Going outside The Wire : Generation Kill and the failure of detail

A TV miniseries developed from embedded reportage, in which reality and fiction seamlessly merge, Generation Kill presents a curious and troubling follow‐up to David Simon and Ed Burns’ much‐lauded series The Wire. Generation Kill shows The Wire’ s creators’ concern for verisimilitude and ethnographic detail, but in its narrow scope, lack of context and wholesale identification with the lower‐echelon American soldiers who are its subject, the series fails in exactly the ways The Wire seemed important and successful: sketching what Frederic Jameson called 'that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic and social institutions’. It is the argument of this paper that Generation Kill was a missed opportunity, and that in contrast to The Wire , it fails to tell us much about the people who inhabit the contemporary battlefield, how institutional and social structures shape their lives, and how war happens today in the city.