"You can't show no weakness."
If the characters on The Wire are the pieces in a game of chess, then Stringer Bell is
the Queen.
Avon Barksdale starts out as the reigning King of the West Baltimore drug trade,
but just as the Queen is the more active and useful chess piece for most of the game,
we quickly sense that the person running the Barksdale empire is Russell “Stringer”
Bell.
And he’s the one McNulty desperately wants to take down, as well, for this reason.
Stringer is the spiritual descendant of Michael Corleone and the iconic godfather line
“It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.”
He’s trying to turn gangster business into legit business.
He catches our attention early on by attending night business classes at the community college.
And he approaches the Avon Barksdale brand with a calm temperament and strategic approach.
"So he proposed --"
"To change the name."
"Exactly."
At times, like Michael Corleone, he almost convinces us that this is going to work and
he can pull it off.
The problem with Stringer’s “business,” of course, is that it combines the cool-headed
efficiency of a corporation
with a market in which it’s standard to kill people who get in one’s way.
Without the limitations and oversight that most legitimate businesses presumably have,
and without rules against killing anyone who annoys us,
Stringer’s pragmatic capitalist mindset yields the most exceptionally cold and lethal
code that we witness on the show.
"You know what the difference is between me and you? I bleed red, you bleed green."
Over time, Stringer’s cold-blooded capitalism sets him at odds with his childhood friend
and partner.
Avon is emotional, instinctive, and old-school.
He sees himself matter-of-factly as a drug kingpin, and he’s fine with that.
He doesn’t share Stringer’s desire to change up the way things are or distance themselves
from the streets and the gangster image.
For a while, we’re encouraged to see the value in Stringer’s cool-headed way over
Avon’s hot-blooded one.
In the early seasons, Stringer also seems to be the one who’s doing all the work and
showing the real skill in the Barksdale empire.
While Avon’s in jail, Stringer is running the business better than ever, as if this
so-called King isn’t really needed at all.
The peak of Stringer’s control happens in Season 3, and just as Bunny Colvin introduces
Hamsterdam --
the experiment with effectively legalizing -- or turning a blind eye to -- drugs in order
to clean up the neighborhood.
For a brief moment, as Bunny’s experiment seems to be working,
it seems that Stinger’s vision of the drug trade as respectable business could also possible
--
that there's a chance for, if not a win-win, at least a form of drug-dealing that’s relatively
body-free.
Thanks to Stringer’s logical approach and the way events are coming together,
he starts to strike us -- in moments -- almost like the Enlightened Kingpin.
But this Hamsterdam moment is revealed to be a false promise.
Avon returns and gets back into his tough gangster act, as Marlo Stanfield comes at
his crown.
"Look at you. F**king shooting dope without a f**king needle right now, man.
Getting high on a power trip, playing f**king soldier."
Avon keeps messing up Stringer’s business because he’s addicted to the rush of posturing
and warring on the streets.
"It ain't right for you to be at the head of our table, when you can't call off your
dog."
Stringer wants to grow and leave the corners behind, but for Avon the street is still the
point.
"String, this ain't about your motherf**king business class either. It ain't that part
of it. It's that other thing.
The street. It's the street, always."
At first we think Stringer and Prop Joe are right to be condescending about Avon’s addiction
to showing his muscle in turf wars,
but we later realize Avon was right to take the threat of Marlo seriously.
And in fact both Stringer and Joe have been a little too progressive or optimistic in
thinking that making all of this more civilized was really going to work.
And at the same time as all of this is going down, Tommy Carcetti turns Colvin’s Hamsterdam
into a casualty of his campaign for mayor.
So we see that Stringer’s aspiration of becoming the Enlightened/Peaceful Drug Kingpin
was never to be.
And Stringer’s end comes when he’s betrayed by none other than his partner, Avon.
Every action Stringer takes makes sense. He's unfailingly logical.
Yet it’s precisely because Stringer is too logical that we come to hate him.
Stringer is cold blood personified.
The most stunning, jaw-dropping reveal in Stringer’s story is when he finally tells
Avon the truth that he murdered D’Angelo.
"I knew you couldn't do it, and Brianna wouldn't do that shit.
But there goes a life that had to be snatched, Avon."
We gather Stringer likely arranged the killing, but following Avon’s direction.
So it’s shocking to learn that Stringer took this move on his own, and Avon truly
didn’t know.
Here Stringer is not confessing -- he proudly boasts that it was him.
"Man ain't wrong about that."
Stringer is using this information to prove that he, too, is as hard and tough as Avon.
"What, 'cause I don't shoot up a block indiscriminate I ain't hard enough?"
Yet Avon is far from impressed. He reacts as we do with disbelief at the icy blood that
runs in Stringer’s veins.
Because Avon would never have been capable of this action.
We feel sick at the sight of him.
There was no emotional heat -- no fear, anger or revenge -- in his decision to kill D'Angelo,
nor was it even really that necessary.
The kid had already taken his years, was minding his own business in prison and not in a position
to do them much harm.
