[Earlier this year, I shared with Vaughn one of my favorite TV shows and cultural works of all time, Deadwood. Watching and talking about it with her made me realize how many AmericanStudies layers it features, so this week I’ll blog about a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post where I’ll develop my overarching reading of the show’s American ideas!]
On three layers of how we read the famous figure on whom the opening episodes of Deadwood focus.
I’ve thought a lot about revisionist Westerns across my career—multiple times on this blog, and also in a long-ago conference paper on Dances with Wolves and Thunderheart, among other places—and there’s no doubt that Deadwood falls squarely within both sides of that complex genre: employing a ton of Western tropes and stereotypes, to very entertaining effects; but also depicting the gritty realities and more authentic histories behind (or really alongside) them. Creator David Milch sets that tone immediately and potently through the show’s opening, four-episode mini-arc centered on Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine), who in this depiction at once lives up to the mythos of that legendary Wild West gunfighter (one of his first actions is to outdraw and gun down a villainous character) yet at the same time thoroughly undermines it (in one scene he is found drunkenly asleep in a hotel hallway, for example). For a lot more on those aspects of the show’s Will Bill, check out this thoughtful conversation between Milch and Carradine.
If this week’s blog series has any one throughline, however, it’s that everything in Deadwood has layers atop its layers. On this watch in particular, I was especially struck by another layer of Wild Bill’s character, one that echoes our 21st century moment in a number of ways: celebrity culture, and its effects on both the celebrities and the culture. The most obvious example of that is the character of Bill’s eventual assassin, Jack McCall (Garrett Dillahunt), who immediately defines Bill in relationship to his imagined version of him (“I’m not impressed” is Jack’s telling first line) and spends the rest of both of their lives playing that scenario out. But I think an even more telling example is the random man who approaches Bill while he’s in a private conversation with friends, demands that Bill listen to an extended admiring recounting of a shooting the man saw Bill perform, and then when Bill, having listened patiently for some time, wearily but politely asks the man to move along, turns on a dime and unleashes a foul string of epithets and a fervent desire to see Bill himself shot dead. I don’t know of a moment from any cultural work that captures more succinctly what our parasocial perspective on celebrities, along with the idea that they become literally public (ie, our shared possessions), does to everyone involved in these interactions.
Those layers would be plenty to make this a fascinating character—but this being Deadwood, there’s a good bit more still, including an additional lens that we only get two seasons later, with Bill long dead. Toward the end of Season Three, another pair of famous Wild West figures are introduced in a brief two-episode arc: Wyatt and Morgan Earp (Gale Harold and Austin Nichols). When I first watched the show, I couldn’t figure out what to make of this very brief depiction of these very famous men, at a much earlier stage than the famous OK Corral era portrayed in the film Tombstone among many other works. The arc still felt a bit quick and partial on this rewatch (as does much of the end of the third and final season, as it was not intended to be the final one), but having thought about Wild Bill so much in Season One, I came to feel that the Earps were brought in at least in part to extend and amplify that prior depiction of Bill. As another example of the revisionist Western (they’re quick draws and good shots, but in other ways far less impressive than the legend), but also to make clear that in the evolving culture and society on this moment, there’s not really a place for such Wild West celebrities. The Earps move on from Deadwood quickly, as Bill likewise does (more tragically), and the show gets back to the defining social conflicts about which I’ll have a lot more to say this weekend.
Next DeadwoodStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Takes on Deadwood you’d share?
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