Duelling and Jamming: Hurricane Katrina,

Everyday New Orleans, and the Satisfactions

of Treme

The crisis of New Orleans in the wake of 2005’s Hurricane

Katrina has, to date, been less the problem of reconstruction

than the question of it. The process of recovery that the

disaster demanded also held in it potential for reinvention;

the city’s restoration also presented an opportunity for re-

conception. Despite its leisured touristic image, New Orleans

has for centuries been a city of extreme racial and economic

divisions, whose civic leaders have typically adopted short-

term rather than long-range solutions, aimed at ameliorating

or obscuring rather than solving the city’s substantial social

problems. Post-Katrina, the city’s tourist industry –

particularly centred on the French Quarter – has been restored

and maintained, but so the city’s traditionally high rate of

individual povertyi and murderii, factors which particularly

affect the city’s majority black population.

It is these dilemmas of recovery, and the tensions that

underlie them, that form the core of the first two seasons of

Treme (HBO, 2010-2012), set in the immediate aftermath of

Katrina.iii The show explores these issues in terms of the

daily experiences of New Orleanians: of bar owners and chefs,

of small contractors and civil rights lawyers, and above all

of jazz musicians. In the process, the viewer is offered a

drama of everyday helplessness – less the dramatising of

disaster, than a framing of the banal struggles and

frustrations of its aftermath.

In the show’s pilot episode “Do You Know What It Means”

(1.1), set three months after Katrina (although filmed almost

five years later), such questions of reconstruction seem

particularly real and immediate. In an early scene that

introduces one of the show’s central characters, novelist and

Tulane University literature professor Creighton Bernette

(John Goodman), these questions become explicitly voiced.

During an interview with an English TV journalist, Bernette

criticises the flooding as “a manmade catastrophe, a federal

fuck-up of epic proportions and decades in the making,” the

product of governmental incompetence, apathy, and graft. The

journalist, however, seems more interested in the dilemmas of

recovery than in questions of culpability, openly asking “why

should the American taxpayer foot the bill to fix New

Orleans?” “Since when don’t nations rebuild their great

cities?” Bernette replies.

Journalist: For the sake of argument, let’s say that New Orleans was once agreat city…Bernette: Are you saying that New Orleans is not a great city, a city thatlives in the imagination of the world?Journalist: I suppose that if you’re a fan of the music, which has rather seenits day, let’s be honest. Or the food, a provincial cuisine which many wouldsay is typically American – too fat, too rich. And yes, of course New Orleanshas its advocates, but what about the rest of the country?

Stunned by these comments, Bernette asks the “limey vulture”

why he has even come to New Orleans if he hates its culture so

much – before proceeding to throw his microphone into the

nearby canal in enraged protest.

Bernette’s response is, in essence, Treme’s response. The

journalist’s arguments are designed to affront the viewer, and

heighten their engagement with the show’s recreation of New

Orleans’s “spirit” and satisfactions. In arguing that the city

must survive because it “lives in the imagination of the

world,” Bernette effectively serves as the show’s spokesman,

and prefaces Treme’s commitment to actively promoting New

Orleans’s physical and cultural rebuilding. Yet this interview

also has a more complex and troubling subtext, too. It raises

the question of what New Orleans essentially is: whether its

identity is the product of “authentic” experience or of

touristic representations and narratives; and whether,

moreover, its physical spaces are ultimately subject to the

projections of those imaginative spaces. It is a question of

who “owns” the city, in both geographic and conceptual terms,

a question to which Treme offers no easy answer. Does New

Orleans belong to the world that imagines it – or watches it –

just as much as it belongs to the inhabitants who dwell in it?

And to whom, for that matter, in more localised terms, does

the dramatisation of Katrina’s aftermath belong?

