Winona Ryder as Vinni Restiano and Oscar Isaac as Nick Wasicsko in HBO's 'Show Me a Hero'
The fundamental flaw with democracy as a system of government is this hard truth: What is right is not always popular. The result is a situation where telling people what they want to hear is a far better path to success than telling them what they
need to hear. It's easier to
lie to people and tell them we can cut taxes and still get the same government services than it is to be honest and say we all share a community that needs improvements and the help of resources from everyone. It's much simpler to
ignore climate change data than to acknowledge a problem and deal with it. If one wants to
play on the fears and insecurities of a population, demagoguing immigrants and minorities as the cause of crime and unemployment is less complicated than finding a way to extend the American Dream to everyone here who wants to be part of it. All of this leads to a society built upon impassioned ignorance and a selfishness that eats away at the threads that hold us together as a country.
One of the most acclaimed episodes of The Twilight Zone ends with Rod Serling warning the audience that the pity of it all is the menace at the heart of the story cannot be contained to a television show. Some might like to believe a mentality of ignorance and intolerance is endemic only to "red" America and voters in pickup trucks with Confederate battle flags. But historically, the sad reality is the blue areas of the country have just as much of a problem treating other human beings as individuals worthy of respect, an education, and a home if it means property values might go down a nickel. And while no one in places like Massachusetts or New York ever explicitly wrote their intent into a law or called it Jim Crow, the same tactics of appeals to ignorance and selfishness were used to divide and differentiate neighborhoods. It is the year 2015, and the most segregated city in the United States is not anywhere in the South. It's not Nashville, New Orleans or Atlanta. It's Chicago, Illinois. The segregation within Chicago didn't happen by accident, and it has persisted for decades. And the effects of this go beyond just housing to educational and employment opportunities, transportation costs, and overall economic growth within a region. There are segregated Maple Streets all over this country, and all one has to do is go from one to the other.
Based on the nonfiction novel Show Me a Hero: A Tale of Murder, Suicide, Race, and Redemption by former New York Times reporter Lisa Belkin, HBO's latest miniseries centers on the controversy over federally mandated public housing in Yonkers, New York, and how the tensions in the community boiled over. Directed by Paul Haggis and adapted for TV by David Simon and William F. Zorzi, Show Me a Hero argues economic inequality comes from the right combination of fear and money interests, which leads to political inequality that equates freedom with "Fuck ’em, I got mine."
Continue reading below for more.
Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy. —F. Scott Fitzgerald
In 1980, the NAACP and the Department of Justice
sued the city of Yonkers and the Yonkers Board of Education for purposeful segregation of schools and unfair housing practices based on race. Five years later, Judge Leonard Sand of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York found that over the course of 40 years "a pattern and practice of discrimination" by city officials had pushed almost all black and Hispanic residents into a one square mile area west of the
Saw Mill River Parkway, while the more affluent whites lived in the other 20 square miles of Yonkers, mostly to the east.
Judge Sand's remedy ordered the city to designate and build 200 low-income housing units and 800 moderately priced units on the east side of Yonkers. The response from most Yonkers officials was to drag their feet and do everything they could to resist, prodded along by white residents who worried an influx of minorities to their side of the city would bring crime and a decrease in their property values. Years of foot-dragging ultimately resulted in the court threatening compounding fines that would bankrupt the city, terminate city services, and result in jail time for intransigent politicians.
As the situation in court worsened for Yonkers and the city's appeals looked more and more hopeless, voter anger deepened and led to 28-year-old Nick Wasicsko (played by Oscar Isaac) being elected to the position of mayor in 1987. Wasicsko had beaten the incumbent on the promise of opposing the low-income housing units. However, after taking office and realizing the damage prolonging the lawsuit could do to the city, Wasicsko changes position and supports a settlement. He becomes reviled by the public while Deputy Mayor Henry J. Spallone (Alfred Molina) grandstands in opposition.
In interviews, David Simon has been telling journalists that he doesn't think anyone will watch Show Me a Hero because of the topic, which includes watching recreations of city council meetings and court proceedings over housing regulations. The Wire, which is probably his best-known creation, is considered by many to be one of the best dramas in the history of television and has gained a huge following. But like his other shows, Treme and The Corner, it struggled with viewership during its initial run. However, Show Me a Hero might be the most accessible series Simon has created yet, maybe because of Paul Haggis' direction and the use of more well-known actors than what's usual for a Simon show. It also shares many of the qualities of Simon's other series.
A common theme in all of Simon's work is systems: family, government, and larger community institutions, and how those systems fail because of flawed people and the flawed schemes by which things operate. At the core of both The Wire and Show Me a Hero is futility. In both cases, the governments of Yonkers and Baltimore are fighting to hold on to futile policies, whether it be a "war on drugs" that doesn't work or a discriminatory housing policy that has no chance of winning in court. And in both shows the failure to move away from that futility spirals out to negatively affect so many lives and allows the worst elements of government to take root.
