You know, like anything can be great, anything can be great. I don’t care. Bricklaying can be great if a guy knows what he’s doing and why and if he can make it come off.
– Paul Newman, The Hustler
Play for that money, boys; play for that motherfuckin’ money!
– Antoine Batiste, Treme, “Do You Know What It Means?”
Hopefully, this will be the last time I need to compare Treme to David Simon’s prior work, like The Wire and Generation Kill. With Treme already being picked up for a second season, a critical corpus will start to build around it. Then we can start comparing early seasons against late seasons (see, kids, TV criticism is easy! and fun!).
But standing here, with our foot on the door frame: one of the reasons many critics thought Treme was slower, less focused or not as strong as The Wire was because it lacked an overarching metaplot to drive it. The Wire had an obvious arc. Each season was about a major criminal case. The season began when the Baltimore police department was made aware of the crime; the season ended when they brought the criminals to prosecution. As the season reaches its end, the stakes ramp up and the tension mounts.
Of course, as we know by now, that’s hardly what The Wire was about. S1 of The Wire ends with Avon Barksdale being sentenced to six years while his nephew, a low-ranking dealer, gets twenty. S2 ends with Frank Sobotka, the target of an unwarranted investigation by a police major with a grudge, being brutally murdered by Balkan drug importers who get off without incident. And so forth. You think you’re getting a police procedural. You’re actually getting a gun-barrel look into how institutions grind people into dust.
We’re in a similar spot with Generation Kill. Generation Kill follows the 1st Recon during the early days of America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. So the series starts with the men on the outskirts of the country and ends with them occupying Baghdad. Easy arc to follow. Except, by the time the series has ended, we realize the situation in Baghdad is still a clusterfuck (to use the accepted Marine Corps term) of epic proportions. There is no resolution, either happy or tragic. And our heroes don’t get the fate we feel they deserve.
This should tell us something. When we’re watching a Simon/Overmyer joint, the arc is never obvious.
Treme did not even present us with an initial arc on which to hang its naturalistic character studies. The first season starts three months after Hurricane Katrina and the levees breaking. So where should the season end? With New Orleans getting “back to normal”? With our protagonists regaining the prosperity and satisfaction they had before the storm? Were it either of those, Treme would have to take place in Alternate Universe New Orleans.
In The Wire and Generation Kill, we could track the tone of the story by seeing how our favorite teams were doing. You were either with the Cops or the Dealers. You were one of the Privates or one of the Officers. Not everyone was on a team – consider Omar Little or Evan “Rolling Stone” Wright. But those characters were defined as “the ones without a team.” They were the exception. If you wanted to tell whether an episode was uplifting or depressing, just take note of how your favorite team was doing at the end.
In Treme, there are no obvious teams. The teams are easy to identify on The Wire and Generation Kill because they literally wear uniforms. They are teams which society recognizes. They are institutions in themselves. We can plug them into existing frameworks – Cops vs. Crooks, Enlisted vs. Officers – and let genre tropes do the heavy lifting. But for Treme we have to back up a step.
Treme is about Art vs. The World.
“A national treasure.”
“If the nation but knew.”– Davis McAlary and Elvis Costello, Treme, “Do You Know What It Means?”
Every protagonist on Treme – with the exception of LaDonna Batiste-Williams and Toni Bernette – is an artist.
Some of them are obvious artists: Antoine Batiste, working his ‘bone; Sonny and Annie on the street; Creighton Burnette struggling with his novel. Some of them are artists to an audience of one: Big Chief Albert Lambreaux, who would mask and march if no one else in the world were watching. Some of them are posers more than artists, like Davis McAlary: better at appreciating art than creating it. And some of them are artists in a loose sense of the word, like Janette Desautel, master chef. But they all create art and they’re all passionate about it.
