The opportunity to reflect on “Cinematic Spenser” has given me the chance to make an inescapably self-indulgent return to an inescapably self-indulgent footnote that I wrote a little over a decade ago for an earlier issue of The Spenser Review. In an essay written in response to Gordon Teskey, I justified my unlikely pairing of Spenser and Hegel by observing the way in which, when one is reading The Faerie Queene, it begins to echo eerily and cheerily with everything else that one is reading, observing, thinking at the same time. I noted another example of this phenomenon–an early stage in my study of the poem, which coincided with my first immersive viewing of HBO’s The Wire, leading the two to intertwine in strange ways in my mind. The footnote in question briefly explored this intertwinement:
The Wire’s co-creator, David Simon, has repeatedly suggested that the show takes its bearings from a canonical literary tradition. Specifically, he has suggested that it was written as a modern equivalent of a Greek Tragedy, in which individuals act with a false sense of their own autonomy while in fact the meanings of their actions are determined by inscrutable and amoral higher forces (we have institutions that play this role, where once there were gods). Clues for this connection are scattered through the show, including a character who carries a copy of Prometheus Bound into a courtroom in order to achieve a spurious appearance of dignity and erudition. But it is worth noting that allegory is another form in which agents believe that they act for individual motives while in fact they are actualising the dictates of abstract forces that work through them: and The Wire, like The Faerie Queene, experiments dazzlingly with the fictional personae that it contains, tempting us at different moments to see them as fully realized individuals, or mere instances of social or conceptual types. Even if this is purely an instance of a connection created by my idiosyncratic hermeneutic anxiety, each of these works has helped me better to experience the other, and I generally wonder if we should allow more room for this sort of groundless but revelatory parallel when we write, as we often do when we teach.1
What the presence of this note reflects is the fact that, lover and aficionado of film though I certainly am, when I mentally juxtapose my experiences of reading Spenser with my experiences of screen-based storytelling, it is not the realm of the cinematic or of the feature film that leaps to mind, but rather the experience of long-form television. I’m taking this themed cluster as an opportunity to reflect a bit more on this relationship, and to ask what these kinds of work might have to do with one another.
The television shows on which I plan to focus are hardly unpredictable: The Wire vies with The Sopranos for top spot in my all-time televisual rankings. These two shows are often recognized, in the words of scholar of television Jason Mittell, as ‘two of complex television’s landmark innovators and trendsetters,’ routinely topping lists of the greatest ever programs.2 If I share these widely held valuations, my own passionate adherence to them also has something to do with the stage of my life at which I watched them. Alexander Nehamas, defending the “Serious Watching” and analysis of television in 1990 against soberly dismissive defenders of High Culture, sardonically observed, in terms that still very much resonate, that “[t]raditionalist critics of recent developments in American universities are fond of comparing the current situation to the past–that is, in most cases, to their own student days.”3 I do tend to feel that the current state of television, administered by streaming services, involves a combination of endless profusion and aesthetic flattening, so that there are always countless things to watch but little basis for choosing between them, but I recognize that this also probably reflects something of the knee-jerk nostalgia that Nehamas describes, wherein works that make a mark on you at around university age make that mark particularly deeply and decisively.4
In any case, if the study of film and television has become firmly established in the academy in the three and a half decades since Nehamas wrote these words, then The Sopranos and The Wire would be about as canonical as television shows get, often taught and much analyzed.5 And if I get irritated when these shows are discussed alongside or relegated below other shows with which they are periodically compared–like Breaking Bad or Mad Men, shows that I enjoy but would put in an entirely different category of aesthetic or conceptual complexity–this no doubt risks a version of the nostalgia that Nehamas rightly criticises. I happen to have encountered these shows at just the right moments in my own life, which were also pivotal periods in my life of reading. The first season of The Sopranos aired in 1999, when I was fifteen, and at the peak of my teenaged cinephilia; I’d only recently watched the classics of mafia cinema, the first two Godfather Films and Goodfellas, whose tropes the show references and reworks. As the ensuing series were broadcast and I continued to watch them weekly, broadcast late at night in the UK on Channel 4, I was also making a pivot in my own life, thanks to a change of schools and a transformative teacher, from being someone who loved reading by myself but hated English Class to becoming someone who could see the point of studying books and the finer nuances of words; who could see that patient attention could incrementally enrich, rather than excruciatingly strangle, the experience of reading. I don’t think I’m purely indulging in nostalgia if I claim that it wasn’t just the violence, nudity and profanity that drew teenage me into The Sopranos, but the writing. One example among many, the writers’ delight in superb malapropisms and misconstruals, of a kind I’d never encountered before: Tony Soprano confusing “Dwayne” and “deign” (“What, now that the dragon lady is gone they’ll Dwayne to set foot in our house?”); the brilliantly layered substitution of “mofo” for “amour fou”; rival boss Carmine Lupertazzi mixing up “stigma” and “stigmata”; and Bobby Bacala muddling Nostradamus with Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame (“You know, Quasimodo predicted all this.”)6
