Frank Sobotka is an empty man
Epistemic status: openly eisegetical. The author’s prejudices are perhaps on display more than is advisable. Spoilers for season 2 of The Wire.
It’s well-known by now that The Wire was an attempt to follow Napoleon’s advice to Goethe about tragedy:
The Emperor seemed to agree with me; he returned to drama and made some very sensible remarks, as a man who had observed the tragic stage with a great deal of attention, like a criminal judge, and who felt very deeply how far French theatre had strayed from nature and truth.
He went on to talk about fatalistic plays, of which he disapproved. They belonged to the dark ages. ‘Why, today, do they keep giving us destiny?’ he said. ‘Destiny is politics.’ [Translation from here, emphasis mine.]1
David Simon made this explicit a number of times: ‘In our heads we’re writing a Greek tragedy, but instead of the gods being petulant and jealous Olympians hurling lightning bolts down at our protagonists, it’s the postmodern institutions that are the gods.’ In the world of The Wire, it is true that ēthos anthrōpoi daimōn, but the daimones are political: the institution you find yourself in is the daimōn that holds the thread of your life, and the challenges of the day are bureaucracy and the need to glad-hand and grease wheels to get anywhere.2
That very general aspect of the show, replacing gods and Fates and Furies with politics and institutions, is hardly novel: again, the idea is Napoleonic. What tied The Wire together was a very specific picture of the kinds of institutions that were hurling down lightning bolts. This was a picture rooted in late twentieth-century American ideas about deindustrialisation causing urban decline and decay3—ideas that today have little influence in the US beyond J. D. Vance’s occasional attempts at profundity (even as they have had influence, more-or-less subtle, on the more protectionist parts of the British political spectrum).
One of the show’s clearest statements of these ideas comes in season 2, episode 5, when union boss Frank Sobotka meets up with criminal Spiros Vondas. The meeting catches Frank on the back foot—Frank thought he would be meeting Spiros’ boss, ‘the Greek’. But he tries his best to insist to Spiros that he wants out of their deal: Frank, the secretary-treasurer of a local branch of the stevedores’ union, will no longer help the Greek smuggle goods into the US via the port of Baltimore.
Spiros does not directly respond to Frank; instead, he looks across the water to a factory.
They used to make steel there, no?
Smoke from the stacks, but inside…
And then, he walks away.
The standard reading of the scene is that Spiros is telling Frank that, like other industries before it, the port of Baltimore is dying; without the money that Spiros and the Greek provide, Frank’s union will die with it. The criminality and corruption seen at the Baltimore port (exemplified by the deal between Frank and the Greek) are the result of perverse incentives created by deindustrialisation, where criminal enterprises rush in to fill the void left by a political and economic system that cannot handle the shock. Frank’s tragic dalliance with organised crime—and in the end, it is truly tragic, and ends with his death—was a matter of fate; but fate handed down not by the gods, but by deindustrialisation. This is pure The Wire.
But I think there’s another reading of the scene. When Spiros uses the hollowed-out factory as an comparison, he isn’t (or isn’t solely) talking about the port. He’s talking about a hollowed-out man: Frank Sobotka.
I want to use this as a bit of a jumping off point for reading the show, and specifically the character of Frank Sobotka, against the grain and against the clear intentions of the showrunners. I want to suggest that it can be productive to believe that the world of The Wire is not in fact defined by the grim structural fatalism implied by Simon’s philosophy. We might instead want to think that the sense of inevitability is constructed by the characters, as a rationalisation for their actions. This is not to read the show in a crudely individualistic manner, to deny that characters are shaped by institutions. But it is to suggest that the institutions are not doing that shaping in the way Simon had in mind.
