Dark Brown Waffles

David Simon has rightly earned himself a religious following. How could he not with The Wire under his belt? I count myself amongst the legion that believe that show is one of the peaks of television achievement.

David Simon’s involvement is what pulled me into Treme. Yes, I have my own reasons for being interested, but I was actively hyping myself up for the show’s premier by thinking, “Simon! The Wire! New Orleans! Music! Huzzah!” Treme, for me, hasn’t been The Wire, but that’s okay. It has still been very, very good. The critical reaction to it hasn’t been as forgiving - there’s been plenty of whining from people infuriated that Treme wasn’t The Wire II: Electric Boogaloo. Such is life.

One of the coolest parts about Treme has been the way its participants, Simon included, have interacted with the show’s fans. Simon has been participating at Back of Town, the show’s epicenter on the internet. The other day, he posted there, talking about the (mis)interpretation of his characters by some. I have thought about his response for several days, as it precisely touches on one of my favorite things to ruminate on. Below, I will post his comment in blockquoted italics.

I’ll say it again. The fictional characters have agency. They can think that Joe Strummer is a flawed vehicle when it comes to songwriting, even though someone else, say, David Simon, has every Clash album on vinyl from the year of release and has worn them all down to near nothing. And even though someone else, say, Davis Rogan, burned every Clash album when he was at my house. Fuck Simon. Fuck Rogan. Davis McAlary gets to be Davis McAlary. Trying to follow this narrative by attempting some internet-search based psychoanalysis-at-a-distance of the writers is just silly, silly shit.

Yes but no but yes but no. Two episodes ago, Albert Lambreaux roared at a city inspector who was going to shut off his water that, “This whole neighborhood was under water and you go on like it’s business as usual!?” It was a moment in which Albert, the character, was exasperated, disgusted, infuriated, and outraged. We could just view that moment as a singular moment of a single character’s righteous indignation. But we don’t. We read it more broadly, as a character giving voice to a larger problem, one of bureaucratic intransigence in the face of catastrophe. That nothing could change that home inspector’s mind - that, in fact, he was tasked to interference with the attempts of New Orleanians to get their repair their lives - is what we’re seeing in that single scene. Surely we can’t be expected to believe that the show’s creator doesn’t, to some small extent, share that viewpoint, can we? Just as those who watched The Wire could assume that Simon was disgusted by the Baltimore Police Department’s repeated attempts to juke the numbers. Simon has written as much.

I would venture to guess that attributing what a character says in a fictional work to the actual voice of one of the writers is the quickest way to misapprehend the work. And given how much bullshit people have already collected under the banner of “Simon thinks so,” I think it possible that some people ruined Treme for themselves even before it aired.

Simon doesn’t object when his work is rightly interpreted. The critiques of The Wire that praised it for laying bare the city’s substantial structural, political, legal, and economic problems didn’t get this sort of response from Simon, did it? In this case though, fans of the show were attempting to deconstruct a scene in which Davis McAlary attempts to school L’il Calliope musically. Those fans, accustomed to interpreting Simon’s work and its deeper meanings, assumed that Davis’s feelings about The Clash were Simon’s feelings about The Clash. Simon wants us to know that this particular interpretation was incorrect. Hence his frustration. But surely Simon doesn’t want fans to disengage from his work to the point that they see only characters and nothing larger.

For the record, I don’t believe that San Francisco, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, is a cesspool with hills, or that a legitimate analogy can be drawn between that city being rebuilt by local initiative after the earthquake and New Orleans relying on federal initiatives. Just as I don’t think that the kids from Wisconsin deserved to be mocked by a street performer. Nor do I “hate” New York. How does a sensate American hate New York? New York is magnificent. Arrogant at times, but magnificent. I spend as much time there as I can. And Strummer? Rest in peace, Joe, because much as I love him for other moments, this McAlary fella talks shit occasionally.

Simon here is going through what other artists have been forced to, laundry listing the times in which the interpretation of their work has proven wildly off base. The example I used the last time I wrote about this subject was Amanda Palmer. She posted a nude photograph of herself on Twitter, then insisted that it was a non-erotic photo. That may have been true when it was in her hands, just as Davis McAlary may have been shit talking when he expounded upon The Clash. But Palmer’s photograph in the hands of a 14-year-old boy turns that non-erotic thing into something else entirely, just as Simon’s scene in the hands of his fans turns that shit-talking into something else entirely. Not for everybody of course. There are plenty of fans who don’t always leap to huge conclusions based upon single scenes. But for those that do, doing so is part of the engagement, part of the fun of watching. Yes, it infuriates Simon to have to answer accusations that he secretly hates whatever, but that’s the price of doing business in a day and age when everybody can easily expound publicly upon the meaning of art.

But what I think, or what Eric thinks, or what Nina thinks about such things sometimes matters a helluva lot less than what some fictional New Orleanians, operating after the near death of their city, might think and say and do at a given moment.

Except that those people (Eric, Nina, and David) are putting the words in the mouth of those characters. That reality will always make it difficult to disconnect characters and creators. The characters are, occasionally, vessels for those writers, as in the scene with Albert, as I’m sure we can all assume that the inspector’s action was an outrage to the three of them. The trick is figuring out when we can assume views for the writers from the actions of their characters and when we can’t. In this case, the fans who assumed Simon was saying something about The Clash through Davis (did he even write the scene in question?) got it wrong. But the point is that there are plenty of times when those fans almost certainly haven’t gotten it wrong, when they have accurately conflated the characters with the writers.

It’s really that simple…Seriously, guys. You’ll do better by yourselves and the work if you stay with the film and the idea that the characters are on their own journey.

Perhaps. But the extrapolation of bigger messages from single characters has long been a theme for fans enjoying Simon’s work. It’s what differentiates what Simon does from what somebody like Chuck Lorre (who produces Two and a Half Men) does. Sometimes the fans misinterpret what’s being communicated, sure, but most of the time they don’t and for that reason, opposing the attempt to tease out bigger meanings is problematic. To put that another way, maybe David Simon is a Republican who believes that New Orleans should have been left to rot after Katrina, never to be rebuilt as a way to send a message to that city and its inhabitants. But I seriously doubt it.