Under the Shadow of Prop Joe: Writing Noir and Pop Culture in a Post-Wire World

By Nik Korpon

My first exposure to The Wire came in 2003 while working as a valet driver at the Peabody Court Hotel in Baltimore. I’m inside the elevator with Mr. Morgan—a blind guest—taking him up to show him around the room. I’m making smalltalk, giving the lowdown about the Harbor, the best cannoli in Little Italy, which streets to avoid. Thinking maybe he’ll drop a fiver on me so I can eat that day. I ask why he’s in town and he says he’s got a recurring spot as Butchie, a drug dealer on The Wire. I congratulate him, say that I’ve heard it’s a great show but (because I didn’t have a TV) I’ve never seen it. He says he hasn’t, either.

If I hadn’t been looking right at his face, I never would’ve seen that hairline smile.

To say The Wire has cast a shadow over crime and noir is an obvious understatement. Living and writing in Baltimore, I feel it that much more. Round here, mentioning that I wrote a noir novel, Stay God, always brings the same question—‘Like, The Wire?’—to which I mumble incoherently about moral ambiguity and the inevitability of a narrative. Yeah, they bear some resemblance, but you’d never catch D’Angelo discussing the complexities of a drug-dealing existence in terms of Evil Dead and Marvel comics like the characters in my novel do.

Their methods of comparison are similar—though my characters turn the dork knob up to 11—and it’s through this similarity that I pilfered a key concept from the show: The characters are products of their environments, and their worldview is tinted by that. In a story as dramatic and overarching as The Wire, they deal in kings and queens and pawns, moving between the vacant blocks and abandoned buildings like the squares on a chess board. Likewise, Damon and Mary—the two dealers in my novel—inhabit a media- and drug-saturated world and think in smaller, more domestic terms, carving out a small block of the game for themselves. They fluently speak pop culture, their lives viewed in terms of Nightmare on Elm Street and The Clash and The Simpsons. In the same way D imagines himself a bishop, then knight, then pawn, to Damon and Mary it’s perfectly logical that the nine-fingered man who just held them up was the same one scoring during their conversation about Freddy Krueger cutting of one of his fingers.

Really? Exactly.

One of the best pieces of writing advice I’ve heard was from Craig Clevenger (this relates, don’t worry.) He told the story of his Detective Anslinger, a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, daughter-never-seeing cop who’s married to the force. And exactly like every other cop we’ve read. So he decided to run the opposite way. We’ve read the Scarface archetype a hundred times over, and I didn’t want Damon to be that. So I ran the complete opposite way, made him this completely unaffected, fearless bastard. A pair of thugs rob him, holding a gun to his head, speaking Spanish to hide their identities. What’s Damon do? Correct their grammar. Okay, so maybe this desire to be the opposite wasn’t metered properly. Around this time, I became obsessed with The Wire. I read a bunch of analysis online and watched every clip I could find on Youtube (I still didn’t have a TV at this point.) I kept seeing this idea of moral ambiguity popping up, that no one was good nor bad but all kind of fucked and it really appealed to me and my lack of appropriateness. Reading through my novel a few more times, I started to see that though Damon and his supplier (and rival) were different factions on the wrong side of the law, at their core there was only a breath between them. What if the ‘good’ bad guy was actually worse than the ‘bad’ bad guy? We see them when they’re in ‘job mode,’ but who are they in the quiet moments between? What music do they listen to while talking a shower or eating dinner? Which books sit beside their bed, on the tank of their toilet? What movie do they choose after a long day? After a few redrafts, a lot of introspection and some refinement of that tendency to sprint towards the opposite, Damon became the sarcastic, delusional asshole I’ve come to love and loathe today.

All that being said, it’s easy to overanalyze The Wire’s influence. Yes, tons of people call it one of the best shows in TV history, the crime-minded especially, but I’d propose that the title’s appropriate because it’s more than a crime show: It’s a show about people, and all the fucked up things we do to ourselves and each other. That aside it’s entertaining, too, as well as an exemplary example of storytelling, stripped to the bone. True, I could have written Stay God without any of the structure or concepts or characterizations I’d seen in The Wire, and it probably would’ve worked out. It would’ve been cheeky and gritty and fun to spot the references, but there’d be no heart, no real people in the story. And all the pieces matter.

Spinetingler Guest