John Waters v. The Wire

An image of the ideal city is housed deep inside the palazzo-style fortress of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, tucked within granite and marble halls, protected by climate control, surveillance cameras and legions of guards. The painting, a long horizontal of pale blue and muted earth tones hangs at shoulder height and seems to lord over the assortment of other Italian Renaissance treasures collected in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries by the railroad barons Henry Walters and his father William. The painting is inspired by Leon Battista Alberti’s theories on architecture and is attributed to Bartolomeo di Giovanni Corradini (Fra Carnevale). The Ideal City (c. 1480-84) is not a real place of course but an aristocratic dream of a city, a 15^th century pastiche of architectural references that together represent order, elegance and power.

The scene is bathed in gentle morning light; four Corinthian columns bracket the fountain and hold up the personifications of Justice, Moderation, Liberality and Courage. With its restored Roman Coliseum, Florentine Baptistry, sober palaces and triumphal arch, this is a city that preserves its antiquities while providing contemplative spaces for its citizens. Human activity, what little there is of it, consists of a few simple gestures: an itinerant peddler, satchel upon his shoulder passes in the foreground, a group of men stroll in apparent conversation, a handmaiden enveloped in a blue robe dips her urn into the central fountain while another servant draped in diaphanous umber approaches. Through the Triumphal Arch, itself a reference to Emperor Constantine, the distant gate of the walled city is visible and beyond the gate, the horizon sealed off by the misty blue Tuscan hills.

If you exit the Walters Art Museum via the east portal you will alight upon Charles Street. Look north to your left and the original monument to George Washington looms over the elegant and ordered neighborhood of Mount Vernon.  Echoes of Rome’s Trajan Column can be discerned in the monument’s neo-classical design as it rises above the stately residences and elegant parks accented with bronze statuary of allegorical scenes and political figures.  If this was your only impression of Baltimore, if you did not travel a couple blocks east or west, had never read the newspaper, watched a John Waters film or become addicted to HBOs The Wire you could almost believe the ideal city, that 500 year-old hallucinatory utopia of civic order had somehow manifested itself here in Baltimore.

The opening sequences of John Waters’ 1998 film Pecker depict back and forth shots of the film’s eponymous photographer, played by Edward Furlong, and the Washington Monument. Pierced by several lightning rods, Washington appears like an abstract voodoo doll or a post-colonial Saint Sebastian.  Pecker squints through his cheap 35mm camera snapping photos of the monument before he sprints to hop on a bus headed for the neighborhood of Hampden.  Pecker hangs out the window of the bus taking pictures of the animated street life as it heads north on Charles Street.  He exits the bus on 36^th Street or ‘The Avenue’ as it is known locally, to begin his shift flipping burgers.

 

Before I moved to Baltimore in the summer of 2001, I spent one weekend driving all over the city looking at neighborhoods (neighborhoods declared relatively safe that is), where I could possibly live. I cruised the streets of Patterson Park, Bolton Hill, Mount Vernon, Federal Hill, Canton, Fells Point, Locust Point, Pigtown, Brewer’s Hill, Charles Village, Waverly, Remington, Lauraville, and Hamilton until bleary eyed and confused I pulled the rented car over on 36^th Street in Hampden and sat on the stairs of a shop called Oh Said Rose! While scanning the mix of storefronts and rowhouses across the street, a skinny white kid with corn rows doing his best Eminem routine strutted by while an elderly woman in curlers walking her mangy miniature poodle snuffed out a cigarette in front of a second hand clothing store called Fat Elvis.   I realized that I must have stumbled into John Waters territory and that I would make this place my home.

How did John Waters come to own Baltimore? Or to be more precise, how is it that an independent filmmaker could so dominate the image of Baltimore in the popular imagination to the extent that any mention of the city immediately conjures the image of the elegant and eccentric filmmaker with the slightly creepy pencil moustache? Born and raised in and around Baltimore, Waters briefly attended film school at NYU.  By his own account he was less interested in analyzing Battleship Potemkin than trawling porn houses for his cinematic inspirations, and after being thrown out for smoking marijuana, he returned to his hometown. Yet this rejection did not deflate his ambitions.  Instead he embraced the provincial perversity of Baltimore and formed a loose confederation of actors and assistants called the Dreamlanders.  Waters’ first film was a 17-minute, 8mm short Hag in a Black Leather Jacket (1966).  Working within a budget of $30, Hag featured a rooftop interracial marriage presided over by a Klansman.  Several productions followed but it was 1972s Pink Flamingos that forever inserted John Waters and his muse Divine (Glenn Milstead) in the cultural landscape.

