ABSTRACT
David Simon and Ed Burns are probably best known for their work on The Wire, the dark and epic television series about the policing of drug economies in West Baltimore that has garnered significant critical attention (see, for example, Ethridge 2008; Hanson 2008; Kinder 2008). I have chosen instead to focus on The Corner, which is the televisual adaptation of the true stories chronicled by Simon and Burns in the book of the same name. The latter has been referred to as the ‘the book that spawned The Wire’ (O’Hagan 2009) but, this notwithstanding, there are three reasons for my choice of analytical vehicle. The series represents ‘true stories’ and, in doing so, first tells the reader something extremely interesting about contemporary perceptions of subjectivity: each of the multiply flawed characters performs a profoundly fragmented identity throughout the six episodes and the normalisation of tensions between aspects of personal identity invites the audience to embrace fluidity and undecideability, indeed to see this as a source of renewal. Second, the inclusion of interviews with the ‘real’ central characters at the end of the final episode is a reminder that narrative closure in fiction is a fiction. There are many endings and beginnings, births and deaths represented in The Corner, and much hard labour in between; through exploring some of the narrative themes – of life, work, home – I argue that (re)birth is not by definition non-violent, but also that violence is not by definition destructive. Finally, to justify the inclusion of this show, I turn to the classic essay by Cynthia Enloe, in which she challenges the ‘raison d’être for studying international politics’ that she identifies as explanation, specifically the identification of causality and effect (1996: 188). In order to construct a persuasive explanation for this phenomenon or that event, she argues, ‘one has to be economical, discriminating … For an explanation to be useful, a great deal of human dignity has to be left on the cutting room floor’ (ibid.). I was inspired to refer to Enloe in my justification not just because she uses the metaphor of the ‘cutting room’ (formally known as the editing suite), which seems to fit well with the analyses I present here, but also because in this essay Enloe 104reminds scholars of the need to pay close analytical attention to those snippets of human dignity that more usually end up on the ‘cutting room floor’ and to my mind this is the specific narrative function of The Corner. The series depicts, without hesitation and without apology (and rightly so), life on and in the ‘margins, silences and bootum rungs’ of which Enloe speaks (ibid.).
