Okay, first off, if you haven’t seen The
Wire yet, get your ass of the couch and buy it, or grab your laptop, keep
your ass on the couch and watch it. Either way, unless it’s your goal in life
to only watch mind-numbing trash, you owe it to yourself—and probably mankind
in general—to watch The Wire.
All this elitist
rambling aside, anyone who’s seen season two will undoubtedly remember a young
punk by the name of Ziggy. He’s easily one of the key characters of the season,
though you wouldn’t know it watching him. His entire character development
takes place during this one season and afterwards, he’s never seen again. At
the end of his character arc I started realizing how the writers tricked me
into taking a certain point of view regarding Ziggy and it’s this point of view
I want to briefly discuss.
Everyone who’s seen
season two probably didn’t hold a very high opinion of Ziggy. In fact, I’d
describe him more as something along the lines of ‘incredibly annoying’. His
fuck-uppery knew no bounds, he couldn’t take anything seriously, could never
keep his mouth shut, not to mention the fact he’s the boss’s son which gave him
a certain protection and immunity. We often catch him entreating Nick to help
him with his problems which he usually does. This also shows Nick to be the
more reliable figure, the one who knows how to get things done, unlike someone I
know… Anyway, whether it’s trying to make money, committing small crimes,
dealing drugs on the street level, Ziggy is always messing things up, not only
for himself, but also for others (his father, etc.). In the midst of a police
investigation taking place and all kinds of character development, it’s always
a drag to return to Ziggy and see what he’s been up to. You get tired of his
behavior and his shenanigans and you want him to receive some kind of
payback…and that’s precisely the point.
As the season continues
on, we’re treated to crucial scenes like Ziggy talking to his father and the
scene that gets him arrested. After he steals a few cars for Glekas (who works
for The Greek), Glekas doesn’t pay Ziggy the full amount that was agreed upon.
History repeats itself: Ziggy’s never been taken seriously and now, even though
he held up his end of the bargain, Glekas laughs in his face. This is the last
straw: he grabs the gun from his car, shoots Glekas and, realizing what he’s
done, sits in his car and sobs, awaiting arrest. In prison, he has a final talk
with his father where it becomes clear he resents his father for always putting
his business at the docks first. In Ziggy’s final scenes, we get a completely
different picture. We get context, reasons for his errant behavior. We start to
understand his desire to be taken seriously in his father’s eyes and in the
eyes of the dockworkers. We get that he wants to solve his problems on his own,
not just rely on the ever-reliable Nick all the time. This is why he vainly
attempts at taking care of a duck, to show the world he can be a responsible
adult.
The best thing about the
way the writers handled Ziggy was that you spent pretty much the entire season
experiencing Ziggy ‘the annoying loser’ before being confronted with the
reasons behind his behavior. You therefore automatically assume the point of
view of just another dockworker who occasionally spots Ziggy desperately trying
to act tough, etc. Like the dockworkers (and pretty much everyone else) you automatically
ridicule him. You don’t take him seriously, because you aren’t familiar with
his past, with the reasons for his behavior. Because you’re only given this
context at the end, and not at the beginning, you’re forced to realize your own
prejudices which is the point, me thinks.
I grant you I’m
probably going a bit overboard with what this all might say about us viewers. It
sounds like I’m saying we’re basically all prejudiced assholes when we
immediately denounce Ziggy. This is all, of course, a tremendous case of
audience manipulation on the part of the writers. They specifically allow you
to sympathize/empathize with Ziggy only at the end, thus forcing you to look at his previous actions in a
different light, thus forcing you—at least in my view—to consider your own prejudices
and the way you easily judged him to be a person of no value. You could say not
revealing too much about Ziggy is just audience manipulation, but do we know
everything there is to know about our coworkers or other people that inhabit
our daily lives? Do we always immediately try to empathize with someone else,
even when they’ve committed some crime? No, at least not most of us. We have a
tendency to quickly look at things in black-and-white and, to be fair,
sometimes that’s a necessity. If we were to closely examine every occurrence in
our lives, we’d go mad; ain’t nobody got time for that! Nevertheless, not to
judge too quickly is definitely important as we can see in the case of Ziggy. This
is the lesson (one of many!) I think the writers were trying to teach us.
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