An Endearingly Rephrehensible Reprobate

So a week on (maybe a little less; it's Monday, so named after the moon, and I'm typing on a school keyboard that requires the application of so much force it feels like I'm six again and hammering away at my grandfather's old Smith and Corona) we're still studying The Wire. We're only about two, maybe three episodes into the first season, so really very little has happened in terms of plot - instead, the focus of both the lesson plans and David Simon's teleplays (isn't that a delightfully futuristic word?) has been on character introduction. This afternoon we're tasked to write about Detective James McNulty, Baltimore City Homicide Dept., who is in the tradition of Catholic Irish boys from New England an endearingly reprehensible reprobate.

Jimmy McNulty enjoys a somewhat strained relationship with his commanding officers (although it's sometimes difficult to tell when Sergeant Landsman, a murder police of equatorial proportions, is angry or just amused) and a decidedly strained relationship with his ex-wife, also mother to his two healthy kids. Although throughout the series there is a tension between Jimmy and Elena which is not always entirely asexual, Jimmy's marital difficulties basically stem from his chronic infidelity (one Elena will likely never forgive), to which end he basically has it off with every minor female character who isn't, like Kima, fashionably gay-but-not-butch. (And anyway, in season three, he ends up covering for Kima when she starts cheating on her partner). Because Jimmy is so often seen in the company of hard-drinking policemen, however, and in an atmosphere in which moral boundaries are blurred to begin with, his promiscuity is something to be regarded less as a character flaw and more of a character consequence. In the third season, for example, he explains that "maybe the thing that makes me so good at this job is the thing that makes me so shitty at everything else" - his insatiability, this flaw that means he's never satisfied (either with married life or only apprehending mid-level pushers) is his principal characteristic.

Whether or not the fact that McNulty represents some kind of psychosexual pattern in his writers, or within the American population at large - which would be easier to talk about in broad, sweeping (and blithely Viennese) arguments that bear little correlation to reality and make them therefore perfectly suited for Media Studies - is hard to say. I think it's more realistic to interpret him as an inherently broken character; morally righteous in terms of police work, often butting heads with what he sees as an overly-politicised command, but at another level more reflective of some kind of deep cultural melancholy. A third of American marriages end in divorce, and Jimmy's was no different. He deals with the stresses of alimony and visitation disputes by drinking heavily and engaging in more-or-less mechanical sexual encounters, and almost all of his friends are murder cops.

He does, however, at least try and find a better situation for himself, so there's some redeeming hope. In season three (which I've just finished watching and so feel confident referencing) he finds a political strategist who might be the one to set him back on the rails, or at least stop pissing on them. Although as a Catholic he seems sometimes doomed to perpetual penance, he's still an American, man.