Dark Brown Waffles

If you ask the critics, Treme is a polarizing show, mostly because it isn’t The Wire: New Orleans. These critics have imagined a show and are subsequently disappointed when the action on the screen doesn’t match their own hopes and aspirations. As somebody who has defended everybody’s right to interpret art in whatever way they want to I feel the need to clarify the following: believing this doesn’t mean I have to like that interpretation. 

New Orleans insiders are understandably incensed about this article from Salon. The show is once again being pilloried for accurately capturing the horrors of New Orleans after Katrina: the random violence, the crushing heartbreak, the despair. Why? What else is the show supposed to do, I wonder?

The answer to that, according to Salon’s Matt Seitz, is being more like The Wire, which never featured the sort of anonymous violence that Treme’s viewers were witness to Sunday night. I’d say Ray Nola pretty well crushes that claim from the perspective of New Orleanians, but even as an outsider, I can safely say that this Seitz’s claim is utter horseshit. Let’s deal with that here:

LaDonna was shutting the place down when one of the rapists knocked on the exterior gate with a false story about wanting directions to a local club and needing to use her phone. She called the cops (fat lot of good that did, with response times so poor), waited a bit, then tried to leave, only to find the same man and a partner loitering menacingly near the back door. When she retreated inside and tried to shut the door behind her, they pushed it open and followed her in, then advanced on her as she tried to fend them off with a bat.

Rght from the outset, you can object. LaDonna’s call the police went unheeded because, per the police operator, her situation wasn’t immediate or dangerous enough. She was told to call the non-emergency line. This sets up the noxious insistence of the police later on, who repeatedly demand to speak to LaDonna as if time is now of the essence.

And it’s at this point that the episode started to feel somehow off. These young men were almost literally faceless; the first was seen through a gate, his face partly obscured by his hoodie, and the second was just a menacing creature, Thug No. 2. When they edged closer to LaDonna in the bar, they were immersed in darkness, practically shadows: Not people, but THE OTHERS. I can’t recall another act of violence on this show or “The Wire” that turned perpetrators of violent crime into wraithlike abstractions, like something out of  a “Death Wish” movie.

Again, the facts are wrong:

1. The Death Wish movies always featured cartoon caricatures of violent criminals that you had to know to enjoy the movies, if such a thing was possible. Why did you have to know them? So you’d enjoy it when Paul Kersey got his revenge throughout the rest of the film.

2. He can’t remember an act of violence committed by wraithlike figures? Let’s ignore the fact that violence is sometimes committed by wraithlike figures. Let’s also ignore Ray Nola’s example of Kima’s shooting during the first season of The Wire. Focus instead on Bodie’s death from Season Four, in which he dies defending his corner, shot in the back of the head by somebody that has been assumed to have been Michael but never actually confirmed. He spends the entire scene shooting at ghosts only to be taken out by somebody he never saw coming.

I don’t harp on all this in order to plead for a sympathetic treatment of rapists on film, but to emphasize how un-David Simon-like the handling of this whole subplot seemed. The scenes themselves and their placement within the episode showed poor judgment, which is an observation I have never before made about a Simon series.

It was “un-David-Simon-like” in the author’s head, not in reality. Violent things happen in his shows. Violent things happen(ed) in New Orleans. It isn’t unreasonable to assume that violent things were going to happen in David Simon’s show about New Orleans. The notion that LaDonna’s rape is indicative of poor judgement is all the author has in his hand: his own expectations. He was disappointed with it - and I think there is conversation to be had about that point - but lets not pretend that one critic’s expectations can be conflated with facts. 

The run-up to the rape was a more intense and horrifying cousin of the other crimes depicted in this episode; in many of them you never saw the crimes themselves, just looted apartments and houses and that one shot of a dreadlocked perp glowering on the hood of a squad car while cops cuffed him. New Orleans’ late-aughts crime epidemic destroyed the city’s post-storm unity and created an “us vs. them” mentality, even though in most cases the “us” and the “them” were denizens of the same city and had endured many of the same traumas. That’s tragic and fascinating, and a great subject for Season 2 of “Treme.” And yes, future episodes do explore this dynamic in slightly more depth (emphasis on “slightly”).