Treme uses manifestations of power relationships drawn from

the everyday to explore these questions, which it often frames

as paradoxical tensions and sources of contestation.iv The New

Orleans it presents is a place composed of conflicting spaces

and competing representations. It is an apt depiction of a

city that has always privileged performance to an unusual

degree, not simply through spectacles like carnival and

funerals, but also, as a historically racially segregated

Southern city, in terms of social identity. The narrative

action of Treme revolves loosely around a dozen principal

characters who struggle with the suddenly dramatic nature of

everyday activities in Katrina’s wake, and make a range of

individual and communal attempts at counterculture expression

or political resistance – attempts at some kind of redress,

reconstruction, or satisfaction that I broadly characterize as

either “duelling” (overt, individual resistance) or “jamming”

(covert, communal resistance). These characters are not

figures of influence or power, however, and the overall

trajectory of the show depicts, in my view, the gradual

subsuming of these counterculture expressions into a singular,

cohering New Orleans image of recovery, an image in which the

ostensibly “authentic” becomes inseparable and

indistinguishable from the more expressly “touristic”. This is

a dilemma in which we, as viewers, become tacit and complicit

witnesses (Ellis 2002, 72), through the mediating touristic

“eye” of our TV screens, through the veiled visibility of

camera and crew occupying and contesting the streets of New

Orleans for “ownership” of both space and vision.

Front Lines and Side Lines: Katrina, TV Banality, and Camera

Space

The characteristic nature of New Orleans as site of

performance and spatial contest, where carnival and everyday

blend – and where in a post-Katrina environment the drama of

disaster and the routineness of the everyday blend – make it

perfectly suited to television. Television is a medium built

simultaneously around the exceptional and the banal, and it is

for this reason that there is, I would contend, no televisual

equivalent of the “Disaster Movie”. Film, typified as an

“event” activity by the social practice of movie-going, has

equally tended to emphasize “events” in its narrative

practice. Theatrically and aesthetically, it has traditionally

been drawn to spectacle and the spectacular. Television, on

the other hand, despite expanding budgets, remains far closer

to the pulse and pace of daily life, a “domesticated” medium

embedded in the texture of the everyday, through its aesthetic

favouring of close-up details, interior settings, and serial

narrative forms, and its thematic interest in small-scale

human interactions. It typically expresses a sense of

immediacy and “liveness”, a pronounced sense of “nowness”

(Fiske 1987, 22); it provides, as John Ellis puts it, “a key

role in the social process of working through because it

exists alongside us, holding our hands.” (Ellis 2002, 72)

In consequence, television seems particularly suited to

dramatising a disaster like Katrina. “Three months after,” the

pilot episode elliptically announces at its start: the

hurricane and flooding serves as the unseen prologue to Treme,

a haunting absence nowhere presented yet everywhere present,

in the wreckage of homes and hopes, of daily routines. In

taking post-Katrina recovery as its subject, the show

highlights a narrative truth, that seriality essentially is

aftermath. Serialized television drama elides catastrophes

themselves, and instead offers us consequences – in lingering

detail, rendered painfully close: again, part of Ellis’s

process of “working through” (Ellis 2002, 79-80). Its

specialty is perhaps not action but impotence, helplessness –

of which Treme, with its battered and largely marginalized

characters, offers a demonstration par excellence.

Structurally, Treme emphasizes these particular qualities,

eschewing plot-twists or abrupt action, and instead offering

de-centred narratives, a proliferation of details, and a pace

that echoes the slow pace of post-Katrina recovery. The

opening of Season Two (“Accentuate the Positive”, 2.1)

exemplifies the show’s downplayed approach, in a largely

wordless scene set in a cemetery, where characters quietly

tend to graves, leave flowers, touch-up paintwork. The details

accumulate rather than necessarily cohere, an aspect of the

show Nancy Franklin argues is detectable from the first

moments of Treme’s pilot episode, where a montage showed close-

ups of hands, feathers, instrument keys and other details

prior to the first “Second Line” parade since Katrina.v “In

Treme, your gaze is always brought from the general to the

specific, or – more specifically – to a dense mesh of details

that don’t always appear to make sense or add up easily. That

approach is a fitting one for looking at New Orleans,

especially post-Katrina[.]” (Franklin 2010)

