Last night on Deadwood, Ellsworth proposed to Alma Garrett, Tom Nuttall rode his bone-shaker the whole way down the sidewalk, Al Swearengen spent too much time talking to a dead Indian in a box, and Seth Bullock, as he does in too many episodes, spent most of his time glowering, grinding his teeth, looking as though he would like nothing more than to find someone to beat bloody, and generally not getting anything accomplished.
That tendency of Bullock's to not get anything accomplished is one of the reasons my enjoyment of Deadwood isn't as unreserved as some people's.
Fans of the show recognized immediately that the episode I described up top, Childish Things, is from the middle of the second season. The third and final season has just ended on HBO, but the blonde and I don't subscribe so we've been watching on DVD.
That doesn't mean that I'm a season and a half behind in knowing what's going on. I've been keeping up through the website and Matt Zoller Seitz's reviews. (Look out: Plenty of plot spoilers at both places.) So I know what's in store for the main characters and apparently what's in store for Bullock is more glowering, teeth-gnashing, and lack of accomplishment.
I find this dramatically uninteresting and uninspired. I understand why the writers can't let Bullock get to work cleaning up Deadwood quite yet. But couldn't they have taken a page out of the King Arthur stories and let him leave town now and then on an adventure in which he gets to be the movie western hero we know he is and is going to be? Launcelot spent as much time as he could away from Camelot so that he wouldn't have to see Guenevere every day. Bullock should follow his example so that he doesn't have to keep exchanging longing glances with Alma Garrett.
But what is also bothering me about Bullock's inertia is that it is historically inaccurate.
There was a real Seth Bullock, just as there was a real Al Swearengen and a real Tom Nuttall and a real E.B. Farnum. In fact, at least half the main characters had historical counterparts whose careers pretty closely paralleled the characters'.
Series creator David Milch and his writers have taken more than a few liberties with their personalities. The real E.B. Farnum appears to have been a more respectable, intelligent, and self-reliant type than the unctuous, fawning, greedy, foolishly scheming coward and "born follower" portrayed so brilliantly by William Sanderson.
And the real Seth Bullock appears to have been too busy and too accomplished to have wasted a single moment grinding a single tooth.
Bullock, the real Bullock, was one of those fortunate people who are born older, possessed of a maturity and sagacity beyond their years, more than his their share of energy and talent, and a genius for being in the right place at the right time and knowing just what needs to be done when and how to do it.
There were good reasons he was made sheriff, Teddy Roosevelt became his lifelong friend, his business thrived, and he became over time one of the leading citizens of Deadwood. He was smart, hardworking, brave, honest, and, above all, preternaturally sensible.
And I understand why David Milch wouldn't have wanted him for his hero.
The real Seth Bullock wouldn't have wasted any time with the fictional Al Swearengen---the real Al Swearengen doesn't appear to have left any mark on history and was probably just what you'd expect the owner of a whorehouse to be, a petty thug---and the central dramatic tension of the series, which is based on how the thoroughly corrupt Al Swearengen longs for a world in which he is not only not necessary but an evil to be stamped out, so that his mission in life is to bring about his own self-destruction, requires a tortured, indecisive, and not at all level-headed Seth Bullock.
It's necessary to the plot that the "good" people Swearengen needs to make his dream of a civilized Deadwood come true be weaker and not as sharp as he is so that he can give them the benefit of his cynical wisdom and back them up when they prove incapable of committing the violence or dishonesty that a scheme requires to succeed.
And it's necessary because Milch's conception of the Wild West is essentially ahistorical.
In Milch's Deadwood, the West is a thoroughly lawless and savage place that has to be tamed through the most brutal means. Civilization has to be built from the ground up, one small step at a time, and against great odds. The West---the World---wants to be a hellhole. People are for the most part stupid and vicious and driven to self-destruction by their lusts and greed and appetites and no matter how often you demonstrate to them that it's better to walk down a wooden sidewalk than wade ankle-deep through mud and shit, they will not just keep stepping off the sidewalk, they will not just regularly trip and fall off it, they will jump off it, happily, after taking a running start, and break their necks landing head first in the mire, if they see a penny shining up at them from a puddle.
Heck, they don't even need to see the penny. They will drown themselves in the shit just because it's too hard to walk straight on the sidewalk or because the echoing clomp of their own boots on the boards drives them crazy.
Pretty much, then, they have to be forced at gunpoint or bribed or tricked into acting human and decent.
Honesty, compassion, mercy and other more refined virtues are often problematic in such a world.
In reality, civilization was imported all at once to the various Deadwoods that sprouted up all across the continent from Plymouth on out to San Francisco.
