The Wire: Stringer Bell - It's Business

The Wire’s Stringer Bell is cold blood personified, the spiritual descendant of Michael Corleone and the Godfather line “It’s not personal – it’s strictly business.”

The problem with the Idris Elba character is that he combines cool-headed corporate efficiency with a market in which it’s standard to kill. His capitalist mindset yields one of the most exceptionally cold and lethal codes we witness on the show.

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00:00
“You can’t show no weakness.”
00:02
If the characters on The Wire are the pieces in a game of chess, then Stringer Bell is
00:07
the Queen.
00:08
Avon Barksdale starts out as the reigning King of the West Baltimore drug trade,
00:12
but just as the Queen is the more active and useful chess piece for most of the game,
00:17
we quickly sense that the person running the Barksdale empire is Russell “Stringer”
00:22
Bell.
00:23
And he’s the one McNulty desperately wants to take down, as well, for this reason.
00:27
Stringer is the spiritual descendant of Michael Corleone and the iconic godfather line
00:31
“It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.”
00:35
He’s trying to turn gangster business into legit business.
00:39
He catches our attention early on by attending night business classes at the community college.
00:44
And he approaches the Avon Barksdale brand with a calm temperament and strategic approach.
00:49
“So he proposed –”
00:50
“To change the name.”
00:52
“Exactly.”
00:54
At times, like Michael Corleone, he almost convinces us that this is going to work and
00:58
he can pull it off.
01:00
The problem with Stringer’s “business,” of course, is that it combines the cool-headed
01:04
efficiency of a corporation
01:05
with a market in which it’s standard to kill people who get in one’s way.
01:09
Without the limitations and oversight that most legitimate businesses presumably have,
01:14
and without rules against killing anyone who annoys us,
01:17
Stringer’s pragmatic capitalist mindset yields the most exceptionally cold and lethal
01:23
code that we witness on the show.
01:25
“You know what the difference is between me and you? I bleed red, you bleed green.”
01:31
Over time, Stringer’s cold-blooded capitalism sets him at odds with his childhood friend
01:35
and partner.
01:36
Avon is emotional, instinctive, and old-school.
01:39
He sees himself matter-of-factly as a drug kingpin, and he’s fine with that.
01:44
He doesn’t share Stringer’s desire to change up the way things are or distance themselves
01:48
from the streets and the gangster image.
01:50
For a while, we’re encouraged to see the value in Stringer’s cool-headed way over
01:55
Avon’s hot-blooded one.
01:58
In the early seasons, Stringer also seems to be the one who’s doing all the work and
02:05
showing the real skill in the Barksdale empire.
02:07
While Avon’s in jail, Stringer is running the business better than ever, as if this
02:11
so-called King isn’t really needed at all.
02:14
The peak of Stringer’s control happens in Season 3, and just as Bunny Colvin introduces
02:19
Hamsterdam —
02:20
the experiment with effectively legalizing — or turning a blind eye to — drugs in order
02:24
to clean up the neighborhood.
02:26
For a brief moment, as Bunny’s experiment seems to be working,
02:29
it seems that Stinger’s vision of the drug trade as respectable business could also possible
02:34
—
02:35
that there’s a chance for, if not a win-win, at least a form of drug-dealing that’s relatively
02:40
body-free.
02:41
Thanks to Stringer’s logical approach and the way events are coming together,
02:45
he starts to strike us — in moments — almost like the Enlightened Kingpin.
02:49
But this Hamsterdam moment is revealed to be a false promise.
02:54
Avon returns and gets back into his tough gangster act, as Marlo Stanfield comes at
02:58
his crown.
02:59
“Look at you. F**king shooting dope without a f**king needle right now, man.
03:03
Getting high on a power trip, playing f**king soldier.”
03:06
Avon keeps messing up Stringer’s business because he’s addicted to the rush of posturing
03:11
and warring on the streets.
03:12
“It ain’t right for you to be at the head of our table, when you can’t call off your
03:16
dog.”
03:18
Stringer wants to grow and leave the corners behind, but for Avon the street is still the
03:23
point.