Yet as I shall later discuss, this emphasis on the everyday

is also, of course, simply a representation, a performance of

the everyday, and in this Treme also constitutes a paradox. The

presence of cameras and artifice render its everyday

exceptional; its privileged authenticity becomes

“inauthenticated”. Treme draws formally on this inherent

televisual tension between the everyday and dramatic – and

more generally between authenticity and artifice – and through

this generates its narrative and thematic shape. It is one of

its great satisfactions as a show that its dramatisation of

Katrina’s aftermath serves to reveal the common performativity

that lies at the heart of both television production and the

production – and reproduction – of New Orleans.

First Lines: Duelling; or, the Histories and Narratives of New

Orleans Resistance

From its Francophone place in the early American republic and

its centrality to the Confederacy and the post-Civil War “Lost

Cause” mythology, to the emergence of jazz and the generation

of its twentieth-century tourist narratives – and via the

continuing satire and revelry of carnival – both white and

black New Orleanians have historically and enduringly framed

the city as a counterculture space of resistance, distinct

from mainstream American culture. Perhaps no neighbourhood

exemplifies that ethos better than Tremé, historically famed

for its red-light district Storyville and its place in the

birth of jazz and second line parades.vi Tremé has long

embodied the twinning of places of pleasure and satisfaction

with spaces of counterculture resistance. Indeed, Michael

Eugene Crutcher argues that it in fact constitutes a long-

established informal public space, an “oppositional community”

composed of those traditionally “excluded from the bourgeois

public sphere (and thus public space)”, and with its spirit of

resistance spatially articulated above all through its musical

and parading traditions (Crutcher 2010, x). It is apt then,

given Treme’s interest in everyday resistance, that the show

should take the neighbourhood’s name.

In discussing the nature of that resistance, I have

suggested that the concepts of “duelling” (overt, individual

resistance) and “jamming” (covert, communal resistance) might

together articulate how resistance is acted out in both a

spatial arena and a historical context. Broadly speaking, the

show’s central characters can be assigned to one of two

groups: those using the process of recovery to improve the

everyday, and those using the experience of the everyday to

help ease the process of recovery. Among the “duellists” would

be included not only the impassioned Creighton Bernette, but

also his wife Toni (Melissa Leo), a civil rights lawyer, who

clashes with the authorities in her active attempts to

emphasise the individual, personal tragedies of Katrina and

its aftermath. In a similar vein are the attempts by Albert

Lambreaux (Clarke Peter) – a building contractor and Chief of

one of the tribes of Mardi Gras “Indians” – not simply to

rebuild ruined houses, but also to prevent the demolition of

New Orleans’s largely undamaged housing projects. In the

episode “Smoke My Peace Pipe” (1.7), Lambreaux squats in the

boarded-up buildings to protest their closure during a period

of acute housing shortage. His civil disobedience, however, is

unable to alter their fate, and his failed efforts underscore

Treme’s depiction of how the social opportunities for

rebuilding, created by Katrina, quickly degenerated into

opportunistic real-estate developments and attempts to

profitably “gentrify” the city. The speculations of Houston-

based developer Nelson Hidalgo (Jon Seda) in Season Two offer

a particularly bleak depiction of this, including his symbolic

corruption of one of New Orleans’s central carnival

traditions, the black Zulu parade krewe. Zulu originated as a

way for working-class blacks to satirize the pomposity of

exclusive white krewes like Rex by satirically “signifying” on

them (Roach 1996, 20-24); it offered an instance of “jamming”

in a technical, communicational sense, where hegemonic

narratives were disrupted by dissonant parody. Treme instead

shows the historically countercultural parade as a place where

black politicians and city leaders make secret deals, and

where guest membership can readily be bought. In the episode

“Carnival Time” (2.7), the hispanic Hidalgo puts on the

krewe’s traditional blackface paint and grass skirt, and

accompanies the court of King Zulu; later on, we see him

copulating with a black woman who is now wearing his grass-

skirt. It is the starkly symbolic image of New Orleans – and

especially its black underclass – getting royally screwed, and

by a man resembling the “carpetbaggers” who exploited the

ruined South following the Civil War, during the failed period

of black civil rights and economic recovery known (with bitter

irony, now, in hindsight) as Reconstruction.