Civilization arrived as soon as the Seth Bullocks and Sol Stars opened up their hardware stores.
It arrived in the form of hardware stores.
And schools, and libraries, and lecture halls.
It arrived in the persons of people like George Hearst.
In the series, George Hearst is a rapacious monster, a dragon who comes along and despoils the village, and carries off all the gold the hardworking and honest citizens have earned through their sweat, blood, and courage.
He's an invincible dragon too.
Not only do bulletts fired at point blank range into his face magically swerve off course to merely nick his shoulder, but there is no political or economic power on earth that can resist him. He corrupts with a touch all that he can't destroy.
Even Al Swearengen is no match for the dragon. Al survives, and saves Deadwood, by strategically retreating at every step the dragon takes and letting him gobble up pretty much all he wants to gobble up. In the end, they win out simply by outlasting the dragon's appetites. His lust and greed and gluttony slaked, the dragon leaves on his own, although not before demanding and getting the villagers to sacrifice a virgin...
Well, she's hardly a virgin, but she's a young woman so completely innocent of any offense to any one, let alone the dragon, that her moral purity is practically that of a virgin's.
Very dramatic. But also a pure fairy tale.
The real George Hearst was not a dragon. He was someone dragons---little, mean-spirited, much less talented dragons---followed around in hopes of making a killing off his hardwork.
Like Seth Bullock, Hearst was born older. He matured young and he was a success in life almost from his first step out the door into the great wide world, and he succeeded by being harder working, smarter, more talented, more sensible, and less greedy than most young businessmen of his day.
I'm not saying that he was some kind of saint. I'm saying that he did not make his way in life as a parasite. He was a true entrepreneur. He started businesses, made them prosper, and then sold them off, probably sometimes to parasites of the type the fictional Hearst is a grotesque caricature of in Deadwood.
The real Hearst's supposed Indian name "Boy the Earth Talks To" appears to have as been as well-earned and deserved as Natty Bumpo's Indian names, Deerslayer and Hawkeye.
He was a true prospector and an accomplished mining engineer as well as a savvy businessman and investor.
As a person, he appears to have had far more in common with Deadwood's most decent and noble, and humble, character, Ellsworth than he'd have had with his fictional counterpart.
It's very possible that the real Seth Bullock was a far more tortured and tempted young man than he appears to be in the historical record. He might have succeeded in life because he was able to repress and tame his demons and resist the dark angels of his nature. That side of him might very well have not made it into the history books. So if Milch needs the character to be more flawed and conflicted than was apparently the case, he can do it without really doing a disservice to the real Seth Bullock's reputation.
If in the two movies that will finish off the series next year Milch makes Bullock a corrupt hypocrite undeserving of the respect and positon his historical counterpart earned in real life, I will be extremely disappointed, both as a student of history and as fan of the show, since it will mean that Bullock wasn't worth investing all the time and trouble it's taken to watch Timothy Olyphant glower and grind his teeth and stand around looking frustrated and impotent and incompetent.
I will also be disappointed in Milch for letting his ideas trump his art. He will have used Bullock to illustrate a non-dramatic point at the expense, not just of history, but of good storytelling.
I don't really expect that will happen. I think that in the end Bullock will step up and become the hero Milch has set him on the path to become.
Note, I didn't say that he will become the hero the real Seth Bullock was. The real Seth Bullock arrived in town as a hero. There would have been no drama in that. Not enough to sustain a TV series planned to last even longer than the three years Deadwood has unfortunately been limited to.
It is enough to sustain a pretty good movie western and is in fact pretty much the plot of Dodge City and Destry Rides Again, movies, by the way, I think David Milch must have had in the back of his mind as models, despite his cynical view of the West compared to those westerns' romanticism.
But I am already disappointed in that with George Hearst Milch has allowed a non-dramatic idea to give him permission to alter history to a far greater degree than he had in the first season and in effect libel the real George Hearst.
Yes, I know, you can't libel the dead. And Hearst was a public figure anyway, so I can only use libel figuratively here. But I mean it, doggone it. The Hearst in the series an insult to the real man.
And don't try to tell me about what Shakespeare did to Richard III. There's some disagreement about just how much of a tyrant the real Richard was and how much blood was on his hands, but besides that there's reason to think Shakespeare believed he was being true to the historical record. He was working from what passed for it.
Milch knows he's making it all up. And I can't help being disappointed that while he was making up his character George Hearst he didn't take the extra step of making up a name for him too.
The show is more of an allegory than it is a historical drama, which is, of course, one of the justifications for all the ahistorical profanity, which is itself a disguise for the far more ahistorical habits of the characters to speak in blank verse.
