LOTTERY TICKET

Here’s how dumb I am: I feel sure, as I watch, that Lil Bow Wow will ultimately lose the $370 million lottery ticket he purchased on a whim and which, over the course of a scorching Fourth of July weekend in the projects, he must protect from every manner of golddigger and thug. And in losing it realize that he never really needed it, that he can start that sneaker company anyway, and earn an honest fortune, and in so doing raise up the ‘hood.

And yet when he does in fact redeem it and uses the winnings to fund a community redevelopment project in the final scene I think, a-ha, this bleak tale has us constituted by luck, and the happy ending only reifies the institution as capricious and insane, unsmashable because it feints and floats like the boxer Ice Cube plays who was denied his shot at the big time by a mugging and yet still proclaims risk-taking, dream-following subjecthood worthwhile. And the hoochie, trying to get LBW to knock her up, gestures to her endowments: “This is my lottery ticket.” It’s the soul of The Wire, isn’t it, that if Mookie threw the garbage can through the pizzeria window in present-day Baltimore the next scene would be the councilman figuring out how to spin the whole event as political capital, or some other undercutting move. The senseless of smashing what's already transparent, yet doesn't reveal a thing.

But that’s still not it. Because here the hero is vessel to nothing but the random numbers that we sense swarming like insects to any flare of thought. So no wonder the villain (The Wire’s Chris) boasts as his signature violence the squeeze—he both hugged and in the process suffocated the lovers he took to his prison bed. When he fights the local crimelord he grabs the guy’s nuts and under his tightening fist we hear an audible pop: the wiping out of stories, all those non-acts that bolster, by their potentiality, the very one that transpires. I wasn’t ready to understand those fluttering random numbers as the reality towards which these organic singularities we embody must in fact aspire, because it is they, and they alone, who cannot be crushed.