For other residents, such as local DJ Davis McAlary (Steve

Zahn), the course of resistance proves less clear, a confusion

that finds apt analogy in his conflicting understandings of

the notion of “satisfaction”. Davis is a bon vivant who

constantly indulges himself, and in the Season One finale

“I’ll Fly Away” (1.10) he takes chef Janette Desautel (Kim

Dickens), his “friend with benefits”, through an all-day

schedule of New Orleans’s musical and culinary satisfactions –

a hard-sell of its mythic dream of “ease” and plenty – in an

(ultimately failed) attempt to persuade her not to abandon the

city for a job in New York. Yet at the same time, the

sensualist Davis also feels intense dissatisfaction at his

city, alienated by post-Katrina changes and by the daily

presence of the national guard, in his view an “army of

occupation”. “I just want my city back,” Davis protests

(“Right Place, Wrong Time”, 1.3): and he later attempts,

somewhat ineffectually, to run for city council on the back of

a satirical protest song with the refrain “shame on you now,

Dubya” and policies such as a half-baked attempt to fix the

city’s roads by legalising marijuana, which he calls “Pot for

Potholes.”

The confusion of his political agenda is embodied in one of

his first scenes in “Do You Know What It Means” (1.1), when he

playfully challenges a friend to a duel, saying “I will have

satisfaction.”vii “I will have satisfaction is like what a

gentleman says when he wishes to duel,” Davis subsequently

explains to his uncomprehending friend – and it is highly

significant that his friend here is in fact black. For all his

postures, Davis himself is from a wealthy white family, and is

even named for the proslavery Confederate president Jefferson

Davis. Davis’s naivety extends to his ill-judged

conversational use of the word “nigger”, for which he is later

beaten, and to the paradox of forming a rap-funk-fusion band

while also dressing for Mardi Gras as the pirate and slave-

trader Jacques Lafitte. By invoking the idea of duelling,

Davis unwittingly invokes the Old South’s hierarchical “honour

codes” too. To duel, one had to be a gentleman, and to be a

gentleman one had to be white. Blacks were thus unable to

demand “satisfaction” of whites – and so it remains in both

actual Tremé and dramatised Treme, despite the black majority

on the city council. Most of the poorer black residents of New

Orleans – even a community leader like Chief Lambreaux – have

no real means of demanding satisfaction or restitution from

the predominantly white institutions that govern them, from

the federal government on down to the profiteering

construction firms and the insurance companies who strenuously

deny the majority of claims, by distinguishing between

“hurricane damage” and “flood damage”.

Second Lines: Jamming; or, Jazz, Parades, and the Pleasurable

Spaces of Resistance

Davis’s trajectory of protest is characteristically naïve, and

is doomed because it fails to recognize, from a position of

privilege, the dramatic imbalance of power within New Orleans

society. It is echoed again in Season Two, when the members of

his political rap-funk-fusion band gradually ease him out to

allow them to pursue more purely musical – and commercially

remunerative – directions. This embrace of music as a more

effective means of self-empowerment and cultural resistance –

the emphasis on “jamming” over “duelling” – is tacitly

expressed by many characters throughout the show, particularly

by trumpeter and bandleader Kermit Ruffins (playing himself,

in a supporting role). Kermit effectively resists the traumas

of Katrina and of the city’s older crises through cultivated

indifference. “Do you just stand there and tell me all you

want to do is get high, play some trumpet and barbecue in New

Orleans your whole damn life?” Davis asks him at one point.

“That’ll work,” Kermit smiles in reply (“Do You Know What it

Means”, 1.1).