The blank verse, the very Shakespearean scene structures, plus the outrageously exaggerated violence, are signals of the show's artificiality. Depsite its realistic looking surface, Deadwood is theater. It isn't meant to be taken as a documdrama. It's meant to be taken as pure Drama.
Which is why I think calling the George Hearst character George Hearst was an artistic mistake, on top of everything else.
The character is an allegorical monster of corporate capitalism. It is neither true to history, true to life, nor true to the art of the show---to keep Hearst alive and thriving the other characters have had to act in ways artistically inconsistent with their behavior. Swearengen has cut the throat of a goverment agent. Would he really have hesitated to have had Hearst killed? Faced with the choice of having to kill Trixie or killing Hearst himself, would he have hesitated?
Giving the dragon the name of a real human being, I think, highlights the character's artistic implausibility by calling attention to the fact that no real human being could have acted like this and gotten away with it.
But it's a failure too in that by not caring if the fake George Hearst gets mistaken for the real one, Milch allowed his politics to get the better of his art.
Those capitalists, they're all the same, aren't they?
At which question, the allegory shrinks into a tract.
Such brilliant timing - I am just about to watch season one again - it's been over a year and I just got season two, my roomies also want to see season one before we venture into two as they have never seen the show at all. I enjoyed it a lot th first time around - while I recognize a lot of historical inaccuracy, it is generaly pretty pervasive in tee vee and if I otherwise like a show I don't let that get me down. It is telling that the producer/writer who started Deadwood was planning to set the show in Rome but HBO told him they had a Rome show in the works already, so it got set in the "wild west" instead. I also find it amusing that Deadwood had a season finished by the time Rome finally materialized.
Posted by: DuWayne | Wednesday, August 30, 2006 at 01:29 PM
Lance,
Admire the perspective, but I'm not so sold on Hearst-as-gargoyle being inexact. They may be, but in the context of the story and the show, it's inescapble. As "Seth Bullock" is a mostly-inarticulate steamer, "George Hearst" has to be the price of 'civilization', just as much as the corrupt henchman from Yankton is. That other mining impresarios in real life used Pinkertons to kill union men is not in doubt.
And since anyone who would have been that kind of dramatic character (the imperious mining magnate) in the show would have been thought of as George Hearst even under a different name (like anyone who saw Citizen Kane understands), they may as well used the name. There would have been little practical difference. The slithery malevolence of the Hearst character and fight between the motley townsfolk and "big business" was riveting television, and was at least part of the story of the West, even if it wasn't this particular one in the historical record.
Posted by: Jay B. | Wednesday, August 30, 2006 at 07:47 PM
At the risk of sounding like some senile Pollyanna, I have to say that, even given the legitimacy of every one of your quibbles, we still should get down on our knees and thank whatever invisible being might exist that Deadwood and Swearengen and Wu and Trixie and Jane and Joanie et al. happened. I am grateful that David Milch exists, that HBO turned TV time over to him so that he could give us Deadwood, that the program so moved all of us that we have the need to keep writing and reading about these characters. Best show ever, even if Seth and George really weren't quite as Milch portrayed them.
Posted by: Raenelle | Wednesday, August 30, 2006 at 09:45 PM
Thanks for ruining all the plot points for me, Lance, though you did warn there would be spoilers. Like you, I'm a DVD person rather than a subscription TV guy, and am about halfway through the second season, though I haven't yet seen the episode you were referencing.
I'm somewhere between James Wolcott, who recently trashed the show as being a non-poetic "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," and the idolators who think the show is the best thing since Shakespeare.
The oddest ahistorical detail for me is how there is zero homoeroticism on the show. The Wild West was way more bisexual/queer than is being represented. When you've got thousands of men and just a few women, well, just look at all those other same-sex institutions like prisons, convents, monasteries, armies, and well, you get the idea. Even the great Calamity Jane character, who feels real, isn't allowed any lingering looks over any other girls, which feels wrong.
The first season DVD set has an interesting group of interviews where one learns that Mr. Milch went to HBO with not just a "Rome" story, but a tale about upstanding characters within an Empire where The Law has ceased to exist, and the entire enterprise is being run by gangsters/tyrants. The theme has something of a contemporary resonance as everybody but KM would probably agree.
(By the way, I couldn't make it through the first episode of "Rome." Not only has "Deadwood" taken the same themes and gone further with the language, metaphors and sheer salaciousness, but the acting, writing and stupid British accents of all the Romans got on my nerves fast.)