Typical readings of Frank have him as a kind of ageing remnant of a world that’s passed, a figure more of pity than anything else. Fighting an uphill battle to preserve an industrial union and the work that it does against the immense forces of deindustrialisation and modernity, he is destined to win Pyrrhic victories at best. ‘[H]e’s a dinosaur and he knows it’, as one reviewer put it. Yet in the real world, the canal dredging and expansion that was portrayed as Frank’s desperate dream of reprieve, the green light at the end of his dock—it’s actually happening, along with many other infrastructure upgrades at the port. Indeed, Baltimore’s port is the fastest-growing in North America. Union bargaining power at American ports is growing.
So if Frank Sobotka is not a dinosaur left behind from a bygone era, what kind of man is he, then? My suggestion is the same as Spiros’: Frank is an empty man, a man without real values or morality, who has been hollowed out not by some inexorable logic of deindustrialisation but by the extractive norms that he learned, consistently, from the stevedores’ union.
Every time Frank tirades at the Greek, every time he tries to insist that he’s done with criminality and smuggling (like in the scene described above)—he backs out at the last minute and returns to criminality. Oh sure, every time he finds some excuse as to why he has to do it; but in the end it’s the money that clearly motivates him, money for his union. Any man with any semblance of virtue would have drawn the line, unequivocally, when thirteen young women being trafficked into the sex trade were found in one of the Greek’s shipping containers, having slowly suffocated to death. But that happens in the first episode, and Frank stays on side until (essentially) the very end of the season.
Yet, in a crucial scene in episode 3, Dolores tells Frank’s son Ziggy that ‘your father is a good man’. Traditional readings of Frank simply take the this claim at face value, and ask what could have led a good man to such tragic circumstances. But in the face of everything the audience knows about Frank, I think it is worth wondering if we should take this for granted. Frank certainly appears to Dolores (and to almost every one of the stevedores) to be a ‘good man’, to be virtuous. But I might suggest that Frank could be acting in accordance with the advice of Machiavelli:
A ruler, then, need not actually possess all the above-mentioned qualities [the virtues], but he must certainly seem to. Indeed, I shall be so bold as to say that having and always cultivating them is harmful, whereas seeming to have them is useful… [The Prince, trans. Russell Price, ch. 18.]
Frank has the appearance of virtue to those around him, of that there is no doubt. But it is a mere simulacra. From the very beginning of the season he is confronted with the terrible horrors he is complicit in, horrors that would cause any virtuous man to utter ‘this far, no further’, and yet he keeps going. Beneath the surface layer, beneath appearances, there is no actual morality in Frank Sobotka.
Frank is, if anything, worse than Machiavellian. Machiavelli’s prince was advised to pursue the appearance of virtue as a means to an end, as a way to become more resilient and flexible and so maintain the glory of his state in the face of fortuna. To some degree Frank is indeed justifying his means by his ends (he’s not merely enriching himself, he’s protecting the union’s grandezza). But he’s self-aware enough to know that he has reached the level of Machiavellian cynicism. He still bothers with his long, emotionally-draining tirades against the Greek, even though the Greek knows (and at some level Frank himself should know) that Frank’s not really going to back out. Frank has already crossed the moral Rubicon by continuing the smuggling operation after the bodies are found, yet despite this he keeps pretending that this most recent action from the Greek has offended his ethical sensibility. Machiavelli’s prince at least had self-awareness and was honest with himself, if not his subjects; but Frank is keeping up appearances to himself. He’s doing it because it’s all he knows—or rather, because he maybe thinks that the appearance just is virtue.
This last is important, because the lies that Frank tells himself go deep. Again, there’s a line that was intended as a rather explicit statement of The Wire’s philosophy, from Frank himself: ‘We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.’ Yet everything we hear—from Beadie, from Horseface, from Frank himself—tells us that stevedores have been stealing cargo for decades, right back to the years of peak shipping traffic. When new technology is developed to log containers in an attempt to reduce theft, the union (led by Frank) immediately turn the tech around and use it to enable the Greek’s smuggling efforts. The stealing isn’t new, produced by the retreat of industry and ‘building’; unionised dockworkers have been putting their hands in the next guy’s pocket every year of the union’s existence. The idea that deindustrialisation has led inexorably to crime and tragedy is a self-serving lie, told by Frank to himself as much as anyone else, to erase his agency and to hide the emptiness of his supposed values.