If The Sopranos was both an accompaniment to, and a participant in, my turn to books, The Wire came later, as my earlier footnote suggests: like many people I missed it when it was first aired and watched it on DVD in 2008-9, just after the final season had finished. This was when I was in graduate school, taking the second of two seminars on The Faerie Queene, this time with Susanne Wofford (lucky me), and beginning to write my dissertation. If The Sopranos aligned with my discovery of what it meant to read, The Wire was interwoven with my working out of what it meant for me to read renaissance literature, and Spenser in particular. Whether or not this is an overly neat and tidy placement of these shows within my intellectual autobiography, what is certainly the case is that more than anything else I’ve watched and read, these are the three artworks to which I find myself recurring most frequently–both in terms of actual re-reading and re-watching, in parts and as a whole, and also, I suspect, in the much harder to quantify sense that they are three works that seem to pop into my mind with unusual frequency, as an analogue or point of reference for whatever it is I’m trying to think about. They have become part of what Geoffrey Hill resonantly calls “the natural sequences of stresses and slacks in the thoughts and acts of a representative human being”–in this case, me.7
If I’ve been indulging in reminiscence, there is, I think, a larger reason for doing so. The fact of The Faerie Queene, The Sopranos and The Wire serving as my recurrent mental reference points is not just a reflection of how much I admire and enjoy them, but reflects something that they have roughly in common: commonalities of size and shape, and of balance between consistency or integrity of vision on the one hand, and internal variety and differentiation on the other. I’ve written previously for Spenser Review about The Faerie Queene as a poem of intermittence–a word that characterizes both its poetic mode and the relationship it establishes with its readers.8 This is a function of the poem’s size, which I’d characterize as being poised on the brink between memorable and forgettable: not so unthinkably vast that one can ever quite give up on the idea of knowing it, if not perfectly, then well enough (whatever that would mean), but always too big to be held in one’s head as a rough whole in the manner of a Shakespeare play, or, indeed, a film. And it’s on this basis that I don’t find myself immediately drawn to the idea of “Cinematic Spenser.” I almost always watch films in a single sitting, from start to finish, but my experience of The Faerie Queene and of my two favorite television shows is usually an experience of some subsection–one or more of their parts, of varying scales, whether a book/season an episode/canto, or a scene/stanza. Spenser’s poem has six books and a fragment of a seventh; The Sopranos has six seasons, one split into two parts, and The Wire has five; not so much as to feel unmanageably endless, not so little as to get boring or to feel exhausted of possibility.
I am suggesting, then, that my personal relationship with these three works might reflect something about the ways in which Spenser’s poem and this particular scale of long-form television exist in and through time, and inflect their readers’ or viewers’ experiences in and through time. Nehamas, in the essay that I quoted above, argues that
the object of criticism in broadcast television drama is primarily the series and not its individual episodes…But, of course, individual episodes are all we ever see, and it is by watching them in sufficient numbers that we become familiar with the series as a whole…Character, for example, is manifested through particular occurrences in particular episodes; but each manifestation is thin and two-dimensional, until we realize that thickness and depth are added to it if (and only if) it is seen as a manifestation of character which can be understood and appreciated only over time and through many such manifestations.9
He suggests as an analogue not film, but rather the comic strips that appear (or, one would have to say, that then appeared) in daily newspapers, and quotes Umberto Eco’s description of a comic strip, which can’t be experienced in isolation: “rather it acquires flavor only in the continuous and obstinate series, which unfolds, strip after strip, day after day.”10 It is of course significant that Nehamas was writing in 1990, before the golden age complex TV shows like The Sopranos and The Wire that were so lauded precisely because they gave us characters whose manifestation is not “thin and two-dimensional.” Their richness was integrally connected to the basic fact that Nehamas highlights, which is that such televisual characters are doled out to us gradually, over long spans of time, via their extended recurrence. In fact, Nehamas’s account of a TV character, focused on the largely forgotten hospital drama St. Elsewhere, sounds in some ways more germane to Spenser’s poem than to my beloved TV shows: “television characters,” he writes, “have no innermost nature. And yet, I want to suggest, the intimacy with which these not deep characters are revealed is one of the medium’s glories”:
The serial unfolding of character and the ability of individual characters (at least in some programs) to change and develop with time have an important consequence. They render character ambiguous. By this I do not mean that television characters are difficult to understand. Rather, the point is that television can present various aspects of its characters without offering a single, all-encompassing judgment about their ultimate nature or worth. This is another sense in which television characters have no depth.11