Anyway, the odd detail in the Extra Materials in the first season of "Deadwood" was that the historical Sol Star, in business with Bullock, got insanely rich, was a good person, and was "A Lifelong Bachelor." What WAS their actual relationship, anyway? It certainly had to be more interesting than the Wife-of-My-Brother / In-Love-With-The-Top-Whore storylines that both Bullock and Sol are saddled with in the TV series.
Ian McShane, however, was given a good role and made it great. He's why the show is going to be watched forever.
Posted by: sfmike | Thursday, August 31, 2006 at 12:39 AM
Raenelle, Jay B., You can bet that when Season 3 makes it to DVD I'll be watching, all my quibbles forgotten, at least for each hour I'm watching. I hear Gerald McRaney is absolutely terrific as Hearst.
But Raenelle, I don't think my complaints are quibbles. My objection to the way the Bullock character is being played is a historical quibble. Like I said, we don't know what went on inside the real Seth Bullock's head. Being successful and being well-adjusted don't often go hand in hand. The real Bullock might just have been better at hiding his demons than the ficitonal one. My real complaint with the way he's being played is that the character has become way too static, to the point of being almost irrelevent to the unfolding of the story arc. It seems long past time for the "real" Bullock to start showing himself.
As for Hearst, everything Jay says sounds like it will be great fun to watch. I just wish Milch had called the character George Kane.
Mike, sorry about the spoilers. But I think one of the beauties of the show is not that surprises but watching how the inevitable plays itself out, so in a way knowing what's coming makes the drama more intense.
Yeah, that's the ticket.
Posted by: Lance | Thursday, August 31, 2006 at 09:46 AM
"I hear Gerald McRaney is absolutely terrific as Hearst." He is terrific as Hearst. He makes you forget anything and everything he has done in the past. You forget he was ever capable of playing a kind character.
Posted by: Jennifer | Thursday, August 31, 2006 at 10:13 AM
I respect history as much as most. Hell, I teach it at a community college. But, IMHO, good history is easily found; good drama, not so much. I still wish they'd kept Wild Bill alive.
Posted by: Raenelle | Thursday, August 31, 2006 at 01:36 PM
Ahistorical profanity? I was under the impression that the profanity was surprisingly historical. Certainly, the old West was chock-full of naughty language (so much so that Hollywood had to invent fauxfanity like "dad gum" just so their movies wouldn't get laughed off the screen by anyone who actually remembered the settling of the west). And Slate recently covered the extensive research Milch used to justify the language to HBO, in case they ever had censor troubles. So---any source for the profanity being innaccurate?
Posted by: That Fuzzy Bastard | Thursday, August 31, 2006 at 02:56 PM
Frankly, I could care less whether Deadwood is historical. How many classic movie westerns are historical?
It is brilliant drama-the best tv show since Joss Whedon (who should have his own network) got kicked off the air.
Too bad we will have to settle for a couple of 2 hour movies instead of the originally planned seasons 4 and 5.
Posted by: Td Raicer | Thursday, August 31, 2006 at 04:46 PM
I've read an immense amount of historical fiction that is based on an essentially documentable situation but veers off into the stratosphere. I have no problem with it. I regard "Deadwood" as much the same. But then I tend to ignore a certain percentage of what Milch says in any interview. I'm willing to believe one thing for sure: he did an immense amount of research to absorb the ambience, flavor, what have you, of Deadwood at that time, and then took off on his own tangent. Nothing wrong with that.
Posted by: JVD | Saturday, September 02, 2006 at 12:08 PM
Good point about how historically inaccurate
Deadwood is. Of course watching people acting
badly is much more entertaining than watching
people acting rationally and sensibly.
Deadwood by portraying a world that is more
violent and vicious than real life
is just another show that supports
mean-world syndrome.
http://www.oregonlive.com/special/girls/index.ssf?/special/oregonian/girls/072202_ed.html
Deadwood is a drama not news, but isn't one
of the justifications for shows like this is
that in addition to entertaining, they point
to larger truths.
Deadwood's larger truth is "do whatever it takes
to keep people watching".
Posted by: Terry | Saturday, September 02, 2006 at 01:04 PM
Great article! I believe also that David Milch let his political views show in his Hearst charactor. Until the last show though I thought he would make it right. Boy was I wrong. As far as I am concerned he created then fucked up the best TV show of all time. Joe
Posted by: Joe Knight | Monday, September 04, 2006 at 09:24 PM
"In reality, civilization was imported all at once to the various Deadwoods that sprouted up all across the continent from Plymouth on out to San Francisco."
lance,
i am coming late to this one, i know.
you made the above point to descry the glacial pace of the growth of civilization in "deadwood". but then you listed all the aspects of civilization one by one, alluding in your sentance structure to that very pace.
