Dark Brown Waffles

This must be noted: the actual David Simon stopped by this website and commented. Although I sometimes feel like an adult - what with the wife and the children and the mortgage and the job and the retirement savings and the health care - this comment brings out my worst (albeit limited compared to some) fanboy tendencies. I excitedly told my wife about Simon’s comment and her response was a very polite, “Oh, really? The writer huh?” 

I am going to attempt to respond to what Simon wrote because I think (hope) I have more of substance to contribute:

Respectfully, you have equivocated, creating an argument that I never made and never would make, and now you are arguing forcefully against that argument.  I never said you shouldn’t try to extrapolate “bigger messages” from the work itself.  Or that your knowledge — if it is indeed knowledge, and not internet hyperbole — about who made the work or why they made it might not be relevant to evaluating the work.

This, I must admit, was not the ideal thing to read starting out. I certainly didn’t mean to have equivocated. If I have (badly) misrepresented what Simon was trying to say here, I’m not only sorry, but embarrassed. 

I said specifically that using what a CHARACTER says or does in a given instant to extrapolate the argument, biases, interests of the author(s) is a fool’s errand.  I don’t think what you’ve written addresses this argument in any way.

Here I find myself back at the original conundrum, in which I simultaneously agree and disagree with Simon. Yes, I agree that taking a single moment from a character’s existence and building backward is a fool’s errand. If a Davis McAlary orders a Barq’s Root Beer, I would be a fool to conclude that David Simon thinks that Barq’s Root Beer is the king of all root beers. Just as those who believed that McAlary’s rant against Joe Strummer in anyway reflected Simon’s feelings about Strummer. (I still haven’t seen it clarified anywhere, but did Simon even write this scene?) At the same time, I do think it is conceptually possible to see scenes and extrapolate backward. The scene I offered as evidence was Albert Lambreaux’s fury at the city inspector insistent on fulfilling his bureaucratic imperative as if there hadn’t been a catastrophic natural disaster that occurred within the last two years. I don’t believe it is too far a jump to assume that whomever wrote that scene probably felt the same way about that inspector. 

That said, I don’t remember thinking at the time that “Whomever wrote that scene probably feels just like Albert!” It never crossed my mind. 

You argue that I am unfairly laundry-listing the moments when tthe work has has been misinterpreted.  I disagree.  I am not complaining about something so unspecific as viewers not geting our intentions or perceiving some alternate reading of the work.  I am critiquing the lazy and corruptive practice of simply mistaking what CHARACTERS say and do for the voice and character of the authors.  This — and not your overall argument that I am cherry picking the occasions when viewers have misinterpreted the work in general — was the target of the post I offered at Back of Town. 

I genuinely feed badly here. I do not want to have unfairly accused anybody of doing anything; I recognize the frustration that must come along with fans of show (or worse, people who can’t be bothered to even invest who still leap to these conclusions) conflating characters with writers. But I still hold my ground that there seem to be numerous times when this has been a correct leap to make. Here, for example, is a moment from The Wire in which Daniels rails against the stated desire to juke the numbers yet again to achieve a political outcome. Here’s the Wiki about Simon stating that he was responsible for the both the story and the teleplay for episode 10, from which Daniels fury comes from. Here is Simon’s response to the Baltimore Police Chief who got angry that The Wire portrayed Baltimore in an unfavorable light, “A more lingering problem might be two decades of bad performance by a police agency more obsessed with statistics than substance, with appeasing political leadership rather than seriously addressing the roots of city violence, with shifting blame rather than taking responsibility.”

You can see the overlap for yourself. What is plainly unfair, of course, it to leap from the idea that this scene with Daniels might capture some part of Simon’s rage to the conclusion that every scene with every character reflects Simon. After all, nobody believes that Simon is a habitual heroin abuser. Nobody believes that Simon robs drug-dealers with a shotgun. Nobody believes that Simon is corrupt and desperate union boss. 