A strange kind of “intimacy” with “not deep characters,” who, by virtue of their serial recurrence under different and sometimes irreconcilable guises, prevent us from forming final and determinate judgements of them: this is pretty spot-on as a description of my experience of The Faerie Queene. As I have just acknowledged, however, it seems less obviously suited to The Sopranos or The Wire, praised for their rich and quasi-novelistic characterization. Such praise, while merited, does not capture the whole truth of these shows. What distinguishes them for me, and aligns them with Spenser, is that, in very different ways from one another, they give us characters who are so compelling precisely because they fluctuate between the depthlessness that Nehamas attributes to televisual characters, and the depth that he denies them, or rather they leave us wildly and thrillingly unable to decide where and how to look for and to locate compelling fictional personhood.
I would like to close these reflections by suggesting one particular way in which these works can be aligned: their diverse ways of ending. Much ink has been spilled on the question of The Faerie Queene’s many ways of finishing and failing to finish: the cancellation of the 1590 conclusion, the smallness of the poem’s existing bulk relative to the staggeringly grandiose ambitions that Spenser may have had for it, and the curious fragment that is the Cantos of Mutabilitie. Perhaps television has something to add to the many ways in which Spenser’s many endings have been considered. As Jason Mittell observes, “Every television series begins, but not all of them end—or at least not all series conclude… Every series that is no longer in production has a final episode, but actual finales are quite rare for American television series, with a range of other, much more common techniques of ending.”12 Many shows just stop abruptly, between seasons or even mid-season; some are wrapped up in a hurry, granted an opportunity to provide closure of a kind even if not in the way that might have been hoped. The indefinite length of so much modern American television–a situation altered but by no means eliminated by streaming services’ eclipse of broadcast TV–makes it a suggestive analogy for The Faerie Queene: a hugely ambitious work begun without a sense of definite end, and with the fantasy of endless renewal vying with the reality of various anticipated or feared endings of a more abrupt and less desirable kind; a work that grows in complexity as it unfolds, like an ever more convoluted and repeatedly renewed TV show, until it is impossible to imagine a single terminus or finale that would feel like an end point adequate to what’s gone before certainly not to the most devoted fans.
The Sopranos and The Wire give us two alternative responses to this predicament, and help us appreciate the extent to which Spenser was divided or drawn between them, and, in the end, combined them. Both shows, unlike The Faerie Queene, are among the small and privileged televisual subset that receive a planned and carefully orchestrated finale, but nowhere is the contrast between these frequently paired shows greater than in the way they handled their ends. The Wire concluded with what was to my mind, as to that of many viewers, a weak final season, undermined by the implausibility of its fake serial killer plot and the smug self-importance of the newsroom plot. But it redeemed itself with a spectacular ending, which shows the lives and afterlives of many of the surviving characters. What becomes clear as the final episode proceeds is that it combines two seemingly irreconcilable versions of the characters whom the show had created. On the one hand, in granting each of them a moment of distinctive focus, it continued the remarkable investment in the particularity of frequently marginalized and easily overlooked human lives that had been core to the show’s political and ethical vision. On the other hand, it became clear that many of the characters within the show, insofar as they were being granted a future, were being presented as incipient versions of other characters. Michael, having extracted himself from the hierarchies of gang life that are as dehumanizing as those of the police force and the political sphere, becomes a roving, charismatic, entrepreneurial thief–much like the show’s most remarkable and beloved character, the deceased Omar Little. If this provided a double thrill–of compensation for Omar’s death, and of qualified hope for Michael’s future, one that is, if equally likely to be tragically truncated, at least also likely to attain a form of freedom exercised with panache–then this is offset by the horror of the gentle and intelligent Dukie, spiralling downward into the world of drug addiction that he has striven to avoid, and, the show suggests, embarking upon the long and horrifying arc from which we have witnessed the equally (but differently) touching and savvy Bubbles barely extricate himself. The show ends, in the most remarkable fashion, by having it both ways, by making these figures both particular and general, both individuals and types: Michael and Omar, Dukie and Bubbles, are utterly themselves, and simultaneously illustrative instantiations of the wider predicaments and complexes for which they stand. This is the feat that I had in mind in originally comparing The Wire with The Faerie Queene, which similarly manages to make many of its figures–Archimago, Glauce, Talus, countless others–bundles of trope and convention that somehow coalesce into individualities greater than the sum of their parts. The Wire’s Spenserian poetics ends but only with beginnings; it leaves us with a sense both of provisional closure, and an exhausted, wondering sense of eternal recurrence.
