ghost Dog is intertextual, recursive, and post-modern.  It relies heavily on techniques of estrangement.  The gangsters are old guys without any money, characters seem to understand each other without speaking the same language, and everyone is watching cartoons on old grainy TVs.  The story involves several key misunderstandings, relies crucially on flashbacks that may not be reliable, and seems to involve miscommunication on several levels.  It is heavily symbolic (bears, pigeons, cartoons, cars, pistols) and referential (ancient texts, W.E.B. DuBois, The Wind in The Willows.) However, the referent of these many symbols is obscure - we are not clearly told what the narrative is supposed to mean or what these symbols and references are supposed to add up to. 

Long story short: these two movies mean two very different things.  It begs the question: how does form influence meaning?  How do two works that seem to belong to a similar generic framework produce such different responses?

To answer these questions:

1.  Decide a basis for comparison.  This may be a specific scene that you find important, a formal element (for instance: the use of music, the way dialogue is scripted, the use of light, etc) or a theme common to both of the pieces: (for instance: representation of violence, ideologies of race, use of media technology, etc)  Or it could an qualitative basis: was there a text that you preferred?  Was one more impactful, more poignant, more meaningful? 

2.  Using this framework, examine the different meanings that Ghost Dog and The Wire produce.  Questions that you might want to consider are: What kind of response do these movies elicit?  Who are they for? How might different audiences react to these texts?  Do either of them try to convince us of an ideological perspective?  What would that perspective be?

As always, you don't need to consider all of the points I mention here.  A thoughtful response on the issues you feel are most important is more than enough.  It is likely that you might want to discuss one of the texts in greater detail than the other: this is to be expected, and A-OK.  Simply try to keep both texts in mind as a basis for comparison.  And finally, Linda Williams' excellent chapter on The Wire is a great resource.