Nevertheless, what came through in Sunday night’s episode (to me, at least) was a desire to shock viewers and shake up the series a bit. Bottom line: “Treme” handled the assault in a way that diminished LaDonna and the seriousness of her story. Simon and series co-creator Eric Overmyer have been staunch about treating every character and subplot as more or less equal; this was apparently Simon’s philosophy on “The Wire.” But there are times when I think a series has to budge from that philosophy, and take advantage of series TV’s capacity to be elastic, and stretch to emphasize particular stories and downplay (or ignore) others. What happened to LaDonna was so harrowing that it should have been given more prominence.

What does “more prominence” mean? Perhaps a voiceover before the opening montage, “Tonight, on a Very Special Episode of Treme…”; perhaps treating it like it was an after school special? Again, what we’re seeing is an author who wants a different show, something other than what he’s voluntarily sitting down each week to watch. 

There’s no reason why the episode should have shown the rape itself, but I wanted to see more of her valiant struggle against her attackers. Instead the director cut away as soon as she picked up a bat, which struck me as an insult to the character’s indomitable strength. And the hospital and recovery scenes were meager and perfunctory. All in all, LaDonna got just a few scenes, mostly short and clinical — and in the second half of the episode she was mostly AWOL, returning for a haunting but rather blank final close-up. Whenever the episode cut away from her ordeal to show Antoine’s band rehearsals or Sonny (Michiel Huisman) looking for a job or Delmond Lambreaux (Rob Brown) worrying about whether to fire his manager, it felt like a colossal failure of common sense. A beloved character was raped and beaten to a pulp. The emphasis should have been on her.  Other subplots could have been compressed or put on hold until the following week because they’re of a different order of magnitude.

What valiant struggle? What does the author think that rape is? It is an ugly, brutal thing. He inexplicably seems as if he’d like his rape packaged differently. He then entirely misses the point of the scenes at the hospital and back at home in Baton Rouge - there isn’t cascading music after a rape. There’s the cold reality of it for the victim. Maybe we’d like to pretend that something else happens, but something else doesn’t happen. Maybe Marlo Stanfield can say it better.

This is what David Simon does to beloved characters. There was no parade for The Wire’s Omar when he got shot and killed. He was and remains the most beloved of David Simon’s characters, but when it was over for him, he got misidentified in the morgue and life moved on. Nobody’s life stops because LaDonna got raped. Sonny doesn’t stop looking for work. Antoine doesn’t stop trying to have a band. Delmond doesn’t stop trying to be successful.

The subject of the entire episode was systemic failure: post-Katrina, the city of New Orleans flat-out wasn’t functioning. And for a variety of reasons (some internal, others external) it failed the basic test of government competence by failing to defend property and people against crime. That thesis came through loud and clear; it was expressed in the scenes of people trying and failing to seek redress for their burglarized property and witnessing displays of overwhelming force by the police. “Could you cut me a break, please?” burglary victim Janette Desautel (Kim Dickens) asked a government official, begging for help after being turned away for not arriving on her “appointed day.” “If I cut you a break, I’d have to cut everyone else a break,” the official replied, “and then where would be be?” “I don’t know. We’d all get a break, then? Wouldn’t that be a nightmare, huh?”

We want to believe that what Janette says changed the way that administrator did business, changed the way Road To Home did business, changed the way that the entire relief effort did business. But you know what? It doesn’t. Although Janette’s lament accurately captured what everybody at home was thinking (and what everybody in New Orleans was probably thinking at the time), it was meaningless, because the game remained precisely the same. If you want a show where Janette’s lament means something, watch something else.

But LaDonna’s story could have been a lens through which many of these issues, talking points, themes and motifs were refracted. Instead her suffering was treated glancingly. The net effect was disturbing in all the wrong ways.

The author here is right: it was disturbing. But not because it failed to achieve the sort of television that the author wanted. It was disturbing because it turned a mirror on the human existence in a way that is difficult for us to entirely comprehend. As human beings, we’re literally hard-wired to want the world to make sense in a certain way. LaDonna’s rape forces us to confront the fact that it very often doesn’t make sense in that way. Look at what Marlo Stanfield said on The Wire: “You want it to be the one way, but it’s the other way.” Perhaps nothing else, anywhere else in Simon’s work, so succinctly captures what he’s trying to do.