The Last Western: Deadwood and the end of American empire 9781628928402, 9781441164582, 9781441126306

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Acknowledgements he editors would like to thank the Center for Jewish Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY, for invaluable media support; Bret Benjamin, for astute commentary; Katie Gallof, for her enthusiastic support; and all of the contributors, without whose hard work this volume would not exist. We also express our gratitude to HBO, David Milch, and the writers of Deadwood —John Belluso, W. Earl Brown, Regina Corrado, Ricky Jay, Alix Lambert, Ted Mann, Bryan McDonald, Bernadette McNamara, David Milch, Malcolm McRury, Victoria Morrow, Kem Nunn, George Putnam, Elizabeth Sarnoff, Steve Shill, Nick Towne, Zach Whedon, and Jody Worth—for permission to quote from individual screenplays. Finally, we wish to thank Megan Ingalls Stasi and Barry Trachtenberg for everything else.

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Notes on contributors Erik Altenbernd is a PhD candidate in history at the University of California, Irvine. Erik has published reviews of Catrin Gersdorf’s The Poetics and Politics of the Desert: Landscape and the Construction of America and Philip H. Round’s The Impossible Land: Story and Place in California’s Imperial Valley in Southern California Quarterly, and is at work on a dissertation on a cultural and environmental history of the American Desert. Mark L. Berrettini is an Associate Professor of Film Studies and the head of the Film Program in the Department of Theatre and Film at Portland State University. His book Hal Hartley (2011) is included in the Contemporary Film Directors series published by the University of Illinois Press. He has published essays on animal studies, the Western, film noir, and social difference in Camera Obscura, Cinema Journal, Great Plains Quarterly, Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, and Scope. Jennifer Greiman is Associate Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author of Democracy’s Spectacle: Sovereignty and Public Life in Antebellum American Writing (Fordham, 2010), as well as essays on Gustave de Beaumont, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe. She is at work on a book on Herman Melville’s political imagination. David Greven is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of Representations of Femininity in American Genre Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush (University of Texas Press, 2010), Gender and Sexuality in Star Trek (McFarland, 2010), and Men beyond Desire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Greven is also the author of the forthcoming books, Psycho-Sexual: Hitchcock and the Films of the 1970s (University of Texas Press, 2012) and The Fragility of Manhood: Hawthorne, Freud, and the Politics of Gender (Ohio State University Press, 2012).

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Justin A. Joyce is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Author of an essay on Shakespeare and contemporaneous sartorial legislation featured in Styling Texts, an essay on Justified featured in the journal Western American Literature, and coeditor of A Melvin Dixon Critical Reader, he is currently editing a collection of critical essays, Keywords for African American Studies, while revising his dissertation, “Gunslinging Justice: Justifiable Gun Violence in American Law and Westerns,” for book publication. John David Miles is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Memphis specializing in colonial and nineteenth-century American literature. He received his PhD from Duke University in 2009, where his dissertation was entitled “The Afterlives of King Philip’s War: Negotiating War and Identity in Early America.” His cowritten essay “Those We Don’t Speak Of: Indians in The Village” was published in PMLA in 2008, and he has also published book reviews in American Literature. He is now at work on an essay that examines Mary Rowlandson’s Western imagination entitled “Captured by Genre” for the collection Before the West Was West, as well as a book project about the role of historiography in the construction of early American communities. Ronald J. Schmidt, Jr. is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern Maine. He has published in Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, and Theory & Event, among other journals, and his first book, This is the City: Making Model Citizens in Los Angeles, was published by University of Minnesota Press. He is currently at work on American Anachrony: Time and Trauma in the American Political Imagination. Jeffrey Scraba is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Memphis. He received his PhD from Rutgers University in 2006, and is the author of “Quixotic Memory and Cultural History: Knickerbocker’s History of New York,” published in Early American Studies, and the coauthor, with Michael Warner, of “A Soliloquy ‘Lately Spoken at the African Theatre’: Race and the Public Sphere in New York City, 1821,” published in American Literature. He is at work on a book about Walter Scott, Washington Irving, and cultural memory. Paul Stasi is Assistant Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. He is the author of Modernism, Imperialism and the Historical Sense (Cambridge University Press, 2012), as well as essays on T. S. Eliot, Richard Flanagan, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Jean Toomer.

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Daniel Worden is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Masculine Style: The American West and Literary Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and he is also coeditor of Oil Culture, a special issue of Journal of American Studies (May 2012), and Postmodernism, Then, a special issue of Twentieth-Century Literature (Fall 2011). His work on American literature and culture has appeared in Arizona Quarterly, Canadian Review of American Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, and The Southern Literary Journal, as well as the anthologies The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking , A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West, and Violence, the Arts, and Willa Cather. Julia M. Wright is Canada Research Chair in European Studies at Dalhousie University. She is the author of Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation (Ohio University Press, 2004), Ireland, India, and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2007; paperback, 2009), and over 30 articles and book chapters, including essays in ELH, Gothic Studies, and, on gothic television, Genders. She has also edited or coedited nine volumes, most recently the Handbook to Romanticism Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). Alex Young is a Provost’s PhD Fellow in English at the University of Southern California, where he is completing a dissertation on frontier allegory in the literature of the post-World War II US counterculture. Before coming to USC, he worked as an assistant editor at the Overlook Press, and as a high school English teacher at the American School of Tangier. In 2010, he was awarded the J. Golden Taylor Award for best graduate student essay submitted to the annual conference of the Western Literature Association. Paul Zinder is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media and Chair of the Department of Communication and English at The American University of Rome. His previous writing appears in the cult-television anthologies Investigating Veronica Mars: Essays on the Teen Detective Series (McFarland, 2011) and Investigating Alias: Secrets and Spies (I.B. Tauris, 2007). He is also an award-winning filmmaker whose documentaries Robot e Pinocchi (Robots and Pinocchios) [2011], Benedizione delle Bestie (Benediction of the Beasts) [2009], and Uno degli Ultimi (One of the Last) [2007] were screened at over 45 international film festivals in 2008–12 and won nine awards.

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Introduction: Deadwood and the forms of American empire Paul Stasi and Jennifer Greiman Whatever happened to Gary Cooper? TONY SOPRANO

We are in the presence of the new. AL SWEARENGEN

The anxiety of empire n a famous remark—“Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?”—Tony Soprano captured a pervasive anxiety about the lost icons of American power that lay at the heart, not only of David Chase’s series, The Sopranos, but of all three of the major serial dramas that HBO debuted during the late Clinton and early Bush presidencies: The Sopranos (1999), The Wire (2002), and Deadwood (2004). In quick succession, HBO took on three quintessentially American genres—the gangster drama, the police procedural (whose antecedent is the detective story), and the Western—and evacuated them of their heroic protagonists. In their archetypal forms, all of these genres rely on the idea of an individual able to navigate the complexities of modern life either by returning to the ideals of a simpler social order—the rough justice of the Western, the protection of the mob’s patriarchal family structure—or through an uncanny skill at transforming modernity’s wealth of anonymous signs into a legible text. In each case, the protagonist is able, by force of will, to assert a certain measure of personal control on the threatening world that surrounds him.

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Such a model of agency emphatically does not apply to Tony Soprano—a mob boss prone to panic attacks. Nor does it fit the police force in The Wire, whose best efforts to address society’s ills are continually thwarted by the banal forms of institutional corruption the show finds to be present at every level of the social order. It does, however, find perverse realization in Deadwood’ s Al Swearengen, who manages his operations with a ruthless and charismatic violence that seems, at the series’ outset, to go virtually unchecked. And yet no sooner do we meet Swearengen than we observe the arrival of a series of threats to his reign that will culminate in his almost total defeat by the end of season three. Taken together, these three shows represent an anxiety over the decline of American power and the evacuation of the American subject at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a decline that finds something like an origin story in David Milch’s profane reimagination of the Western genre. It is as if Milch has provided an answer to Tony’s question, though the answer is not exactly what Tony was hoping for. Gary Cooper, Deadwood suggests, was never the hero of Tony’s imagination, for he too was constantly besieged by forces outside of his control.1 That Tony Soprano’s anxiety might transcend his personal circumstances is suggested in The Sopranos ’ pilot episode. If the operative joke of the first season is Tony’s inability to control both his crew and his family—an early ad for the show runs “If one family doesn’t kill him . . . the other will”—we soon learn that he is also unable to control himself. The series opens with Tony nervously waiting in a psychiatrist’s office. Soon the psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi, emerges and after some pleasantries, Tony begins to describe his state of mind before his recent panic attack: “The morning on the day I got sick, I’ve been thinking. It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that. I know. But lately I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over” (“Pilot” 1.1). Dr. Melfi responds: “Many Americans I think feel that way” (1.1). The conversation continues, with Tony offering oblique descriptions of his stressful job, and Dr. Melfi pressing him to describe his feelings. After one such moment, Tony launches into his wellknown rant: Let me tell you something—today everybody goes to shrinks and counselors. Everybody goes on Sally Jesse Raphael and talks about their problems. Whatever happened to Gary Cooper? The strong silent type. That was an American. He wasn’t in touch with his feelings. He just did what he had to do! Unfortunately, what they didn’t know was once they got Gary Cooper in touch with his feelings, they wouldn’t be able to shut him up! (1.1)

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Tony views his own problem as symptomatic of a larger issue with American culture. Today’s Americans, he suggests, are unable to act as real Americans should, their formerly decisive actions transformed into endless self-expression. Tony thus articulates his loss of control as a form of belatedness. Though far less interested in belatedness—positing no past about which we might feel nostalgic—David Simon’s The Wire nonetheless presents a similar loss of control. The show’s first scene concerns the murder of a man named “Snotboogie,” killed for trying to rob a local craps game. After learning from one of Snotboogie’s friends that his robbery attempts were a weekly ritual, Detective Jimmy McNulty asks the obvious question: “If every time Snotboogie would grab the money and run away, why’d you even let him in the game?” (“The Target” 1.1). The kid’s reply is telling: “Got to. This America man” (1.1). What initially seems the violent world of the streets—a man killed for stealing another man’s money, a known criminal repeatedly getting to return to a game he has tried to rob simply because he has the money to do so—is here seen to be emblematic of the entire country. And The Wire will make good on this claim, gradually broadening its horizon to include the decline of American industry, the corruption of city and state governments, the failure of the public school system, and the unreliability of the media, demonstrating in each case how the violence that seems external to society proper has only been sublimated into the channels of power, wealth, and status that run the city and, by extension, the nation. These seemingly autonomous realms of society are so deeply interconnected, the show suggests, that the individual’s attempt to assert control within any one sphere can only fail. Baltimore—the show’s true subject—becomes a synecdoche for the decaying institutions of an increasingly unjust America. Deadwood, in our reading, synthesizes elements of both of these shows and allows us to see the connecting threads that run through all three. Beginning with a radical revision of the Gary Cooper myth, Deadwood demonstrates the advance of a modern totality that crushes an individuality which was never actually that heroic to begin with. Telling the story of a mining camp, illegally set up on Indian territory, which eventually gets annexed by the nation and overrun by the consolidating interests of monopoly capital, Deadwood suggests that the evacuation of individual agency felt in the twenty-first century has been with us all along, and that its contemporary manifestations have their origins in the imperial capitalism of mid-nineteenth-century territorial expansion. Deadwood is thus a modernizing narrative, but one that refuses to posit modernity as a story of either unending progress or as the fall from some Edenic perfection. Instead, what we find is that the violence of the frontier is matched, if not superseded, by the corruption of the nation-state

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and the brute force of consolidated capital. The nostalgia that Tony and the “many Americans” for whom he speaks feel in response to modernity is itself shown to be one of modernity’s most consistent effects. In proposing Deadwood as “the last Western,” we do not mean to suggest that there will no longer be Westerns after Deadwood, nor do we discount the strains of ambivalence that have always been an integral part of the Western genre. Instead, we argue that the Western after Deadwood can no longer operate as a kind of affirmative culture in Herbert Marcuse’s sense. For Marcuse, culture can be affirmative even when it seems critical, precisely by providing comforting fictions that help sustain the social order.2 The Western, in this argument, offers a respite from contemporary ills by dissociating them from the true spirit of America, best represented by the decisive action of its heroic protagonists. By contrast, in demonstrating how the problems American culture faces in the twenty-first century were always already present during the nation’s origins and expansion, Deadwood offers us no escape from imperial decline. For an America that finds itself in a difficult transition period, during which the corporation and the state are seen, by figures on both the Right and the Left, as engaging in thinly veiled forms of theft, Deadwood offers a strikingly relevant narrative of a similar moment of transition.

History in transition No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. T. W. Adorno (Negative Dialectics 320) The series opens with Seth Bullock, a sheriff in Montana, on his last evening of work before heading out to the illegal settlement of Deadwood to seek his fortune. In a scene much discussed in the essays below, a mob arrives to lynch his already condemned prisoner. Bullock hangs him instead. For Bullock this action is a principled refusal of mob violence, but for the dead man it is not clear that this principle is of much use. The law is seen here, in a critique that will only gather force as the series progresses, to be both different from and entirely parallel to the violence from which it seeks to distance itself. As in Adorno’s aphoristic declaration quoted above, this scene offers no easy narrative of progress, demonstrating instead the continuity of different forms of violence. Immediately after this action, Seth and his partner Sol Starr leave and the episode cuts to a stalled wagon train that has held up the progress of Wild

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Bill Hickok, much to his companion Calamity Jane’s ire. The camera follows Jane’s perspective as she looks across the hills for the one and only panoramic shot of the camp. Another cut takes us to the spaces in which we will spend the duration of the series: the chaotic muddy streets through which Sol and Seth arrive in camp and the close interiors of residences such as the Gem Saloon where we first meet Al Swearengen. Within five minutes, Al has his boot on the neck of Trixie, one of his whores. Clearly, here is a villainy to match Al’s appearance: black suit, slicked back hair, handlebar moustache. With this, the opening of the show places us in familiar territory, suggesting, as Justin Joyce notes below, several narrative paths it might follow. Either Bullock will reluctantly take up the badge once more, bringing order to a lawless land or he will be compelled to act outside the law as an honorable renegade, perhaps aided in this endeavor by that symbol of outlaw justice Wild Bill. And yet by the season’s fourth episode Wild Bill is dead, Seth is no closer to taking up the badge, and Swearengen, our presumed villain, has become the town’s de facto leader. Just as Deadwood eschews the promise contained in the panoramic vista for the enclosure of its cramped spaces, so too does it reject the simple narrative of honor and villainy upon which the legend of the West was built. Even Hickok himself is weary of the symbol he has become, arriving in Deadwood to “go to hell the way I want to” (“Here Was a Man” 1.4). Bullock, meanwhile, is not only a reluctant sheriff, but also a man barely able to control his murderous rage, while Al acts out of a violence—as Julia Wright argues below—that always serves a purpose, even if that purpose is entirely self-interested. It is not that Deadwood resists cliché—Seth will indeed become sheriff with all the appropriate reluctance—but rather that it suggests that the clichés of the Western, though grounded in reality, are its least interesting parts. Instead, the show asks us to attend to its villain, Al Swearengen, caught in a moment of historical transition, a movement away from the visible and personal forms of violence characteristic of precapitalist social orders to the invisible and impersonal violence of the nation-state as it emerges alongside monopoly capitalism. Historical transitions are not, however, unitary processes. History does not unfold universally, and so the North American continent in 1876, the year of the show’s opening, encompassed both a fully capitalist east and “undeveloped” areas where the originary violence of American settlement was still being enacted. Deadwood is poised in between these two social forms, and it thus offers a snapshot of a much more complicated and lengthy historical transition. Only by bracketing off these contiguous spaces—which nevertheless make themselves felt in various ways throughout the series—can Deadwood provide an examination of what Karl Marx famously called “primitive accumulation.”

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Marx’s account is meant to undo the founding myth of bourgeois political economy, which seeks to explain the existence of classes in modern society by an appeal to personal virtue. “Long, long ago” the story begins, “there were two sorts of people: one, the diligent, intelligent and above all frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals spending their substance, and more, in riotous living.”3 Positing bourgeois values which are, for Marx, the product of capitalist social relations as the origins of capitalism itself, political economy naturalizes a social order that is, necessarily, historical and contingent, cloaking its originating violence in the moral language of what Max Weber would name the Protestant ethic.4 In contrast, Marx argues that the creation of two classes of people—one which owns the means of production, the other “unencumbered by any means of production of their own”—is a narrative in which “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short force, play the greatest part.”5 “The process, therefore, which creates the capital-relation,” Marx concludes, “can be nothing other than the process which divorces the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labour.”6 Only when this process is completed, can capitalism establish itself, for capital “is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things.”7 Thus, no man can be a capitalist without what Marx calls the “essential complement” to his property: money, means of production, and “the wage-labourer, the other man, who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will.”8 Something like this process is depicted in Deadwood ’s second and third seasons, as the mining baron George Hearst’s “murderous engine” expropriates all the independent miners from their land, ostensibly through a neutral appeal to economic self-interest and historical necessity, but actually through violence, intimidation, deception, and murder (“Wants Me to Tell him Something Pretty” 3.12). Put on this earth to demonstrate the “virtue of consolidating purposes,” Hearst rarely acts directly (“I Am Not the Fine Man You Take Me For” 3.2). Instead, he operates through his advance agent, Francis Wolcott, and—as John Miles and Jeffrey Scraba elaborate below—the intimidation of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Working with Swearengen’s rival, Cy Tolliver, and the full cooperation of the officials of the nearby Dakota territory, Wolcott circulates the rumor that all claims will be invalidated when the inevitable annexation arrives. Panic ensues which, conveniently enough, allows Wolcott to purchase nearly all the camp’s claims at very attractive prices. Hearst’s ultimate goal is nothing less than the establishment of capitalist social relations, with himself as sole proprietor, a transformation which will allow him to operate with complete impunity once “workers at wage outnumber individual prospectors in the camp” (“Childish Things” 2.8). This last phrase comes from a letter Wolcott has written to Hearst wherein he

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describes what he calls “the most forward-looking gold operation in the world” (2.8). Read in a voice-over intercut with, on the one hand, the first mechanized images of gold extraction we have seen and, on the other, the brutal treatment to which Hearst’s overseers subject his workers—naked men invasively examined for gold and the cold blooded murder of one who flees such treatment—the letter clearly illustrates the combination of brute force, technological modernity, and the disciplining of wage-labor that makes Hearst so “forward-looking.”9 Indeed, his modernizing efforts are continually described as inevitable, as unavoidable as “fate itself” and as natural as the language of the earth, which Hearst claims to understand (“Requiem for a Gleet” 2.4). Unfortunately for Hearst, “the truth I know, the promise that I bring, the necessities I’m prepared to accept make me outcast” (“A Rich Find” 3.7). For this reason, he says, “I may best serve my own interests here by standing at some remove” (“Full Faith and Credit” 3.4). His interests, that is to say, are transpersonal. They represent historical truths that a backwards camp cannot yet acknowledge, natural forces they refuse to see, virtues they fail to understand. Al’s response to this line of thinking is succinct: “I’d say that’s naming horseshit virtue. Purposes butt up against each other and the strong call consolidating bending the weak to their will” (3.2). Al’s ability to see through Hearst’s sentimentalizing evasions is due, in part, to the similarity he sees between Hearst and himself: Pain-in-the-balls Hearst. Running his holdings like a despot, I grant, has a fucking logic. It’s the way I fucking run mine. It’s the way I’d run my home if I fucking had one. But there’s no practical need for him to run the fucking camp. That’s out of scale. It’s out of proportion, and it’s a warped unnatural impulse. (“Tell Your God to Ready for Blood” 3.1) No sooner is the similarity between the two articulated than we also perceive a distinction: Hearst represents a will to dominate that is in excess of his actual needs. The comparison between Al and Hearst suggests both the common ground between capitalism and the supposedly backwards world it seeks to rationalize as well as the important difference between an interest that is limited in scope and one that, through an increase in scale, is able to imagine a larger transpersonal sanction for what, nevertheless, remain individual desires. It is this distinction between two different kinds of interest that leads to the strange drama of season three. We have spent the first season and a half coming to appreciate Al’s particular gift for accurately divining the motives of those around him. And yet, despite the avowed similarity he finds with