Nonetheless, there are profound political and ethical

implications encoded in Kermit’s actions, and in those of

other musicians who adopt “jamming” over “duelling” as their

means of resistance. The origins of New Orleans jazz, after

all, are intimately related to dilemmas of race. Jazz’s

earliest opponents were quick to see analogies between its

“worrying the line” of Western musical traditions, and its

worrying of the physical and racial lines of segregated

Southern society, especially through late-night performances

in racially-mixed districts like Storyville. “Jazz was musical

miscegenation,” as Charles Hersch puts it (Hersch 2007, 5).

Both socially and technically, jazz was the product of a rich

interweaving of musical and cultural traditions; it was “never

singular, but always multiple, constantly overflowing the

containers critics tried to force it into.” (Hersch 2007, 8)

At the same time, though, it also had a very particular value

for the black community, themselves oppressed daily by the

containment of boundaries and divisions. The free-form nature

of jazz – its decentred interweaving of polyphony and cross-

rhythms, its “signifying” reference on other pieces, and its

constant manipulation of metronomic time – made it a vital if

unconscious metaphor of resistance in the everyday. It is one

of Treme’s core articles of faith that jazz can play a

similarly redemptive role in the acutely racialised wake of

Katrina.

Treme’s opening scene, showing the first Second Line parade

“three months after” Katrina, led by the appropriately named

Rebirth Brass Band, does not simply capture New Orleans’s

spirit of community, passion, and resilience, but also

embodies its spirit of resistance. Ned Sublette has argued

that such musical parades are equally civil rights parades,

“[l]iterally demonstrating the civil right of the community to

assemble in the street for peaceful purposes. Or, more simply,

demonstrating the civil right of the community to exist.”

(Flaherty 2010, 8) Much the same is asserted when Chief

Lambreaux’s Indians parade at the end of Season One: such

parades, Joseph Roach argues, perform “a rite of territory

repossessed, to assert not sole ownership, perhaps, but

certainly collective entitlement to fair use.” (Roach 1996,

205) By privileging these community parades over the grander

Mardi Gras parades, which are generally viewed more distantly,

Treme subtly reveals the contrast between their purposes: while

the Indians stress community, and the Second Lines embrace

interactivity, the old (and historically white) carnival

krewes like Comus or Rex in particular were founded on a

principle of exclusivity. By introducing costume themes and

secret membership into carnival culture in the mid-nineteenth-

century, such krewes restricted who could parade, ordered and

hierarchised the previous anarchy of carnival, and created a

distinct division between paraders and spectators. Such

ordering proved so effective that it was subsequently

maintained by the Zulu krewe, despite their ostensibly

satiric, “signifying” role (Mitchell 2005, 24, 60). The

presence of both camera and television audience equally

problematically blurs the line here too, making the viewer at

once integral to yet external to the parade. Joseph Roach

refers to paraders accompanying the Second Line with mini-cams

as a “Third Line”, and we might equally consider the camera-

crews and audiences of Treme as an intensified manifestation of

this role (Roach 1996, 279).

Third Lines, or Bottom Lines: Tourism, Authenticity, Audience

The veiled visibility of the camera marks a division between

space of spectacle and space of spectator, and in this respect

the camera crews and the old parade krewes symbolically echo

one another. By carnival masqueing and by filming, both

separate themselves from the body of the New Orleans populace,

and become an external community, a community apart. Both also

assert an ownership of space and a privileged view of the

city, one that marks an invasion into the everyday, an

intrusion which has clear analogies to other spatial

occupations of New Orleans which preoccupy the characters of

Treme: the presence of national guardsmen and tourists, and

above all the imprint of Katrina. And like tourists,

production crews (and by extension, audiences) are exterior to

a world of which they are also necessarily and inseparably a

part. The physical actions of Treme’s camera crews thus

dramatise the everyday by their very presence, as do carnival

parades – and at the same time also inauthenticate the very

sites and sources of authenticity the show attempts to

privilege and preserve, as tourists do. Television drama in

general offers a “reality effect”, a performance of the everyday

in which the process of production is masked, and by which the

“finished representation is naturalized” (Fiske 1987, 21). In

much the same way, Treme might be said to offer an

“authenticity effect” – and one which is as essentially

touristic as that reality effect is fictitious.