Stringer did it just to rule out the possibility, however small or unlikely, that Dee could
cause a problem.
If we look back, Stringer is also to blame for the worst, most heartless murder of season
one,
one of the first moments in the show that made us truly scream at the TV screen.
"String! String! Look at me! Where the f**k is Wallace? Huh?"
"Alright you stupid motherf**ker. You made this decision."
"Yeah, I made my decision. Where's Wallace at? Where the f**k is Wallace?"
Stringer rushes to order this hit without really knowing whether Wallace was guilty,
erring on the side of killing a young boy, just in case.
And when he orders the murder of Omar’s lover Brandon, he displays the young man’s
mutilated body to get at Omar.
He then has the nerve to misdirect Omar’s grief over the very murder that Stringer ordered
at the wrong culprit.
He manipulates Omar into going after Brother Mouzone, simply because Brother Mouzone is
making his business somewhat awkward
and Stringer doesn’t feel like confronting Avon about that or speaking to Brother openly
about changing the arrangement.
"My n*****, I would take the motherf**ker out if I could but Avon can't know it came
from his own people, right?"
"You don't think I'm gonna send any of my people up against Brother? Shit.
That n***** got more bodies on him than a Chinese cemetery."
All of this shows that Stringer has a very low threshold for committing murder that has
nothing to do with
guilt, retribution, fairness or even proportionate response to the individual’s behavior.
Stringer approaches killing as if it were simply another aspect of his business,
another tool in his arsenal that he uses freely when he’s decided to fire someone from his
organization,
or when he can’t be 100% certain that a person is not even a small risk.
And this logical, green-blooded approach to killing is what makes him so hateable.
In the era or the Hamsterdam experiment, Stringer does want to avoid bodies, but not because
he has a distaste for killing,
merely because this makes life easier and helps his business by keeping the police away.
"It's the fight for the territory that be bringin' the bodies, and the bodies that bring
the police."
So it’s merely a happy coincidence that for a time that he shares Bunny’s goal of
keeping the body count down.
He argues against fighting because that helps his business,
but he’d just as easily argue for more killing if that were more beneficial to his profit.
Since he’s an opportunist, Stringer is the kind of drug dealer who could thrive in a
city where Colvin’s social change went forward.
And in that environment, Stringer, with his discipline and control actually might not
be so bad.
But he lives in this world, and he has no objection to killing.
So Stringer’s pure capitalist logic applied to the arena of the violent illegal drug trade
yields something terrifying and perverse.
Stringer’s plot shows us that this idea of the not-so-bad, Enlightened Businessman
Kingpin is a myth that can’t exist.
Meanwhile, his forays into becoming actually legit, as a developer, are frustrating and
full of errors,
He gets taken in by Clay Davis and can’t wrap his head around the kinds of legitimized
crooks he’s now dealing with.
He can’t set his muscle on them to get his way.
"Assassination shit, man."
" Look, I tell you to get somebody, you gettin' him. I ain't askin'."
"Damn, String, I don't know --"
"N*****, I gotta remind you who the f**k you work for?"
"Ayo. I think Slim gonna have to sit this one out, boss."
Stringer gets stuck in an in-between place -- trying to turn the street into business,
and business into the street.
So when Stringer’s Iago-like scheming eventually catches up to him, he falls because he’s
slipped between the two worlds.
He doesn't really get the rules of legitimate business,
and he’s shown too much disregard for the rules of the world he came up in.
Omar and Brother Mouzone come after Stringer for breaking the rules of their game.
And Avon knows these rules are everything for maintaining their credibility.
"What got you here is your word and your reputation. With that alone, you've still got an open
line to New York.
Without it, you're done."
When Stringer tries to bargain with his killers, offering them money, he still doesn’t really
grasp how and why he ended up here.
"What y'all n*****s want, man? Huh? Money?"
Stringer the Capitalist doesn’t get that, however you go about it, murder is still murder.
It’s more than just an exchange of money or some other routine aspect of business.
It can’t be healed by any negotiation or appeal to self-interest.
"You know what? I look at you these days, you know what I see?
I see a man without a country. Not hard enough for this right here.
And maybe, just maybe, not smart enough for them out there."
So he doesn’t understand why his time has come, but Stringer Bell most certainly has
it coming.
"Well, get on with it, motherfu --"
What we don’t see at the moment of Stringer’s death is that the future is about to get even
colder than
we could have imagined when we thought Stringer was the epitome of icy blood.
Everything we saw as heartless in Stringer gets multiplied many times over in Marlo Stanfield.
Stringer’s just-in-case murders to rule out any possible problem are exactly the kind
of killings that
we’ll see became everyday routine for Marlo’s lieutenants Chris and Snoop.
So we see that Stringer, the capitalist green-blooded kingpin, wasn’t an individual phenomenon
at all, but a sign of the times.
"It's a cold world, Bodie."
"Thought you said it was getting warmer."
"World going one way, people another, yo."
And everything is about to get much worse.