Civilization grows slowly and without organisation. The hardware store arrives, then the bank, then the first wives and children, then the first school...etc. My use of the structure which deadwood follows is intended to show its logic.
Indeed civilisation, like organic life itself, is wholely against the virtue of universe. The organisation of cellular life, and a few billion years down the road, civilisation is the only opposing force to the entropy inherent in our existence.
That is why civilisation developed over 70,000 years in the case of the modern man.
In this broad sense I do not think deadwood's depiction is misguided or ahistorical in any way on this front. In fact, it is the first 'western' I have seen which so clearly showed what the 'west' may very well have been like in places where there was no "law at all". In fact, there it is - Law is civilisation. How can you say that civilisation happened "all at once" unless your scope is wider in terms of time then the show's. If indeed, "all at once" implies 5-10 years of dedicated settlement and lawmaking, then I am sure you are correct. But we have not even reached 5 years of progression in 3 seasons of deadwood. Milch, imho is right on target.
as far as the violence - again, no law is important here. Was every town as violent as deadwood? i imagine not, yet I also imagine towns that were far more violent then the show's depiction...I leave that question to those that want to spend more time then I have in researching death tolls in frontier towns...
On bullock - the show has gradually rotated over the 3 seasons from the first season's axis - bullock, to the 2nd and 3rd season's - Al. The fulcrum, perhaps, being the final episode of season 1. Bullock becomes a lesser character particularly in season 3 because the more interesting character is Al, as far as Milch and his team are concerned. I tend to agree heartily, as i find Bullock to be very much how al see's him: tedious and belicose, given to folly due to an imbalanced temperance.
He is not a hero, for a hero would do a diservice to this show, as they are very rare, and beholden to circumstance. Deadwood was not the time or place for heroes.
Lastly, Hearst. I do not agree with your reasoning here. Hearst is not "an allegorical monster of corporate capitalism", Season 3 is not a political struggle.
Again, i turn to Al. The struggle is Al's. To allow civilisation to swallow him up, the same civilisation he has fled from, the same one that made him so cynical (watch any of his soliloque's to verify his outlook), he must accept it in order for his deadwood to flourish. It has little or nothing to do with capitalism. it does with man's inner struggle with the control and law of civilisation. Look who al turns to to pose his quandaries and question his role in the world: the severed head of an "uncivilised" indian. (note: the "uncivilised" quality is based on Al's worldview) Al must eventually accept control, civilisation, law, and in so doing must diminish.
None of this has to do with capitalism, who's laisse-faire qualities are not far from Al's strong heart.
well, that is my mouthful for the evening.
Luke
Posted by: luke | Thursday, February 22, 2007 at 01:04 AM
Hey Lance,
In the beginning, I would curiously watch Deadwood and the bail at the violation of my sensibilities through seemingly gratuitious foul language and violence. Aut as an owner of land in the "Gold West" territory of Montana, I got very interested in the history of this "stuff" starting with Virginia City MT and the road agents of the time. I found that "Deadwood" is in many ways a lightweight version of what happened all over the gold rush region of the far west. Anything and everything was routinely done in these places and the towns frequently died before "civilization" could take root,
As for the George Hearst defence, one has only to read the history of the Comstock Lode to realize that to make Hearst out to be some kind of nice guy amongst the capitalist barbarians of the time is to speak in relativist terms.
After much reading of the history of the mining towns of the 1850 to 1900 era, one has to regard your view of the era as uninformed or purposely biased.
KMOUT
Posted by: K. Montanaman Matthews | Monday, December 17, 2007 at 02:38 AM
Well a bit of drama was added of course, as for the details I can wager that most are not 100% and that many of the side characters are for entertainment reasons.
BUT I have a hard time believing a major gold operation in that period in time was not cutthroat.
Also how can you not believe the DNA that created such evil scumbags as William Randolph Hearst, and Patty Hearst didn't evolve from an evil scumbag sperm doner like George. For gods sake these people invented the Death mobile.
Posted by: MrMe | Sunday, April 26, 2009 at 04:32 PM
I know I'm late to the game, and to this topic of conversation...and I'm not interested in how historically accurate or inaccurate the show is. I'm just trying to restart conversation on the matter of Deadwoods unfortunate end, in the hopes that HBO or milch will notice...the show needs closure...weather its a movie or two, or the axed 4th season...its the best show in the history of t.v., and us fans deserve closure...as do the actors. (They seemed very disappointed in the shows end too.)
Posted by: me | Friday, May 29, 2015 at 11:08 AM