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Hearst, Al spends much of season three failing to understand the reasons for his actions. “What’s in his fucking head,” Al wonders, “that I can’t find in mine” (“A Two-Headed Beast” 3.5). He asks a similar question of the Native American head he keeps in a box in his office. Clearly a symbol of a vanishing past, the head was brought to camp just after Wild Bill’s murder, and the two continue to be linked throughout the series as twin emblems of the world that has passed. Al’s comments suggest that he also sees himself as part of that world: “Watching us advance on your stupid teepee, Chief, knowing you had to make your move . . . did you not just want first to fucking understand?” (3.5). What aligns Al with the Native American, in his account, is a common failure to grasp the historical shift occurring beneath their feet, in Al’s moment, a transformation in the very notion of interest itself. No longer conceived in personal terms, interest becomes, in the capitalist modernity Hearst represents, sublimated into the laws of the market, which mask personal interests in the language of formulaic necessity. Hearst’s will to run the camp is out of proportion, though it is imagined to be eminently natural. Like Cecil Rhodes’s desire to annex the planets, it represents no “practical need,” but rather a will to dominate that obeys a law of its own.10 We can profitably reframe the transition narrative Deadwood offers us through Raymond Williams’ understanding of the “dynamic interrelations” among the “varied and variable elements” that constitute the complexity of any culture’s historical unfolding.11 Culture, for Williams, is a process, and though there is, at any given moment, a dominant cultural order, there are also elements that cannot be readily subsumed into that order. These elements Williams names as either residual or emergent. In examining the past, we can discern both residual cultural moments—those that the dominant culture has overcome—and emergent moments—those that, with historical hindsight, we recognize will become dominant. Al, like the Indian before him, represents a residual culture; Hearst can be seen as an emergent form, already dominant at the level of the world system of capital, and on its way to dominance in the semi-peripheral space of the American West.12 Al’s inability to understand Hearst is precisely due to his allegiance to a form of residual culture that Hearst simultaneously preserves—for he clearly retains Al’s interest in personal gain—and yet transcends, transforming the residual cultural form Al represents into something entirely new. The narrative of Deadwood ’s last two seasons can thus be seen to operate at two levels at once. The first level is that of tactics, of the old ways that Al fully understands, where he and Hearst are relatively well matched. On this level, Al wins some skirmishes and loses others. Superseding the tactical level, however, is the historical shift that Hearst represents, and here the purposes of consolidating capital, whether horseshit or virtue, cannot be resisted.

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Thinking about the series through these two levels can help us better understand the show’s abrupt, though telling, ending, which feels simultaneously like a victory and a defeat, and which succinctly summarizes the difference between the personal reign of Swearengen and the impersonal world Hearst ushers in. We are at the end of season three. Having gone back and forth many times about whether to meet Hearst’s force with force, Al has finally recruited dozens of men, both from a nearby camp in Montana and from his Chinese ally, Mr. Wu. In the meantime Hearst has gained the largest claim in the camp, that of Alma Garrett, intimidating her by having his Pinkertons shoot at her and, when that fails to advance his purposes, ordering the murder of her husband, the honorable Ellsworth. In retaliation, Trixie—whose throat had been Al’s bootrest in the show’s first episode but who has, by now, developed into one of its main characters—tries to kill Hearst, but manages only to shoot him in the arm. Annoyed at such constant resistance, Hearst agrees to leave camp—thus forestalling a seemingly inevitable war and the destruction such action would entail—provided Al brings him Trixie’s body. Al cannot kill Trixie because he cares for her, but he also does not want to risk the destruction of the camp; instead he kills a woman who looks like Trixie. Hearst, of course, fails to notice the difference and so the camp is preserved. Al’s sacrificial violence is directly contrasted to one of the most brutal episodes in the entire series: Wolcott’s merciless killing of three whores in season two. Al’s action, we are meant to understand, serves a purpose, acting as a kind of sacrifice that preserves the camp. Wolcott’s, in contrast, has no larger purpose. Obeying the necessities of an inner voice, one that in conversation with Hearst he links to the earth’s own speech, Wolcott kills simply because he can.13 And yet, as with the series’ opening, no sooner do we see the difference between the two scenes than we recognize what they have in common. For the principle upon which Al acts does not help the dead woman. More damningly, it fails to achieve any real purpose for the camp as a whole. Hearst has gotten exactly what he wants: he controls the entire camp, and he is able to leave, since his interests, as he has already noted, are best served from afar. Al, in contrast, has secured only the ability to persevere within the margins of Hearst’s empire. He wins the tactical battle but loses the war. Deadwood is, then, a narrative about the evacuation of personal agency, one that uses our attachment to the subject—in this case Al Swearengen—to demonstrate not only the inefficacy of that subject but also, and more importantly, the violence that has always accompanied the heroic subject’s ability to act. Forcing us to endure the brutality of Swearengen’s reign, Deadwood manages, by constructing an even more monstrous villain in Hearst, to make us nostalgic for an agency we know to be entirely destructive. Indeed, despite the fact that Hearst’s “warped unnatural impulse” to dominate will

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necessarily transform all aspects of the camp in a way that Al did not, it is not at all clear that life under Al was, for the majority of Deadwood’s residents, any better than it will be under Hearst. Nostalgia does not represent, here, as it does for Tony Soprano, the longing for a simpler time; it does not, that is to say, describe a past that existed. Rather, nostalgia is the image of the very thing modernity lacks, as much its product as telephone poles, nation-states, and the consolidating forces of monopoly capital. Ultimately, Deadwood asks us to reflect upon the relationship between history and individual agency, not only through a narrative arc that traces the evacuation of that agency, but also through its explicit reconsideration of the aesthetic forms and genres that purport to tell its story.

Affect, aesthetics, and the genres of Deadwood Wants me to tell him something pretty. Al Swearengen (“Tell Him Something Pretty” 3.12) If Al Swearengen’s futile, brutal murder of Jen in the final episode captures the evacuation of personal violence and agency which makes evident the larger transformations of culture, politics, and capital that the show expressly thematizes, then Swearengen’s final word on that murder—indeed, the final line of the series itself—also registers the show’s intense self-reflexivity about the entanglement of affect and aesthetics in the genres and forms through which such stories of transition can be told. Asked by his henchman, Johnny, who has fallen in love with the murdered woman, if she suffered, Al refuses to “tell him something pretty.” Refusing Johnny the affective consolations of a beautiful death, Al refuses the audience, too. No matter how much we may want it, there is no narrative of Jen’s murder that can belatedly give it meaning, no story to tell that can account for the brutal calculus through which Hearst’s flesh wound equals a woman’s life, or through which Trixie’s life is valued more highly than Jen’s. As Justin Joyce persuasively shows in his essay below, there is only the unaccountable remainder registered in the bloodstain on the floor and the deliberate restraint of Al’s final line. Though emblematic of Deadwood ’s awareness of how aesthetic forms can both convey and betray affect, such restraint and refusal are not exactly characteristic of the show’s approach to aesthetic form more generally. Indeed, repeatedly described by critics and fans as a “Shakespearean Western,”14 the show is perhaps most notable for its combination and recombination of film and television genres—like the Western and the period costume drama—with literary and theatrical forms from the Victorian novel to Elizabethan tragedy.15

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If the show opens with the recognizable plot motifs of a Western, it quickly layers onto that mode the theatricality of Shakespearean soliloquy, the sensationalism of the dime novel, and the broad social vision of the Victorian novel. Deploying several aesthetic registers simultaneously—some of which seem appropriate to the setting of the show while others seem anachronistic to it— Deadwood conveys formally its thematic concerns with historical transformation, as well as with the emergent and residual cultural elements that accompany all such periods of transition. Put more simply, the show makes explicit the ways in which particular aesthetic genres produce particular feelings that make the past and the present—as well as the relationship between them—legible and comprehensible. Nostalgia, sympathy, sensation, and, ultimately, powerlessness, bewilderment, and horror are among the chief affective registers that the show develops through its simultaneous deployment of disparate genres and modes. Even the thick, poetic, and obscene dialogue that accounts for the show’s peculiar sound and feel registers this mix, combining a Shakespearean density of expression—often employing multiple syntactic inversions in a single line—with a commitment to the variety and nuance of profanity that would make The Wire ’s Jimmy McNulty blush. Deadwood ’s reflective approach to genre is perhaps most evident in the ways it both nods to and overtly departs from classic film Westerns and the structures of nostalgia that they proliferate. Much of the show’s debt to the Western—as well as its reflections on the relations among affect, history, and genre more generally—can be traced to the death of Wild Bill Hickok in the first season. “Once Wild Bill Hickok dies in the fourth episode of the first season,” David Milch has said, “that’s when the show can properly begin.”16 With its “proper” beginning predicated on the death of an infamous Western hero, the show might also be said to open where the best-known narratives of the frontier—whether in film or fiction—generally end. Those narratives, Robert Pippin argues, consistently track the founding of a legal and social order out of war and conquest, and end in the extinction of both the native peoples whose land has been taken and those who have taken it in violence.17 Indeed, for all of the significance attached to Hickok’s death, it is crucial to emphasize that Wild Bill does not die alone; immediately after his murder in the No. 10 Saloon, a man rides into the camp brandishing the head of a Sioux chief, whose long hair visually rhymes with Hickok’s own signature mane (1.4). The pairing of Hickok’s murder with that of the Sioux chief binds both men together through the trope of “lasts,” in which a long narrative tradition—from James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans to John Ford’s The Searchers —has marked both native and frontiersman as inassimilable to the legal and social order of a settlement. But even as the show predicates its beginning on this doubled murder, and thus bypasses the plot that ends with

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the extinction of the Native American and the obsolescence of the frontiersman, it does not dispense with either the Sioux chief or Hickok, nor does it allow them to rest in peace. Indeed, in Al Swearengen’s repeated soliloquies to the Sioux’s head and in Calamity Jane’s drunken, late-night confessions to Hickok’s grave, we instead get something of an allegory for our own perpetual return to those narratives that repeatedly resurrect such figures in order to kill them all over again. With this, the deaths of Hickok and the Sioux chief also provide occasion for the show’s meditation on the cultural production of nostalgia. If Al Swearengen is a character who confronts his own residual status in a swiftly changing cultural order over the three seasons of the series—making both him and the viewer perversely nostalgic for a time in which “a draw across the throat made fucking resolution” (3.1)—Hickok is one who has already “outlived his usefulness, outlived his own era,” as the actor Keith Carradine says of him.18 Hickok’s death thus establishes a pattern for the confrontation with transformation and obsolescence that the show repeatedly thematizes. One key measure of Bill’s obsolescence is his own resistance to adapt his fame to the new conditions created by the culmination of Westward expansion. With the closing of the frontier imminent, figures who had attained mythic status in popular culture like Hickok and Buffalo Bill Cody found themselves in a position where they could only live by capitalizing on the fame they had, touring with circuses, theater companies, and Wild West shows. Bill arrives in Deadwood, famous for being both a trigger-happy lawman and a terrible actor, as one drunk in the camp gleefully reminds him: “I’ll tell you this much Mr. Hickok. And I’d say this to the angels in heaven. As a stage performer, you cannot act a single damn lick” (“Reconnoitering the Rim” 1.3). The culture of the camp is thus one that is already located in an era of nostalgia for the very frontier that it would seem to occupy, and the very figures whom you might expect to find there. Ultimately, Deadwood can only begin when Wild Bill Hickok dies because its time and plot is not that of the Western itself— the narrative of expansion into Native American territory that ends with the death of both Native and frontiersman—but of the production of nostalgia for that narrative. Hickok may have outlived his era and failed to turn himself into a theatrical character, but that does not stop the residents of present-day Deadwood from reenacting his murder 14 times a day in the No. 10 saloon.19 Rather than a Western or even a Revisionist Western, Deadwood may be best understood as a meta-Western—a show that traffics in the narrative motifs of that genre in order to foreground the Western’s modes of nostalgia-production. Further, Deadwood layers onto the motifs of both the Western and the frontier novel elements drawn from other genres of the novel—the gothic, the sentimental, the sensational dime novel—as well as

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from other aesthetic modes altogether—most notably, the theater. Working in and across multiple genres and aesthetic forms, the series makes its diverse, populous social world legible, in some sense, by doing with genres and forms what the Russian formalist M. M. Bakhtin argues that the nineteenth-century novel did with social languages—namely, playing a diversity of forms centrifugally off one another in order to capture both the complex and conflictual relations within a particular social space.20 For example, while Hickok’s story is unfolding as the ending of both a frontier narrative and a film Western, the storyline of Brom and Alma Garrett begins as something of domestic-sentimental novel gone awry. As the laudanum-addicted wife in a loveless marriage, into which she’s been coerced by her dissolute father to pay his debts, Alma is one of the characters Milch invented for the show, explicitly drawing influence from Victorian novels in general and Henry James in particular.21 When Alma descends daily into the hotel’s dining room, with her glazed eyes and rustling silks, it may look as if a strung-out Isabel Archer had wandered into a scene from The Wild Bunch, but in such conflicting aesthetic motifs, the show captures the gulf of class and culture that separates the Garretts from the miners who, like them, have come to the camp in search of a strike. In another example of such pointed incongruity, the show offers something of a profane reinterpretation of the iconic scene of the American sentimental tradition—Little Eva’s endlessly reenacted death in Uncle Tom’s Cabin —when Al’s henchmen and whores gather around his bed as he struggles to pass a kidney stone (“Requiem for a Gleet” 2.4). While Trixie, Johnny, and Dan express their fear and grief with what may appear to a twenty-first-century audience as excessive sentimentality, the affect they display is in many ways precisely appropriate to a historical moment that—as David Greven argues below—was saturated with such scenes. In moments like these, Deadwood eschews both realism and naturalism to draw upon the heightened affective realm of the most popular aesthetic modes of the late nineteenth century. This is nowhere more apparent than in the show’s frequent recourse to the theater, the visual mode that would have had the most purchase in the historical Deadwood, as it did in camps and settlements throughout the West. 22 Indeed, the historical Al Swearengen ran the Gem Theater, not the Gem Saloon, and in shifting theater out of its conventional location, Milch allows it to overtake the whole camp. No longer confined to a single space, theatricality becomes one of the chief modes through which characters represent themselves in the market economy of the camp and perform both power and interiority. In the pilot, just before Sol Starr and Seth Bullock open their hardware store for the first time by raising the flaps of their tent, they adjust their clothes, zip their flies, and rehearse their lines, as if preparing for the curtain to rise, all while a confidence man

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works the crowd outside with a fake prize scam and E. B. Farnum pursues his gold claim con on Brom Garrett. In such scenes, theatricality highlights the fictive elements of capital—with trust and confidence as its chief emotional registers—even in an economy like Deadwood’s, which is founded not on the contingency of paper currency (as on Herman Melville’s Mississippi riverboat in The Confidence-Man ), but on gold itself, a symbol that seems to have become real but is ultimately no less contingent or subject to the vicissitudes of trust than paper.23 Positing character as a performance to a marketplace on the one hand, the show also employs the more overtly theatrical strategies of soliloquy and monologue to convey character as a complex (and thus more authentic-seeming) interiority performed to an audience, on the other hand. One of the more remarkable features of the show is the total absence of flashback as a means of developing characters’ backstories and motivations, as if in explicit refusal of the cinema’s chief method of conveying psychological depth. Instead, beginning with E. B. Farnum’s sullen, peevish rant about Al’s secrecy in “The Trial of Jack McCall” (1.5), characters literally speak their minds and memories, performing their interiority theatrically, often in either iambic pentameter or blank verse. In perhaps the most infamous of the show’s monologues, discussed in several of the essays below, Al receives fellatio as he recounts the story of buying the young woman who is servicing him from the same orphanage to which his own mother had sold him years earlier: I had to give her 7 dollars and 60 odd fuckin’ cents that my mother shoved in my fuckin’ hand before she hammered 1, 2, 3, 4 times on the fuckin’ door and scurried off down fuckin’ Euclid Avenue probably 30 fuckin’ years before you were fuckin’ born. Then around Cape Horn and up to San Francisco, where she probably became Mayor or some other type success story, unless by some fucking chance she wound up as a ditch for fuckin’ cum. Now, fucking go faster, hmm? (grunting) Okay, go ahead and spit it out. You don’t need to swallow. (“Jewel’s Boot is Made for Walking” 1.11) Working on multiple levels at once, this scene introduces the kind of childhood trauma of abandonment that would seem both to complicate and contextualize Al’s present brutality, all the while framing the confessional remembrance as coercive and one-sided gratification, culminating both with Al’s orgasm and an offer—extended to both Dolly and the viewer—not to swallow any of it. The theatricality of the scene allows the show to introduce the memory and motivation that complicate its antihero while explicitly undermining the sympathy that such disclosures typically engender by foregrounding the form of psychoanalytic confession over its content. With this, Al is granted the

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psychological depth—along with the verbosity—that Tony Soprano denied to Gary Cooper, but not without a pointed reminder that all such confessional moments consist in performance and artifice. Thus, long before Jack Langrishe and his traveling players arrive in the camp in season three, Deadwood is permeated by the theater. Even George Hearst, who otherwise refuses to observe convention or protocol, understands that power in the camp must first be registered theatrically—specifi cally by the visibility and perspective afforded by a balcony view. After busting through the second-floor walls of his hotel with a sledgehammer, Hearst initially establishes himself as Swearengen’s rival on Swearengen’s own terms, facing him across the thoroughfare in the most visible way possible, as Mark Berrettini shows in his essay. But if such a move indicates Hearst’s willingness to engage in a power play with Swearengen on the tactical level described above, the larger historical transformation which marks Hearst’s advent becomes apparent in the shifting role of theater in the show. The arrival of Langrishe’s troupe in the third episode of the final season functions something like a subversion of the Shakespearean trope of the play-within-the-play; rather than staging a drama that allegorizes the larger plot of the show, the players themselves perform nothing at all, putting on only a single amateur night during their stay. In one sense, putting the theater of the camp on an actual stage makes explicit what is already implicit in its theatrical relations. But more than that, the troupe’s failure to perform a play suggests something about the impending obsolescence of the theater itself as the principle mode through which the relations of the marketplace, political power, and individual character become legible in the world of the camp. Indeed, almost immediately after the troupe’s arrival, their chief tragedian dies while reciting Lear. If theater marked the mode of the new cultural order to which Wild Bill Hickok could not accommodate himself, by the end of the series, even this mode has been supplanted by “the presence of the new”—an unknown and emergent order that has, as yet, no recognizable or legible form. Working across multiple genres, layering apparently divergent aesthetics together, and showing how they both intersect and give way to others, Deadwood conveys both thematically and formally the historical transformations that lie at the heart of its inquiry into modernity in general and American empire more particularly. Ultimately, it is this attention to transformation that brings the show’s setting in the 1870s into contact with the moment of its creation at the turn of the twenty-first century, proposing as a kind of thesis that contemporary America finds itself in a similar moment of transition. Set in the last “new” place on the North American continent and reflecting on the closing of the frontier, Deadwood narrates, in appropriately apocalyptic terms, the end of a beginning that was by 1876 more than 250 years old. In

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this, the show situates itself and its audience in the beginning of an ending, directly addressing itself to those Americans who—like Tony Soprano—have that anxious feeling that they “came in at the end.”

