even the most loving documentaries

by yixuejiaren

"We were very purposely mocking the American obsession with the psychosexual nature of violence," Simon says about season five of The Wire, which featured a fake serial killer. "Seventy-five percent of the victims in my city are people of color, and they're killed for economic reasons. A lot of them are killed by the same people over and over again who are never caught. That's the definition of a serial killer. And you can't get anybody to devote resources to that. But if somebody makes one white girl disappear in Aruba ..." He tiffany Pendants for sale flashes back to the critical response to season five: "Another thing the media didn't get!"

Cop shows were both The Wire's engine and its nemesis. They gave the show something to react against--the same way The Sopranos parasitically reinvented the mob drama or Deadwood the Western. Treme, which doesn't have such structures to cling to, is a stranger creature. Overmyer and Simon each compare the series to Northern Exposure--the CBS early-nineties series about eccentrics in Alaska--but their hearts don't seem in it, and it doesn't really ring true. If Simon is pushing against anything, tiffany earrings for sale it's his reputation as a scourge: This time, he will be making the case that urban centers are sources of joy as well as pain. And where his subject was for a long time the lives of cops, now he's trying to access the inner world of musicians, who create pleasure even in the midst of destruction.

New Orleans, of course, is tiffany necklaces for sale a risky place for such imaginative leaps. Long before Katrina, New Orleanians were wary of portrayals from the outside--even the most loving documentaries, locals told me, hadn't captured the city's essence.But there are New Orleanians who see opportunity in Treme as well as danger. Rogan, for one, is delighted to have his life turned into an HBO story. He'd auditioned to play himself ("I'm not TV-shaped," he gripes). But when Simon wanted to rename the character--telling him, "Davis, we'll change your name, but the cognoscenti will know"--Rogan begged him not to. "I said, David, I can't fill a nightclub with the cognoscenti! It's a selling point for me." They compromised, changing only the last name.

I spoke with Laura Lippman, Simon's wife and a best-selling crime novelist, just after she'd attended Mardi Gras. The holiday had been "happy but chaotic," she said--the Treme crew and Spike Lee's HBO documentary crew were simultaneously filming the Zulu parade, and the result was a strange cinematic game of chicken, with Lee's cameras filming the filming of Treme as the tiffany rings for sale Treme crew tried to avoid filming them back.