[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’ve blogged about a handful of them, leading up to this weekend post where I’ll develop my overarching reading of the show’s American ideas!]
On a more superficial and a deeper conflict in Deadwood, and why the latter matters so much.
In the prior post on Deadwood and Justified that I hyperlinked in my intro above, I argued that the show’s central conflict was between Al Swearengen (the peerless Ian McShane) and Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant). There’s no doubt that the first season sets up the dynamic between the two as such a defining one, not least because it makes us of a number of classic Western tropes: Al as the Black Hat, a character willing to lie, cheat, steal, and murder to make his fortune and stay in power in this explicitly lawless community; and Seth as the White Hat, a character who has ostensibly left his days as a lawman behind to make his own fortune, but who finds himself unable to resist serving in such a legal and moral role and through it attempting to bring order to that community. Both characters are more complicated and multilayered than that (this is Deadwood after all), and by the end of the first season they have also made an uneasy but clear alliance in order to pursue more mutual goals for the community, particularly in opposition to the destructive collective violence that a character like Cy Tolliver (Powers Boothe) seeks to bring. But that surface-level conflict between Al and Seth remains, as illustrated by the fight between the two characters that opens Season Two.
By the end of that second season, however, and even more fully throughout the third, Al and Seth realize that they have a common and far more dangerous and destructive enemy: George Hearst (Gerald McRaney), the mining magnate whose malignant, murderous will dominates the camp even before his arrival at the end of season two (and who employs Tolliver, who is a thoroughly despicable man in his own right but far less powerful than Hearst). On this watch of the show, I was struck by just how clearly Hearst represents the forces of “amalgamation and capital” (as Charlie Utter [the wonderful Dayton Callie] puts it, quoting his late friend Will Bill Hickock), the emerging incorporation of America that would likewise come to dominate the national community and story so fully over the remainder of the 19th century (Deadwood is set in the late 1870s). Hearst hires Pinkertons and other gun thugs to protect his company and enforce his will, murders both workers who seek to organize and rival miners who refuse to sell their claims, works to bring “the future” to the camp in the form of innovations (such as the telegraph and telephone) that will further his corporate interests, and generally behaves and operates very much like all the robber barons who defined the Gilded Age and embodied this new form of American privilege and power.
I can’t imagine a more important 21st century theme, given how much our own moment has come to be dominated by another such cohort of robber barons, the tech titans who are claiming that they are working for our collective future but really furthering their own interests, accumulating obscene wealth along with limitless privilege and power, and more or less directly employing our own era’s thoroughly despicable men like, y’know, the President of the United States (it’s no coincidence that by the time of the Deadwood movie’s setting in 1889 Hearst has become a Senator). And what’s equally important, when we develop this reading of Deadwood, is the way it can help us analyze both Al and Seth, and their allies and friends, as embodying an explicitly contrasting vision of community, one that emphasizes solidarity and support and the common good against the individualism embodied by Hearst and his ilk. Al remains a businessman, but (as Vaughn put it beautifully) in much the same way George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) does in It’s a Wonderful Life, offering a collectivist vision of capitalism in which a rising tide lifts all boats and (to quote my own North Star Bruce) “in the end, nobody wins unless everybody wins.” Indeed, it’s by seeing what Hearst brings to and means for the community that both Al and Seth can push past their own limitations as well as their conflicts with each other, recognizing that the survival of a community they both love depends on their fighting together (alongside so many others, including importantly the camp journalist) for that more perfect union. From David Milch’s pen to all of our ears.
Next series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Takes on Deadwood you’d share?
Leave a Reply