To talk about art, especially in the sense that Treme uses it, we need to define what art is. That’s a debate that could merit its own post. But there’s nothing wrong with courting controversy when you’re talking about a Simon/Overmyer production, so I’ll wade into the swamp. This is the definition I’ll be using: art is any creative endeavor for which the aesthetic value outweighs the utilitarian. The banging of trash cans as sanitation workers empty them is not art. Stomp, a Broadway dance show which uses banging trash cans as an accompaniment, is art. A meal meant to be bolted down before getting back to work is not art. A meal arranged to stimulate all five of the senses is art.
(We can debate this in the comments if you like. Suffice it for now: when I talk about “art” for the rest of this piece, the above is what I mean)
People make art for a variety of reasons. Antoine plays the trombone because he inherited it from his grandfather (as mentioned in Ep 8, “All On a Mardi Gras Day”). He loves performing hot gigs with real artists, like Kermit Ruffins or the Nevilles. He loves the audience. Chief Lambreaux, by contrast, masks for personal reasons. He’s woven the persona of being an Indian Chief so deep into his soul that it’s like a knotted cord. It’s the source of his strength and his stubbornness. To not be able to mask would break him. And while we never see the novels Creighton writes, we presume they’re dense literary works – not the crime fiction of Louisiana natives John Grisham or James Lee Burke. Creighton writes in search of truth, hoping to show us the present by giving us another lens to view it.
All of Treme‘s artists have the same effect: they bring joy and meaning to a weary world.
You wanna write off New Orleans? Cancel Carnival? Well, let me tell you something. Tuesday, February 28th, wherever the fuck you all are, will be just another gray, dreary sorry-ass fucked up Tuesday. But down here, it’ll be Mardi Gras. Fuck you, you fucking fucks!
– Creighton Burnette, Treme, “At The Foot of Canal Street”
The point of Treme is to show how delightful art can be, and how essential. In the case of the music it’s easy. If you don’t love the New Orleans jazz that they’re laying down every episode, no amount of argument will convince you. If you do love it, none should be necessary. The visuals, like Mardi Gras, should also be an easy sell. The more esoteric arts, like Janette Desautel’s cooking, will be tougher to make a case for in a television show. For her, we need the word of celebrity guests like Tom Colicchio and Eric Ripert. (I think a little more effort could have been made to show how great a chef she is; food photography is not a lost art. Anyway …)
So art is delightful. Art is essential. And everyone in Treme is an artist. The problem is that art doesn’t pay the bills.
Every artist in Treme is struggling. Creighton can’t finish his novel. Davis bounces from one job to another. Janette can’t afford to keep her restaurant open. Antoine shorts every cabbie he rides with. Street life is driving Annie and Sonny apart. And Albert can barely get a gang of Indians together. The most successful regular characters on the show – Toni and LaDonna – are not artists. LaDonna’s bar may have a blue tarp flapping over its roof, but it still does good business. And Toni’s a thriving lawyer.
(The one exception is Delmond Lambreaux, Albert’s son, a successful jazz trumpeter. He distances himself a great deal from his New Orleans heritage, even grousing about playing “Iko” to a Southern crowd in Episode 5, “Shame, Shame, Shame.” Has exiling himself from New Orleans made him more successful? Has it made his art less pure?)
Why is art such a struggle? Remember, art values the aesthetic over the utilitarian. Art deliberately avoids the utilitarian – the useful, the profitable, the merchandisable. You can make money off of art, but that’s largely out of your hands. If you want to make money, there are easier ways to do it.
If you want to live in this country at all, there are easier places to do it than in New Orleans, in fact.
What Treme reminds us – directly through Creighton Burnette’s YouTube rants; indirectly through the apathy of FEMA and the insurance agencies – is that, following Katrina, there was debate around whether or not to even rebuild New Orleans. “It’s below sea level,” observers noted. “The damage is so extensive. And another hurricane could come through again and cause just as much damage. Why bother?” It seemed like all of nature was conspiring to keep people out of New Orleans.