Historically, Kevin Fox Gotham notes, New Orleanians have

championed the city “as one of the last authentic places in

the nation”, a “bulwark against the homogenizing tendencies

that have overtaken metropolitan America”, and to which it

seems particularly vulnerable post-Katrina (Gotham 2007, 4).

It is a position Treme not only approves but also to a degree

enacts self-reflexively, recreating, as New York Times television

critic Alessandra Stanley put it, “a cult of authenticity that

villainizes the very outsiders who allow them to remain on the

inside” (Stanley 2010). A particularly clear instance of this

comes in the show’s second episode, “Meet De Boys on the

Battlefront” (1.2), where Dutch immigrant Sonny, a zealous

convert to this “cult”, patronizes some Wisconsin tourists.

“You never even heard of the Ninth Ward before Katrina,” Sonny

sneers, before proceeding to cynically charge them double for

a performance of “When the Saints Go Marching In”. Yet in her

thoughtful review of the pilot episode in The New Yorker, Nancy

Franklin praised the bravery of the show’s broader adoption of

this posture:

The characters in the show are ambivalent about outsiders, and if you’re atall sensitive to that you feel intrusive, rude – almost a colonialist – forappreciating what you see and hear in Treme. The series virtually prohibitsyou from loving it, while asking you to value it. (Franklin 2010)

In historical terms, however, this seeming “authenticity”

actually originates from a singular and highly selective image

of New Orleans first promoted in the 1940s, when the city’s

leaders made a virtue of their stalled commercial and

industrial development, and embraced the city’s historical

backwardness (Stanonis 2006, 26). Although New Orleans had

long been a popular travel destination, this point marked the

birth of a tourist industry outside of Mardi Gras season, and

at its heart was an elevation of New Orleans jazz from

counterculture to mainstream, from something disreputable to

something saleable. Yet as J. Mark Souther has stressed, this

conservationism was deeply marked by conservatism. The rise of

the tourist industry coincided with the height of the civil

rights movement; by distilling the history of African-American

experience in the city into a singular mythic history of jazz,

the legacies of slavery and segregation became displaced.

“Thus, New Orleans could obscure any connection a visitor

might conjure between the racial inequalities of the past and

those written into a present-day social and physical landscape

fractured along racial lines” (Souther 2006, 224). This

historical and cultural segregation directly impacted on New

Orleans’s geography of racial and economic segregation: facts

that were marginalised in tourist narratives, became

physically marginalised away from tourist spaces. New

Orleans’s myth of “authenticity” – which Treme at least

partially endorses – is thus based on a greater, and bleaker,

sense of “exclusivity” than one might think: one reliant on

privileged and disadvantaged uses of space. Tourism ruled: and

as a result, “New Orleans, like all cities that came to depend

on any industry […] ultimately subordinated all other concerns

to the bottom line.” (Souther 2006, 229)

As television drama, Treme thus constitutes an “impure space”

in a double sense. With its often anti-authoritarian message,

its subversive undercutting of television conventions with its

jazz-infused structure, and its potentially wide (although

ostensibly subscriber-based) diffusion through broadcast, it

occupies an “impure space” akin to those of boundary-

transgressive jazz parades and early jazz performances. For

the price of entry, anyone may become a witness. Yet as an

external force conveying a selective representation of New

Orleans to another (largely) external force, it equally

constructs an “impure space” of tourism and inauthenticity: an

“impure space” that, like the conventional tourist narratives,

marginalises racial tensions to a mythic, ostensibly “post-

racial” image of New Orleans as “city of jazz”. In some

respects, then, its “Third Line” constitutes something of a

“fifth column”: by dramatising disaster in ways that privilege

highly selective aspects, rather than broader practices, of

the everyday, it compromises its critique of social injustice

in the cause of post-Katrina recovery.

