Watching the Fire – A Unique Tantric Meditation Experience for Couples! Oct. 19th.

“Rats always run for holes in times of danger”–Omar

For his second heist, Omar and his crew take their act to the Eastside, partly because they want to lay low after Brandon called Omar out, and partly for some easy pickings. This stickup is the opposite of the first one in every way. This one is in broad daylight, with not a shot fired, nobody hurt, and there is very little in terms of pre-rip reconnaissance. What both raids do have in common (other than the fact that Omar walks away with the stash) is the way Omar exploits a common trait among corner boys: a sort of warped childishness.

We see this in the first raid when two young hoppers guard the stash. Before Omar storms in, they absentmindedly play video games and read comic books. They are blind to the seriousness of both the re-up and the broader game they play in.

In the second rip, the child imagery is even more pronounced. In fact, Omar almost consciously plays off of it, framing the rip up like he is taking candy from babies. The scene begins with Omar’s voice proclaiming “alright, this is going to be so easy, them Eastside chumps, they ain’t nothing like Avon’s people. Watch, y’all going to see.” As he says this, we see his hand drawing lines in the dirt with a twig. The camera is positioned so that we can see Omar’s diagram without seeing much of the actual members of the crew. The effect is to bring us into Omar’s inner circle, as if we are in on the plan.

This makes us root for Omar (if we aren’t already rooting for him), but it also contains a subtle visual analogy. As Omar fills in the diagram with Xs and Os and arrows indicating the movement of the play, it become less a brazen drug heist and more a schoolyard game of touch football. Omar is the quarterback, drawing up a trick play in the playground dirt.

As Omar’s team sets the play, we cut away a few times to its targets, an opposing team that isn’t even aware it is in a game. While these hoppers look older than the boys in the pit, they are equally childlike in their actions. A skinny man needs more vials, so he goes to a pudgy partner wearing a gaudy gold dollar sign around his neck and sitting on the steps of a vacant rowhome listening to a discman and blocking out the world around him. The skinny hopper has to shout to get the pudgy one’s attention, and when he finally says “yo…yo, Maurice short, man,” the guy with the discman jokes “tell him to grow a couple of inches.” They both laugh at the clever wordplay, but they don’t do anything to get those extra vials. Neither of them take what they are doing seriously. They are the low-hanging fruit of the Baltimore drug world.

The scene cuts away for a short scene with the police. When we return to the Eastside, we are greeted with two more images of childhood. The first thing we see when we cut back to the corner is two small boys fleeing to the left. They are running from Omar, which means that they were the first ones to notice his menacing approach. Then we hear it. The ominous whistling quickly takes the form of a familiar tune: “The Farmer in the Dell.”

It is a moment straight out of Kubrick, who knew exactly how to pair a chilling scene with the most happy song imaginable, from the “Singin’ in the Rain” rape scene in A Clockwork Orange to the “Mickey Mouse Club” in the bloody aftermath of Full Metal Jacket (not to mention “We’ll Meet Again” playing over the nuclear apocalypse at the end of Dr. Strangelove). Here, the effect is similar, a comic distortion where fierce impending violence is underscored by the lighthearted spirit of a whistled childrens’ tune.

are based on primal instinct, which keeps them in a perpetually-childlike state.

The other Kafka story that applies is a perfect one-paragraph story of an aging mouse who finds that his anxiety over an expansive world morphs into a claustrophobic reduction of his world into a single corner, where a trap waits to kill him. He hears advice from behind him. “‘You only need to change your direction’ said the cat, who gobbled him up.” In this case, Omar is the cat, the one who offers an escape from one trap that leads right into another one. What Omar seems to show is that in a world governed by the instinct of children and rats, a man with a plan will always come out on top. Especially if he carries a big ass shotgun.