“The game is rigged”: framing real life metaphorically in the TV epic The Wire

Abstract

Abstract The aim of the paper is to show the extent to which the game metaphor shapes the Home Box Office (HBO) show (2002–2008) The Wire, which sets out the interconnection of the systems of drug dealing/trafficking, police department, court, organized labor, media, public school, and local policy, as well as the similar structure which all those systems are built upon. As our theoretical-methodological framework we will adopt cognitive and cultural linguistics as a starting point for a contextually embedded sequence analysis. We will focus on the multimodal ubiquity of game as a cultural model, as well as the contextual frames in which this metaphor is embedded with regard to the everyday life of the protagonists on the TV show and the institutions they are part of. Therefore, we will first analyze a specific metaphorical scenario where the conventionalized source and target domains chess and drug business are inverted, which has cultural-contextual implications, before we come to a second scene where the same domains are again accessed, this time in reverse.