I’ll argue that it is always flawed reasoning to attribute what characters say in the work as the thoughts, arguments and opinions of the authors.  We are writing characters, who are embarked on a narrative.  All of them have aspects that might at points coincide with the beliefs and arguments of the writers.  But equally, all of them will certainly have moments that do not coincide with those beliefs or arguments.  For more on this, consider the essential literary device known as the unreliable narrator.  Or consider just the simple notion that none of the characters in Treme, or the Wire, are avatars for the authors.  Knowing Eric, George, myself , Nina, the other writers — I can assure you they don’t successfully stand in for any of us.

I want to re-iterate that I’m not taking a stand in which I defend the idea that these characters are always proxies for their authors. I’m not even sure how that could possibly work, given that different writers are writing different episodes. But for brief moments, there are moments when those predisposed to consuming art in this fashion feel that the light peaks through, and that the scene’s author is trying to communicate something larger than the character. The scene with Davis and the recommended music is a perfect example. Because the recommendations were so specific (Public Enemy, then The Clash, then Woody Guthrie), I think some people assumed some great message was trying to be communicated. After all, why those three and not Tribe Called Quest, Bruce Springstein, and Bob Dylan?

The point isn’t that those interpreters were wrong - Simon has made plain that they were. The point is that those interpreters enjoy the show by doing this sort of snooping and projecting. It might be the fool’s errand that Simon it as, sure, but that’s how they enjoy the show.

You can evaluate the work as a whole as a work by specific writers or producers.  You can speak to whether certain scenes or themes reflect the political or emotional bent of its creators, sure.  But you can’t intelligently say that what a character says, does, or feels at a given moment is the author speaking through the character.  In attempting to do so, you’re willfully ignoring the author’s responsibilities to character and narrative.

You can’t intelligently say, no. But you can try and sometimes, you can be right. Therein lies the fun for some. Not for me mind you. I’m not keeping a baseball scorecard for each episode of Treme, tracking who is saying what and then tying it to what writer wrote each episode so I can nitpick down the line. I can barely remember character names beyond the major ones listed on HBO’s (insufficient) webpage. 

Davis dissing Strummer was a last, albeit amusing straw of sorts and so I spoke to the dynamic a bit in my original post.  To recount how that line came into the script,  I actually took the statement from a musician friend who feels that way about Strummer’s songwriting.   I used an argument because it sounded interesting to me.  It isn’t my argument though.  Similarly, Eric used a variety of sources, including Ashley Morris, to pen Creighton’s opening rant.  I had very little to do with that scene.  But people who think they have a sense of who David Simon is or isn’t — some stemming from my own statements or facts about me, but more often through unchecked and weakly motivated dross on the internet — hear that rant with corrupt ears.  They aren’t listening for what is being said and by whom and in what context, or they would have heard a Tulane prof who is angry and depressed in the wake of his life and his city being battered, and they would have heard him responding to the intentional provocations of a reporter, who when not on camera himself (it wasn’t a live interview) is using the technique to animate his subject fully.  All of that is on the screen.  But to viewers who insist on a direct 1:1 correlation between Thoughts of The Author and Words On The Page For Fictional Character to Speak believed that rather than Eric Overmyer, drawing from the actual expressed rage of New Orleanians three months after the storm, it was David Simon, angry bastard of television, who had issued his political broadside through a soapboxed, hyperbolic character.

I will never go to bat for the notion of a 1:1 correlation of character to author, primarily because of the logistics of making such a claim. I find it impossible to believe that anybody really thinks that way while recognizing the fact that plenty of people do. What can be done though? Plenty of people like Jackson Pollock for the madness he displays before them with every creation; plenty of others go, “Oooh, pretty colors.” Neither is wrong, per se, although we can personally believe who is more right. 

Which brings me to this: when I wrote what I did earlier today, my goal was to talk about the interpretation of art, which as stated earlier is one of my favorite topics. I wanted to use Simon’s frustration as yet another jumping off point. Clearly, I didn’t do a very good job. That’s a bummer. 

That’s my contention.  That the first responsibility of the author is to write the characters as they would conceivably be in a given moment.  And the first responsibility of the viewer is to take in what is on film and evaluate it first on its own terms.  If the words do indeed comport to some argument that the author has made or continues to offer, if it refers to something on which the author has been vocal, or some relevant piece of the author’s past experience, then okay, maybe there is a correlation.  But given that Treme is a drama written and produced by many hands, and given that there is an awful lot of research going into the post-Katrina experience of many, many people beyond the authors, is it not equally or even more likely that there is no correlation at all?