The Last Western We are at our best, I think, as people, when that benign impulse toward community expresses itself in the impulse for order. David Milch24 David Milch has argued that the central theme of Deadwood is the creation of community. The contributors to this volume—in a variety of ways and from a range of disciplines—interrogate the forms that this community takes over the show’s three seasons, describing how it comes into being, the forces both external and internal that act upon it, and its ultimate limits, both historical and contemporary. As they examine the show in both the moment of its setting and that of its production, these essays further track the fictive community of Deadwood as a profane synecdoche of the national one, reflecting on the political, economic, and social transformations of an empire at its edges and ends. In the essay that opens the collection, Ronald J. Schmidt, Jr., argues that Deadwood offers a meditation on the collapse of beginnings and endings that is constitutive of all narratives of foundation. Situating the show within the post-Civil War discourse of refounding, where the Black Hills was positioned as the space that would solve a series of financial and political crises gripping the nation, Schmidt demonstrates how the “vile task” of founding takes hold among a community of outlaws whose explicit aim was to escape such narratives of redemption. Al Swearengen emerges as the central figure in this story, as his pursuit of economic self-interest leads him, paradoxically, to take an increasingly public role in the construction of the camp’s ad hoc governing institutions. Schmidt’s essay thus demonstrates both the fictional nature of foundation narratives—all of which rely on fables of retroactive authority— and their overwhelming power to subsume and reframe individual actions and actors. For Julia M. Wright, this shift from private to public interest is understood through a reading of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” Overturning individual agency, through the transformation of private (economic) gain into public (civic) good, the trope of the invisible hand has its theoretical origins in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and its aesthetic realization in Horace Walpole’s gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto. The invisible hand “undermines

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the Enlightenment ideal of the self-knowing, agential subject” from within one of the very discourses imagined to have created this subject: that of political economy (44). Outlining Milch’s “gothic reading of Enlightenment political economy” (43), Wright demonstrates how the violent social order that modernity imagines itself to have overturned persists within the heart of its most central institutions. “Modernity itself,” Wright concludes, “is revealed to be counterfeit” (58). Representing this suspension and fabrication of agency, not through the rhetorical sleight of hand of political economy or the paradox of foundations, Jeffrey Scraba and John David Miles instead focus on those concrete historical agents who acted on behalf of capital’s interests in the later decades of the nineteenth century: Allan Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency. Emerging as threat to the town’s well-being, the Pinkertons produce an unlikely alliance between Al Swearengen and Alma Garrett. They are thus responsible for the origins of a community they will ultimately work to destroy. If Deadwood seems at first a place that might regenerate those quintessentially American values of “acuteness, acquisitiveness and dominant individualism,” the role of the Pinkertons illustrates how these values are only produced at the moment they are being eclipsed (64). Deadwood, Scraba and Miles argue, thus makes us nostalgic for a particular form of community, at the same time that it shows us that this community never actually existed. Daniel Worden takes up this relationship between the community and individualism through Deadwood ’s deployment of race. Building on contemporary critics of multiculturalism, Worden describes its appropriation by a neoliberal discourse that imagines access to markets as the only form of social and racial justice. The result is that a discourse premised upon the ideal of community becomes, through its abandonment of the notion of collective good, instrumentalized for the sovereign individual’s pursuit of economic self-interest. Nowhere is this contradiction clearer than in the show’s depiction of George Hearst, who posits the pursuit of “the color”—by which he means gold—as the unifying force for all humankind. Hearst’s seemingly tolerant position toward race—in contrast to Swearengen’s strategic deployment of racist rhetoric—ultimately conceals an even more ruthless, and violent, pursuit of individual interest. Though it takes place off-screen, Hearst’s murder of his cook’s son Odell becomes an emblem of the racism his economic logic attempts to hide. For Justin A. Joyce, Odell’s off-stage murder is the exception to the show’s pitiless display of corporeal suffering. Situating Deadwood within both a contemporary cultural landscape filled with the reified bodies of C.S.I. and medical procedurals like House and the Western’s long-standing tradition of redemptive violence, Joyce shows how the violence within Deadwood

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is random, visceral and, above all, excruciating. Deadwood thus unites its investment in a realistic depiction of nineteenth-century life with contemporary anxieties about the fate of the body under neoliberalism, providing a poignant reminder of the way the abstractions of the marketplace always leave behind a physical reminder. Neoliberal violence, for Joyce, is always enacted on someone or something. Erik Altenbernd and Alex Young take up the figure upon whom this violence, in its nineteenth-century form, was most often enacted—the Native American—and in this, they argue, Milch’s series plays out a more primal political drama of sovereign power and bare life. Arguing for the show’s investment in the trope of the “vanishing Indian,” Altenbernd and Young demonstrate how the lawless nature of the Deadwood settlement, far from posing a threat to national sovereignty, instead became a means of extending that sovereignty. If the camp settlers could remove the Indians from the land first, then the state could disavow its role in this particular form of violence. Reading this representation in the light of post-9/11 anxieties about terror and state power, Altenbernd and Young find a deep ambivalence in the show’s simultaneous exposure of—and blindness to—the extralegal violence of the frontier. A more literal form of blindness haunts Mark Berrettini’s essay: the failure of Swearengen’s eyes that leads him to the grudging use of a magnifying glass. For Berrettini, this represents Al’s diminished capacity to observe, and thus control, the events of the camp. Tracking the series’ complex deployment of lines of sight, Berrettini describes three crucial modes of visibility: Al watching the events of the camp from his balcony; Alma observing everything from the curtained window of a Victorian interior; and Hearst boldly strolling upon the balcony he creates by smashing through his walls, displaying his power for all to see. Through these visual tropes, Deadwood reveals both the emergence of a series of counterpublics and their ultimate subsumption within the consolidated public sphere represented by Hearst’s monopolizing interests. And yet, according to Paul Zinder, these counterpublics persist at the series’ end. Despite Hearst’s undeniable victory in subduing the camp to his consolidating purposes, Zinder argues that a community built on affective attachment nevertheless survives. Aligning traditional marriages with the coercive force of the nation-state, Zinder shows how Deadwood depicts nontraditional relationships—such as that between Sol Starr and Trixie or Joanie Stubbs and Calamity Jane—that rely on a radical acceptance and openness to the other. Built upon values antithetical to the capitalist public sphere Hearst represents, these communities survive precisely because they are invested in a distinct form of social belonging.

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There are, however, limits to this form of social belonging, as David Greven’s concluding essay makes abundantly clear. Arguing that the show’s trope of complexity serves to justify its relatively conservative depictions of gender, Greven’s essay can be seen as a kind of “counterpublic” to the preceding essays, which tend, in distinct ways, to highlight the show’s progressive potential. For Greven, however, Deadwood deploys sentimentality and psychological complexity in order to humanize the uniformly violent men it puts at the center of its narrative. Greven demonstrates this through a virtuosic reading of Al’s ordeal with kidney stones, which ends with Al symbolically giving birth to a nascent community as if through sheer will, and notably without the aid of a woman. This fantasy of male auto-genesis, Greven argues, undergirds the show’s depiction of sexuality, masculinity, and ultimately, the violence that is constitutive of the frontier itself. Complexity, in Greven’s account, thus serves to neuter critique. Nevertheless, if complexity is a cover for a narrative about masculine violence, it is also the complexity of the show that allows for such divergent readings to emerge. Ultimately, as we hope these essays show, Deadwood is compelling precisely because of what cannot be resolved in its representations of nineteenth-century America. Whether progressive or reactionary, critical or complacent, the show provides rich fodder for arguments that tell us as much about our own values as they do about the show itself. Deadwood, from this vantage point, functions not unlike the nineteenth-century frontier that is its ostensible subject: a place into which we project our fables of origin and fantasies of control, only to have them return to us as nostalgia and powerlessness. For though we are continually in the presence of the new, as Al Swearengen suggests, the new is always cloaked in the clothes of the past.

Notes 1 There is a further irony to Tony’s remarks, which is that Gary Cooper also stars as the hero of High Noon, often considered the first anti-Western. Even Gary Cooper, it seems, wasn’t Gary Cooper. 2 See Herbert Marcuse, “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 88–133. 3 Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1976), 873. 4 See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism: and Other Writings, trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (New York: Penguin, 2002), originally published in 1905.

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5 Marx, Capital, 874. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 932. 8 Ibid. Thus, while the original dispossession of the Native Americans from the land is clearly one of the preconditions for the establishment of capitalism in the West, it would not be considered “primitive accumulation” in Marx’s strict sense, since its aim was not the creation of those “free” wage-laborers upon which capital depends. Instead the camp is dominated by independent proprietors, who seem to hold to precisely the form of property that capitalism seeks to overthrow. Marx develops this insight by examining in some detail the difficulty of establishing labor markets in the New World: “the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property as well, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of that private property which rests on the labour of the individual himself.” Ibid., 940. Though never entirely spelled out, Deadwood’s property rights, at least as far as the mines are concerned, seem to rest on labor, as for instance when Ellsworth tells Alma that he will “keep [her] title good workin’ the surface” (“No Other Sons or Daughters” 1.9). 9 Another crucial element of Hearst’s “forward-looking” operation—and one that connects him even further to contemporary capitalism—can be seen in the arrival in season two of the nameless Chinese prostitutes. Cheaper to import than they are to feed, these women are literally worked to death and then burned in large piles, an action that is one of many grievances Wu has against Hearst’s agent Lee. The show spends little time with these women, a fact which makes them a precise analogue of the Chinese labor that currently fuels our own consumption economy. We may, as Swearengen does, see the smoke in the distance, but we nevertheless continue to use our iPods without inquiring about the smoke’s origins. Joyce addresses this issue more in his essay below. 10 Rhodes famously said “I would annex the planets if I could.” The quotation appears in numerous places, among them Cecil Rhodes, The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes (London: Review of Reviews, 1902), 190. Hearst, of course, is subject to the pressures of an international competition Al’s more limited scope cannot perceive. The difference in interest, then, is also a difference in scale, as from the vantage of international capital Hearst’s desires must seem entirely in proportion. 11 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121. 12 The “peripheral” space of the camp is, simultaneously, residual—in the sense that it represents a set of social relations capital is busily eroding— and yet, at the same time, part of a larger world system that contains it. The camp could thus be profitably considered as an example of what Andre Gunder Frank famously calls “The Development of Underdevelopment,”

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a phrase meant to avoid the progressive temporal assumptions that would posit a peripheral space such as Deadwood as a holdover from some premodern past. As an underdeveloped space, Deadwood exists in the same temporal moment as the developed Eastern seaboard. Its development—primarily the extraction of its resources—would, in this view, be precisely the kind of dependent development characteristic of peripheral spaces. The classic articulation of Frank’s position can be found in Andre Gunder Frank, “The Development of Underdevelopment,” Monthly Review 18.4 (September 1966): 17–31, though he has written about it in many other places. 13 In conversation with Hearst, Wolcott says: “What if the earth talks to us to get us to arrange its amusements? . . . Suppose to you it whispers, ‘You are king over me. I exist to flesh your will.’ . . . And to me . . . ‘There is no sin.’” Hearst replies that this is “nonsense” (“Boy the Earth Talks To” 2.12). 14 Most recently, in a New York Times interview with the actor who played Seth Bullock. Jeremy Egner, “Defined by a smile and a draw,” New York Times, 5 January 2012. 15 Such mixing of genres is not unique to Deadwood among contemporary television dramas. As Fredric Jameson notes in an essay on The Wire, “generic classifications are indispensable to mass or commercial culture at the same time that their practice in postmodernity grows more and more complex or hybrid” (359). Our interest here is in the rigor with which Deadwood seems to be thinking through the very genres it bends and hybridizes. Fredric Jameson, “Realism and Utopia in The Wire,” Criticism 52.3–4 (Winter 2010): 359–72. 16 David Milch, Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills (New York: Melcher Media, 2006), 201. 17 Robert Pippin, “What is a Western? Politics and Self-Knowledge in John Ford’s The Searchers,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 225, 227–8. 18 “The Real Deadwood: Historical Featurette” (supplementary material on DVD release of Deadwood, disk six), HBO Video, 2008. 19 “The Meaning of Endings: David Milch on the Conclusion of Deadwood ” (supplementary material on DVD release of Deadwood, bonus disk), HBO Video, 2008. 20 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse and the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), 272–3. 21 Describing Alma as the show’s key fictional character in an interview, he quotes Henry James on character, fiction, and the real to explain her origins. “Q&A with the Cast and Creative Team Courtesy of the Paley Center for Media” (supplementary material on DVD release of Deadwood, bonus disk), HBO Video, 2008. James also makes an appropriately ghostly appearance in the form of the two childlike con artists whose names—Miles and

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Flora—are borrowed from the children in “The Turn of the Screw” (“Suffer the Little Children” 1.8). 22 As Lawrence Levine argues in Highbrow/Lowbrow, theatrical companies toured throughout not just the eastern United States but the territories, as well. Lawrence Levine, “William Shakespeare in America,” in Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 11–81. 23 Milch, Deadwood, 67. Also see Sianne Ngai’s study of the affect of confidence: Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). 24 Milch, “The New Language of the Old West” (supplementary material on DVD release of Deadwood, disk six), HBO Video, 2008.

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1 “Vile Task”: Founding and democracy in Deadwood ’s imperial imagination Ronald J. Schmidt, Jr. We’re forming a fucking government. Who is? Us! You and me! Come to me in a vision. You stupid bastard. AL SWEARENGEN TO E. B. FARNHAM

n his discussion of the American Declaration of Independence, Jacques Derrida notes the central dilemma of founding: the need for an authorizing body politic in order to enact the creation of a body politic. “The signature invents the signer,” he writes. “This signer can only authorize himself or herself to sign once he or she has come to the end, if one can say this, of his or her own signature, in a sort of fabulous retroactivity.”1 This “fabulous retroactivity” is both the form and the content of David Milch’s Deadwood. Set in an historical and illegal encampment in the Black Hills of Dakota directly after the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Deadwood draws our attention to the mundane violence that constitutes American foundings. American politics in 1876 was consumed with the direction of national power: away from the occupied South, toward the struggle of labor and capital in the cities and the struggle for dominance in the West. “The Black Hills” of the American imagination promised solutions to the problems of power, offering, in a series of popular

I

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political fables, mountains of gold for individual prospectors, territorial unity for the republic and the railroads, a training ground for an army composed of otherwise dangerous lower-class urban workers and directed away from the “fratricidal” conflict of Civil War, and a final solution for America’s racial wars. “The Black Hills,” in short, were offered as a refounding location of the United States, creating new narratives of national identity and redemptive purpose. In this essay, I will examine the construction of this imagined empire in the United States of the 1870s and the way that it is explored and remapped in Milch’s series. In its own way, HBO has reimagined some of the constitutive fables of American political identity, and I will conclude by briefly considering the role the network’s television programming plays in our own “refounding” moment. Before we turn to the “Black Hills” in the American political imagination of the nineteenth century, or of Milch’s production in the twenty-first, I need to map out the tensions involved in the attempt to achieve political regeneration through the invocation of foundings. Machiavelli describes this “refounding” maneuver in his Discourses. . . . it is clearer than light if these bodies [republics and religions] are not renewed they do not last. The way to renew them, as I have said, is to carry them back to their beginnings; because all the beginnings of religions and republics and of kingdoms must possess some goodness by means of which they gain their first reputation and their first growth. Since in the process of time that goodness is corrupted, if something does not happen that takes it back to the right position, such corruption necessarily kills that body. The doctors of medicine say, speaking of the bodies of men, that ‘daily something is added that now and then needs cure.’2 An attempt to conjure such a reform was a part of the obsession with the American founding that increased during the midterm elections of 2010 and the rise of the “Tea Party Movement.” The use of actual costumes was noteworthy, but the obsession itself is not extraordinary. Moments of real or perceived political crisis call forth attempts to reestablish the legitimacy and authority of American politics via organized invocations of a variety of founding principles—Puritan theology, classical republicanism, democratic equality, to name a few. Abraham Lincoln provided one of the most enduring (and, in Garry Wills’ formulation, most successful) examples of such “refounding moments” in the Gettysburg Address, positing that the democratic experiment of “rule by the people and for the people” was the underlying principle of US politics and the Civil War itself.3 The Address exhibits the central tension within this sort of attempt at political rejuvenation; the act of founding

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is a radical act of beginning that creates its own history through its enactment. This “fabulous retroactivity” is compromised by the heirs of revolution who, at the very least, cloak their activities in the pious narrative of custodial obedience. Lincoln brings the dilemma to a finer point in his 1838 speech to the Springfield Young Men’s’ Lyceum. In this address, concerned with the topic of “perpetuating our political institutions,” Lincoln calls his audience to preserve and transmit the republic “undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation, to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know,” to treat American law as a sacred trust, and to call “the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, to sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.”4 The speech cannot, however, contain the tension between revolutionary and “re-founder.” Lincoln’s contrast of the American founding with his own generation notes the adventure and glory involved in revolution, and the dutiful preservation that is the inheritance of all later generations. This raises a problem; what of ambition, the trait which Madison, Adams, and others considered a central, and politically useful, human desire?5 Ambition in this context, Lincoln warns, becomes unsustainable, a threat to the continuation of the republic. The ambitious man “thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, . . . will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving freemen.”6 As readers, we are torn; Lincoln calls for our pious reverence of the status quo, but his argument is at its most affectively persuasive when he describes the desire to remake, to transform, our polity. To truly invoke the founding engages us in this dilemma; we piously promise to preserve a tradition of radical transformation, and the tension both compels and disturbs. The aftermath of the Civil War saw several competing public narratives for the basic definition of American political culture, and many of them attempted to deploy differing readings of the American founding to legitimize their claims. These attempts were enacted among situations of great upheaval; the composition of the American public, the deployment of American political power, and basic readings of the US Constitution were all called into question by the events of the 1870s. Battles over Reconstruction—both the political and ideological debates and violent struggles in the occupied former Confederacy— recreated some of the lines of conflict from the years before the Civil War, but new economic realities led to different configurations of power, and different types of debate. As Richard Slotkin writes, “great concentrations of wealth and power . . . provided the means and motives for large-scale attempts by the newly rich and powerful to translate their economic power into political privilege. The result was a pervasive corruption of public officials that threatened to discredit the authority of republican government.”7

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New economic privilege coupled with laissez-faire doctrines in the White House and on the Supreme Court provided a rationale for the economic power of the “newly rich and powerful” that was not necessarily or obviously discredited, however. Close relationships between corporate elites and governing Republican majorities in Washington, forged during the war or the antislavery politics of the antebellum period, were deployed to support policies that extended massive federal funding to privately owned railroad companies, and US Army support for assistance in defeating union organization. The economic upheaval of the Panic of 1873, however, stretched the capacity of this narrative to contain the contradictions of American democratic capitalism. Deadwood and the Black Hills emerged at this moment as proposed sites of refounding and redemption for a nation in crisis.

