"Hamsterdam" - David Simon's Imaginative Intervention into Urban Politics

Curator's Note

Commentators have always noted the social realism of The Wire. The way David Simon’s celebrated TV series portrayed its characters’ lives against the depiction of post-industrial American urbanity invited comparisons to realistic novels. Inner-city Baltimore comes alive in The Wire. The city’s idioms, its secret codes, and hidden backstreets were populated with local extras and the soundtrack captured the noisy, muffled sound of the urban environment. Yet, The Wire self-consciously employs these realistic elements to cleverly subvert, undermine, and to finally transform them in order to weave its own version of Baltimore. From the outset, Simon’s main narrative strands are concerned with uncovering the dysfunctional institutions and social systems of the city. All of the characters are pawns in an unforgiving social-Darwinist milieu and their failed relationships and personal estrangement echo the de-humanized logics of social conflicts out of bounds. Especially America’s War on Drugs is perceived as a failed attempt to regulate the drug trade. Because law enforcement, housing policies, and zero-tolerance policing do not take into account the fragile social fabrics of the inner-city communities and do not engender equality in access to employment, education, and recreational spaces, they miss the chance of tackling the inherent problems by their roots. David Simon had addressed these issues in his journalistic writing before. The Wire was a new step, because the imaginative medium of the TV series allowed him to come up with his own creative take on the problem. In Season Three, Mayor Colvin becomes the advocate of a policy that perceives the drug trade not in terms of a criminal issue, but rather as one of public health. In this scene, he has invited some of the local corner boys to an abandoned part of his district. The death-in-life motif of the boarded-up vacants and the weeds overgrowing asphalt are a strong reminder of the critical state of the community. Colvin explains his approach that legalizes the open sale and consumption of drugs in these deserted areas. What soon comes to be called, in an allusion to Amsterdam’s liberal drug laws, “Hamsterdam” is Simon’s most interesting imaginative intervention in America’s urban politics. And in a series where there is no moral compass to judge good or bad, this counter discourse invites the viewers to draw their own conclusions.

Comments

Imaginative indeed! I think what you've alluded to here is the capacity of narrative television (in Simon's hands) to both produce certain types of social knowledge and propose experimental solutions. One thing I found fascinating about the Hamsterdam season of The Wire was Colvin's understanding that the physical site he created would be administratively invisible--officials and bureaucrats actually had to visit it to believe what he had done. So much of the show itself seems to be an oscillation between the abstractions of institutions/bureaucracies and what's happening on the ground.

Imaginative indeed! I think what you've alluded to here is the capacity of narrative television (in Simon's hands) to both produce certain types of social knowledge and propose experimental solutions. One thing I found fascinating about the Hamsterdam season of The Wire was Colvin's understanding that the physical site he created would be administratively invisible--officials and bureaucrats actually had to visit it to believe what he had done. So much of the show itself seems to be an oscillation between the abstractions of institutions/bureaucracies and what's happening on the ground.

Yes, absolutely! The COMSTAT meetings during Season Three, along with the photos of drug corners and crime statistics, are an example of the abstractions of institutions and its bureaucracies that can pose systemic obstacles to solutions. Simon has repeatedly addressed these issues in his work (Post-Katrina bureaucracy in New Orleans as shown in Treme would be another example). By confronting these abstractions with community life and lived social space, he points to inherent tensions and conflicts and opens up (with the de-pragmatized medium of the television series) an imaginative space for working out alternative takes on urban problems. One thing about "Hamsterdam" is that its story is really told in images rather than institutional discourse: There is a dialectic between the scenes of the communities in West Baltimore (that recover once the drugs have been moved) and those set in Hamsterdam (a place that is in danger of turning into a living hell). There is also a great degree of self-referentiality involved in this: When "Hamsterdam" is stormed by police by the end of the season, we are confronted with the media frenzy that ensues. The camera lenses of journalists remind us of how this social space has been presented in the first place (and that many aspects got lost along the way). And when Rawls puts on "The Ride of the Valkyrie" as the troops are moving into the "free zone" we are, of course, confronted with a reference that gives the "War on Drugs" an entirely new meaning. This is a thought-provoking cultural intervention into a pressing social concern. But it also makes for really great entertainment.

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