03:24
“String, this ain’t about your motherf**king business class either. It ain’t that part
03:31
of it. It’s that other thing.
03:35
The street. It’s the street, always.”
03:37
At first we think Stringer and Prop Joe are right to be condescending about Avon’s addiction
03:41
to showing his muscle in turf wars,
03:44
but we later realize Avon was right to take the threat of Marlo seriously.
03:48
And in fact both Stringer and Joe have been a little too progressive or optimistic in
03:53
thinking that making all of this more civilized was really going to work.
03:56
And at the same time as all of this is going down, Tommy Carcetti turns Colvin’s Hamsterdam
04:01
into a casualty of his campaign for mayor.
04:04
So we see that Stringer’s aspiration of becoming the Enlightened/Peaceful Drug Kingpin
04:09
was never to be.
04:10
And Stringer’s end comes when he’s betrayed by none other than his partner, Avon.
04:16
Every action Stringer takes makes sense. He’s unfailingly logical.
04:19
Yet it’s precisely because Stringer is too logical that we come to hate him.
04:25
Stringer is cold blood personified.
04:27
The most stunning, jaw-dropping reveal in Stringer’s story is when he finally tells
04:31
Avon the truth that he murdered D’Angelo.
04:33
“I knew you couldn’t do it, and Brianna wouldn’t do that shit.
04:40
But there goes a life that had to be snatched, Avon.”
04:43
We gather Stringer likely arranged the killing, but following Avon’s direction.
04:44
So it’s shocking to learn that Stringer took this move on his own, and Avon truly
04:45
didn’t know.
04:46
Here Stringer is not confessing — he proudly boasts that it was him.
04:48
“Man ain’t wrong about that.”
04:51
Stringer is using this information to prove that he, too, is as hard and tough as Avon.
04:56
“What, ’cause I don’t shoot up a block indiscriminate I ain’t hard enough?”
05:00
Yet Avon is far from impressed. He reacts as we do with disbelief at the icy blood that
05:06
runs in Stringer’s veins.
05:07
Because Avon would never have been capable of this action.
05:11
We feel sick at the sight of him.
05:13
There was no emotional heat — no fear, anger or revenge — in his decision to kill D’Angelo,
05:18
nor was it even really that necessary.
05:20
The kid had already taken his years, was minding his own business in prison and not in a position
05:25
to do them much harm.
05:26
Stringer did it just to rule out the possibility, however small or unlikely, that Dee could
05:31
cause a problem.
05:33
If we look back, Stringer is also to blame for the worst, most heartless murder of season
05:38
one,
05:39
one of the first moments in the show that made us truly scream at the TV screen.
05:43
“String! String! Look at me! Where the f**k is Wallace? Huh?”
05:48
“Alright you stupid motherf**ker. You made this decision.”
05:51
“Yeah, I made my decision. Where’s Wallace at? Where the f**k is Wallace?”
05:55
Stringer rushes to order this hit without really knowing whether Wallace was guilty,
05:59
erring on the side of killing a young boy, just in case.
06:02
And when he orders the murder of Omar’s lover Brandon, he displays the young man’s
06:07
mutilated body to get at Omar.
06:09
He then has the nerve to misdirect Omar’s grief over the very murder that Stringer ordered
06:14
at the wrong culprit.
06:16
He manipulates Omar into going after Brother Mouzone, simply because Brother Mouzone is
06:20
making his business somewhat awkward
06:23
and Stringer doesn’t feel like confronting Avon about that or speaking to Brother openly
06:27
about changing the arrangement.
06:29
“My n*****, I would take the motherf**ker out if I could but Avon can’t know it came
06:33
from his own people, right?”
06:34
“You don’t think I’m gonna send any of my people up against Brother? Shit.
06:38
That n***** got more bodies on him than a Chinese cemetery.”
06:43
All of this shows that Stringer has a very low threshold for committing murder that has
06:47
nothing to do with
06:48
guilt, retribution, fairness or even proportionate response to the individual’s behavior.
06:53
Stringer approaches killing as if it were simply another aspect of his business,
06:58
another tool in his arsenal that he uses freely when he’s decided to fire someone from his
07:02
organization,
07:03
or when he can’t be 100% certain that a person is not even a small risk.