Keeping with this example, it’s not just that the stealing has been consistent—the stealing almost defines what the stevedores’ union is. Dolores’ declaration that Frank is a ‘good man’ comes as she hands over a large quantity of Frank’s money (the proceeds of crime) to a dockworker who is struggling to make ends meet: there’s too few boats coming in, he’s not getting work, and as such he’s not being paid. He is looking to go off and find some work, to make a contribution that is properly productive and would be properly remunerated; but he’d have to leave the stevedores’ union. Frank makes sure that this worker is bribed, with stolen money, to remain in the union—keeping subscription and membership numbers inflated, by ensuring that a man who could contribute to the economic and social life of the city is kept out of meaningful and productive work. A more transparently cynical and corrupt action, sapping the wealth and productivity of the whole community, could hardly be imagined; yet Dolores (and Ziggy) see it as a paradigm of virtuous leadership.
Why? Because those are the norms that the union is based on, and its survival is predicated on them being internalised by everyone even tangentially involved. Whether intended or not, the stevedores’ union is portrayed in The Wire as an unambiguously extractive institution. It operates economically to limit the supply of labour and the productiveness of the port, keeping working men off the docks but also out of other work, to ensure benefits accrue to its members by seniority; it operates politically by lobbying against the construction of new housing in favour of expensive vanity projects that will primarily enrich its members; and yes, in the end, it operates criminally to get cash from organised crime that can be used to pay bribes and fund projects that will enrich its members. We see its blatantly pre-decided elections, its explicit endorsement of seniority benefits over reward for effort or productivity, and its members’ regular habit of ‘losing’ containers in the stacks. In short: extracting wealth from the port of Baltimore, beyond the productive contributions of its members, is the very raison d’être of Frank’s union. The criminality is continuous with, and emergent from, it.
Frank’s actions are consistently extractive, unconcerned with law or contract or ethics, and always oriented towards the preservation of the union itself. And they are consistently seen by those around him as the actions of a ‘good man’.4 This is not an accident: it is union members ‘telling on themselves’. The union teaches a set of norms: twisted, extractive, and insular versions of solidarity and obligation and community. These norms are designed to benefit union members at the expense of the productive functioning of the port and (thus) the city as a whole.
But, crucially, the union relies on its members fully internalising these norms. It is not enough that the dockworkers all agree act collectively (because one day, when times are hard, they might decide to stop): they need to think that the union’s norms are genuinely good in themselves, real values, so that they are intrinsically motivated to follow them. Frank has been taught to internalise these norms from the very start of his working life, and he truly believes that they are the values of a good man. But not only are they not the virtuous man’s values, they are not real values at all. Frank’s actions are no different to the actions a blatantly cynical Machiavellian would have performed in his place, except for the layer of self-deception. But below that layer, there is no genuine morality; he has been hollowed out.
Even those within the world of unionised labour who seem to condemn Frank are not, in the end, so far from him. In episode 8, Frank meets with his brother Louis, a laid-off member of the shipwrights’ union. Louis is honest to a fault, lives a simple homely life, and is opposed to his brother’s criminality and corruption. I think the showrunners wanted the takeaway from this scene to be that Louis’ job loss, while a tragedy in its own way, spared him from the vicissitudes of deindustrialisation and allowed him to stay honest.
But Louis’ simple, honest life isn’t actually real. He has adopted over-the-top, exaggerated shows of virtue: he gambles only in his imagination, picking horses but never putting money on them! No matter the intention of the showrunners, the obvious reading of Louis’ character is that he is not genuinely virtuous but has built up a hypocritical habit of moral grandstanding and showiness, ‘virtue signalling’ in the original sense. And the obvious reason he would have done so is to put false distance between himself and his brother. Louis wants to protect his moral self-image and reputation from what Frank represents: the logical outworking of the union norms Louis himself embraced as a younger man. It’s notable that the member of the stevedores’ union most obviously suited for the world of organised crime is Louis’ son, Nick. On this reading, Frank’s rude outburst at Louis is one of the former’s rare moments of honesty and awareness: ‘The only difference between me and you is you picked the wrong union!’
