Word: copping
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Jiang has every reason to be exhausted. He's a notoriously choosy actor who usually appears in just one movie a year, yet his brooding mug will flicker through five films in the next 12 months. Missing Gun?a fast-paced crime flick about a small town cop whose frantic search for his stolen pistol unearths a web of provincial vice?is Jiang's first appearance in a film since Devils on the Doorstep, which he co-wrote, directed and starred in. Two years ago, Devils, a black-and-white masterpiece about the Japanese occupation of a Chinese village...
...Wire (Sundays, 10 p.m. E.T.), a sprawling octopus of a story that follows a single drug investigation over 13 episodes. (Later this month Showtime adds Street Time, an earnest but somewhat tone-deaf series about parolees and parole officers.) Creator David Simon says The Wire is "not a cop show" but a series about how the drug trade and the war against it have become institutions that chew up and spit out the people who work in them...
That said, it is a cop show--though one that, unlike those on network TV, suggests that not only cops but their objectives as well can be flawed. When Detective James McNulty (Dominic West) pursues a drug kingpin in the Baltimore projects, he's undermined by higher-ups who want quick, low-level "buy and bust" stings to generate p.r., not the painstaking investigation required to ensnare the bosses. The series also plumbs the Byzantine world of the criminals, focusing on D'Angelo Barksdale (Larry Gilliard Jr.), a midlevel captain who wants to rise in his organization but questions...
...this point, as when D'Angelo teaches his crew members chess to show that they're pawns in a game (chess metaphors are always a reliable DIDACTICISM ahead sign). But it slowly develops into an engrossing look at the methodical nature of police work and the limits of individualism. Cop dramas are dispatches on America's relationship to authority, and like The Shield, The Wire is a daring and timely one. We responded to 9/11 with a national narrative of teamwork: unite behind our institutions, and let's roll. (Waco? Diallo? Old news.) The rhetoric of good and evil...
...that the system may make mistakes but it works. Evil is knowable, crime solvable, justice swift and attainable. The Wire and The Shield arrive like an unconscious (and just as American) response: It's O.K. to doubt, to question, to acknowledge the bad among the good. Decades of cop shows have schooled us on our Miranda rights, chief among them the right to remain silent. Cheers to these cable cops for exercising their right to make some noise...