Over the course of almost four decades, Pink Flamingos has transformed from cult artifact to legendary spectacle. Virtually anyone with a passing knowledge of film history can evoke the encounter between a poodle’s poop and Divine’s dental work.  But Pink Flamingos is more deeply perverse than that little culinary outrage and so unique that it is impossible to distill into a few descriptive associations. But lets try just for the fun of it.  Pink Flamingos is Pasolini engorging on crab cakes, it is Un Chien Andalou on a date with the Honeymooners, it is the Viennese Actionists performing in the sleaziest strip club, it is a Manson Family picnic, it is a home movie by Hieronymus Bosch if he grew up in a trailer park on the outskirts of Baltimore in the 1950s.

 

In terms of cinematic representation, whether it is Waters’ band of eccentrics, the violent complexity of David Simon’s The Wire, or the nostalgia of Barry Levinson, Baltimore is less of an image space than a situational or attitudinal space.  Baltimore is conventionally pictured as gritty, authentic and populated by a seemingly vast assortment of exceptional characters.  Lacking dramatic visual anchors such as New York’s Empire State Building or Statue of Liberty, Chicago’s lakefront and architectural showroom, San Francisco’s precious Victorian homes or Golden Gate Bridge, Washington D.C.’s monuments or even L.A.’s infinite sea of lights or smog shrouded Hollywood sign, Baltimore offers a far more modest spectacle.

For John Waters what Baltimore lacks in architectural or natural wonder it more than compensates with vivid personalities, kitschy décor and a raggedly porous border between the city and its rural periphery. Burnouts from the 1950’s, white trash hippies, doughy drag queens, inbred hillbillies, rhinestone studded killers, clueless housewives and Manson Family copycats, a virtual orgy of stereotypes crash into each other within the hideous interiors of row homes and the littered alleys of a city way past its prime.

Like Diane Arbus with a sense of humor, Waters is entirely skeptical of all the utopian nonsense that trickled down from the 1960s counter culture.  If it is possible to set aside all of the theatrical outrageousness of Waters’ early films, one can find an almost documentary authenticity in his portrayal of a social and moral system in complete disarray. Without directly addressing race riots, economic collapse, white flight and the now obviously empty promises of  LBJ’s the Great Society, the Trash Trilogy (Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble and Desperate Living) and Pink Flamingos in particular, presents a contemporary image of the 1970s – a vision of corruption, depravity and chaos; Baltimore as antithesis of the Ideal City.

It wasn’t always so, John Quincy Adams bequeathed the title ‘Monumental City’ upon Baltimore in the 1820s in recognition of its impressive public statuary and careful city planning. Throughout the 19^th century Baltimore played a hugely significant role in American history and culture, the Star Spangled Banner, for example, honors the heroic defense of Fort McHenry in Baltimore’s Harbor in 1814.  But for all of its post-colonial glory, Baltimore has had more than its share of civic ugliness.  John Q. Adams’ compliment had barely enough time to stick before the term ‘Mobtown’ was applied in reaction to the enthusiastic frenzy Baltimore’s citizenry could be whipped into at the slightest provocation.

Baltimore is the southernmost northern city and the northernmost southern city; where it is said, the graciousness of the north meets the efficiency of the south.  And although Maryland was officially neutral during the Civil War in many ways the north/south rivalry is still being fought in the cultural subconscious of the city.  As if to concretely embody this historical and cultural schizophrenia, Baltimore is a city with dueling Civil War monuments – an imposing pedestal proffering triumphal Union soldiers accompanied by righteous angels occupies the same park with a double equestrian statue featuring Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson as they ride off together toward military glory. And if that wasn’t enough; it would be a leisurely 10 minute stroll between the heartbreakingly emotive statue of Billie Holiday on Pennsylvania Avenue to the base of the Washington Monument to view the somber and respectful bronze figure of Roger Taney, the Supreme Court Chief Justice and author of the 1857 Dred Scott decision that determined that African Americans were in every way inferior to the white race and therefore could never be considered citizens of the United States.