Frank’s daimōn shapes his character, but that daimōn is not a ‘postmodern institution’ of deindustrialisation. It’s his union, and his union as it has always been, during the peak years of the port as much as in the years of decline. The story of deindustrialisation as a force constricting the union is a comforting story, that Frank uses to rationalise his extractive criminality. But his behaviour is not an adaptation, some desperate survival mechanism adopted out of pure necessity. Rather, Frank acts according to norms he internalised directly from the stevedores’ union, norms that made him (like Nick, and Ziggy, and Horseface) into who he is. The real tragedy is that the dockworkers’ logic has convinced Frank, and those around him, that the hollow shell of morality surrounding his extractive and (indeed) criminal core really is enough to be a good man.
In the penultimate episode of the season, Frank rejects the Greek’s demands (for the very first time), choosing instead to co-operate with the Baltimore police. At this point Nick and Ziggy, his family members, have been arrested (the latter for murder), and the police are offering to help them out if Frank co-operates. It might look like Frank has finally found some wellspring of virtue inside himself: he seems to be making a genuine self-sacrifice for the good of the people around him, not just for his own power and the grandezza of the union. But as soon as he leaves the police and returns to the port, we see the real context. The arrests led the union to ice Frank out: he is no longer trusted, his pet projects are now toxic for politicians, and the only role left for him in the union is ordinary stevedore work. In a Machiavellian turn of phrase, he had already lost his stato, already incurred disgrace. His co-operation with the police might instead be interpreted as an act of desperation, an attempt to assert some control over a situation where he has lost control. And the second Nick lets Frank know that the Greek wants to parlay, that organised crime might still be able to help him and Ziggy—Frank changes his mind. The episode ends with him walking to meet with the Greek.
The audience knows, of course, the Greek had heard about his co-operation with the police, and that Frank is walking to his death. But this death was not inescapable, a fate handed down from on high by the caprice of deindustrialisation. Frank chose every step he took. The idea of remorseless fate was a rationalisation he used to avoid having to look squarely at what he had become: a man following a remorseless logic all of his own, acting at every turn to cement his own power and to put his hand in the next guy’s pocket. For all of Frank’s attempts to portray himself as a good and honest man who cared about those around them, when we look at his actions (and not his words) we see that he constantly lied—he was complicit in crimes all the way up to murder—he may have driven his son to murder; the virtue was nothing but appearance. There was nothing below the surface. ‘Smoke from the stacks, but inside…’
Benjamin Constant has a similar remark, and I would be grateful if anyone could tell me whether Constant was likely to have read Goethe’s account of the meeting with Napoleon or whether this was dreamed up independently. (And, if the latter, if there may be a common influence.) ‘If you base a tragedy today on the fatalité of the ancients, you will certainly fail… The public will be more moved by the struggle of an individual against the social structure that strips or garrots him, than by Oedipus pursued by destiny, or Orestes by the Furies.’ From Constant, ‘Reflections on Tragedy’; translation taken from Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity, p. 164.
Likewise, tying in with last week’s post, Yeats uses a quote from Thomas Mann as an epigraph to ‘Politics’: ‘In our time the destiny of man presents its meanings in political terms.’ I have not been able to find the source of this quote, but assuming it genuinely is from Mann (an author who knew his Goethe well), I would be shocked if it were not influenced by this account of Napoleon.
‘Peter, have you read Shame and Necessity? I couldn’t tell!’
William Julius Wilson has been explicitly cited as an influence on the show.
You might want to contest this, and say that the praise is limited to Frank’s public actions. This isn’t correct even within what we see in the show—but even if it were, Frank’s public actions are made possible only by the financing of his private criminality, and (crucially) everyone basically knows or at least suspects this, even if they don’t say it.