I came to Treme with the most favourable preconceptions imaginable: not only am I huge fan of The Wire, David Simon’s previous HBO series, but when the first episode of Treme premièred on 11 April, I had just returned from a conference in New Orleans (photos here, and above) and had just watched Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke. If there was any doubt at all, in other words, I was prepared to give this series the full benefit of it.
Things got off to a somewhat slow but, to my mind, quite promising start, with a diverse collection of characters trying to rebuild their lives in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The dramatic possibilities were potentially endless. But as the season wore on, the story and the characters not only appeared to lose momentum, it was almost as if the writers were deliberately sabotaging their own story.
For instance, Davis McAlary (Steve Zahn), in many respects the main character in the series, is dissatisfied with the way things are going in New Orleans and decides to record a protest EP, using local musicians. The EP is a huge hit, and some of Davis’s more politically inclined acquaintances encourage him to run for political office on the strength of the grassroots support his music has garnered. So far so good. Davis doesn’t really know anything about politics, and is mostly determined to have a good time at all costs, but the potential for a political awakening storyline is ripe for the picking. Or so I thought. But how do the writers handle this narrative capital? They squander it, as Davis is paid off by a representative of some other candidate for the same office who offers him a “get out of jail free card” if he’ll drop out of the race. Which he promptly does, and all political ambition—his and the series’—ebbs away and instead we get another overlong musical sequence, with pictures of people having a good time, indicative, I suppose, of the unique tradition and atmosphere that makes New Orleans so special.
Davis’s political non-career is by far not the only non-starter in the series. LaDonna’s roof gets fixed by some out-of-towner for no apparent reason (except that the storyline wasn’t going anywhere and they needed to resolve it somehow) and she and Terri eventually manage to figure out what happened to her brother but then she doesn’t want to press charges and the entire foray into the bureaucratic and governmental quagmire is aborted at the last minute. After having spent an entire season sewing a new Mardi Gras costume, Albert Lambreaux misses the big day because he’s in prison for staging a protest against the local government’s decision not to open up the projects to let poor black New Orleanians return. Again, it looks as though this will provide some insight into the socio-political situation but ultimately he just sits back down and sews while Davis, who’s got is job at the radio station back, plays some long-forgotten New Orleans song. When they finally go out in the streets wearing their Indian get-up, there’s no one there to see them, and whatever significance this minor parade might have had is completely lost on the audience—or it was one me, at any rate: are we meant to see this as a vindication of Albert’s hard work and dogged determination? What exactly is he trying to achieve here?
In episode nine (“Wish Someone Would Care”, June 13, 2010), the high-point of dramatic action is a thunderstorm, which ruins Janette (Kim Dickens)’s chances of ever establishing herself as a kitchen on wheels following the forced closure of her restaurant. In the meantime, Davis throws a party, which takes up a large portion of the episode and is about as interesting as watching a recording of some other “great” party you didn’t go to. Realising that she’s had enough of New Orleans (because of the thunderstorm, not because Davis’s party was so boring), Janette pays a visit to Davis (with whom she has a sort of on-and-off relationship). The following morning, as they lie side by side in bed, it becomes clear that she has made up her mind to leave New Orleans and go to New York.
Davis: Not that again. You can’t be serious.Janette: I am.Davis: You’re a damn good chef.Janette: I am better than good, but this town beat me. Much as I love it, I’m not trying to fight with it anymore.Davis: But New York?Janette: I want to see how I stack up against the big boys, you know? Without all these broke-ass levees and blocked gas lines and…Davis: May I quote the author of La Cuisine Creole? I believe it’s your professional bible.Janette: Jesus, Davis do you ever stop?Davis: New York is very fashionable and fast, so fast that you can’t even stroll through it. You just get pushed along. And don’t plan on getting invited to any backyard barbecues. ’Cause there ain’t no backyards.Janette: You don’t know that!Davis: Everyone dressed in business suits, working, working, working, and of course the, uh—what do you call ’em?—the financials are very strong.Janette: Davis…Davis: Would you rather have a strong economy, or a four-hour lunch? Would you rather have a Macy’s Day Parade, with fuckin’ Bullwinkle floats, or an impromptu second line, where you dance your ass off with your neighbors?Janette: Is your check from the tourism board in the mail?Davis: There are so many beautiful moments here.Janette: They’re just moments. They’re not a life.
