"Deadwood” – The HBO series, directed by David Milch,
2004-2006
If you caught this series when it first aired or as
it exists now in digital suspension, it stood out for several very important
reasons. Most people are drawn in by the characters that appear on television programs or in books. You either love or hate them, are amused by
them, admire them, are bored by them, wish they were dead, etc. It is all about a personal, emotional
attachment to an imaginary human being, or a fictional recreation of a real
person. In this series for instance, the
hotel owner Farnham is a servile toady, creepy and greedy and ultimately sad. But riveting in his own way. Yet character-driven stories end up
somewhat meaningless, as what is of real import is the framework in which the
‘characters’ labor.
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| Deadwood, Black Hills South Dakota, 1876 |
The real Deadwood itself exists now as a cheesy and
cheap casino town in the Black Hills of South
Dakota. Its
main legend besides gold is the murder of ‘Wild Bill’ James Butler Hickok in Saloon #10, and the graves
of both Hickok and ‘Calamity’ Jane Canary on Boot Hill just up from
town. This is what might make you tune
in at first. In the series, Hickok is a
somewhat admirable but deeply troubled character who haunts the rest of the
series after being shot in the back in the first season. Jane and his companion, Charlie Utter, never
forget him.
What becomes obvious is that this is first of all a
story of small businessmen. Every key
character runs a saloon, a bordello, a hardware store, a livery, a transport business, a
hotel, a newspaper or a bank in this booming gold town, saturated in mud and
whiskey. These owners also predictably run
the town as an informal group that gather at the GEM saloon. We are supposed to
admire them. This is not so much
different than the control small businessmen still have over real small towns in
the U.S. The proletarian miners and the
entrepreneurial individual claim owners – the ‘hoople-heads’ as they are
referred to by Al Swearengen, the key saloon and whore-house owner – are mostly
invisible. Bit players. Background scenery, even though they are the
overwhelming majority.
Given his name, Al swears a lot, as does almost
everyone else. ‘Fucks’ fly (over 4,000
times) and ‘cocksucker’ is the biggest insult – giving homophobia and anti-woman
attitudes a constant mantra. After all, crudity was the point. Women are
mostly represented by abused prostitutes, until a rich woman and a wife come
into evidence. The buck-skinned drunk Jane
ultimately finds solace with another woman. But the language that really
captures the ear is the archaic and formal way with words used by everyone in
1876 – even in a frontier town where you’d think only grunts and a vocabulary
of 150 words would be appropriate. The
language alone – as in T.C. Boyle’s books ‘Water Music” and “World’s End” – is
a treat to hear and follow, especially spoken at high speed. This is a version of American Shakespeare on
the frontier, a language derived from the archaic cadences of the Bible. But again, the language is
another layer on a deeper cake.
What lies behind the murders and scheming of the
town’s small businessmen are even bigger businessmen – the “Comstock Syndicate”
and representatives of the big mining owner, George Hearst, another real
person, as were many other lead characters.
Appropriately, Hearst’s key man in Deadwood is a bright psychopath and
sexual deviant. And working with this
Syndicate are crooked representatives of the ‘government’ of Dakota in Yankton,
which plans to work with Hearst to steal mining claims by creating a panic about
ownership of those claims. The Black Hills, while taken from the native Americans, had
not yet been taken from the placer miners or the town’s leading citizens.
Dead people die without much problem while the holy
hardware store owner and appointed sheriff Bullock deals with the obvious and sometimes
avoids the criminal. After all, he’d
have to arrest at least 3 or 4 of the town’s businessmen if he enforced all the
laws. Even the murderer of Hickok is
declared innocent in a farcical trial. So
what we have here is what Marx called ‘primitive accumulation’ – fortunes built
on genocide, land theft, violence, law-breaking and fraud. As
one person said, this is really the story of the founding of America.
Celestial ‘Chinks’, ‘niggers’, Jews and 'dirt worshipping' Native Americans are merely
problems for the mostly white and male Deadwooders. The series shows the bigotry of
some of the white population, with exceptions of course, as Swearengen has his own Chinese guy Wu, who he is allied with. One
drunken loudmouth gold-claim owner, Steve, instead of taking out his anger against
the real suspects behind the scheme to invalidate claims, ultimately directs it
at a helpless black man in town. He keeps up his absurd racism until the end. He's certainly not an accidental character. Modern academic verbiage would say this is how a 'colonial-settler' state functions.
Being this is the U.S., elections are a required part
of the fake democratic political stew. Hearst wants a
sheriff elected who ignores his bold-faced killing of 3 Cornish union
organizers. Accompanying this plan is
the stuffing of election boxes by imported soldiers who vote the way they are
told, the way Hearst and Yankton want.
This makes it clear that election theft is a long-time tradition in the U.S.
Hearst wants everyone in the camp under his thumb,
even every other businessman. So it’s war
between them. And so we get to the real framework of the characters – money and capitalism. Or ‘amalgamation and
capital,’ Hume and Marx, the pursuit of capitalist monopoly in the face of small
enterprise; the conflict with
labor; the bloody monopolist Leviathan descending into their midst.
Inevitably the anti-union and violent Pinkerton’s
make an appearance on Hearst’s side. With their help
Hearst wins his bloody fight to seize all the valuable gold claims through
murder and intimidation.
Later the Deadwood and Lead area became a stronghold
of the Socialist Party and the IWW, and had its own widely-read Socialist
papers because of the strength of the miners’ union. However, this series ignores the miners all
around. The camp’s businessmen failed to recruit them in the fight with
Hearst - something that could have made sense. Instead a
motley collection of hired ‘guns’ arrive from Cheyenne,
as well as armed Chinese – all too late. The capitalist Leviathan wins because
the miners are not brought into play, even in the smallest way.
P.S. The 2019 HBO movie that wrapped up Deadwood used the 'hoopleheads' led by Jane to punish Hearst. 'Bout time.
(Other long-series reviews below: “Game of Thrones,” “The Wire.” Use blog search box, upper left.)
Red Frog
September 14, 2016
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