In the initial episodes, each of the characters is sketched in broad strokes, while also leaving room to see how they adjust as the situation progresses. We have the people in the thick of it: the lawyers, consultants, and councilmen making decisions about how to deal with housing policy, and being pushed and pulled by an unruly mob. And as white residents defensively claim they're not racist while trying to deny a small number of homes to poor black people for specious reasons, they grow nastier, more anti-semitic (since all the lawyers and judges have "Jew names") and ultimately more violent.
Some of the tangents that develop are close-ups of the individual lives of Yonkers residents, with the miniseries focusing on the effects to four women. Mary Dorman (Catherine Keener) is a vocal opponent of the new housing units, but begins to see how ugly everything is becoming. Carmen Reyes (Ilfenesh Hadera) is a Dominican single mother of three children who works full-time and wants out of west Yonkers desperately, but can't afford to move. Billie Rowan (Dominique Fishback) is also a single mother whose boyfriend is dealing drugs and trying to get them out of the Schlobohm housing project, with the hope of getting into community college. Norma O'Neal (LaTanya Richardson Jackson) is a home nurse that is slowly going blind from diabetes, but can't get help or a nurse of her own, since healthcare providers are too afraid to come into the Yonkers' projects.
But the standout in the cast is Oscar Isaac as Mayor Wasicsko. Isaac gives the portrayal equal portions of naivete, ambition, and decency. We know that from the very beginning when the audience sees Nick puking his guts out in a cemetery that all of this will take its toll. But Simon and Zorzi's words, Haggis' direction, and Isaac's acting skill make the moments visceral as the city council votes turn against Wasicsko and diapers are thrown at his head during public meetings. He's a politician who uses horrible public sentiment to achieve a goal, and then finds out how empty the prize really is. The change in Wasicsko's stance is due to the pragmatism of facing fines, a falling bond rating, and contempt charges. But his refusal to take the politically easy route when things get bad, and committing to support the court-enforced housing even after death threats and public humiliation, is explained by the character as "being a leader."
And therein lies the rub when it comes to modern politics and why this is indicative of how things can go off the rails. When it's somehow more expedient to be the asshole in the room that says fuck the law, fuck rational decision-making, let's all burn, whether it be over public housing in Yonkers or the debt ceiling in Washington, there's something very wrong.
- A Ringing Phone: The best scene of the first two hours is a ringing phone during Wasicsko's victory celebration. As he approaches the podium to give his speech, a phone begins ringing in the background. It continues on through the scene and into the next, which fast forwards to what seems to be weeks later. The phone is finally answered to reveal the city's lawyers informing Wasicsko that Yonkers' legal argument is untenable.
- Springsteen Heavy Soundtrack: I guess since it's New York of the 1980s it's to be expected. The miniseries opens with "Gave It a Name" and Bruce's music pops in at about 30-minute intervals thereafter.
- Westchester County and Affordable Housing: In 2009, Westchester County, New York (the county in which Yonkers is located), settled a lawsuit and agreed to build 750 homes or apartments, with 630 of them "in towns and villages where black residents constitute 3 percent or less of the population and Hispanic residents make up less than 7 percent." However, there have been disputes as recently as May of this year over whether or not the county is complying with the agreement.
- Zorzi's 13-Year Project: Simon's writing partner for Show Me a Hero is Bill Zorzi. Like Simon, Zorzi is a former Baltimore Sun reporter. He left the paper and became a writer on The Wire and spent the last 13 years re-reporting Lisa Belkin's book for this project.
- What Exactly Does "Victory" Look Like?: There's a really interesting scene between the NAACP's lead counsel in the Yonkers case, Michael Sussman (Jon Bernthal), and Benjamin Hooks, who was then the executive director of the organization. Sussman thinks he's done something wrong when Hooks and others at the meeting aren't exactly enthused about what the case could mean for the advancement of civil rights. Hooks expresses that the attrition of going through years and years of litigation for "a few hundred scattered units of housing" has left him tired, and reached a point where he ponders that if "they don't want to live with us, why should we want to live with them?"
- The Precedent That Wasn't Used: Belkin wrote an op-ed on Friday that looked back at the Yonkers case, her recollections, and the legacy that came from it all.
I assumed that the N.A.A.C.P., which brought the lawsuit that became the Yonkers case, would, as planned, ask for similar rulings in other cities, and that the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which made the pivotal decision to authorize those scattered townhouses rather than the huge brick apartment complexes that had failed so spectacularly in the past, would, as promised, build similar designs nationwide. The lesson of Yonkers would be that proximity can make neighbors out of strangers and bridge racial gaps one street at a time. That didn’t happen.
Since then there has been only a smattering of similar suits around the country, and a sprinkling of new townhouses, but nothing more. Supporters of desegregation won the Yonkers battle — but the high cost of victory lost them the war. Few in this country had the will to risk another divisive, ugly municipal bruising any time soon.
So the fight that was meant to map a road out of racial separation instead further codified it, leading deeper down the path of what the Kerner Commission so long ago described as “separate but unequal.” That was what I saw with sudden clarity on that day of filming last fall: Yonkers was not an end, nor a beginning, but a murky middle. We’re still a nation divided by race, staring at one another from different sides of literal and metaphorical streets.