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I've just started watching Treme and I'm most of the way through Season 1. For me aside from the general drama and recreation of Katrina and it's aftermath, the show is so far focusing on two things. Firstly Disaster Capitalism. Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine goes into this with specific reference to New Orleans, but basically the way the democratic wishes of people are overturned in a disaster and capitalist forces use this destruction to create new especially exploitative forms of profit. The total abandonment of a normal public school system in place of the mass charter schools initiative is something that would have been impossible to do without the disaster. You've got the liveable houses standing empty that Big Chief Detective Lester Freamon wants to see used, but instead stand idle and empty while the poor suffer in foreign cities and FEMA trailers waiting to return to homes that will eventually no longer exist because developers will have replaced them with new buildings far outside their price range. The people's wishes are ignored and swept away while they're still battered, weakened and disparate from the effects of Katrina in a way that is very out of the ordinary. The second is the culture. Not just an exploration and indulgence of New Orleans culture, but rather considerations of ownership, exploitation, conflict and deeper meaning. You're got gentrification with Davis and his neighbours (who are both guilty of it), you have the appropriation of a cultural heritage with Dr Dave John's cover of the Mardi Gras Indians sacred song, the weakening of the uniqueness of New Orleans in the need for commercialisation as tourists come to listen to New Orleans music meaning musicians have to force themselves to NOT play New Orleans because it's not sanitised and easily sellable, etc. Dave Harvey's Rebel Cities goes into this quite well and would be a useful read for someone looking to get some more depth from Treme.
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Jun 26, 2013 00:53
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| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 09:25 |
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Now all we got is bodies and predatory motherfuckers like Omar and now where that man Stringer fell I saw forum posters acting like Omar, calling him by name, glorying his rear end because he didn't piss on the body. Makes me sick motherfucker how far we done fell.
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Jul 28, 2013 23:41
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Sam. posted:In S1E9 (Game Day), when Omar tries to kill Avon, why doesn't he pull the trigger as soon as Avon gets on the phone, instead of when Wee-Bey comes? Is he waiting for something? You come at the king, you best not miss.
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Jul 29, 2013 19:55
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Orange Devil posted:Season 2 is probably the most depressing season when you think about it. It'd be easy to say season 4 is. I mean, it's about kids and they are the future and that future gets corrupted at a very, very, young age in a very, very thorough way and it's awful. The whole series is about how this happens and why. Season 2 though, is the real gut punch, because it shows that the mechanism by which all this horribleness could be done away with is broken down and being dismantled further with no real hope of recovery. It's about the engine which could legitimately solve all the issues, not just sweep em under the carpet like Hamsterdam or what-have-you, and the state it is in. Nah, the point the Wire hammers home again and again is that the failure is multi-layered and there is no simple fix to the problem of drugs. Make a thousand, five thousand, ten thousand, however many jobs and it won't magically fix the problem. Will those jobs magically go to all the drug addicts rather than the less suffering working class like those who live out in the county? If they do will a drug addict be able to keep them? Will having a job solve someone's addiction to coke or dope? Good jobs matter and having a thriving economy would lessen the scope of the drug problem and is certainly worth striving for, but is not in and of itself a solution.
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Aug 20, 2013 00:06
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Aces High posted:One final thing that will probably get covered in Season 5 but kinda flew over my head, what happened to Clay Davis? One part of the episode he was making GBS threads his pants because he was going to have to stand before a Grand Jury and then next his lawyer is somehow spinning his embezzling as being for "the greater good" and he ended up walking? I mean I've watched a lot of Law and Order and other lawyer type things but I was just completely lost with that whole story. When push came to shove he turned the Clay Davisness up to 11 and managed to get the Jury on side by presenting himself as a man of the people who had heroically given and given and given to his community and was now being harassed because he didn't keep receipts.
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Aug 20, 2013 08:20
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Yorkshire Tea posted:I think I'm the only person who actually likes Carcetti and thinks he's okay. At best he does a completely mediocre job, if you're generous. His focus has always been on himself, not his community of the people he represents. The very best we can say is that in one particular narrow area, the police, he has a more effective outlook. So what will this result in? The rate of homicide, assault, etc will all probably drop by several percentage points. He will not stop the ghettoisation of large parts of the city. He will not stop the destruction and off-shoring of the well-paid working class jobs. He will not fix the critical failures in the school system. He will not stop continued drug epidemic plaguing the city (In The Corner, they specifically point out that even good policing is not an answer to the drug problem). He will not stop the city's dealings with corrupt businessmen or even other corrupt politicians. This is a man whose goals are to see a reduction in crime, build something big with his name on, avoid dealing with schools because they are too problematic and keep his boyish good looks. He is marginally better than Royce, but that margin is slim. What is really needed is a politician looking at addressing the massive structural problems of the city, which unfortunately means addressing the massive structural problem with capitalism and the USA as a whole and would entail some incredibly radical politics.