Yes, exactly. They’re just moments. They’re not a life, and they’re certainly not a TV series!
Looking at the synopsis of this episode on the HBO Episode Guide (it is significant, I think, that the List of Treme episodes on Wikipedia stops providing plot summaries after the seventh episode: after all absolutely nothing happened in the eighth episode, “All on a Mardi Gras Day”), one line in particular stands out: “Creighton struggles to write”. Creighton Bernette (John Goodman) has been struggling to write his novel about the 1927 flood for the entire series, but mostly spends his time writing and recording rants about post-Katrina New Orleans and posting them on YouTube. He is an English professor at Tulane, and his rants and invectives frequently serve as more or less transparent vehicles for David Simon’s own views on the whole situation. He’s been unsuccessfully trying to write this novel for the past several years, we learn, but in the wake of Katrina his publisher wants him to add something about the current situation.
Cut to another shot of Creighton struggling to write. As less and less happened in the series and more and more of each episode was taken up by long musical sequences with little or no content plus the occasional shot of Creighton sweaty and pained staring at a blank Word document, I couldn’t help feeling that this was all somehow an allegory for the screenwriter’s inability to come up with a decent story about the 2005 flood and its aftermath. When, at the end of episode nine, Creighton appears to commit suicide by jumping off the edge of the Algiers ferry, it became clear that the screenwriters had just committed collective dramatic suicide. As the LA Times put it, “Did he really jump? Do you really care?” In fact, I’m inclined to read the title of that episode, “Wish Someone Would Care”, as a sort of pre-emptive plea from those same writers. But if the best they can come up with is a thunderstorm and a completely (narratively) unmotivated suicide, then I’m afraid I find it pretty hard to care about any of this.
I gather Treme has been renewed for a second season. I hope they come up with some actual stories to tell this time around, or some new and interesting characters. Each season of The Wire was devoted to a different aspect of Baltimore society—the police department, the schools, the media, etc. Let’s hope David Simon and co. decide to do something similar when Treme returns next spring. A more institutional approach might do the series enormous favours, and perhaps deliver on some of the political and social promises which it hinted at in the beginning.
2 comments:
Treme has me scratching my head, too. Like you, I really want to like this show, and given post-Katrina events there, it has an important contemporary story to tell, along with the larger one of why New Orleans matters, the fact that it is far more than America's good-time city. I've read some reviews, though, that feel the show is more focused on the latter at the expense of the former; and while I can see that, I would also argue that it's the fact that the former endangers the latter that requires that the latter be emphasized.
Maybe The Wire works as it does because, though steeped in Baltimore-iana, its storylines, viewers realize, are playing out in any number of cities across the country. Treme, though, is busy showing the viewer how different New Orleans is from the rest of the country--and, thus, it's harder to see how this impoverished, more-than-a-little dysfunctional place nevertheless matters. I mean, how does one do a dramatic series on a place's culture?
Well, you would need a better set of characters for a start. And initially, as I say, I thought the characters were potentially interesting, but the series gradually abandoned them, always shying away from the more interesting (and therefore harder) storylines that it half set up, in favour of an easier, or lazier way out. The flashback to the eve of the storm in the last episode, for instance, was also a failed bid for sympathy. The aimed-for dramatic irony of these characters not knowing what was about to hit them was entirely lacking, because although we all know it was a tragedy, we simply don’t care enough about any of these characters in order for it to carry any emotional weight that doesn’t derive from the series’ embededness in real-world events. That’s not storytelling, it’s just attempted emotional blackmail: care about our characters, it says, because if you don’t that means you don’t care about New Orleans. Well, I’m sorry, but it doesn’t work that way. I was ready for this show to who me how and why New Orleans matters, but instead it was just full of resentment for those to whom this is not self-evident.
I think the dialogue between Davis and Janette is endlessly revealing in this regard. The thing is that Davis’s depiction of New York is just as clichéd and one-sided as his depiction of New Orleans is. If New Orleans matters, it’s not because you can take four hour lunches there, or because of the beignets or jambalaya. Davis’s attempt to convince Janette that New Orleans matters are very revealing, since they left me entirely unmoved, and, it seems, her as well. “This town beat me” she says, well it seems to have beaten the writers as well. And so they all jumped off the boat in the penultimate episode, in what has to be the ultimate coward’s way out of a narrative impasse.
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