The Black Hills 1877 For outright stupidity, the whole fucking trial goes shoulder to shoulder with that cocksucker Custer’s thinking when he went over that ridge. Al Swearengen (“The Trial of Jack McCall” 1.5) The expansion of the American railroads—roughly 33,000 miles of track between 1868 and 1873—directed a vast portion of the economy toward a speculative and unstable industry. When the Grant Administration’s new monetary policy restricted the nation’s money supply and the Coinage Act of 1873 demonetized silver, Jay Cooke’s overextended railroad financing led to the collapse of his bank. Scores of other banks and railroads followed; the “Panic of 1873” became the “Long Depression” of the 1870s. Richard Slotkin has shown how American newspapers after the 1873 Crash engaged in narrative slippage, eliding the distinctions between Native American resistance and urban labor organizing to create a master narrative of “Red” savagery on the borders and in the heart of the republic.8 At the same time, while Indians served as metaphors for the dispossessed of the new economic order, they were also represented as akin to the victors: the Sioux, for example, were represented simultaneously as the equivalent of the Molly Maguires and as powerful monopolists. The key ingredient to the threat was race, even in conflicts that were usually narrated in terms of class conflict. Native American “savages” on the frontier were elided with union “savages” demonstrating in the nation’s cities or “tramping” across the country; all were posited as an absolute threat in need of military confrontation. Since the passage in 1790 of the

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nation’s first naturalization law, which made “whiteness” a necessary precondition for citizenship, the racial status of all large immigrant groups had been a central topic of debate in urban politics. By positing that a newly energized working class was “savage,” media and partisan elites were in essence threatening to strip those groups of the means for representation and political advocacy. Meanwhile, mobilizing the army to confront labor and Native Americans provided a rationale to remove federal support for the nation’s largest group of non-White citizens, the newly emancipated slaves of the former Confederacy. The “new” Union could turn its efforts to the Frontier—redirect the Army away from the South, allow the reimposition of White rule in the former Confederacy, establish military control over strikers in the nation’s cities and strip from the Sioux on the frontier the land “given” to them by the Grant Administration (which was associated with almost all of the social ills of the postwar period)—or it could give way to the nation’s enemies, inside and out. Racist rhetoric was matched by racialized violence as public policy. The Sherman and Sheridan drives to exterminate the buffalo—and, essentially, numerous Native American tribes—in 1866–70 prefaced a schizophrenic national policy that veered between treaty negotiation and genocide. In the South, meanwhile, the US Army was attempting to maintain peace and provide protection for Reconstruction (including a successful campaign against the Ku Klux Klan), but under circumstances of increasing racialist criticism from Washington and decreasing budgets. In short, American national politics in the years before Deadwood’s founding was dominated by a sense of financial and political crisis related to both industrial development and a changing set of race relations. It was in these circumstances that the Black Hills became an imagined corrective to national corruption. The figure that drew these narrative strands together in the Black Hills themselves is one who haunts the opening of Deadwood but never appears in the show: George Armstrong Custer. By the time Custer was sent to the Black Hills, he had already carved out a national reputation premised as much on skillful public relations as military ability. He became a public figure during the Civil War, and cultivated relationships with journalists, including reporters at the New York World, the Herald, and the Times, and even then was defined in the public eye by the cultivated persona of the Boy General with the Golden Locks, “his long fair curls and smooth skin, his high voice that ‘fairly screeches’ calling his troops to charge, his ‘Merry eye and rosy lip,’ his vanity and self-display.”9 But despite the air of childlike enthusiasm, and his position as Chief of Cavalry to General Sheridan, Custer became a romanticized warrior in a conflict that was, to many in the United States, an apocalyptic event. The Civil War resulted in a mortality rate

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that was unimaginable, and Custer’s language at times took on the themes of redemptive and genocidal warfare.10 Rather “than that we should accept peace,” he wrote in 1865, “except on our terms, I would, and do, favor a war of extermination. I would hang every human being who had a drop of rebel blood in their veins whether they be men, women or children.”11 Once stationed in the occupied South after the end of the war, however, Custer seemed to be anything but exterminatory; indeed, despite the fact that the Ku Klux Klan was at the high-point of its activities during Custer’s time in Kentucky, he was involved in almost no fighting. Custer had his eye on higher office and greater wealth by then, and he spent as much time as possible in New York, wooing Democratic politicians and investors. Being part of an occupying army in the Democratic South was potentially devastating to the first line of effort and did nothing to further the second. For that reason, he leapt at the opportunity to go West. In that regard, he was not alone; political elites of both parties, and financial leaders of all regions, increasingly depicted the Frontier as the safety valve necessary to reduce the tensions of postwar America. Custer offered a vision of the frontier that contained all that the United States promised in the founding era: endless land, natural plenty, the opportunity for entrepreneurs to create personal fortunes and great cities, and inaugural acts of violence against the nation’s enemies. The Dakotas, though, seemed an unlikely location for such a rebirth. In 1868, the Lakota had achieved a rare victory over the United States. The Treaty that ended the war with Red Cloud resulted in an order from President Grant to close Army forts along the Bozeman Trail, and promised the establishment of the “Great Sioux Reservation.” By 1870, however, rumors of gold on the territory granted to Native Americans had already begun to start the incursions that would lead to the settlement of Deadwood (and many other comparable camps). Gold was wielded in the political imagination like a genie’s lamp; it meant more possible wealth for miners and those who serviced them; for towns like Yankton and Sioux City, it meant a glorious future. For the railroads, the gold promised demand for new lines, which meant profit and increased government support. (After Cooke’s collapse in 1873, this became even more important, suggesting essentially the only route to recapitalization.) For the Army, gold in the Dakotas meant new settlements, which meant new forts. General Sheridan saw the Black Hills as the gateway to more control over the nation’s Indian policy, and particularly more power vis-à-vis the Sioux. Congress found itself besieged by a lobbying campaign that partly took the route of backroom negotiation and bribery, but that was also a huge public relations campaign. To be clear, this is not the Founding spirit that was invoked in Lincoln’s “refounding” moment. The crux of the campaign to sell the invasion of the

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Black Hills was the adaptation of old narratives to the realities of postwar America. Lobbyists and advocates in the media seized on the problems of the United States in the 1870s—economic instability, urban transformation, and powerful monopolies—and applied them to antebellum stories of savages and civilization. As Slotkin writes, American emigration into the Black Hills promised “a new wave of pioneers to experience for themselves the regeneration of personal and social character undergone by our pioneer forebears, fitting them to rank with the hunter-heroes of legend,” the opportunities for perpetuating careers “like those of Daniel Boone and other historical pioneers.”12 The model is an old American narrative, one in which the dispossession of Native American land was offered as an intrinsic part of the formula for individual self-making; land that “was not being used” by Indians could be provided for a land-hungry working class, enabling men who otherwise might be a threat to public peace in cities to create a new destiny as yeoman farmers. Major metropolitan newspapers shared variations on this theme, combined with a sense of urgency. A reassertion of these founding principles would be necessary to keep American civilization from collapsing, in this account; the Black Hills were not just a possible location of rejuvenation but the only alternative to apocalypse. Two events of 1874 helped to mobilize this argument. The first was the Tompkins Square affair. After a series of protest meetings in the aftermath of the Crash, a coalition of radical and reform organizations scheduled a meeting in Tompkins Square Park, in what is now the East Village in Manhattan. Protesters had varied demands, including that New York City’s municipal government deal with the aftermath of the Depression by providing public works programs. Some 7,000 people gathered; over 1,500 policemen responded with massive violence. The police, mounted on horseback, “charged the crowd on Eighth Street,” according to Samuel Gompers, “riding them down and attacking men, women, and children without discrimination. It was an orgy of brutality.”13 Newspaper accounts told quite a different story, detailing a conspiracy to use Parisian jewels, stolen by Communards, to fund an internal army of savages in a campaign against the United States. The second event was more directly concerned with the Black Hills themselves. Custer departed Fort Abraham Lincoln in the Dakota Territory with the Seventh Cavalry for the hills. Their mission, ostensibly, was to scout for possible settlements for forts and to find a route to the Southwest. Custer reported on the trip to the New York World, describing the necessary material for a financial and agrarian utopia. The most famous quotation from Custer’s account—“the miners report that they found gold among the roots of the grass”—was enough to increase pressure on the Hills, as miners and those that serviced them pushed in increased numbers to Sioux territory.14 As the

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Seventh Cavalry marched into the Hills, Custer reported flowers so thick and “exquisite” his soldiers “plucked them without dismounting from the saddle.”15 As plentiful as the gold was, timber, coal, and arable land were more so. And, with lush vegetation, animals thrived. Custer wrote, “I can state the fact that my beef herd . . . is in better condition than when I started . . . I have never seen as many deer as in the Black Hills. Elk and bear have also been killed.”16 Custer was already a public figure by this time; his reports helped move public opinion and, he hoped, set the stage for a future public career in politics. The Great Sioux War precipitated by US policy in the Black Hills, of course, set in motion that cementing of Custer’s future reputation, but not in the way he imagined. The battle near the Little Bighorn River, Montana Territory, was a devastating loss for the Seventh Cavalry. Press accounts of the battle varied initially, but criticism of his military errors was quickly supplanted by a mythology of White American sacrifice. The media reported that Sitting Bull was glorying in the death of an American military hero and in the spread of organized labor, both parts of a Sioux plan for undermining American civilization. Subjugation of the working class, Native Americans and, in the South, African Americans was the only sensible recourse; the “fact of the Last Stand was evidence of the need for transferring troops out of the South and into the West, to fight dark-skinned savages rather than ‘oppressing’ progressive southern whites.”17 Americans could reinhabit the utopian territory of a founding, establishing, not the “rebirth of freedom” but the “birth of a nation,” white, corporate, and continental, or they could succumb.

The Black Hills 2004 Commerce is one of those forces that move us toward order. And then there are parasites . . . David Milch18 A viewer with only a cursory knowledge of Deadwood might find it puzzling that show-runner David Milch sees his show as a story about community. The show is famously profane, not to mention anarchic. Almost the first thing we hear about the town in the pilot episode is said, dreamily, by a horse-thief: “No law at all in Deadwood. Is that true?” (“Deadwood” 1.1). Nonetheless, reading the story as an exegesis on the creation of American community makes sense. Much of the on-screen action is centered around the personal relationships of the various characters; almost all of them find themselves trying to redefine themselves in Deadwood’s own context; and many of

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them are forced to play the roles of citizens in a “civilized” encampment. The significance of the cost of this community creation is underscored through storylines limited to each season, but also to a story-arc that lasts throughout all three years: the recreation of Deadwood as a specifically American community. The people of Deadwood occupy a space of refounding, the transformation from a place outside American law, into a town in South Dakota, guided largely by the unlikely figure of Al Swearengen, saloon and brothel owner. But there are competing narratives of the town, visions that promise freedom and/or threaten corporate anarchy. The vision offered by the horse thief, Clell Watson, is our first look at the idea of “Deadwood,” both as conjured by the press of the 1870s and by HBO. The dialogue between Watson and the Montana marshal Seth Bullock lays out this vision of the town: Watson: Bullock: Watson: Bullock:

No law at all in Deadwood? Is that true? Bein’ on Indian land. So then you won’t be a marshal? Takin’ goods there to open a hardware business. Me and my partner. (1.1)

Deadwood’s location—its “bein’ on Indian land”—makes it available to Americans to step outside the mundane reality of their legal world to recreate themselves. The Native Americans of the show are all off-screen, with the exception of the decapitated head of a Sioux chief and the warrior with whom Bullock fights in “Plague”; they provide a narrative frame and an excuse, a threat performed by the “road agents” in service to Swearengen, or a legitimating prop. From Puritan invocations of “Satan’s Imps” to paternalistic condescension, American political leaders used Native Americans as props and defining Others, marking the boundaries of civilization.19 The Sioux of Milch’s Deadwood serve a comparable role, as they did in the Black Hills of the 1870s American imagination: they are the monstrous prefounding population whose name frames the reinvention of the central characters. The historical Seth Bullock, for instance, served as a marshal, moved to Deadwood with Sol Starr, and eventually became a close friend of Theodore Roosevelt; he marched in Roosevelt’s inaugural parade. Thus Bullock was able to signify a genuine frontier history and the one promised by Custer’s financial supporters, the vision of a “Wild West” brought to civilization, the “rough riding” spirit invoked by Bull Moose Progressives. When we meet Milch’s Bullock, he seems to be attempting to escape this fate.20 Indeed, as he makes clear to Watson, the freedom of Deadwood’s lawlessness is not the promise of a frontier that he can civilize, but rather the mundane world

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of commerce. He and Starr are not moving to found a city; they are moving to found a hardware store. The Black Hills are filling with emigrants; miners need tools, store-keepers need lumber, and Bullock and Starr stand to create a new fortune for themselves away from the law—not as members of a Hobbesian battlefield, but as the sort of Lockean fantasy of small-scale and practical self-making that, as Michael Rogin has shown, the barbaric Indian was invoked to protect.21 Before we ever meet Starr or Bullock, however, the show’s opening credits have told us a different story. “Commerce” in Deadwood is not the “rational and industrious” activity described in New York World editorials or The Second Treatise. Deadwood commerce is premised on gold mining—uncertain, unstable, and dangerous—and prostitution. We first meet the former trade in the person of the miner Ellsworth, for whom mining is a path to long dry stretches and occasional strokes of good luck that disappear into saloons and brothels. The latter form of commerce is under the firm control of Al Swearengen. Initially Al is a gangster; the oppressive treatment of the women at the Gem Saloon, a confidence game directed at a wealthy Eastern investor, that investor’s eventual murder, and even the murder of a family of Swedish pioneers by road agents, are all part of Al’s enterprise. If anyone in Deadwood is emblematic of a “lawless frontier town” and its central virtues, it is Al. But Al will not get the opportunity to occupy this position for long. In short, Seth Bullock and Al Swearengen both begin their occupation of Milch’s “Deadwood” intent on avoiding precisely the narratives of redemptive refounding offered by the Black Hills of the 1870s’ political rhetoric. Timothy Olyphant’s Bullock is determined to avoid being the lawman out to civilize the frontier. Unlike the historic Bullock, who married a woman he had courted since his youth, the Bullock of 2004 is married to his brother’s widow, a step he has taken out of a sense of duty. This Old Testament role, as obligatory as that which constrains Judah’s sons in the Book of Genesis, impresses Bullock’s lover, Alma Garret, as a sign of what sort of man he is, but it does not seem to bring him much pleasure. The responsibility of living up to social narratives forces Bullock to take up the badge again as well, and to live out the role that had promised civilization in a previous century’s rendition of the Black Hills. Surprisingly, this sense of personal obligation to large social narratives of redemption also weighs on Ian McShane’s Swearengen, who is led, inexorably, to the role of frontier founder merely by following the logic of protecting his own criminal interests. The price of this role for Al is quantified in Episode 4 of the second season (“The Boy the Earth Talks To”): he is forced to remove the remuneration from Yankton he has spent weeks engineering when Deadwood is finally organized as an official municipality because he

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doesn’t “want the founding document recording a fucking bribe” (“Requiem for a Gleet” 2.4). But the problems of founding are dealt with most explicitly in Season One’s “No Other Sons or Daughters” (1.9). The episode begins with a conversation between Al and Trixie, Al’s abused confidante. The discussion concerns Deadwood’s upcoming annexation by “the lying fucking thieves of the territorial legislature at Yankton” (1.9). His whiskey voice even more weary than usual, McShane gives us Milch’s version of Virgil’s “Such a long hard labor it was, to found the Roman people”: “I don’t want to talk to these cocksuckers, but you have to, in life, do a lot of things you don’t fuckin’ want to do. Many times, that’s what the fuck life is, one vile fucking task after another” (1.9). The performative element of that founding challenge is clear. In Swearengen’s later discussion with Magistrate Jarry of Yankton, Native Americans play the role that, as we have noted, they play throughout the series in general: they frame the narrative in a manner that serves entrenched interests in the United States. Jarry raises the issue of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty (which recognized Sioux possession of the Black Hills) merely as a way to threaten the people of Deadwood with their own dispossession. Al’s response is both blunt and appropriate: “So who needs to get paid?” Jarry responds: Signs of conciliation and willingness would weigh in the camp’s favor, but just as important is the presence of an ad hoc municipal organization that would enable the legislature to say Deadwood exists, we don’t have to create it. It would be disruptive if we did. The community’s already organized, not legally, maybe, but certainly informally. Why not let’s give this informal organization the blessing of legal standing? (1.9) Swearengen wants to contain the negotiations with Jarry as a standard illegal transaction in the town “with no law at all.” But this episode makes it clear that neither he nor Bullock can escape the script prepared for the Black Hills. Swearengen and Bullock, in short, exhibit the power of refounding narratives, as the actual crises of the 1870s force them into the positions of power and political membership that they seek to avoid. In the end, their determination to escape, to be free as gangster or as hardware store owner, is undone by the vile task of founding. Circumstances force Al’s hand via the territorial legislature. A narrative is already in place, whether a town, officially, is or not; it is required of Al that he arrange the performance of founding the community of Deadwood so that it can serve as the civilized outpost that the United States will absorb. Another vile task, then; he summons the town’s worthies to a meeting at Swearengen’s Gem Saloon. There is precedent for the meeting; Deadwood

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may be outside of US territory, but it is organized, as the previous town meeting to deal with the plague spreading in camp made clear.22 But the actual presence of a governing arrangement is not the point; what US annexation means here is the performance of founding. Swearengen inaugurates the town’s founding meeting: Thank you, Johnny. The heathens will get money to give up the Hills and Hills’ll be annexed to the territory. Cost to avoid getting fucked in the ass by those legislative cocksuckers was just handed to me by Yankton’s toll collector, who suggests also our best case in keeping title to the claims, property, and businesses is to start up now, a kind of an informal governing organization that will be recognized by the territorial cocksuckers and given legal status when the territory is annexed, since we’ll all have proved ourselves civilized sorts that don’t only wear our pants to cover our tails. Hence the fuckin’ meeting. (1.9) Bribery is part of the game, of course, but so is the distribution of titles and offices, the erection of an authority that can qualify as a legitimate participant under the American regime. Bullock manages, for another few episodes, to avoid being returned to the status of marshal. E. B. Farnum, hotel owner and general lickspittle, claims the position of mayor and provides his own reading of foundation: “Taking people’s money is what makes organizations real, be they formal, informal, or temporary” (1.9). From Farnum’s perspective, the new Deadwood will be more of the same, with the added proviso that he will find it easier to improve his position with the help of money garnered from the poor citizens, the hoopleheads, of the town. This is his bid to join the likes of the magistrate, a recognized and propertied figure of authority. The fact that Farnum does not become such a figure is explained by the circumstances of the show’s final season. Season 3, episode 8 concludes with a pack of men, armed and bearing torches, riding into town. In the next episode, they effectively drive Wyatt and Morgan Earp from Deadwood and spend two days accosting people, trying to ride them down in the street, and breaking the leg, in a particularly gruesome fashion, of a traveling salesman. This gang looks more like the free agents of anarchy and chaos on the lawless frontier than anything else we have seen in the series, including the early days of Al Swearengen. The appearance, however, is misleading, as the title—“Leviathan Smiles”—of episode 3.8 suggests. The gang operates at the orders of George Hearst, the sociopathic mining titan, who wants to create the impression of lawlessness to forward his own ends. The historical Hearst went on to become a Democratic US Senator, but it is hard to imagine why Milch’s Hearst would want to claim an official position in government. He