On a smaller scale, there are times throughout Season One where it feels like all of nature is conspiring to keep the protagonists from pursuing their art. Creighton struggles for inspiration. He doesn’t want to turn his novel about the 1927 flood into an allegory for the current catastrophe. But his anger at the nation’s indifference to New Orleans’ suffering is too raw to set aside. Antoine can barely afford to make it to the few gigs he gets. His trombone gets confiscated during his arrest (Ep 03, “Right Place, Wrong Time”), putting him in dire straits. Janette can’t keep her gas lines clear enough to serve the crowds she gets. She can’t pay for repairs, food, rent and her staff’s wages at the same time. As Episode 9 (“Wish Someone Would Care”) draws to a close, she’s considering moving to New York – the same place Delmond went – to make a living there.
New Orleans is a tough place to live. The artist’s life is a tough one to live. The devastation of the broken levees made both of those harder.
So, in the first season after the storm, how do our artists do?
Antoine keeps living his hand-to-mouth life. His circumstance vary with his luck and with the quality of his choices. He’s got a good woman and a few regular gigs. But he’s too trifling to visit Baton Rouge and his children as often as he should. He fools around on his live-in girlfriend. And when he gets a plum gig with the legend Alan Toussaint, he gambles most of his gig money away. Antoine is the same kind of comic relief fuck-up that Simon, Mills and Overmyer frame so many of their stories around. Antoine will manage, because New Orleans is the only kind of city that can sustain him.
Albert gets to march with his gang on St. Joseph Night. Delmond conspires with the rest of the tribe to break down some of last year’s suits for re-use. Albert grouses about incorporating pieces of an old suit – sacrilege to a Mardi Gras Indian – but doesn’t put up a fight. That’s about as far as we’ll see Albert go toward compromising. As a result, we get to watch the tribe march: meeting other tribes and showboating for passerby.
(The threatened confrontation with the police passes without much of a ripple)
Janette concedes that the city’s too much for her. She packs it in to move to New York City. Davis tries to tempt her with one last parade of delights through New Orleans, but she’s already bought her tickets. This is a good thing, aesthetically. If Davis’s attempts to woo Janette back to New Orleans had succeeded, that’d be far too Aaron Sorkin or Joss Whedon for a show as naturalistic as Treme.
Sonny and Annie go their separate ways. Annie is and always has been the more talented of the two and Sonny knows it. He smashes his keyboard – his only means of making money – in a temper tantrum when he realizes she’s not coming back. Meanwhile, Annie shacks up with Davis, a relationship I predict will linger into the second season. We see potential for her future: helping another street musician (played by a slumming Steve Earle) write music. Maybe she’ll find her voice yet.
And Creighton? That one’s hard.
I have a hard time with the writers’ decision to kill off Creighton. Sure, everything he loved about New Orleans was fading. He displayed the classic symptoms of depression: loss of appetite, inability to concentrate, loss of interest in earlier passions. He couldn’t finish his novel. He was worried about money. But suicide’s such a self-centered act. It’s an obsession with one’s own suffering that drowns out all else. And Creighton had to know how his death would affect Toni and Sofia. He clearly loves them. Did he think they’d be happy he was gone? Nothing in his character shows that.
Fortunately, Treme does not shy away from showing how hard Creighton’s death hits his family. The bewilderment, grief and anger play out in their proper course.
“There are so many beautiful moments here.”
“They’re just moments. They’re not a life.”
– Davis McAlary and Janette Desautel, Treme, “Wish Someone Would Care”
Season One of Treme ends with a second line march for Daymon Brooks’s funeral. Antoine marches but doesn’t play, though he could probably use the money. Toni marches, reaching a new level of acceptance for her husband’s death and his final wishes. And LaDonna kicks loose as the band gets into swing, strutting and waving with the best of them. The rest of the country wonders how New Orleans can dance when it hurts so bad. They don’t understand that that’s why you dance.
The second line ends outside church. The marchers circle up and finish their song with a rousing cheer. Then, the music is over. Antoine carries out an argument with a cabbie he stiffed. People talk about their plans for the rest of the day. Car doors slam; engines start. Life goes on.
By choosing to end on that note, not on the second line finishing, Treme delivers its message. There is Art and there is Life. Real Art – like the art created by the residents of Faubourg Treme every day, rain or shine – fills Life with a series of beautiful moments. But Life doesn’t go away.