For 30 years John Waters ruled the image of Baltimore in the popular imagination, but with nostalgic romps like Hairspray the film and then the Broadway musical, Waters, like an unusual but loveable bachelor uncle, incrementally gained acceptance into the mainstream. Meanwhile a new representation began to insert itself in the collective consciousness; The Wire, which ran on HBO for five seasons and 60 episodes between 2002 and 2008.  This is a city branded by opposing visions of excess. Whose Baltimore am I living in? Is it the kitschy depravity of John Waters or the violent streets of The Wire?  The answer is of course, both and neither.

 

Simon considers Baltimore a main character in the series; while most cop shows utilize sound stages and sets, The Wire features virtually all of Baltimore from its old money neighborhoods like Guilford to the third world conditions on the east and west sides, from the scruffy but still elegant interiors of city hall to the degraded classrooms of its schools. For those years while The Wire was in production it was almost a fact of daily life to encounter detours while driving, to observe blocks of boarded up tenements glowing brightly with expensive lighting equipment, and to cross paths with one of the actors who call Baltimore home.

Simon describes The Wire as one long story about how people live together in an American city. Through its characters and plot lines, each season examined how various institutions, the police, drug trade, education and politics, inevitably engulf and compromise the individuals engaged with those power structures. Simon has also stated that he understands the crime story as an essential genre to understanding contemporary American culture, every bit as foundational as the Western was to earlier generations of Americans. It is difficult to cite another example in film or television of a narrative of such scope and ambition. Why Baltimore and not, say, Chicago, Philadelphia or Detroit?  Most importantly is the simple fact that Simon was a reporter for the Baltimore Sun for 12 years and his writing partner, Ed Burns, worked as a detective on the Baltimore Police Department and later as a public school teacher.

 

The image of Baltimore is now so wrapped in the reverence for The Wire that it is hard to disassociate oneself from the connection.  Everyone in Baltimore has their Wire encounter stories and I have a few of my own. While driving downtown one afternoon, I caught a quick glimpse of a scene underway with the actor Aidan Gillen who played Baltimore’s Mayor Tommy Carcetti.  And while Simon has never owned up to the remarkable resemblance, Gillen is a miniature version of the actual mayor at the time, Martin O’Malley. An instant later I saw the mayor himself speaking to reporters in the shadow of City Hall. Like a skip in the time / space continuum, it momentarily felt as if somehow the moment had repeated itself in a slightly different iteration.

Another and perhaps more revealing encounter speaks to the power of narrative to seep into our inner lives. At the end of the school day I was waiting outside a Baltimore High School where my wife teaches. A woman pulled up, practically leaping out of her vehicle and looked toward the school’s front door.  She seemed familiar and unknown to me simultaneously, as if I knew her but had forgotten how.  I felt a twinge that can only come from an unresolved emotional bond and it crossed my mind that we must have been intimate long ago and in some other city. I was left squirming in this perceptual no man’s land for an uncomfortably long few minutes. Should I approach her to say hello in hopes that our connection will be revealed?  Will I embarrass us both and possibly my wife?  As if a veil had been pulled from my eyes I realized the woman in question was Sonja Sohn, the actress who played Detective Kima George for the entire run of the series. Evidently her daughter was a student at the school. The uncanny experience of not being able to distinguish my own memories from something I watched on DVD was funny and unsettling.

 

Baltimore has become an enduring metaphor and muse for Waters and Simon, yet ironically Baltimore is a decidedly unselfconscious place. Despite its obvious dysfunction, the city as a social entity seems not to compare itself to other municipalities; it is unabashedly itself. There is no competition with other American cities such as the rivalries between New York and Boston or Los Angeles and San Francisco.  It is not mildly apologetic, like Chicago or Seattle, for not being the center of the universe. And despite the awkward campaigns to attract business to Baltimore utilizing short-lived slogans like  ‘Charm City’, ‘The City That Reads’ or the crazily stupid ‘The Greatest City in America’ you will not find people in Baltimore indulging the provincial braggadocio you might find in Houston (or anywhere in Texas for that matter). And despite the fact that many people from Washington D.C. have moved to Baltimore for its relatively cheap housing stock and easy commute, the political capital of the world seems to make no impression on the concerns of Baltimore and its citizens.