Here, sadly, I am forced to vehemently disagree with Simon. I don’t believe viewers have responsibilities. This is why the larger discussion is so interesting to me. Viewers are free to do whatever they please with the artistic productions of others. Once the artist has released the piece to the audience, it is beyond their control. Which is why I feel my Amanda Palmer nude photograph example is so important. Palmer explicitly said that the photograph she was posting was non-erotic. But as soon as she posted it, she couldn’t control what it was going to be used for. For (some) of her fans, the photograph was non-erotic, but for the teenaged boys who enjoyed her music? That photograph was capable of being something else altogether, regardless of what Palmer thought it should have been. 

At the same time, viewers can self assign themselves responsibilities. They can want to watch the show on its own merits. They can want to watch the show on its creators’s merits. They cant to watch the show to justify their every preconceived notion. They can watch the show for whatever other reason motivates them. But the creator(s) have no control over those responsibilities. 

For some viewers, this weird David Simon persona trumps everything.  Everyone seems assured that I am the angriest dog in the yard. Ergo, when any character gets angry, some viewers take what they thins they know and run miles beyond what is on screen and the reasons for it.  Such a viewer can’t take an honest temperature.  His thermostat is set not to what he is seeing or hearing, but who he thinks Simon is.  Tellingly, the same might go for this posting.  In my mind, I’m further engaging on a subject of interest to me, and doing so at length because the argument lends itself to example and detail.  You might, perhaps, read this with a mind to the Angriest Man in T.V. and think I am raging.  But nope.  Just interested.  And willing to engage because the NOLA blogging community has offered us some of the most telling and interesting feedback on Treme.  So thank you.

For whatever it is worth, I don’t see Simon as the angriest dog in the yard. Perhaps the most vicious but not the angriest. No creator that I have come across has more formally laid bare the awfulness that administrative bodies are capable of. That ability may explain the notion of Simon being so angry. It is unfortunate that people would confuse that precision for anger. They’re different concepts. At the same time, that’s what I believe. If somebody else watches Simon’s work (or more irritatingly, doesn’t) and jumps to the conclusion that Simon is a furious man, I will whole-heartedly disagree and happily discuss my opposition to their proposal, but that’s the end of it. What else can be done? 

Meanwhile, and I fear this undermines me considerably, I’m just some guy in West Virginia. I’m not a part of the NOLA blogging community. My connections to the town are spurious at best: my father’s research and various family friends hailing from the Crescent City. There are other, far purer blogs in that regard. I’m just a fan who likes to write.

To conclude, I know that who the authors and producers are and what they think is part of the discourse.  In no way was I arguing otherwise.  But if those attempting to use narrative as a storytelling form aren’t allowed to write for the characters and let them have their say, independent of our own arguments and credos, then what are we to do with those characters that can possibly matter? And how then to serve the narrative and make it credible enough to matter?

I don’t think the (wrong) interpretation necessarily changes what the author meant initially or what a more correct interpretation might be. Authors are allowed to do whatever they want. My position is that the cannot control what happens after they make that work available. For me, what Simon does with characters matters to an exceptional degree, to the point that I write up every episode of the show that he is currently working on. The same is true of the blogs elsewhere that passionately discuss and dissect his work. In amongst those people are those who attempt to interact with the work by believing that every character is no different than the man Simon sees in the mirror each morning. They’re free to do so. But I’m free to disagree. And Simon is free to not only disagree, but do so aggressively. 

I don’t believe that allowing for that sort of interpretation, even if it is entirely wrong, in any way affects the author’s ability to do whatever they want with their own characters. Those characters can serve the narrative and remain credible whether or not they are occasionally misunderstood. 

This was ridiculously long. If you’ve made this far, I owe you a debt that I cannot repay. I also owe Simon thanks for taking the time to post here, and more for reading what I wrote in the first place. I don’t think my response will be at all satisfactory but I couldn’t fairly respond without writing what I believe. Thanks for reading.