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operates like Noah Cross in Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown,” who tells private detective J. J. Gittes, “I don’t blame myself [for the acts of murder and incest he has committed]. You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of ANYTHING.”23 Indeed, Cross is a fictional representation of the historical Harrison Gray Otis, the publishing robber baron who claimed the credit for founding Los Angeles. In Polanski’s imagination, foundings are lawless moments in which monstrousness can be integrated into the creation of cities and even exacerbated by them. But Cross (and Otis) derived enormous power from embracing the role of founder; Hearst, in contrast, represents himself as lawless figure, an outcast (albeit a regretful one). He is not in Deadwood to found a community and he does not see himself as capable of occupying a place in one. Hearst defines himself entirely in relation to gold, which he sees as an equalizing factor, creating an opportunity for both Lockean individualism and a kind of social Darwinist leveling. That narrative, however, is as theatrical as the “anarchic mob” represented by his hired thugs. Rather than occupying a kind of prefounding position, Hearst is an agent of the postwar corporate power that reshaped the historical Black Hills. To Farnum, whose hotel he purchases in order to keep him on as a target of abuse, Hearst boasts that he can identify and enjoy the smell of human flesh on the spit, but his angry rejoinder to Jarry is nearer the point: “Elections cannot inconvenience me. They ratify my will or I neuter them” (“A Constant Throb” 3.10). For Hearst, “foundings” are stories that dress up the reality of late nineteenth-century American politics. Al Swearengen, as we have seen, represents a different model. Consider, for example, his mercy killing of Reverend Smith. When Al first walks into the room where the Reverend has been left to spend his last days, Smith is repeating Romans 7:15 under his breath: “For that which I do, I allow not; for what I would, that I do not; but what I hate, that do I” (“Sold Under Sin” 1.12). Smith has been obsessed with the fear that his illness represents a fall from Grace, but the phrase evokes a meaning in Al’s case as well. Despite his desire to be a “power broker” in the rich black market of a lawless territory, Al has found himself pushed by circumstances to play the role of founder. His relationship with Bullock, which Milch characterizes as patriarchal, draws its strength from the fact that both are trying to flee the restraints of civilization but are bound by their skill at playing the necessary roles. Recall, for example, Al’s efforts to persuade Bullock to take on the role of sheriff (1.12). General Crook, of the Seventh Cavalry, “Custer’s Avengers,” provides Bullock with an argument based on community and responsibility: “In a camp where the sheriff can be bought for bacon grease, a man, a former marshal, who understands the danger of his own temperament, might consider serving his fellows” (1.12). Bullock hesitates; he is in conversation

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with Crook because, after badly beating Alma Garret’s father, and suggesting to Dan Dority that Al might want to see the man murdered, Bullock now wants his victim protected. The general takes this into consideration, but in the end asserts “We all have bloody thoughts” (1.12). And who could speak to this situation better? Crook goes out of his way in Deadwood to protect his men from the exploitative capitalism of Farnum and the camp in general; but Custer himself had become a public figure through his skill at navigating the relationship between corporate capitalism, the myth of aristocratic warriors, and the mass media. Maintaining Custer’s myth requires that men like Crook deny the underlying logic of Custer himself: bloody thoughts and acts—violence against the “uncivilized” or American martyrs. Indeed, it is as men of violence, motivated by a sense of the larger meaning Deadwood has as a political entity, that Seth and Al assume the character of founders. Al sees “forming a fucking government” as a vile task, but he does actually carry out the work, creating the space and the opportunity for founding actions, crafting the founding document, and, eventually, even giving up the “fucking bribe.” The historical Swearengen kept the Gem going until it was burned down, and eventually seems to have been murdered in a suburb of Denver, but Milch’s Swearengen is part of a different narrative, becoming the kind of founding father promised in the propaganda of the Black Hills maneuvering in the 1870s. The performative labor of American refounding is illustrated by this flawed character in this gothic landscape of villains. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” says a reporter in John Ford’s revisionist Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In the Deadwood of 2004, the legend seems to enact itself through the protagonists of Milch’s show. Westerns are about foundings in the American frontier; the Black Hills have been evoked in American media since the 1870s, as we have seen, as a site of American redemption and refounding. The legend moves Bullock and Swearengen to enact this refounding, a fable of retroactive power that speaks to the audience about America through persuasively unlikely actors.

The “Black Hills” and other strange creations The “productions of democratic poets may often be surcharged with immense and incoherent imagery, with exaggerated descriptions and strange creations; and . . . the fantastic beings of their brains may sometimes make us regret the world of reality.” Alexis De Tocqueville

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In his Subversive Genealogy, Michael Rogin examined the monsters of democratic poetry that worried Tocqueville and found them pale, so to speak, in comparison with those of American politics. The scatology, violence, and myth-making of Milch’s Deadwood has been ruthlessly mined for signs of anachronism and narrative over-reaching, but Milch’s central characters, and the communities they help to define, serve instead as a political and bounded alternative to the political imagination of the Black Hills in the late nineteenth century. In the 1870s, ideological arguments for the annexation of Deadwood and the other towns of the Dakota Territory promised a cleansing refounding, for entrepreneurial citizens and the nation as a whole. Violence was invoked as a rationale for state action that served to destroy Native American community and independent townships, while facilitating the spread of corporate power from one end of the continent to the other. By design or contemporary obsession, HBO’s department of programming has served a similar function with several shows, providing an imaginary universe to rethink the movements of imperial power in a United States whose political imagination is more violent, sex-obsessed, and anarchic than any of the storylines in the network’s controversial programming. Compare, for example, any of the plotting and thuggery in HBO’s Rome with former Vice President Dick Cheney’s promise that the United States will operate on “the dark side,” kidnapping and torturing in order to defend the republic against certain apocalypse.24 In “How Titus Pullo Brought Down the Republic,” for example, an elite plot to stage a fraudulent vote in the Senate opens the door to riot, and the fit of temper by one soldier is enough to bring Caesar’s armies marching into Italy (“Rome” 1.2). Or, to take another example, contrast the fervid discussions of sexual orientation and political community in recent political campaigns with even the most outlandish Southern Gothic storylines of Alan Ball’s True Blood ; even the show’s opening credits, riffing on the Westboro Baptist Church with an evangelical church sign reading “God Hates Fangs,” position the show as an imagined arena for the playing out of dangerous American narratives of violence and sexual panic. The Wire brings a narrative coherence and precision to the decline of the American Dream that is mostly absent from our political discourse, which contributes instead an hysterical tale of ressentiment and anxiety.25 Deadwood invokes the narratives of refounding—the promises of economic autonomy, individual self-making, national and racial regeneration— promised to American voters during the annexation of the actual Dakota Black Hills in the 1870s. But Milch is striving to tell a story of actual American community; even the dead are part of the profane discourse of belonging. The sociopathic George Hearst, the sick and violent games of Cy Tolliver, provide monsters more concrete, and less threatening to community, than the events that were told through the prism of founding narratives in the months after

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“Custer’s Last Stand.” Deadwood, well written and deeply invested in threedimensional characters, provides an opportunity to experience what Derrida calls the “fabulous” element of the founding—the fables that are created and reinforced by acts of political definition. “If the theme you’re working with is the negation of law,” Milch asks, “how do you make the viewer experience an environment without law? The assault of the language . . . begins to establish that kind of lawlessness emotionally” (1.1 v/o commentary). But his story is the story of the coming of law, the coercive power present in these fables of founding, and the way that we claim and map a nation that has been founded, violently, over and over for centuries. Meanwhile, the Black Hills themselves remain narratively in play, a space for the imagined self-creation, through the violence and poetry, genocide and prayer, which are intrinsic to American self-definition.

Notes 1 Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” New Political Science 7.1 (1986): 10. 2 Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, trans. Allan Gilbert (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 419. 3 See Gary Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), passim. 4 Abraham Lincoln, Selected Speeches and Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1992), 17–18. 5 Both at times see governance as primarily a way to channel ambition productively. See, of course, Federalist 51, but also Adams’ Discourses on Davila. 6 Ibid., 19. 7 Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 284. 8 Slotkin, The Fatal Environment, passim, but especially chapter 16. 9 Ibid., 386. 10 Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage 2009), introduction and chapter 1 esp. 11 Slotkin, The Fatal Environment, 384. 12 Ibid., 349. 13 Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1925), 32–4.

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14 Slotkin, The Fatal Environment, 357. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 465. 18 David Milch, “Commentary” (supplementary material on DVD release of Deadwood, disk one), HBO Video, 2008. 19 See Stephen Cornell, The Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence, Part 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana or the Ecclesiastical History of New England , books six and seven (New York: Frederick Unger Publishing Association, 1970); Michael Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Knopf, 1975); Michael Rogin, “Liberal Society and the Indian Question,” in Ronald Reagan: The Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 134–68; and Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973). 20 Milch on his version of Seth Bullock: “See, Bullock went to a place where there was no law because he was trying to get away from being a lawman, to make his own fortune, but, you know, our lives chose us. He immediately, look at him . . . it’s like cops on their day off, let’s go look for some skells and beat the shit out of ’em” (Milch v/o, “Deadwood 1.1”). 21 See Rogin, Ronald Reagan, 134–68. 22 Season 1, episode 6, “Plague.” 23 Chinatown, dir. Roman Polanksi (Paramount, 1974). 24 Cheney was forced by historical events to shift the identity of his defining enemy—the Soviet Union was replaced by the “elusive” and “unseen” forces of international terrorism with less narrative skill than the displaced Native Americans were by the “Reds” or organized labor—but his overall narrative, and his policy prescriptions, remained essentially consistent from the mid-1970s until quite recently. See, passim, Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side. 25 See, for example, Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Gebeloff, “Even Critics of Social Safety Net Increasingly Depend on it,” New York Times, February 12, 2012. No diatribe by “Snoop” was ever as incoherent as the argument about social welfare uncovered by the Times ’ pollsters.

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2 The gothic frontier of modernity: The “Invisible Hand” of state-formation in Deadwood Julia M. Wright “As I watched Yevgeny’s bout this evening,” Moseh continued, “it came to me that said market [slave market] is a sort of Invisible Hand that grips us all by the testicles—” “Hold, hold! Are you babbling some manner of Cabbalistic superstition now?” “No, Jack, now I am using a similitude. For there is no Invisible Hand—but there might as well be.” NEAL STEPHENSON, THE CONFUSION (2004)

avid Milch’s Deadwood, as has been widely noted in both online forums and scholarly publications, is centrally concerned with economics as “the camp” moves from a mostly barter economy to a banking system, and from individual gold-prospectors such as Ellsworth to George Hearst, a corporate entity with agents and vast resources.1 This economic transformation goes hand in hand with governmental development, as Deadwood moves step by step from its original lawless state to the structures for lawful respectability of the third season. This is a narrative that conforms to Enlightenment

D

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historiography, and particularly the work of Adam Smith, in which societies are presumed to progress on civil terms as they advance economically from hunting, to pastoral, agricultural, and finally commercial systems—a narrative also followed in conservative Westerns, such as the epic How the West Was Won (1962). As Robin Paul Malloy puts it, for Smith, “the movement from his least developed to most developed stage involves the continual expansion of the law. . . . In each stage, Smith detected an increasing complexity to legal arrangements that corresponded to similar trends in social, political and economic relations.”2 Hence, sentiment and civility increasingly govern social relations in Deadwood as it also develops economically and politically—but it does so, as the final episode stresses, on a gothic foundation inherent in Enlightenment thought. To account for advancement, Smith uses the trope of an “invisible hand” to refer to an undefined force that transforms (economic) self-interest into (civic) public interest. Stefan Andriopoulos argues that the “invisible hand” is a gothic device which parallels the disciplinary “invisible hand” of the first explicitly gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), where “an invisible hand” intervenes to thwart the evil “intentions” of the usurper who possesses the Castle.3 In a discussion of Walpolean gothic that addresses economic progress in slightly different terms, namely the transition from an aristocratic order of inherited property to the more fluid one of capitalist production, Jerrold Hogle has argued for the centrality of the counterfeit to the gothic: “The ‘Gothic revival’ occurs in a world of increasingly bourgeois ‘free market’ enterprise trying to look like a process sanctioned by more ancient imperatives. . . . In this transition, the Gothic carries the counterfeit’s increasing preference for less ‘bound’ signification towards . . . the counterfeit’s replacement: the view of the signifier as fundamentally a [Baudrillardian] ‘simulacrum.’”4 As I shall suggest here, part of Milch’s “high culture critique of the American experience” lies in a gothic reading of Enlightenment political economy which represents the benign selfregulation of a market economy and inexorable progress of civil societies as founded upon gothic maneuvers of counterfeiting, the invisible hand’s overturning of individual agency, and the more overtly gothic figure of tyrannical violence in the series’ “gory finish” (“Tell Him Something Pretty” 3.12).5

Mr. Smith goes to Deadwood: Self-interest and disinterest With the “invisible hand,” Smith figures a guiding force that directs markets to the greater good through the self-interested actions of individuals,

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“render[ing],” Andriopoulos explains, “external interventions by the state unnecessary. [Smith] can reject the mercantilist demand for state intervention only by a hidden recourse to supernatural intervention.”6 As Molloy notes, Smith understood self-interest to resist operating “at the expense of others”7—in a kind of naturalized obedience to the medical dictate, “do no harm”—but to have a positive effect on others the invisible hand is required to transform it. The trope is not only a sleight of hand that promises governance without government action, but also conceals a philosophical crisis: by definition, it “caus[es] a disjunction between an action’s intention and its result.”8 The invisible hand thus undermines the Enlightenment ideal of the self-knowing, agential subject and, moreover, suggests that such erosion of the individual is necessary for the social good. This trope appears in his influential contribution to moral philosophy, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), when Smith argues that the rich reach a physical limit of consumption—they can only eat so much, use so much—and this limit necessitates the redistribution of their excess, so “They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society.”9 Nearly two decades later, in the Wealth of Nations (1776), a significant work for US liberal and economic thought, Smith would repeat the invisible hand’s opposition to intent: By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he [“every individual”] intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.10 This transformation of intent repeatedly appears in Wealth of Nations: for instance, “A revolution of the greatest importance to the public happiness, was in this manner brought about by two different orders of people, who had not the least intention to serve the public.”11 The (neo-) liberal fantasy of a market which functions best in the absence of regulation has, at its foundation, not only the subversion of agency but also its inversion. In intending self-interest, one contributes to the public interest, and intending the public interest will only lead to the thwarting of that intention as well: Smith laments, “I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the

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public good.”12 The invisible hand, therefore, empties out the sovereignty of the Enlightenment subject into the coffers of the state, and refuses what that subject offers willingly. Daniel Worden has examined self-interest and economic thought in Deadwood but views them as part of an anachronistic “account of life within neo-liberalism” instead of, in some measure, as an explicit return to Adam Smith and other early economists.13 Such material is explicitly invoked in Deadwood. In “Amalgamation and Capital” (2.9), Hearst’s advance agent Frances Wolcott mocks Charlie Utter:14 Utter: Wolcott:

It’s all fucking amalgamation and capital, ain’t it, Wolcott? Mr. Utter, are you a student of Hume? Smith? A disciple of Karl Marx?

Wolcott’s rejoinder draws attention to Utter’s phrase as a key one in the larger history of economic discourse, especially as it is traced in chapter 25 of Karl Marx’s Capital (1867). The English translation uses these terms and a footnote details David Hume’s influence on Adam Smith.15 “Accumulation of capital,” a chapter title in Smith’s Wealth of Nations , is invoked in Marx’s chapter, but Marx introduces the phrase “amalgamation of a number of capitals” to refer to “centralisation” as an advance on traditional “accumulation,” whether through “the violent method of annexation (certain capitals becoming such powerful centres of attraction that the individual cohesion of other capitals is broken up, and the fragments of these are drawn into the orbit of the major aggregation)” (Hearst’s modus operandi ) or “the smoother road of the formation of joint-stock companies” (akin to Alma Garret’s bank).16 Swearengen himself uses Smith’s phrasing in a discussion with the Hegelian journalist, A. W. Merrick: “Let it help me accumulate capital or, at worst, not interfere, the story is true and decent” (“A Lie Agreed Upon, Part 2” 2.2).17 In the immediately previous episode, Swearengen echoes Smith as he watches the construction of a telegraph line approach Deadwood: “Messages from invisible sources, or what some people think of as progress. . . . tries against our interests is our sole communications from strangers, so by all means, let’s plant poles all across the country, festoon the cocksuckers with wires to hurry the sorry word and blinker our judgments of motive” (“A Lie Agreed Upon, Part 1” 2.1). Like Smith’s “invisible hand,” “invisible sources” over-rule individual “interests” and propel society forward. Such echoes of Smithian economic thought call attention to the ways in which the series envisions a disjunctive, even oppositional, relationship between civic progress and individual intent.

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Soon after his confrontation with Wolcott, Utter discusses the subject with Seth Bullock: Utter: Bullock: Utter:

Bullock: Utter:

I’d best go, lest Mr. Amalgamation and Capital take one through the fucking head. What’s the import of that expression? Do I look like I fucking know? Some big-shot eastern magazine reporter interviewing Bill said that was what’s changing things around. Jane, I don’t know what’s going to come of fucking Jane. I’ll keep an eye on her. You should lock her in that cell and don’t let her fucking drink. And don’t fuck yourself up over Mose Manuel. He’ll get himself fleeced of what is rightfully his and what he got by fucking murder. He’ll be judge on himself and jury too, just like the fucking most of us. (2.9)

Utter’s argument about Manuel—who has killed his brother to steal their claim so that he can sell it to the profiteering Hearst via Wolcott—follows the general plot of Walpole’s novel, insofar as, through an unseen force, murder will out and the usurper will lose all of his ill-gotten wealth.17 But there is more to this scene than Manuel. Wolcott is also to be punished by an unnamed hand (note Utter’s passive construction, “lest [he] take one through the fucking head”), and everyone is to be transformed by the economic force of “amalgamation and capital,” even though most do not, like Utter and Bullock, even understand the term. The passive phrasing and their ignorance of the economic term are consistent with Smith’s requirement, “without intending it, without knowing it.” Wolcott’s naming of Smith earlier in this episode is thus part of a thread of dialogue in which the inexorability of justice and economic advancement, like the telegraph, supersedes the self-interested actions of men—Wolcott, Manuel, and “most of us.” Calamity Jane, however, like many of the women characters in the series, derails this paradigm: she cannot act in her own self-interest, so her self-interest cannot be transformed, and hence others (like Utter and Bullock, above) think they must compensate for her feminine lack. Similarly, in the final season, Trixie acts against her own self-interest, leaving clerical work and trying to return to prostitution. In response, Swearengen urges her to self-interested action: “I lose patience with cunts too ignorant to know when their lot’s improved. . . . Look after your fucking self” (“A Rich Find” 3.6). Alma Garret offers a more complicated case, surrounded as she is by men who act for her interest. In “Here was a Man” (1.4), Wild Bill Hickok indicates he will

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not “betray her interests,” and that she “can trust [Bullock] to see to [her] interests.” Later, Ellsworth takes on that role as well, and even Swearengen protects her when Hearst’s agents shoot at her in the street. The women in the series generally operate outside of Smith’s paradigm, being unable, for various reasons, to act in their self-interest and so contribute to the public interest. Instead, they participate in the counterfeiting that marks economic modernization in the gothic. As Hogle argues, the gothic emerges in part in response to economic modernization: the gothic interest in the counterfeit arises from an apparent shift from stable, unmediated value (such as land) to relational value that is always mediated through systems of signs, as when paper signifies gold which signifies purchasing power for commodities or labor. According to Hogle, this shapes the representation of women in the gothic: “Walpole’s women . . . are really made coins of exchange, into counterfeits of counterfeits (falsified and falsifiable women able to be substituted one for another)” (181–2). Similarly, women are at the center of Deadwood’s economic development, from prostitution, the example par excellence of women “as commodity objects” (Hogle 181), to the foundation of a banking economy with loans, deposits, and other non-trade transactions by Garret, the daughter of a con-man. Garret not only makes possible the exchange of gold, currency, and property title for slips of paper, but also intersects with other counterfeit concerns: Trixie:

Jack: Alma: Jack: Alma: Jack:

There’s 12 bucks I deposit into my account. If the currency’s counterfeit, my fucking Jew boss is the culprit. . . . I don’t need no receipt—I trust the lady. John Langrishe, Madam, of the Langrishe Theater Company. How do you do, Mr. Langrishe? Glad I’m well to bid you good morning. I’d undertake two transactions: deposit of $4,000 and the borrowing of like amount. Those would seem at cross-purpose. Theater types being perceived as transient, nomadic—without stake, so to speak, in a place’s particulars—my redundant undertakings would allay mistrust of my kind endemic in such camps as these. (“Amateur Night” 3.9)

Trixie performs “trust” which invests more value in an unreceipted transaction than in paper currency, just as Langrishe appears to “allay mistrust” by securing a loan he does not need—the economy here, as in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man (1857), identifies modernity with trust, with “confidence”

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in such transactions. In an economy of signs (paper currency, deposit slips, loan paperwork) rather than things (gold, land), trust becomes essential: the sign rather than the thing becomes the object of a transaction only because of trust. But, through that advanced economy, the bank can assuage racial hostilities (see “Full Faith and Credit” 3.4), establish the legitimacy of a theatre company, and involve members of the camp from all echelons, including Leon, Trixie, Steve, and Samuel Fields—in other words, it contributes to civic advancement through communal participation and increasing equality. Through the counterfeit, then, there is a second magical transformation to which Deadwood calls our attention. While the “invisible hand” converts (masculine) self-interest into public interest, counterfeiting—the substitution of a less authentic thing for a more authentic thing (deposit slips for currency, currency for gold)—converts (feminine) disinterest into public interest. The normalization of this paradigm is nowhere more urgently pressed than in those rare instances in which women ambitiously serve their own selfinterest: both Flora Anderson and Maddie, in doing so, elicit violent repressive action from economically powerful men.19 Counterfeiting, however, moves Deadwood forward into modernity, and not only economically: counterfeiting is also instrumental in the myth-making critiqued by the series, including the introduction of justice into the wilderness and the autonomy of the male subject, as I shall suggest in the next section.

