Written Interview: David Simon (“Treme”)
If you missed my post this week about the HBO series “Treme,” you can check it out here. Whether you responded to Season 2 the way I did or not, I think we can all agree that David Simon is a special writer with a unique vision of the world. Thus I was fascinated to read an interview Simon did with Salon. Here is a key excerpt:
Look, American television has been a juvenile medium for most of its existence. This is true. Because of the commercials, because of the need to placate the maximum number of eyeballs, happy endings abound, redemption abounds, perfect revenge is often achieved in an action sequence. It’s very much unlike life as I have experienced it, and as most people have experienced.
Life is glorious and vibrant and joyous at points, but it is essentially tragic. That’s not a unique David Simon perspective. That’s the perspective of anyone who contemplates anything as simple as mortality. You’re gonna die, and everyone you love and care about is gonna die. Life is finite. Some of them are gonna die too soon, and some of them are gonna die with things unsaid and things unfinished. And if you look at life in a fair and accurate context, you see that it is often deeply tragic, regardless of how well or poorly you live portions of your life — and certainly some people get luckier than other.
Television, by and large, has not dealt with that … because first of all, there’s no money in it. And second of all, because they’re scared of distracting you for a moment from what you have to do, which is buy Lexuses, or buy iPods, or buy bluejeans, or buy feminine hygiene products. Every few minutes, they need you reassured enough that you’re gonna pay attention to the ads.
Simon offers up some harsh, damn truth — about TV, about human existence. But bottom line, it is the truth. Each of us is born with an expiration date. I’m convinced all the great questions we have are fundamentally about the simple fact: We live, we die. How to reconcile that? How to live with that? How to make sense of that?
Some years back as I was working on a project, I asked my friend Kurt Brown, a poet, to recommend a poem that hit on the subject of death. He emailed me back:
“Scott, all poems are about death.”
Most TV, movies, entertainment pretend to be about something other than death, to distract us from the reality of our terminal state. But even in supposedly not being about death, they’re all still standing in the shadow of death’s dark door by virtue of them attempting to be a distraction.
Not David Simon. He’s not trying to distract anyone, rather in TV series like “Homicide,” “The Wire,” and “Treme,” he embraces the reality of death. And I would argue in so doing, he makes the miracle of life — through the ordinary, yet extraordinary characters in his story worlds — that much more miraculous. Finding a universe of meaning in a simple, but rich moment, filled with layers of depth.
Simon and his creative vision may not be your cup of tea. But he speaks the truth. The fact he does that while sucking us into his compelling narrative universe and entertaining us hour after hour is all the more remarkable.
For more of the interview, go here.
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