As if in a vision from an alternate cinematic universe, the image of the Ideal City returns in Isaac Julian’s short film Baltimore (2003). Julian, who might be described an artist who uses film rather than a traditional filmmaker, and is therefore less shackled to conventional notions of plot and character development. He is also black and British, which provides an informed outsider’s perspective on issue of race and representation in America.  His image of Baltimore is not a site of manic outrageousness or unrelenting crime and poverty, but a place of almost mythological solitude, a spare proscenium of urbane elegance and urban grit.

The film opens with a shot of Baltimore’s generic downtown skyline, although we are cued toward otherworldly expectations by the softly muffled pinging of sonar and a whirling dark cloud formation hovering over the city.  Julien’s film places two iconic figures, Melvin Van Peebles the revered blaxploitation director of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) and an Angela Davis / Foxy Brown look-a-like played by Vanessa Myrie, in a kind of futuristic existential drama. These two opposing characters pursue and surveille one another as they oscillate back and forth between two distinct cultural institutions, the Walters Art Museum and the Great Blacks in Wax Museum, which is housed in an old firehouse on the city’s embattled east side.

It is a truism that Baltimore is small city if you are white and a big city if you are black. The attendance figures for the Great Blacks in Wax museum seem to prove the point.  Originating in a small storefront space in 1983 with a half dozen wax figures, the Great Blacks and Wax Museum has become an essential, if still somewhat humble, cultural organization.  But the humility of its environment belies the impact of the impact and intensity of its exhibits which include revered historical figures such as Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks and Marcus Garvey alongside more obscure personalities such as Mary Elizabeth Lange, founder of the oldest order of Roman Catholic nuns.  Exhibits devoted to the Middle Passage and to lynching make the museum a more vivid and disturbing experience that if were simply a hall of heroes.

Via this institutional juxtaposition, by playing the Walters and the Great Blacks in Wax Museum as opposing versions of history, Julien suggests a struggle between narratives and representations. The Walters’ palatial interiors and marble statuary emanate a cold cyan-hued glow while the crowded and homespun galleries of the Great Black in Wax Museum peak out from vignetted frames as if illuminated by a prowler’s flashlight.  As if to confront, assess or quietly contradict the European version of history on display at the Walters, a full contingent of waxen figures are magically transported from the dingy halls of Great Blacks in Wax Museum to the antiseptic galleries of the Walters.

As the camera dollies through the galleries, Julien frames Zora Neale Hurston as she contemplates the image of an astonished and emaciated elderly man in Jusepe De Ribera’s canvas St. Paul the Hermit.  And as if documenting a fantasy cocktail party of notable African Americans, the camera then pans across the room to momentarily rest on the faces of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and a dramatically costumed Billie Holiday who seems about to break into song while standing in front of Panini’s View of the Colosseum. Meanwhile Melvin Van Peebles studies Fra Carnavale’s Ideal City while slowly removing the ever-present cigar from his mouth. Is that a skeptical frown on his face as he turns away from that Renaissance dream?

Toward the end of the film, Van Peebles and our Angela / Foxy proxy stroll the streets of the eastside as they enter and exit the Great Blacks in Wax Museum. Refreshingly, Julian does not fetishize the unavoidable surfeit of boarded up housing or focus on street corner drug traffic. Instead he allows his characters to walk purposefully, apparently without fear, accompanied by their own internal dialogue and private motivations.  This duo seems to exist outside of history, as observers, flaneurs and silent commentators. With freedom animating their strides, Van Peebles walks the streets like a bemused and cynical angel, while Angela / Foxy loses her afro-wig to reveal a head shorn. Without her nostalgic halo of hair and wrapped in an ankle length black coat against the Baltimore winter, she moves away from the camera emphatically toward the future.  Unlike John Waters’ exaggerated and unglued characterizations or the atmosphere of futility that permeates David Simon’s Baltimore, Julien’s Baltimore remains enigmatic and free of cliché and/or hopelessness. This is a Baltimore I would like to live in for a change.

 

Many thanks to Mark Street for providing the impetus for this essay.