The man who shot Ned Mason: Counterfeit narratives and mystified agents Deadwood is, of course, not the first Western to critique the myth of “the West,” and, indeed, in this it draws directly on a significant Western tradition, including The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). The film opens its framed narrative with Liberty Valance robbing a stage-coach. One of the passengers, the young lawyer, Ransom Stoddard, threatens to have Valance jailed for his crimes. Valance viciously beats him and leaves him in the wilderness, but Stoddard is rescued and brought to town by Tom Doniphon, and the townspeople nurse him back to health. In the climax, Valance, having called Stoddard out, clips Stoddard’s arm in a shootout that highlights Stoddard’s awkwardness with a gun and then, after Stoddard regains his gun, the two men fire, and Valance drops to the ground, fatally injured. But viewers soon learn that Doniphon had been in the shadows with a shotgun and fired the fatal shot, thus leaving Stoddard innocent of the killing but publicly known as “the man who shot Liberty Valance.” Ethically willing because of the first

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and politically viable because of the second, Stoddard becomes the emerging state’s new delegate and later its senator and governor, and thus the lawyer left beaten on the side of the road leads the lawless “territory” into modern statehood. As Cheyney Ryan points out, “the film describes how, in the public realm, figures and events that possess a defining importance for a community can be infused with fabrication,” even as it details the “triumph” of “legal order.”20 Naomi Mezey draws a link between this film and Deadwood : “Just as in Liberty Valance, law’s eventual stability is seen (and unseen) to be predicated on illegal acts of violence and a lie, in Deadwood the coming of law is paved by unspeakable but seen violence.”21 She does not, however, address the close plot parallels between Liberty Valance and the first episode of the series, “Deadwood” (1.1), in which road agents attack and rob the Metz family on the road, wounded Sofia Metz is rescued from the robbery site and brought to town where she is nursed back to health, and, at the end, a shootout occurs with two shooters, Bullock and Hickok, drawing against Ned Mason, the man held responsible for the attack on the Metz family. But while Liberty Valance corrects the myth of one unlikely shooter with the truth of a gunslinger who coolly shoots to kill, Deadwood calls truth and agency into question: Bullock and Hickok do not know which of them fired the fatal shot, nor that Mason was innocent of the murders. The opening episodes of Deadwood thus attenuate Liberty Valance ’s emphasis on “fabrication” by rendering the truth unknown, even unknowable, to the key players, thwarting their intention to pursue justice even as the gunfight becomes, to the townspeople, evidence of justice coming to Deadwood, leaving viewers with a “disjunction between an action’s intention and its result”: Alma Garret: They rescued a child in the wilderness, and brought to justice one of the men who murdered her family. Otis Russell: And how was justice meted out? Bullock: We shot him. (“Jewel’s Boot is Made for Walking” 1.11) Deadwood thus not only asks, with Liberty Valance, “To what extent does the legal order necessarily find its origins in kinds of violence that compromise its very legitimacy?”22 but drives the film’s focus on the founding “lie” (as Mezey terms it) into the domain of the counterfeit and the unknowing, nonagential subject. Instead of Doniphon deciding to shoot Valance and then manipulating the public narrative, only later revealing his “lie” to Stoddard, so that his intentions guide the plot and affect the protagonist’s sense of self, Deadwood gives us shooters who never learn that the public narrative is false and continue to circulate it. The narrative, that is to say, is counterfeit, insofar as it is

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false and its circulation produces the appearance of modernity (as justice), but no one is lying. There is no intent-action-effect continuum here. This crucial difference is highlighted by the episode’s relentless concern with other forms of counterfeiting. Mason arrives in town, and nervously announces to the recently arrived Bullock and Star, “I seen a terrible thing tonight. . . . I seen white people dead and scalped and—man, woman, children with their arms and legs hacked off. . . . A whole family on the road to Spearfish. Oh my God! It’s them heathens—bloodthirsty savages” (1.1). As Bullock recognizes (“you probably need a drink”), Mason wants to exchange his sensationalist tale for liquor, but Bullock uses Mason’s interest to circulate the narrative lucre more widely: Mason: Bullock: Mason: Bullock:

Ain’t nothing against y’all fellas, but I’d as soon do my drinking getting a piece of ass. First you want people to know about that family. Yeah, well, what harm is it in me meeting my needs before I circulate the news? What if the third child’s alive?

Bullock tries (and fails) to direct Mason’s intent (“you want people to know”), while he and Hickok, even though they “want people to know” so that they can gather a posse, do not believe Mason’s story: Bullock: The fella’s story on this don’t hold water. Hickok: No, it don’t. As the viewers soon learn, Mason was part of a group of “road agents” who attacked the family on the road, and there is indeed a survivor. While no one learns the truth of the shootout at the end of the episode, here the key players all know that the story is false, a counterfeit that Mason, in a simple confidence-game, wishes to exchange for alcohol and “a piece of ass” (reminding us again of the centrality of the trade in women to the series), but which Bullock wishes to “circulate” to generate a community response—a posse. The point of the story is not its truth but its usefulness as an instance of Barthesian myth, an icon emptied of its history (colonization, racism, centuries of captivity narratives) to support an ideological position. As Barthes writes, “Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them: simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of

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an explanation but that of a statement of fact,” in other words, “heathens— bloodthirsty savages” (1.1), the mythic threat to progress and civility.23 The story’s counterfeit status, moreover, is reinforced by other counterfeiting moves in the episode. Immediately after Bullock offers Mason a drink, the scene switches to the saloon where they are taking him and Jack McCall asks, “You call my bluff, Hickok? I was trying to run one.” But McCall, it turns out, was not bluffing: he finds a third eight in his hand (“I absolutely did not realize that”) and remarks, “Here I am, thinking I’m fucking bluffing the third eight . . .,” recalling Hogle’s description of the gothic counterfeit as “a refaking of what is already fake.”24 McCall’s lie is here revealed to be the truth he did not yet know—and both the lie and the truth are equally consistent with his strategic aim of creating the impression that he has three eights. “Deadwood” thus revolves around various forms of counterfeit, all of which are centered on money, especially Swearengen’s elaborate con on Brom Garret. But this money-counterfeit economy is redirected by Bullock’s recirculation of Mason’s counterfeit tale to another purpose—not Mason’s self-interest (liquor and sex), but public interest and public action (the rescue of Sofia and “justice”). That action, however, is a filmic cliché, that is, the creation of a posse which demonstrates a mythic moral order and civility that prevails even in the absence of law and law enforcement.25 The cliché is played out to its inevitable conclusion, a gunfight in the main thoroughfare so that justice can be seen to be done by the entire community: Mason draws on Hickok and Bullock, and Mason drops dead with a bullet in his eye. The undecideability of who fired the fatal shot contributes to the representation of the incident as one in which justice (rather than a personal motive) was served, even as it calls into question the agency of these lawmen—if “intent follows the bullet,” in the common legal analogy, then whose intent is at stake if we cannot trace the bullet back to its origin? In the second episode, “Deep Water,” viewers learn that Mason was innocent of the murders, and that the actual killers, Ned’s brother Tom and Persimmon Phil, are working for Swearengen. If the refrain of “Deadwood” is the con-game and the counterfeit, that of “Deep Water” is lying: Alma Garret lies to get opium; “keep lying,” Swearengen tells Phil, “and I’ll murder you in that chair;” “Stop lying,” warns Cochran to a patient, as he prepares to lie to Swearengen about Sofia; and Bullock lies for Hickok, justifying Hickok’s fatal shooting of Tom Mason by saying that he was “going for his gun.” Other witnesses indicate that Mason’s “gun never left its holster,” as viewers can clearly see, and Bullock was watching Phil, in another direction, at the time. While there is consensus that Tom Mason’s “gun never left its holster,” camp

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witnesses are just as certain that his brother did “draw first” on Bullock and Hickok. The first gunfight is morally clear to most of the camp, if ambiguous to the viewers, even as the second is the inverse: viewers, but not the camp, have seen Swearengen in another scene spurring a drunk Tom Mason to revenge his brother’s death and so know that Mason was intent on killing Hickok. Furthermore, the Reverend registers the public judgement, praising the first gunfight with the remark, “Men like Mr. Seth Bullock there raise the camp up” (1.2), and condemning the second by rebuking Bullock during his eulogy for Tom Mason (“Reconnoitring the Rim” 1.3). While Bullock and Hickok in the first episode are represented as the noble Western lawmen who gather a posse, rescue the girl, and kill the bad man, in the second episode Bullock backs Hickok’s dubious shooting with a lie and represents the first gunfight as merely “a turn of events.” The second episode therefore unravels not only their moral superiority but also their agency. Hickok cannot control his gambling, Bullock cannot control his temper, and both were simply subject to a “turn of events” when they brought “justice” to Deadwood. And nearly everyone in “Deep Water”—criminals, lawmen, professionals, the well-educated well-to-do—is intentionally lying for one reason or another, calling into question the moral order that the posse symbolizes. This lack of control and agency is represented in a sustained way through Swearengen, who spends much of the episode trying to learn the truth and so “clean up the mess” to protect his position. But, as Swearengen tries to protect his interests by concealing his part in the murders, he is inexorably led to cause the deaths of both Tom and Phil—indirectly by spurring Tom to try to kill Hickok, precipitating the gunfight, and directly by stabbing Phil in his office. Hence, while the first gunfight secures justice from the camp’s perspective and from the shooters’ perspective, it is actually the second gunfight, set in motion by Swearengen, and Swearengen’s murder of Phil that punishes the murderers, even though it seems unjust to the camp. As noted above, Alma Garret indicates that Hickok and Bullock “brought to justice one” of the murderers—Ned, not Tom. Put another way, Hickok and Bullock intend to act in the public interest—and, as Smith remarks, that rarely goes as planned—but first shoot an innocent man and then one that they believe to be innocent of any crime, while Swearengen pursues only his own self-interest but achieves Hickok’s and Bullock’s aim of “bringing justice” through the execution of the guilty parties. Both outcomes are largely a matter of happenstance (“a turn of events”)—powerful men achieving results opposite to their intentions, and often “without knowing it.” Swearengen’s coercion by the “invisible hand”—directing his self-interest toward the public interest—continues throughout the series and takes a final turn in “Unauthorized Cinnamon” (3.7). After agreeing to the publication of

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Bullock’s open letter to the family of a man murdered by Hearst, Swearengen has the following conversation with a friend: Swearengen: Why am I fucking optimistic? Langrishe: Did your meeting find a strategy in counterpoise? Swearengen: We heard the fucking reading of a letter. . . . Writ by Bullock, to a miner’s family after Hearst had had him murdered. Langrishe: Exhorting they charge Hearst with the crime? Swearengen: Never once mentioning Hearst—expressing sympathy to the family, respect for the way the man lived. We decided Merrick would publish in the paper. Langrishe: Strategy some may call ingenuous, others merely off the point. Swearengen: I sit mystified I was moved to endorse it. Langrishe: Mystified, Al, at proclaiming a law beyond law to a man who is beyond law himself? Its publication invoking a decency whose scrutiny applies to him as to all his fellows. I call that strategy cunningly sophisticated, befitting and becoming the man who sits before me. While the opening episodes of the series have Swearengen acting (“without intending it, without knowing it”) for the greater good through violence, by the end of the third season his “strategy” is now “sophisticated” because it relies on the principles of moral philosophy—Enlightenment notions of sympathy as the basis for morality, and public opinion as a curb on political power—rather than direct force of a Hobbesian type. A number of scholars have pointed to the rise of a public check on the elite in the eighteenth century, a kind of oversight that drew on Enlightenment moral philosophy. Anthony D. Smith, for instance, argues that the tension between bureaucracy and the sovereign led to the adoption of Enlightenment values, including “moral standards.”26 More specifically, Jürgen Harbermas, in addressing Kantian “publicity,” points to the “critical process that private people engaged in rational-critical debate brought to bear on absolutist rule . . . public opinion aimed at rationalizing politics in the name of morality.”27 Habermas links this operation of “public opinion” to “moral philosophy,” including Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, and ties absolutism to a Hobbesian model which aims at “monopolizing public power”28 —arguably the project of Swearengen in the opening episodes, and of Hearst in the third season. This opposition between absolutist force and moral philosophy (from which liberalism emerged) marks the series’ pendulum swing from the first, which defines the early episodes, then slowly towards the second, and then back to

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the first at the end of the third season. The role of moral philosophy—in which sympathy for others lies at the basis of community cohesion and cooperation as well as the law, and is intensified when someone is suffering through no fault of his or her own—is particularly evident in the second season’s treatment of medical crises arising from happenstance. From the group around Al’s bed as he struggles with a kidney stone to the prostitutes weeping at the funeral of Bullock’s son to the begrudging care given to the racist Steve, the accidental pain and suffering of others elevate the inhabitants of Deadwood to a communal response that is moral rather than economic or political, one stressed by the emphasis on the community-wide perception of the first two crises, from Al’s screams echoing across the camp to the ubiquitous grief for Bullock’s son (“Advances, None Miraculous” 2.10). But Hearst flips this Enlightenment progress into gothic paralysis, returning to the Smithian problem of the break between “intention” and “result.” When Hearst attempts to terrorize Garret into selling her claim by shooting at her in the street (“A Constant Throb” 3.10), Swearengen insists that the men most closely attached to her “interests” must respond by not acting—no one must appear affected by Hearst’s actions. In other words, the “result” of Hearst’s “intention” is to be thwarted by their collective effort to counterfeit the failure of his intended result—they must appear to not be terrorized, including Garret, who must walk alone to the bank—and their shared interests are to be furthered by the subordination of their individual free will to this community enterprise. Ellsworth is literally hog-tied until he agrees not to act and, in one of the most exemplary scenes in the series, Bullock, having heard the news, is speechless, his face periodically contorted or gazing in amazement at those who engage in small talk over dinner. He is an image of confusion—he “sit[s] mystified,” an Enlightenment man on the brink of a Hobbesian nightmare, caught between two radically incompatible worldviews and so unable to act or even comment. But Hearst does, in the end, get Garrett to sell her claim: his intention eventually achieves the desired effect, and it is the townspeople’s collective intention that is thwarted. And this is the frustrating conclusion of the series: Hobbes wins. While Liberty Valance critiques the Western myths which undergird American national identity, from Horace Greeley’s “Go West, young man” (cited repeatedly in the film) to the conventional Western narrative of progress toward law, business, and government, Deadwood offers the reminder that key to those myths is the Enlightenment one of the agential, self-knowing subject. Bullock and Hickok do not know that they are shooting the road agent who fled the violence, and Swearengen does not know what he is “going to have to do about it;” Swearengen follows a “strategy” that is “cunningly sophisticated” even though he is unaware why he was “moved” to do so. Progress is achieved, at least for a while, but on gothic terms: through hidden

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violence, the restraint of patriarchal figures, the magical transformation of self-interested actions into public benefits, and a cast of powerful men who “sit mystified.” And that progress grinds to a halt through overt violence and an unrestrained patriarchal figure who is so un-Smithian as to fight against the public interest, as we shall see in the next section.

How the West was amalgamated: “Centralization” and the rise of the gothic The key episode for any discussion of state-formation in Deadwood is the ninth: “No Other Sons or Daughters.” The episode opens with Swearengen’s lament that (recalling my epigraph, above), “Magistrate Claggett will impart to me the attitude toward the settlement of him and his fellow lying fucking thieves of the territorial legislature at Yankton. . . . How hard is the legislature gonna squeeze our balls with regard to our title and properties?” To ease their grip, and so protect their property interests, Swearengen declares, “we’re forming a fucking government!” Government might appear, then, to be established on Lockean terms: “Government has no other end but the preservation of Property.”29 But state-formation is explicitly driven by the “thieves of the territorial legislature,” who not only censor language but also curtail the sovereignty of Deadwood by limiting its governmental rights: Swearengen insists they must term the body they are creating, “Informal municipal organization, not government—no, that would mark us rebellious.” Privately, however, Swearengen continues “rebellious,” telling Merrick that they have to “form a government for the settlement.” The moment of state-formation in Deadwood is, therefore, defined by the same divide between public fiction and hidden truths established in the opening episodes, and as in those opening episodes the motivating force of the hidden, “true” narrative is self-interest. To “form a government,” Swearengen organizes the first meeting of the camp’s businessmen and professionals and opens it by saying, “I’m declaring myself conductor of this meeting as I have the bribe sheet.” In this episode, modern state-formation is generated on Smithian terms as self-interested public officials, seeking their economic interest through bribes, spur the creation of civic government in Deadwood, a process shaped largely by the economic self-interest of those at the meeting: Farnum:

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Do the bribes come out of our pockets? . . . Couldn’t our informal organization levy taxes on the settlement to pay the bribes, say to license businesses, wouldn’t that spread the burden? . . .