07:09
And this logical, green-blooded approach to killing is what makes him so hateable.
07:13
In the era or the Hamsterdam experiment, Stringer does want to avoid bodies, but not because
07:19
he has a distaste for killing,
07:21
merely because this makes life easier and helps his business by keeping the police away.
07:25
“It’s the fight for the territory that be bringin’ the bodies, and the bodies that bring
07:29
the police.”
07:32
So it’s merely a happy coincidence that for a time that he shares Bunny’s goal of
07:36
keeping the body count down.
07:37
He argues against fighting because that helps his business,
07:40
but he’d just as easily argue for more killing if that were more beneficial to his profit.
07:44
Since he’s an opportunist, Stringer is the kind of drug dealer who could thrive in a
07:48
city where Colvin’s social change went forward.
07:51
And in that environment, Stringer, with his discipline and control actually might not
07:55
be so bad.
07:56
But he lives in this world, and he has no objection to killing.
08:00
So Stringer’s pure capitalist logic applied to the arena of the violent illegal drug trade
08:04
yields something terrifying and perverse.
08:07
Stringer’s plot shows us that this idea of the not-so-bad, Enlightened Businessman
08:12
Kingpin is a myth that can’t exist.
08:15
Meanwhile, his forays into becoming actually legit, as a developer, are frustrating and
08:19
full of errors,
08:21
He gets taken in by Clay Davis and can’t wrap his head around the kinds of legitimized
08:25
crooks he’s now dealing with.
08:26
He can’t set his muscle on them to get his way.
08:28
“Assassination shit, man.”
08:29
” Look, I tell you to get somebody, you gettin’ him. I ain’t askin’.”
08:33
“Damn, String, I don’t know –”
08:34
“N*****, I gotta remind you who the f**k you work for?”
08:38
“Ayo. I think Slim gonna have to sit this one out, boss.”
08:41
Stringer gets stuck in an in-between place — trying to turn the street into business,
08:45
and business into the street.
08:47
So when Stringer’s Iago-like scheming eventually catches up to him, he falls because he’s
08:52
slipped between the two worlds.
08:54
He doesn’t really get the rules of legitimate business,
08:56
and he’s shown too much disregard for the rules of the world he came up in.
09:00
Omar and Brother Mouzone come after Stringer for breaking the rules of their game.
09:04
And Avon knows these rules are everything for maintaining their credibility.
09:08
“What got you here is your word and your reputation. With that alone, you’ve still got an open
09:13
line to New York.
09:15
Without it, you’re done.”
09:19
When Stringer tries to bargain with his killers, offering them money, he still doesn’t really
09:24
grasp how and why he ended up here.
09:27
“What y’all n*****s want, man? Huh? Money?”
09:30
Stringer the Capitalist doesn’t get that, however you go about it, murder is still murder.
09:35
It’s more than just an exchange of money or some other routine aspect of business.
09:40
It can’t be healed by any negotiation or appeal to self-interest.
09:43
“You know what? I look at you these days, you know what I see?
09:46
I see a man without a country. Not hard enough for this right here.
09:51
And maybe, just maybe, not smart enough for them out there.”
09:55
So he doesn’t understand why his time has come, but Stringer Bell most certainly has
10:00
it coming.
10:01
“Well, get on with it, motherfu –”
10:06
What we don’t see at the moment of Stringer’s death is that the future is about to get even
10:11
colder than
10:12
we could have imagined when we thought Stringer was the epitome of icy blood.
10:16
Everything we saw as heartless in Stringer gets multiplied many times over in Marlo Stanfield.
10:21
Stringer’s just-in-case murders to rule out any possible problem are exactly the kind
10:26
of killings that
10:27
we’ll see became everyday routine for Marlo’s lieutenants Chris and Snoop.
10:31
So we see that Stringer, the capitalist green-blooded kingpin, wasn’t an individual phenomenon
10:36
at all, but a sign of the times.
10:38
“It’s a cold world, Bodie.”
10:40
“Thought you said it was getting warmer.”
10:43
“World going one way, people another, yo.”
10:48
And everything is about to get much worse.