Infamously, The Sopranos does none of this. The show ends in a New Jersey diner, Tony sitting with his wife Carmela and son AJ as his daughter, Meadow, arrives; Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” plays on the jukebox; and an unknown man seated at the counter stares at them, perhaps ominously, gets up, and heads to the bathroom. The camera cuts to ten seconds of silent, black screen, and then the credits roll. When it first aired, many viewers assumed that there was a fault with their cable and that they had missed the true ending. Ever since it became clear that this was in fact the ending that the show’s creator, David Chase, had chosen, its meaning has been much debated. Did Tony die? Did the unknown man return from the bathroom, a la Michael Corleone, and blow his brains out? Were we experiencing death from Tony’s point of view? Were we being taught a lesson about our own desires for closure, asked to reflect on our imaginative stakes in the lives of murderers and sociopaths?13
These two shows, for all that they are frequently paired, give us what might seem like the two extremes of response to the difficulty of ending, and of ending long-form TV in particular. But as my summary makes clear, their apparent differences can also be read not as paired endings, but paired refusals of ending, or different openings of horizons onto endlessness: suggesting sheer recurrence and repetition on the one hand, and ensuring ongoing speculation by denying certainty on the other.14 If we turn, finally, to The Faerie Queene, we can reread its varied attempts to end in light of the options for ending that long-form television helps to clarify. Both the last complete book that we have, and the last complete canto that we have, end with a disappearance. At the close of Book VI, after the Blatant Beast is
by the maystring might
Of doughty Calidore, supprest and tamed,
That neuer more he mote endammadge wight
With his vile tongue, which many had defamed,
And many causelesse caused to be blamed:
So did he eeke long after this remaine,
Vntill that, whether wicked fate so framed,
Or fault of men, he broke his yron chaine,
And got into the world at liberty againe.
(VI.xii.37)15
What is remarkable about this stanza is its compression: the sheer speed with which it undoes its own claims even as they are unfolding. “Neuer more” lasts only three lines until it begins to crumble into the much more limited duration of “long after,” which in turn is only a line break from “Vntill.” The release of the Beast from a state of constriction into its renewed, rampant liberty is echoed in the C rhymes, with the constraint of “remaine” and “chaine” loosening, as the unpunctuated alexandrine itself loosens, into the stanza’s last word. Like the stage direction at the end of Beckett’s one act Play–‘Repeat play’–and like the ending of The Wire–we apparently go again.
The second of the Cantos of Mutabilitie ends with a different kind of disappearance–here on the part of a figure, Nature, who begins the final stanza by speaking:
Cease therefore daughter further to aspire,
And thee content thus to be rul’d by me:
For thy decay thou seekst by thy desire;
But time shall come that all shall changed bee,
And from thenceforth, none no more change shall see.
So was the Titaness put downe and whist,
And Ioue confirm’d in his imperiall see.
Then was that whole assembly quite dismist,
And Natur’s selfe did vanish, whither no man wist.
(VII.vii.59)
It is a cut to black almost as abrupt and perplexing as the one with which The Sopranos ends: no riposte or rebuttal, the final word spoken. It is a vanishing in the suddenly evacuated readerly present that projects into one kind of future: the apocalyptic ending of endings, the change that will call change to a close. This is where we are left by the poem as it stands, wondering what to do in the time before that time comes, especially when we have only two more stanzas to read. We do not have the privilege of vanishing into that elsewhere, that offstage for an uncompletable fictional figure–“no man wist” its location, but one of Nature’s fellow residents there is Tony Soprano. This is where Nature will apparently be passing the interim period between the end of reading or viewing and the end of days. What to do in the meantime?