The Wire Politics, Postmoderism and the Rebirth of American Naturalism

ABSTRACT THE WIRE: POLITICS, POSTMODERISM AND THE REBIRTH OF AMERICAN NATURALISM by Ryan Aiello Master of Arts in English California State University, Chico Summer 2010 My thesis analyzes the political themes and messages in David Simon’s television show The Wire. Using the opposing theoretical frameworks for effective political art established by Jean-Paul Sartre and Theodor Adorno, I illustrate the ways in which The Wire melds a realistic portrait of an American city with obscure narrative techniques, resulting in a text that both educates and confounds its viewers. In the first chapter, I analyze the journalistic attributes of The Wire, placing it in the tradition of American naturalism. In the second chapter, I illustrate how the show’s form, which forces viewers to grapple with multiple meanings, plays a vital role in allowing it to convey a political message. In the third chapter, I show how the endings of the individual episodes of The Wire provide the ideal site to analyze the ways in which the show’s narrative form helps to formulate its social critiques. Ultimately, through my analysis, I show that The Wire achieves a remarkable balance between the obvious and the obscure, allowing it to convey multiple political messages to the widest possible audience in the most effective form possible to induce individual growth or change.