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Swearengen: Our proper order of fucking business is to make titles and departments before the territorial cocksuckers send in their cousins to rob and steal from us. Farnum: Who fills the various positions? Swearengen: Pick the names from a fucking hat as far as I’m concerned. Farnum: I’d like to be mayor! . . . Bullock: Wouldn’t a good use for an informal organization with temporary appointees be providing a few services to the camp? Swearengen: Mayor? Farnum: We’ll provide a few services and use the lion’s share of revenues to pay the bribes. More than providing services to ’em, taking people’s money is what makes organizations real, be they formal, informal or temporary. (1.9) Bullock, as in the opening episode of the series, tries to leverage others’ self-interest for the public interest, while Farnum argues for taxing businesses (such as his own) only a little more than is necessary to pay the bribes that will protect their property interests. Here are two visions of government: one entirely self-serving and economic in operation and goal, and the other seeking legitimacy through “services to the camp,” a position consistent with Adam Smith who was concerned that “the state” have “revenue sufficient for the public services.”30 It is only the latter that Bullock mentions in telling Garret of the meeting’s outcome: “It’s to put the camp’s best foot forward, as far as being taken into the territory—a number of men took positions.” In the meeting at the Gem, his only contribution is quoted above—he does not overtly acknowledge the central purpose of gathering bribe money. As with the shooting of Mason, Bullock remains locked into the progressive narrative associated with conservative Westerns: justice at the point of a gun, and then “Advances, None Miraculous” toward civility. But the meeting is not the “camp’s best foot forward” for the women in the camp, and not just because of the exclusion of women from the committee that is noted in the episode. Bullock tells Garret that Farnum will be mayor: she responds, “How horrifying!” Utter tells Jane that he is “the new fire marshal” and she responds, “I’m getting out. . . . Direction of this entire camp makes me sick.” Add to this the revelation that Cochran was a grave-robber, and the episode appears punctuated by comic moments of gothic horror as it represents the move toward “informal” government as one driven by self-interested individuals acting to collect bribes or protect their property. The episode, then, represents progress on Smithian terms: self-interest somehow leads to government and “services

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to the camp,” soon followed by Bullock becoming sheriff, Garret establishing a bank, elections, and the emergence of domestic spaces. But, at the same time, the gothic marks what remains outside—even absurd to—that regime, pointing to its limits as an ethical expression of the larger society. These limits become clearest, and most gothic, through Hearst. While Smith, and “No Other Sons or Daughters,” represent self-interest as benefi cial to the collective interest, Hearst views self-interest only as a blockage to his own: “God, I hate these camps—all this deferring and adjusting to others’ wrong-headed stupidities” (“True Colors” 3.3); “the small-mindedness and self-interested behavior that’s so pervasive in this shithole makes impossible my efficient attention to the requirements of my operation” (3.6). Hearst recalls Molloy’s suggestion that Smith “feared that unconstrained self-interest . . . was destructive because it worked against the sharing of authority, it was antagonistic to competition, and it was destructive of community.”31 He is also the gothic villain who reveals the limits of modern civility and is “beyond law” (3.7): he uses terror, force, and sexual threat to exert his will, like so many gothic villains before him. He terrifies the cook he (pseudo-)affectionately calls “Aunt Lou,” uses murder to cow his employees and buy gold claims, and gets, by his own admission, “near to murdering the sheriff and raping Mrs. Ellsworth” (3.3). He also embodies, as I have already noted, Marx’s idea of “centralization” as “violent . . . annexation” (and Hobbes’ of “monopolizing public power”); as Worden puts it, “Hearst comes to represent the evils of the exploitative corporation, and he is multinational,”32 superseding the state-formations being built locally in the camp and elsewhere in the region. Fixated on gold and with little interest in broader economic advancement, he only bristles at mistrust and complains about paperwork, as in the scene in which he purchases Garret’s claim (“Tell Him Something Pretty” 3.12). The final episode of the series brings the gothic aesthetic into the open and centers it on Hearst. On learning that Hearst demands Trixie’s death because she shot him, Farnum asks Swearengen, “By what vile method then? Is Trixie to be drawn and quartered and set aflame?” “When I hear his voice,” Farnum continues, “I see the inside of his skull, phantoms grin out at me, oozing gruesome goo!” Earlier, Garret has told Hearst she thinks him guilty of murder: Hearst: Garret:

At least you acknowledge the insult. I acknowledge the pretence to civility in a man so brutally vicious as vapid and grotesque.

Worse, because of its emerging civility the camp cannot stop Hearst. Cy explains, “The Hearst interest requires special treatment, and we can face up to that like men or get steamrolled by the fucking alternative. . . . George Hearst’s chief geologist don’t get convicted of any crime in any court convened by humans.

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They’ll buy the judge and if they can’t the jury or witnesses. If not, they’ll start into killing” (2.7). Here, in season two, to be “men” is not to execute “justice” in the street, as in “Deadwood,” but to accept abjection, and Bullock is the exemplar of this: the lawman who thought he brought “justice” to Deadwood in the first episode’s gunfight no longer presses “his pet interests—innocence, so forth, guilt” (2.7). At the same time, Hearst’s self-interest is not transformed into public interest by an “invisible hand”—it annihilates all other interest, moving Deadwood away from the Smithian ideal of “‘perfect’ balance between self-interest . . . and public interest.”33 While Walpole’s “invisible hand” overthrows the tyrant, with all of the confidence in progress characteristic of an Enlightenment novel, Deadwood ’s tyrant overthrows the invisible hand, making Hearst’s mutilation of Swearengen’s hand symbolically resonant. The gothic appears in the final episode in plot as well as imagery, its general horror highlighted by the ironic last line of the episode, also used for its title: “Wants me to tell him something pretty.” Though he nearly killed Trixie himself in “Deadwood,” Swearengen now cannot kill her for sentimental reasons (even he has been impacted by the camp’s Smithian development) and so he decides that “Jen’ll adequately pass” and kills Jen. Jen is then dressed in Trixie’s clothes, and exhibited to Hearst—recalling Hogle’s remark about the gothic device in which “falsified and falsifiable women [are] able to be substituted one for another,” and the long history in the gothic which that remark reflects.34 The series ends with Swearengen, on his knees as in the first season, cleaning up the blood stain left by his murder of Jen. Langrishe had warned early in the episode, “This camp is in mortal danger. The man Hearst is a murderous engine. My friend, Swearengen, aware their combat is unequal, feels the appeal of the gory finish. Others I’ve just come to know stand candidates in the elections, whose results they know may be moot.” Modernity arrives in Deadwood only to be revealed as “moot,” for, despite all of the “invisible” redirections of selfinterest into public interest and the progress toward a modern economy, the “brutally vicious” still hold sway, as they did in the first season. Modernity itself is revealed to be counterfeit—a “pretense to civility” through elections and a banking economy, while the “murderous engine” continues unimpeded.

Notes I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canada Research Chairs Program for their generous support of my research, and Jason Haslam for talking—and rewatching— Deadwood with me.

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1 In Deadwood scholarship, discussions of socioeconomic structures tend to proceed on twentieth-century terms while discussions of literary and cultural influences proceed historically. For the former, see, for instance, Daniel Worden, “Neo-liberalism and the Western: HBO’s Deadwood as National Allegory,” Canadian Review of American Studies 39.2 (2009): 221–46; and Naomi Mezey, “Law’s Visual Afterlife: Violence, Popular Culture, and Translation Theory,” Georgetown Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 11–3985 , http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/ facpub/628. For the latter, see, for instance, Joseph Millichap, “Robert Penn Warren, David Milch, and the Literary Contexts of Deadwood,” South Carolina Review 38 (2006): 183–91; Joan Richardson, “Deadwood : Unalterable Vibrations,” Hopkins Review 3 (2010): 376–405; and Wendy Anne Witherspoon, “The Haunted Frontier: Troubling Gothic Conventions in Nineteenth-Century Literature of the American West,” dissertation, University of Southern California (2007). For a suggestive exception, see Rebecca Johnson’s discussion of Deadwood in relation to colonialism, “Living Deadwood : Imagination, Affect, and the Persistence of the Past,” Suffolk University Law Review 42.4 (2009): 809–28. 2 Robin Paul Malloy, Law and Market Economy: Reinterpreting the Values of Law and Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 112. 3 Stefan Andriopoulos, “The Invisible Hand: Supernatural Agency in Political Economy and the Gothic Novel,” ELH 66 (1999): 739–40. 4 Jerrold Hogle, “ ‘Frankenstein’ as Neo-Gothic: From the Ghost of the Counterfeit to the Monster of Abjection,” in Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-forming Literature, 1789–1837, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 190, 191; emphasis added. 5 Millichap, “Robert Penn Warren,” 183. Witherspoon, discussing the intersecting modes of the Western and the gothic, suggests that, in Deadwood, “the drive for law itself becomes a form of violence through which social order is created”—see “The Haunted Frontier,” 147ff. 6 Andriopoulos, “The Invisible Hand,” 747. On self-interest in a post-1970s context, see Worden, “Neo-liberalism and the Western.” 7 Molloy, Law and Market Economy, 65. 8 Andriopoulos, “The Invisible Hand,” 739. 9 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1984), 184–5; emphasis added. 10 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. Edwin Cannan (New York: Modern Library, 1994), bk. IV, ch ii, 484–5. 11 Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. III, ch. iv, 447; emphasis added. 12 Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. IV, ch. ii, 485. 13 Worden,“Neo-liberalism and the Western,” 222.

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14 All transcriptions are taken from Deadwood, seasons 1–3 (HBO DVD, 2005–7). 15 Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul, intro. G. D. H. Cole (London: Dent, 1933), 681n. 16 Marx, Capital, 692–3. The title of chapter 25 is usually translated “General Law of Capitalist Accumulation” and the phrase, “accumulation of capital,” appears in the translated text, for instance as the first words of section 3 (694). 17 Merrick’s Hegelianism, particularly in contending that “History” will (genocidally) erase native peoples, is evident from the first episode, and appears in this episode in his defense as well of Manifest Destiny. 18 As Millichap notes, two characters in season 1 are named for the siblings in Henry James’ gothic tour-de-force, “Turn of the Screw” (1898), “Robert Penn Warren,” 188; Manuel is a common gothic name, notably in the title of Charles Robert Maturin’s Manuel (1817), also a tale of family murder and remorseful killers. 19 See “Suffer the Little Children” (1.8) and “Something Very Expensive” (2.6). 20 Cheyney Ryan, “Print the Legend: Violence and Recognition in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” in Legal Reelism: Movies as Legal Texts, ed. John Denvir (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 23, 24; The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, directed by John Ford (Paramount, 1962). 21 Mezey, “Law’s Visual Afterlife,” 80. On some gothic topoi in the first two episodes, see Witherspoon, “Haunted Frontier,” 152–55. 22 Ryan, “Print the Legend,” 24. 23 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957), sel. and trans. Annette Lavers (London: Paladin, 1973), 156. 24 Hogle, “ ‘Frankenstein’ as Neo-Gothic,” 189. 25 The series, however, again draws on a more critical Western tradition, here echoing details from the opening scenes of the antilynching Western, The Ox-Bow Incident (1943; written by Lamar Trotti, directed by William A. Wellman): a man shows up with a tale of murder that stirs up a posse which includes two just-arrived friends and a woman in men’s clothes, and one character encourages men to stay in town instead by telling them it is “dark” and offering a “round” of free drinks. In Ox-Bow, however, the legality of the posse is extensively debated, and it is crucial to its moral concerns that it is made evident to the characters involved that they lynched innocent men. 26 Anthony D. Smith, “Neo-Classicist and Romantic Elements in the Emergence of Nationalist Conceptions,” in Nationalist Movements, ed. Anthony D. Smith (London: Macmillan Press, 1976), 76. 27 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 102.

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28 Habermas, Structural Transformation, 103. 29 John Locke, Second Treatise, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), §94, p. 329. Smith invoked this principle to address the interests it serves: “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor,” bk. V, ch. i, 771. 30 Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. IV, intro., 455. 31 Molloy, Law and Market Economy, 68. 32 Worden, “Neo-liberalism and the Western,” 232. 33 Malloy, Law and Market Economy, 115. 34 From Walpole’s Castle to Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1859) and Sheridan Lefanu’s Uncle Silas (1864), gothic texts have relied on the device of having two similar-looking women as key characters, with one mistaken for the other at a critical point and consequently dying in the other’s place.

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3 “It’s all f***ing amalgamation and capital, ain’t it?”: Deadwood, the Pinkertons, and Westward expansion Jeffrey Scraba and John David Miles ne of the strangest alliances in David Milch’s Deadwood forms about halfway through the second season, when Al Swearengen requests an interview with Alma Garrett. Despite the fact that Alma knows that Swearengen is responsible for the deaths of her husband Brom and of the family of her ward Sofia, Swearengen points out that they now have a common concern: Miss Isringhausen, Sofia’s erstwhile tutor and an agent for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Swearengen explains that Miss Isringhausen has solicited his participation in a Pinkerton conspiracy to usurp Alma’s gold claim, offering him $50,000 to testify that Alma hired Swearengen to murder Brom. When Alma asks Swearengen how much he would take from her “as commission to tell the truth” that she was not involved in Brom’s death, his reply is crucial for our understanding of the complex dynamics of community formation that operate in Deadwood : “I don’t like the Pinkertons. They’re muscle for the bosses, as if the bosses ain’t got enough edge. . . . Bein’ the Hearst combine and their fucking ilk got their eyes on taking over here, your staying suits my purpose” (2.7). Since the Pinkertons simultaneously pose a present threat to Alma’s well-being (framing her for Brom’s murder) and a future threat to Swearengen’s business interests (moving him aside for larger operators), these two former enemies are compelled to join forces. Through this alliance, Alma and Swearengen attempt to assert their individual and collective agency in the face of the ascendency of outside interests.

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This interaction reveals the crucial role played by the Pinkertons in Deadwood —and by implication in the Anglo-American settlement of the West. As agents for unscrupulous individual interests, like the Garretts’ scheming to usurp Alma’s claim, and as “muscle for the [capitalist] bosses,” like George Hearst planning to take over the camp, the Pinkertons literally and metaphorically represent the most dangerous external threats to Deadwood’s inhabitants. In the face of these threats from outside the community, Alma and Swearengen attempt to protect their individual and community interests. But the forces represented by the Pinkertons prove too strong to resist: the Agency’s interests will ultimately trump Deadwood’s interests. The Pinkertons in Deadwood thus bring about and ultimately destroy the paradigmatic democratic community represented by the alliance of Alma and Swearengen. The changes brought about by the Pinkertons in Deadwood also symbolize the historical events that will integrate Deadwood into America. From Milch’s perspective, the series stages an allegory of American development. As he writes in the companion volume to the series, “Deadwood, like other gold rush towns, was a kind of reenactment of the founding of our country.”1 For Milch, this reenactment proceeds in three stages. The first “Wild West” stage is characterized by the “rush toward a new territory, followed by a collective regression from society.”2 In the second stage, hoping to resolve the “contradictions of the old social order,” the community organizes a “regeneration of society seemingly de novo.”3 As the gold strike gathers momentum, a third stage ensues in which “merchants” and “government bureaucrats” change the pattern of settlement, “bringing with them all the old forms of civilization from which the first wave of adventurers had fled.”4 In this schema, the Pinkertons function as both harbingers of, and infrastructure for, those merchants and government bureaucrats. If Deadwood represents the “regeneration of society” promised by Westward expansion, then the Pinkertons represent the established power and capital that will reintegrate that community into the “old forms of [American] civilization.” Pace Milch himself, what makes Deadwood ’s reconstruction of this process especially compelling is the temporal compression and reversal of these stages. As Swearengen’s alliance with Alma suggests, the “regeneration” of society is not a product of the new freedom offered by Westward expansion, but rather is a response to the threat of established Eastern power. In other words, though it embodies many core American values, the “regeneration” Deadwood depicts is a desperate and ultimately doomed attempt to resist the imposition of the “contradictions” of established American society. Deadwood ’s recapitulation of the American experience is thus a version of one of the most influential and enduring interpretations of American culture: Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis.” Turner famously posits that

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the American national character was forged by the White man escaping the European influences of settled areas to struggle with the land and against the Indian. For Turner, the “intellectual traits” of American character, threatened at the time of his writing in 1893 by the “closing” of the frontier, included “coarseness and combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness,” a “masterful grasp of material things,” and “dominant individualism, working for good and for evil.”5 Swearengen and his allies’ resistance to the Pinkertons mirrors Turner’s pioneers’ resistance to American political and cultural development, though in Deadwood the mythic American traits of self-reliance and independence emerge in the context of what Milch calls the “regeneration” of society rather than in the escape from society. Deadwood amends Turner to suggest that acuteness, acquisitiveness, and dominant individualism can produce a model of exemplary American community. As the series unfolds, however, we learn that this individualist community is both created and destroyed by the power of established American interests. Deadwood suggests that Turner’s frontier traits are not a function of expansion into the wild spaces of the West, but rather develop as a response to the corporations poised to take over this “new” territory. Deadwood also interrogates what Richard Slotkin calls the “Myth of the Frontier.” Slotkin suggests that this “longest-lived of American myths” provides the “building blocks of our dominant historiographic tradition and political ideology”: the ideological “ ‘laws’ of capitalist competition, of supply and demand, of Social Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ as a rationale for social order, and of ‘Manifest Destiny.’”6 As Slotkin’s analysis and Milch’s series make clear, the ideals of Westward expansion are both teleological and contradictory. According to this dominant conception of American character and society, by fleeing established communities and pursuing their own individual destinies on the frontier, pioneers in camps like Deadwood pave the way for the unfettered capitalism that leads to Hearst’s social and economic control of the community. Turner’s rugged individualist and Milch’s nascent polis both represent forms of American independence on the frontier that resist the “civilizing” pressures of urbanization and capitalism, but Deadwood goes further to suggest that the “building blocks” of the Frontier Myth lead directly from pioneer to corporate control. Deadwood thus both celebrates and recognizes the impossibility of American regeneration in the mining camp of Deadwood. As the community coalesces and then disintegrates in response to the external forces represented by the Pinkertons, we are presented with an alternate imagined narrative of Westward expansion. In Milch’s rewriting of this narrative, we are made nostalgic, in Svetlana Boym’s sense, for this “regenerated” Deadwood: we long to return to a place that never quite existed.7 In what follows, we

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trace the role of the Pinkerton Agency in creating this nostalgic community by producing and foreclosing individual agency in Deadwood.