It is in this, then, that Treme becomes somewhat paradoxical,

in its division between impassioned pleas and boosterism. It

aims to show a resilient city that has lost none of its charm

or spirit, yet also one that has been profoundly changed by

Katrina: an ambivalence depicted in its title sequence, which

combines images of carnival and Katrina – presenting New

Orleans as place of dreams and as place of devastation and

despair. Nancy Franklin expresses this paradox best when she

notes, regarding Season One, that it was “heartening (and

mind-bending) to know that for some scenes the production team

had to re-create the damage caused by the flood, because by

the time shooting began […] repairs and reconstruction were

under way.” (Franklin 2010)

Last Lines, or Life Lines: Katrina, 9/11, and the

Dissatisfactions of Treme

“Welcome to ‘the city that care forgot’,” Chief Lambreaux

greets his son Delmond, when he arrives on a visit from New

York (“Meet De Boys on the Battlefront”, 1.2). It is difficult

not to see how this traditional nickname, celebrating New

Orleans’s leisured pace, might take on different resonances

post-Katrina, in light of the federal care, both in policy and

in practice, which was not simply forgotten but neglected. In

a rant he uploads to YouTube in the episode “At the Foot of

Canal Street” (1.4), Creighton Bernette explicitly criticizes

the disparity between federal responses to 9/11 and Katrina.

“You get attacked by a few fundamentalist assholes, and the

federal money comes raining down like rose petals,” he says,

addressing “privileged” New Yorkers. “Our whole fucking coast

was destroyed, and we’re still waiting for somebody to give a

good goddamn.”

The difference in responses perhaps lies in the discussion

of medium and “event” I made earlier in this essay. As a

disaster, Katrina proved less readily translatable into single

iconic images or simple narratives than 9/11. It was a broad

“crisis”, where 9/11 constituted a more containable “event”:

containable because its localised site of trauma paradoxically

made it more readily symbolic and de-localised, more readily

translated and abstracted from personal grief into national

mourning (itself swiftly translated into national aggression).

As a result, there have been many films but few direct

televisual responses to 9/11, yet a substantial number of

televisual responses to the US government’s actions arising

from 9/11. Despite its enormous human tragedy, 9/11 was

nonetheless readily summarised as a narrative of ideology

striking at ideology, whereas Katrina was always an

irreducibly less simple mess, its roots reaching beyond recent

politics and back into a long history of racial injustice that

America still seems monumentally unwilling to adequately face.

In consequence, Treme’s characters are left simply to endure

– to endure, and too often to be defeated, just as Treme’s

combined efforts at boosterism and social critique often

ultimately block one another. Between the failed attempts at

“duelling”, and the compromise of “jamming”, the possibilities

of New Orleans seem reduced down to a few snatched

“satisfactions” – exotic, touristic ones, and ones which

increasingly seem to rely on New York as a foil. In Treme’s

conception, the “mainstream” city is a place of cold weather

and drained faces, of constant bustle but little joy, of

pretentions rather than passions, of snatched pleasures rather

than lingering satisfaction – a place where characters like

Janette Desautel and Delmond Lambreaux live in a state of

exile, like homesick expats.

In one of the show’s most poignant scenes, in the episode

“All on a Mardi Gras Day” (1.8), Creighton Bernette bleakly

reflects that New Orleans life “now is like a dream – the way

that everything in a dream is the same yet not the same;

familiar yet strange; not quite right, but you just can’t put

your finger on it. […] Whatever comes next is just a dream of

what used to be.” Yet one might readily argue that what Treme

helps reveal is less the death of a dream than a process of

rude awakening, as the catastrophic impact of Katrina, and the

failure not of recovery but of reconception, brings to the

surface the ugly, seedy underbelly of that dream. Despite its

often romantic image of New Orleans, Treme reveals, above all,

the manner in which the city has been sustained through its

short-term solutions and by its effective neutralisation of

countercultural resistance, transformed into profitable

touristic spectacle. Yet it is the willingness to show this

dissatisfactory state, this flawed and incomplete process of

“working through” (Ellis 2002, 79-80) in both political and

everyday spheres, that perhaps ultimately constitutes the

greatest achievement, and satisfaction, of Treme.

