Way Down in the Hole
The Metamorphosis and The Wire on the human cost of institutions built to preserve themselves.
Deep Life Reflections | Essay 181 | James Gibb
Institutions can turn people into roles, then punish them when they can no longer perform them.
“When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from troubled dreams, he found that he had been transformed—in his bed—into a kind of giant bug.”
This is the opening line from Franz Kafka’s most famous work, The Metamorphosis, written in 1912. What is most striking about that opening passage is not only that Gregor wakes as a giant insect, but that his most immediate concern is how he is going to get to work. He’s late. His train has gone. His employer is going to be seething. Even in monstrous form, the institution has already infiltrated the room.
But Kafka is also going to have some fun with it.
The Metamorphosis is both weird and wonderful, comedic and brutal. Kafka takes us into his favourite terrain, an isolated protagonist facing a bizarre situation. We bear witness to Gregor’s distressing transformation, his family’s reaction, and his own growing sense of isolation. We feel Gregor’s pain and frustration. As he worries about losing his job, we learn that Gregor, in fact, hates his work. This might be Kafka’s own subtle (or not) critique of work and its oppressive nature, the “giant bug” we all have to bear. Kafka, a man riddled with his own anxieties, captured the anxieties of his era, one marked by the rapid industrialisation of the early twentieth century and the growing alienation of the individual within bureaucratic societies.
Kafka’s metaphor extends to the human condition, exploring alienation, absurdity, powerlessness, and the dehumanising effects of modern life (as it was over a century ago, and as it is today). We see Gregor unable to effectively communicate and connect with others in his new physical capacity. He has no human voice, literally and figuratively. This chasm between mind and body seems to point to the disconnect between our inner selves and how we’re perceived. As a salesman, Gregor was the sole provider for the family. Now, transformed, he feels the scorn of his family, especially from his father, highlighting the burden of family expectations when one’s societal role is altered. Gregor becomes misunderstood and marginalised, his place in the structure of society lost.
In Gregor Samsa, Kafka presents the very personification of alienation, powerless in the face of an absurd, disorienting, and impenetrable reality.
From Gregor’s locked bedroom, the frame widens to the American city of Baltimore.
“All the pieces matter.” - Detective Lester Freamon
When people talk about the greatest television shows of all time, The Wire frequently makes the list. I’ve watched the series in its entirety three times. It has lost none of its impact. It’s Shakespeare for the 21st century.
Set against the backdrop of Baltimore, Maryland, The Wire dissects an American city’s struggle with institutional decay, symbolic of America’s broader urban decline. The series reveals a society caught in the stranglehold of systemic failure, from law enforcement and the drug trade to education, politics, heavy industry, and the press. It shows a world where the powerful are often paralysed by the very systems they command, powerless to effect real change, and reduced to “juking the stats” (manipulating statistics to keep a higher power happy). As one character says, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” The “wire” of the title represents the unseen undercurrent that connects everything across the city, where every action triggers a reaction, often with destructive and permanent effects.
Creator David Simon, a seasoned journalist with The Baltimore Sun, and writing partner Ed Burns, an experienced detective with the Baltimore Police Department, bring a heady dose of realism to the narrative, drawing from their firsthand experiences. This is their city. The series introduces a huge bank of memorable characters, from Dominic West’s flawed detective, McNulty, to Idris Elba’s ‘Stringer’ Bell, a drug dealer who cuts deals by day and attends economics classes by night, to the late Michael K. Williams’ Omar Little, a Robin Hood-esque figure who lives by his own moral code and who infamously whistles his approach to let others know he’s coming. These characters, and many more, each with their limitations and contradictions, are the essence of the show, steeped in reality yet touched by the absurd and the tragic, a vivid picture of the city’s countless and complex challenges.
The commitment to reality can sometimes make The Wire feel bleak. There are heartbreaking stories, especially the one of Wallace, a teenage drug dealer played by Michael B. Jordan, whose empathy and morality make him an inevitable short-lived character for such a world. “Where’s Wallace, String?” may be the most doleful line ever written by Simon, and might even capture the arc of the entire show. People disappear, in all forms. A few do better than expected.
David Simon has talked at length about his motivations behind creating The Wire, including the failure of the drug war, the systematic failure of institutions, and the decline of journalism. Both The Wire and The Metamorphosis, in their own distinct ways, offer cautionary tales of institutional influence. Institutions might be created by people, but they then seem to take on a life of their own, feeding themselves at their own whim in the name of self-preservation rather than doing what they are supposed to be doing: addressing the problems of the people.
In Kafka's Metamorphosis, the institution is represented in its most primal and influential form, namely the family. The Samsa household, with its permanent weight of expectations and obligations, shapes Gregor’s life as much as any government or corporation. Consider these lines from Gregor to himself, “If I didn’t have my parents to think about I’d have given in my notice a long time ago, I’d have gone up to the boss and told him just what I think, tell him everything I would, let him know just what I feel. He’d fall right off his desk!” Gregor is the provider for his family. He might resent it, but it gives him his worth and his identity. His transformation into a giant bug presents two obvious problems. One, he’s a giant bug. Two, he can no longer fulfil his role as the family provider. He becomes irrelevant, his little remaining worth and identity gradually eroded into fine dust.
The Wire has a broader canvas but follows the same logic: Baltimore as a city of institutions, each exerting its own power and pull on the people inside it. So we see police officers trying to do good but hampered by the powers above, teachers who might be able to reach difficult students in class but immediately lose them when they return to their streets, and politicians who keep doing what politicians do, chasing votes and the right kind of headlines. Those characters I mentioned earlier—McNulty, Stringer Bell, and Omar—play out as semi-autonomous players in this complex network, sometimes exploiting institutional weaknesses to their advantage, other times crushed by the indifferent weight of the system. Semi-strangers in a semi-strange land. The Wire is peerless in capturing a specific time and place in America at the start of the 21st century.
Institutions are curious things. We need them. Without them we have anarchy. But some are riddled with bad systems that have been left to fester. The worst ones strip people of their dignity and sometimes much worse. They simply stop seeing them as people. That might be the cruellest thing of all.
We may be in the present now, but the game stays the same. We are all, in some way, a Gregor Samsa or a David Simon character, doing our best to remain human inside systems built to fight that impulse.
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