“How About Dinner?”

Brian Lynch

I have found several episodes intriguing of a television series that exemplified a few themes that I stress in these pieces.

The scenes involve a cop that is divorced, in his early forties, and has only his work and kids but mostly his work to sustain him. He drinks and has little or no insight about his drinking and cheated extensively on his wife. He has an encounter with a political consultant of some weight; they are attracted to each other. They sleep together.

She is driven and seems to “know” the rules and so avoids at all costs any “real” involvement in calling him late at night for a rendezvous, at least for a while. He reverses the usual sexual roles and wants more involvement and asks for a date, they meet for dinner at an upper-class restaurant and he compliments her on the place. It is obvious that he rarely has eaten at such a place. The conversation turns towards what exactly they do and she says she does pretty high-profile political consultations. She asks about his politics and voting.

I don’t remember if he said if he voted or not in the last election but it became awkward very quickly he said something like “Oh Bush and that other guy what’s his name,” and she said you mean “Kerry” and he said, “ As far as I am concerned they haven’t a clue as to what I am doing.” “I don’t know, that is the way I see it,” his voice trailing off somewhat embarrassed. The scene cuts to him standing lonely up against his car.

Then there is a conversation with his female partner in the car on a stake with her asking him how is it going with his new girlfriend. He says “She looked right through me.” He was not embarrassed as if he doubted himself. No, he, knew himself and the work he did and he knew it was real and important. He was simply humiliated.

Much that can be extracted from this, the most obvious is the humiliation the detective feels.

This is the world of “script” and “ideology.” Silvan Tomkins speaks of Ideology. I cannot cover script and ideology in fifty words but in short, it says protest as we will it says that human beings must have a unifying principle to organize their lives. For my purposes, I point out that this almost universally will result in the root of prejudice or severe isolation. That is we each need an organizing principle in our lives. Therefore in the absence of a verifiable truth we have cultural relations, we have political parties we have a religion or we try and “stand above it all” in an attempt to intellectualize everything. I emphasize this later because I think intellectuals too much get on their high horses just as everyone else does.

But back to our cop, he is certainly sympathetic in his alienation. Going back to his dinner he tells her his story of going to Loyola of Baltimore and having to drop out due to being married and having a child. His date gives no signs that she is “getting it.” He goes on to say he joins the force and how he is a very good cop and how he thinks there are only a handful of “police” that can do what he does. Again her demeanor continues to be the same, this, the daily humiliation that wears us down; to be looked through.

But it begs some questions. We need not answer all questions. One is what creates her disconnect. She is behind a “liberal” candidate in a ravaged Eastern seaboard city, he a cop trying to improve his city, why the disconnect? What is going on here? The answers are not easily come by. She is “withdrawn" in some part of her being a prisoner of her “tony” upbringing, be it Georgetown or Harvard Yard or maybe Kansas City to Harvard never to look back, somewhere in there an inability to empathize with those below her. For both, we only have what the writers give us about their past, well after all this is fiction so we don’t know his biography. What abandonment must he have suffered? What shame or self-disgust leads to so much drinking or why he succeeds in alienating everyone around despite his intelligence and personality?

The series is “The Wire” and the episode is near the end of season 3.