Works Cited

Crutcher, Michael Eugene. 2010. Tremé: Race and Place in a New OrleansNeighborhood. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. StevenRendall. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ellis, John. 2002. Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty. London: I. B. Tauris.

Fiske, John. 1987. Television Culture. London: Methuen & Co.

Flaherty, Jordan. 2010. Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Franklin, Nancy. 2010. “After the Flood: The Creators of ‘The Wire’ in New Orleans”. The New Yorker, April 12. Accessed 21 May,2012. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/ television/2010/04/12/100412crte_television_franklin?currentPage=all

Gotham, Kevin Fox. 2007. Authentic New Orleans: Tourism, Culture, and Racein the Big Easy. New York: New York University Press.

Hersch, Charles. 2007. Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mitchell, Reid. 2005. All on a Mardi Gras Day: Episodes in the History of NewOrleans Carnival. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press.

Souther, Jonathan Mark. 2006. New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Stanley, Alessandra. 2010. “After Katrina, Staying Afloat withMusic”, New York Times, April 8. Accessed May 21, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/09/arts/television/09treme/html

Stanonis, Anthony Joseph. 2006. Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Treme. 1.1. “Do You Know What It Means”. Dir. Agnieszka Holland. HBO. April 11, 2010.

-----. 1.2. “Meet De Boys on the Battlefront”. Dir. Jim McKay.HBO. April 18, 2010.

-----. 1.3. “Right Place, Wrong Time”. Dir. Ernest Dickerson. HBO. April 25, 2010.

-----. 1.4. “At the Foot of Canal Street”. Dir. Anthony Hemingway. HBO. May 2, 2010.

-----. 1.7. “Smoke My Peace Pipe”. Dir. Simon Cellan Jones. HBO. May 23, 2010.

-----. 1.8. “All on a Mardi Gras Day”. Dir. Anthony Hemingway.HBO. June 6, 2010.

-----. 1.10. “I’ll Fly Away”. Dir. Agnieszka Holland. HBO. June 20, 2010.

-----. 2.1. “Accentuate the Positive”. Dir. Anthony Hemingway.HBO. April 24, 2011.

-----. 2.7. “Carnival Time”. Dir. Brad Anderson. HBO. June 5, 2011.

i Between 2006 and 2010, 24.4% of the New Orleans population were living below the poverty line – a figure 6% greater than the Louisiana average of 18.1%. See http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/22/22071.html

ii According to FBI statistics, metropolitan New Orleans had 250 murders in 2010,a rate of 20.8 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. The rate is double that of Baltimore (10.3), and even considerably above the area with the second highest homicide rate, Flint, Michigan (13.8). This rate is largely consistent with pre-Katrina rates, however: the New Orleans Police Department reported 257 homicidesin 2002, and 274 in 2003. See http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/table-6; see also http://www.nola.gov/GOVERNMENT/NOPD/Crime-Stats/2003-Yearly-Crime-Statistics/

iii As of June 2012, two seasons of Treme have been broadcast, with a thirdscheduled for Fall 2012, and a fourth currently under discussion. Inconsequence, this essay focuses on those first two seasons only.

iv My approach here draws on the work of social geographers and theorists of theeveryday, particularly that of Michel De Certeau.

v “Second line” is a specific kind of street parade, where a “first line” of amarching band is followed by a “second line” of colourfully dressed spectaculardancers.

vi There is debate over whether Tremé should be spelt with the final letteraccented or unaccented. To stress a distinction between reality anddramatisation, I use the accented form for the neighbourhood and the unaccentedform for the TV show.

vii Later in the same episode, Davis returns to this notion, after failing toretrieve his band’s records, sold “on consignment”, from a closed branch ofTower Records. “I will have satisfaction”, he vows – and later retrieves the CDsby theft.