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Oct 10, 2013 20:42
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3Romeo posted:...in the context of the series. In the context of the series he's still a drug dealer and murderer. Yes society has put him in an awful lovely position and he's had little agency in his life and compared to other people in a similar position he comes of comparatively well, but you shouldn't try and romanticise who or what he is. Basically just go and read one of David Simon's criticisms of people who think Omar is so badass and cool, but substitute Slim for Omar.
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Dec 4, 2013 00:01
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Agreed, David Simon seems to understand the basics of what Marx set out but doesn't really understand it. David Simons has always been good at humanising the flaws in the system, but I've always felt he's fallen down when it comes to an answer (which I think he's admitted). I find it a shame because I really think a marxist perspective would give him some good ideas. Instead he seems limited to "let's move everything back to the golden age of Capitalism" taking no account of how this will realistically be reached or if it were reached again why the disproportionate power of the Capitalist classes wouldn't inevitably result in it following exactly the same pattern it did the first time.
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Dec 14, 2013 23:30
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"Six hundred pages of rules, regulations, directives, orders. ... If a commander can't find grounds for firing a saint in here... The man has worked narcotics for six years and in narcotics there are no virgins." Carver is different from Daniels. The dirt on him wouldn't be as iron clad but he wouldn't have the higher education to help him up to major or colonel in the first place. That doesn't really make a difference either way. If you think lack of solid evidence would stop someone from busting him down or loving up his career, that's a sorry state of affairs and y'all need to go back and rewatch the seasons. Was it what was right that got Carver promoted to Sergeant? Or Herc? Or Daniels held back in S1 or promoted in S3? Of Freeman busted back to pawnshop for thirteen years (and four months)? Or Valcheck existing? Individuals can make a difference, but alone they can't change the entire system. Carver would either have to stagnate at his current rank, start working the system the way his superiors want it to be worked or face getting canned. Simply being idealistic and right doesn't cut it. Him becoming a senior officer who holds to our idealistic standards is not a realistic future.
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Oct 10, 2014 23:53
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Cage posted:It shouldn't matter much because it makes her a terrible person either way, but she killed a girl and only "turned her life around" after her drug dealer friend got murdered. She was also a crack baby born to two incarcerated criminals who grew up in a foster home and was dealing drugs as a child. Terrible people are bred by terrible systems.
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Jan 11, 2015 13:55
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kaworu posted:-Cutty seems like way, way, WAY more of a scumbag this time around. Maybe it's personal bias because I don't like the actor, but practically everything he does ends up seriously rubbing me the wrong way. I never noticed just how much Michael actively despises Cutty as well, this time around. Before I perceived it as more of Michael just averting himself from the guy, but it's really more that he's one loving second away from killing him, and the later incident on the corner between them (which seemed a little bit like extreme out of the blue violence to me) was foreshadowed much more effectively than I thought. I don't see how you could get this opinion of Cutty. He makes mistakes (like going out with the mothers of his students) but he tries hard and does his best to help people. Michael doesn't like Cutty because he distrusts his friendliness due to the abuse Michael suffered from Bug's dad. If anything Cutty being a typical street gangster who was happy to beat people down over nonsense, sling poison and be a stand-up soldier willing to kill people over drugs would have made Michael trust him more. He understands and accepts those relationships but he just can't work out adult men who try and get to friendly with him without an ulterior motive besides wanted to help he. He can't see it as anything other than grooming.
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Jan 17, 2015 21:03
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"Clarke Peters as Robert Mayhawk, neighborhood consultant" Yessssssss
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Aug 14, 2015 08:37
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Vanderdeath posted:I just finished my rewatch and now there's a void in my soul. People get upset about Frank taking his long walk towards Spiros and The Greek but the scene that hurts me the most is seeing Duquan ask Pryzbylewski for some drug money to cop with his Arabber friend. With the ending of the show and where everyone end up you at least have Bubbles being clean and finally being invited upstairs to soften the blow, as well as showing that life as a drug addict is something that it is possible to escape from (although also showing that one person recovering doesn't in anyway break the overall cycle).
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Sep 28, 2015 11:38
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| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 09:25 |
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Ginette Reno posted:He does also say rest in peace or something in Polish after he learns that Frank died. You can see his almost nostalgia over those final photos of the surveillance van. While his motivations were selfish, he was also right in that the union was flashing too much cash and it was a sign of smuggling.
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Oct 25, 2020 10:10
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