“No Law at All”: The Pinkertons as police The town of Deadwood embodies the promise of a “Wild West” escape from the structures of society before the series even reaches the camp proper. The series opens in a small Montana town, with Seth Bullock watching over jailed prisoner Clell Watson, who has been condemned to death. Fantasizing about an alternate life course in which he went prospecting in Deadwood instead of stealing a horse, Watson asks Bullock: “No law at all in Deadwood? Is that true?” (“Deadwood” 1.1). Bullock agrees by emphasizing Deadwood’s frontier and provisionary status: “Bein’ on Indian land” (1.1). From the opening of the series, the problem of law is established as the problem of Deadwood: how will a community function with “no law at all”? Milch elaborates on this problem in an interview: “this was a society which specifically had determined that they would have no law—so that they could keep their claims, so that ultimately they could be annexed to the United States. And the question then became how would there be order in this environment in the absence of laws?”8 In other words, in the environment of “regression from society” created by the initial gold rush, how will order be created and maintained? As the representatives and symbols of powerful outside interests, the Pinkertons provide an answer—morally repugnant in the context of the show—to Deadwood ’s basic problem: in the absence of laws, those with sufficient means will create and maintain order in a way that suits their interests. In fact, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency arose from this same problem on a national level.9 Professional law enforcement in the nineteenth century was primarily a local affair, with police tightly constrained by the boundaries of the municipality or district they served. Though American businesses became increasingly geographically diffuse over the nineteenth century, there was no effective public agency to ensure the rule of law throughout the United States.10 Thus the Pinkerton Agency was founded in 1850 in Chicago as a nongovernmental response to the needs of private business.11 The agency’s founder and authoritarian director Allan Pinkerton was locally famous in Chicago as a spy capable of taking on various roles to gather information on criminals and potential crimes, and his agency carried on this service under the guise of their Private Detective division. During the nineteenth century the Pinkerton Agency was the only organization with a system of national

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bureaus able to supply agents for private detective work and to muster a large interim force of police. With its professionally trained operatives, the Pinkerton Detective Agency responded to the needs of the corporate power on the rise in the mid-nineteenth century, and workers quickly began to fear the threat of the Pinkerton agent. The Pinkertons are first invoked in Deadwood as surrogates for the rule of law, when Swearengen tries to dupe Brom Garrett into buying what is an apparently worthless gold claim. Swearengen realizes that his henchmen may have manipulated the price of the claim too high in selling to Brom, and he speculates that Brom will have to “ask his people back home for more,” in which case “they’re liable to send the Pinkertons” (1.1). As the regeneration of Deadwood begins to take shape, the Pinkertons initially represent the regulatory potential of law: if operators like Swearengen exceed the boundaries of reasonable economic actions (they can cheat people, but only to a certain extent), then a force like the Pinkertons can be called in to right the balance. Swearengen is precisely right in evaluating the Pinkerton threat. Finally realizing he has been swindled, Brom confronts Swearengen: “Pursuing its business interest my family’s had several occasions to engage the Pinkertons. We maintain friendly relations. And I’d prefer we two settle this like gentlemen, but if need be, the Pinkertons can be made a party to our dispute” (“Reconnoitering the Rim” 1.3). While the Pinkertons offer Brom quasi-legal redress for being cheated, they also threaten to upset the balance of power in Deadwood, as they are not simply a mercenary agency for hire to the highest bidder: the Garretts have “friendly relations” with the Agency and so can use the Pinkertons to execute their interests. Moreover, Brom does not have to specify what the Pinkertons might do: they are invoked as an overwhelming adversary that will go far beyond simply restoring Brom’s investment to threaten Swearengen’s livelihood. Considering his later alliance with Alma, Swearengen’s response to this threat is deeply ironic: he suggests that Dan Dority “reconnoiter the rim” of the claim with Brom, ostensibly to prove out Brom’s claim, but actually setting up Brom’s murder. The irony is intensified when Swearengen suggests that the rim where Brom will fall to his death would be the “first place the Pinkertons would look,” and Dority confirms that “that’s how they operate” (1.3). Swearengen is overtly suggesting that the Pinkertons would help Brom exercise due diligence on his claim by reconnoitering the rim. But he also suggests that, like Dority himself, the Pinkertons would see that the easiest solution to this problem (underscored by the threat of the Pinkertons themselves) would simply be to push Brom off the cliff. Once Brom is killed, Swearengen is willing to pay off his widow for the claim in order to keep the Pinkertons out of his operations: “when this camp has a lot more to offer me than twenty thousand dollars as long as I don’t

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get killed by the fucking Pinkertons, why take the chance?” (“Here Was a Man” 1.4). Confused about how to receive Swearengen’s offer on her dead husband’s claim, Alma explains to Wild Bill Hickok that she is unsure about how to “stake the boundaries” on Brom’s murder: “for one, this camp hasn’t any laws or courts. If it did I’ve no evidence. I’d have tried to take the thing all whole if they hadn’t offered on the claim. To receive their money would be a separate matter, make me an accomplice of another sort” (1.4). Hickok perceptively suggests that Swearengen’s offer on Alma’s claim is to “keep the Pinkertons away,” but Alma is puzzled about Swearengen’s motives: “Why pay me? If it were a ransom to keep the Pinkertons off, why not pay Brom instead of killing him?” (1.4). Though she is accustomed to a position of social power, Alma is here unable to assess her interests. Because she is neither directly connected with established power as represented by the Pinkertons, nor sufficiently adept at the system constituted by the Machiavellian manipulations of entrepreneurial operators like Swearengen, Alma remains stuck between the forces that implicitly compete for control of Deadwood. At this early point in the series, the Pinkertons represent the rudimentary operations of law and the imposition of powerful outside interests in the camp. They are not the impartial agents of a democratic judicial system, but the proxies of the powerful in an order determined by capital. Threatening the provisional community structures within Deadwood, the Pinkertons demonstrate how external order can be imposed on a community without internal law. When basic civic order is violated, the wealthy and powerful can bring in the Pinkertons to “stake the boundaries” and “reconnoiter the rim.”

“Shit-Heel Operators”: The Pinkertons as spies While the Pinkertons are a vague threat from the opening of the series, their explicit involvement in the camp is heralded by the person of Miss Isringhausen, a sexually aggressive and manipulative Pinkerton operative disguised as a well-mannered tutor (1.4). Miss Isringhausen evokes one of Allan Pinkerton’s more famous innovations: his use of the first female spy in the 1850s. Pinkerton’s “Female Detective Bureau” was an integral part of the Agency from the department’s inception in 1856.12 The use of female detectives indicated Pinkerton’s willingness to break down traditional gender barriers in the service of his company’s intelligence gathering services. But while Pinkerton went to great lengths to ensure the upstanding morality of all of his operatives, including the women, these women’s transgression of traditional gender roles carried with it hints of sexual impropriety.

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Isringhausen’s willingness to trade upon her gender realizes the suspicions cast on women operatives in the nineteenth century. Apparently left alone in the Wild West after Alma dismisses her (at this point the audience is unaware of her double identity), Isringhausen seduces Silas Adams, Swearengen’s lieutenant. Playing upon Adams’ guilt for having apparently corrupted her innocence, Isringhausen then tries to convince him that Swearengen and Alma conspired to kill Brom. (This is the alleged plot that Swearengen will soon reveal to Alma herself.) Pretending that she wants to meet Swearengen in order to understand the threat against her, Isringhausen then explicitly offers her body to Adams in exchange for an introduction to his boss. Significantly, when Isringhausen makes her play with Adams, Swearengen is physically compromised. In a series that consistently produces meaning through cross-cutting between thematically related scenes, the juxtaposition of Swearengen’s struggle with kidney stones and the Pinkertons’ move against Alma further emphasizes the grave threat the Pinkertons pose to the community (“Complications” 2.5). Once Adams ushers her into Swearengen’s presence, Isringhausen offers him a bribe to skip town and, in Swearengen’s words, “leav[e] the widow lonely at the bar of justice” (“Something Very Expensive” 2.6). Swearengen immediately pieces together Isringhausen’s scheme and realizes that it must be “the Pinkertons whose pay [she’s] in, and that [Alma’s] dead husband’s people hired to steal her gold” (2.6). As Alma observes, despite the fact that the legal system is entirely ineffective in Deadwood, the Pinkertons are able to muster the threat of prosecution to serve their employers’ interests. But Swearengen is able to counter the Pinkerton threat by outmaneuvering Isringhausen. He turns the tables on the Pinkerton plot by intimating that he has double-crossed Isringhausen by revealing her plan to Alma. Swearengen then tells Isringhausen that he knows she has wired her Pinkerton bosses to let them know that their plan to usurp Alma’s claim has gone awry. When Isringhausen takes this as a ploy to raise his price, Swearengen retorts that if the Garrett family gains the rights to Alma’s claim, they will “sell to thirdparty cocksuckers [meaning Hearst] inimical to the whole of my interests in this camp! To buy my allegiance against myself, in-law cunts and shitheel operators [meaning the Pinkertons] would have to bid very high indeed” (“Amalgamation and Capital” 2.9). The strength of his antipathy to the Pinkertons and Isringhausen’s precarious position as an exposed spy revealed, Swearengen then pretends that he has intercepted her boss’s telegraphed reply and convinces her to take a bribe to disappear. While Swearengen is here able to protect his own interests against the interests of Isringhausen’s employers, the forces that are consolidating the “regeneration” of Deadwood

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are poised to take control. Swearengen may be able to outwit Isringhausen as agent, but he will soon confront the full might of the Pinkerton Agency.

“The Interests that Employ Me”: The Pinkertons as corporate enforcers Though Swearengen initially is able to counter the interests behind the Pinkerton plot to seize Alma’s claim, Miss Isringhausen also presages a graver threat to the community: the Pinkertons’ role as labor enforcers, representing the corporate interests that will trump those of Deadwood’s citizens. When Adams interrogates Miss Isringhausen after her first meeting with his boss, she explains that the “interests that employ [her]” saw Alma’s ads for a tutor and sent her West (2.6). While Miss Isringhausen does not admit at this point to being a Pinkerton operative, she does ask Adams why Swearengen hates the Agency. Adams’ reply invokes another key aspect of the Pinkerton organization: their role in undermining union activity in mines and railroads across the West. With heavy sarcasm, Adams answers: “Beats me, a stalwart organization like ‘at. Did you help send them miners up the fucking scaffold in Pennsylvania?” (2.6). Here Adams refers to the Pinkerton efforts in subverting union activity on behalf of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company in Western Pennsylvania, an event that culminated in the 1877 execution of 13 miners, who may have been involved with the Molly Maguires, for murder.13 One of the Agency’s most conspicuous uses of force, this action helped shape the Pinkertons’ reputation of unbridled power acting in the service of business. The Pinkertons’ involvement in the Molly Maguire matter demonstrated their capacity for both covert action and overt force on behalf of their corporate employers. Based in the coal-mining region of eastern Pennsylvania, the Ancient Order of Hibernians—aka the Molly Maguires, or simply the “Mollies”—was a society of Irish American coal miners pledged to the service of labor organizations in opposition to corporate coal and railroad interests. By the mid-1870s these labor activists represented a significant threat to the expanding railroad industry, which depended upon close arrangements with coalmines to provide locomotives with low-cost energy. When striking railroad workers and coal miners supported by Molly violence threatened to disrupt the operations of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, the corporation hired Pinkerton to infiltrate and disrupt labor organization. Pinkerton used undercover operatives and private uniformed police to protect the property and profits of the railroad against union violence it labeled as terrorism.

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In contrast to the anonymous internal surveillance of the detective division, Pinkerton’s private police force openly identified itself so as to deter crime and advertise the potential of further Pinkerton power. The operation was a tactical success for the railroad and the Pinkertons, ending the strikes and radical union organizing. As Adams’ comment indicates, however, public opinion on the matter was not generally favorable to the Agency: questions were raised regarding everything from the railroad’s use of private police, to the Pinkertons’ role in catalyzing violence, to the complicity of the courts that sent the Mollies to the gallows. Adams makes it clear not only that this contemporaneous event was widely known (at least in Milch’s version of the story), but also that many people sympathized with the efforts of the miners against the machinations of the corporations and the Pinkertons. Paralleling the Pinkertons’ involvement with the Mollie Maguires, George Hearst employs both covert and overt force in the service of expanding his Homestake Mine operations and establishing his foothold in Deadwood. While Miss Isringhausen plots to expropriate Alma’s claim on behalf of the Pinkertons (and presumably ultimately for Hearst), Francis Wolcott arrives to implement several of Hearst’s tactics for seizing control of the camp: bribing or intimidating public officials, fomenting rumors to drive down property prices, and exercising ruthless control over the workers at Hearst’s subsurface mine. We first learn about conditions on the Hearst claims as Swearengen is trying to negotiate an alliance with Bullock to preserve Deadwood’s sovereignty. As we see the brutal subjugation of Hearst’s workers, we hear a voiceover of Wolcott reading a letter he has written to Hearst. In the course of detailing how Hearst’s holdings have been consolidated, Wolcott explains that although he knows Hearst is “anxious . . . to move to 24-hour operation, until workers at wage outnumber individual prospectors in the camp, the matter of Chinese labor remains delicate of introduction” (“Childish Things” 2.8). Wolcott makes clear what monopoly capitalism will do to Deadwood: not only will the Hearst interests eliminate the opportunities for individual prospecting, but there will be no employment opportunities for the original settlers. Once Hearst has reorganized labor in the settlement, he will set the conditions of work and import his own Chinese laborers. In the meantime, Wolcott explains, they will have to settle for German and Cornish workers; though the latter are “quicker,” they are “ever ready to combine and complain, and deserve their reputation as high-graders [i.e. thieves]” (2.8). Wolcott reads in voice-over while the camera shows the miners disciplined by being forced to strip and shower after their shift. Captain Turner, who Wolcott notes has been “invaluable to us since the Comstock,” points to one of the workers, who is thrown

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on his knees and anally examined. When they discover a hidden nugget, the worker tries to run and is gunned down by Turner (2.8). This man is publicly punished for stealing, but it is also clear that Wolcott and Hearst wish to set a deadly example against “combin[ing].” Turner’s violence hearkens back to Adams’ discussion of the Molly Maguires and looks forward to Hearst bringing in an army of Pinkertons to forward his interests in the next season.

“A Warped Unnatural Impulse”: The Pinkertons vs. local community During the central episodes of season two, Isringhausen’s scheme to defraud Alma and Hearst’s project to corner the Black Hills market in gold are juxtaposed with Swearengen’s efforts to form a local alliance in Deadwood. Reaching out to capitalist powers (Alma), small business operators (Mr. Wu), political allies (Bullock), and the press (A.W. Merrick), Swearengen endeavors to form a locally financed and administered Deadwood that will be strong enough to withstand the pressures of the Pinkertons. While the Pinkerton threat grows more ominous as it is tied more directly to Hearst, Swearengen becomes the clear protagonist of the show, especially when he aligns himself with the admirable Bullock and the sympathetic Alma. Viewers find themselves firmly behind Alma and Swearengen’s efforts to assert their own interests, despite the vice and corruption that their form of independence fosters.14 The show thus pits viewers against Deadwood’s annexation and takeover by Hearst, despite the political and legal order this further stage of development promises to bring. Through the operations of the Pinkertons, Deadwood sets up a clear antipathy between the forces loyal to Hearst and the forces voluntarily allied with Swearengen. But as Swearengen points out himself, he and Hearst are not so different in their approaches: “Running his holdings like a despot, I grant, has a fucking logic. It’s the way I fucking run mine” (“Tell Your God to Ready for Blood” 3.1). Swearengen’s problem is not with Hearst’s methods, but with his remote reach: “there’s no practical need for him to run the fucking camp. That’s out of scale. It’s out of proportion, and it’s a warped unnatural impulse, this fucking cocksucker!” (3.1). Swearengen does not condemn unfettered free-market trading, but when the scale of the exercise of power becomes too great, the “old forms of civilization” move in to undermine the freedoms implied in the “regeneration” phase of Westward migration. Hearst may be a manifestation of the productive power of American capital, but he is also, in Milch’s words:

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the monstrous abstraction of the symbol made flesh. Hearst understood what gold made possible. The only price he had to pay was to treat human beings as if they were inanimate. That’s a version of original sin. [. . .] It’s one of the horrible manifestations of human possibility, and particularly of the path that we have now taken, which is irreversible—namely, the universal organization of mankind around the symbol of gold.15 For Milch, Hearst embodies the “original sin” of capitalist commodity fetishism: the reduction of human relationships to the symbolic exchange value of gold. In opposition, Swearengen in Deadwood ’s second season becomes a human embodiment of the “regeneration” of American culture promised by Westward expansion. In his alliances with other Deadwood residents, Swearengen becomes an involuntary advocate for individual liberties, democracy, a free press, and an economic climate that favors small, local businesses over large-scale corporations. Ironically, in the face of the unbridled capitalist expansion represented by Hearst, Swearengen’s ideal Deadwood would preserve the institutions most dearly cherished in American ideology. Alma is Swearengen’s first important ally against the Pinkertons as “muscle for the bosses.” Not only does Alma possess the richest freehold claim in the Black Hills, but she also establishes a bank that will, in her own words, “make available funds to organize and develop our community; to build businesses and homes, and whose deposits are guaranteed by gold not two miles distant” (“A Two-Headed Beast” 3.5). Alma explicitly contrasts this local economic model with “the events of late in the east,” a vague reference to the reverberating effects of the Panic of 1873 (3.5). As Milch observes, this oblique reference provides a context for the metaphorical resonance of the gold rush: “the bank panics of 1873 . . . were the result of complicated manipulations and distortions of money produced by people who understood that there were realities at the level of the symbol that you could fuck with. [. . .] A gold strike offers a way to get back to the supposed reality of the symbol—to find real gold.”16 By invoking the local material wealth that will undergird local capital and underwrite local businesses, Alma makes a clear connection between the physical resources of the camp and their symbolic meaning as capital. Milch also notes the connection between gold as actual foundation of wealth and the ideals of American society: “a gold strike promises a social space where the promise that all men are created equal will finally be fulfilled . . . outside the falsifying structures of social classes and legality.”17 Paradoxically, the individual freedom signified by Westward expansion—the “regeneration” of Deadwood—is only possible through the community development of local institutions like Alma’s bank. And the power of these institutions is signaled by the cross-cut between Alma’s bank capital being deposited in Star and

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Bullock’s Hardware and Isringhausen agreeing to abandon her scheme, suggesting that Deadwood is momentarily strong enough to resist Pinkerton intimidation on behalf of moneyed Eastern interests. Just after establishing his new relationship with Alma, Swearengen reinforces his commercial alliance with another important local leader: Mr. Wu. After discovering that Wolcott is operating in the camp, Swearengen’s first play against Hearst is offered to him by Wu, the undisputed leader of the Chinese in Deadwood, who is vital to Swearengen’s interests through supplying opium and helping to dispose of dead bodies. Wu’s position is challenged when a San Francisco tong working with Hearst brings a wagonload of drug-addled and starving Chinese prostitutes into the camp. When Wu enlists Swearengen’s help against the “San Francisco cocksucker” who is challenging him for control, Swearengen cautiously but clearly backs him: Swearengen discovers the tong leader’s intentions, speaks to Hearst on Wu’s behalf, and eventually engineers a battle (sanctioned by Hearst) in which several of Swearengen’s lieutenants help Wu defeat his rival (2.6). While Swearengen’s actions in this conflict are certainly not morally heroic, he does work for the lesser evil of independently and locally controlled vice as against Hearst’s domination. Swearengen’s support of local economic institutions like Wu’s operation and Alma’s bank is part of a larger project to protect his own business against controlling external forces. Ironically, Swearengen’s pursuit of his own interests turns out to be in the camp’s best interests, particularly when trying to preserve Deadwood’s rights of self-determination. Always a man with his eye on the bigger picture, Swearengen understands that his economic interests require certain political structures to undergird them. If Deadwood’s lawless status allows the Pinkertons to ride roughshod over individual property claims, then Deadwood needs a social framework that fosters individual agency. The ideals of democracy, a free press, local economic control, and individual rights are thus not fostered through ideological commitment, but through self-interested preservation. The next attack on the camp’s independence comes from the administration of the Dakota Territory, which plans to annex the region. Commissioner Jarry publicly intimates that Dakota will not respect property rights as established in Deadwood, thereby driving down the price of claims and abetting Hearst-backed Cy Tolliver’s project to buy claims below market value. Against this alliance of Jarry-Hearst-Wolcott-Tolliver, Swearengen enlists Bullock and his “good appearance” as “an asset in the comin’ campaign” (2.8). Swearengen is quick to see that the new alliance between government and capital will usurp individual rights in the camp: “Our cause is surviving, not bein’ allied with Yankton or cogs in the Hearst machine, to show it don’t

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fate us as runts, or two-headed calves or pigs with excess legs, to a good fuckin’ grindin’ up” (2.8). His plan is to use Bullock’s former connections to intimate Deadwood’s annexation to Montana in order to exert some measure of self-determination: “should we ruminate publicly in loud voices over formin’ a new territory with an eye towards future statehood, or even our own republic?” (2.8). When Bullock jokes with him about creating a dictatorship in Deadwood, Swearengen observes that such a consolidation of power is precisely opposed to their interests: “What the fuck do we need a dictatorship for, that silences the public voice, that eases the enemy’s way? Noises made, overtures to outside interests and enlistment of the hooples’ participation is what this situation demands” (2.8). Swearengen proposes to harness the rhetorical power of democracy to pit the hooples’ active participation in Deadwood’s sovereignty against Hearst’s combine. Threatened by Hearst’s capital and Yankton’s corruption, Swearengen’s only play to save his business interests is to promote democracy, hoping that the promise of active political agency will inoculate the hooples against Hearst’s offers to buy their support. At this point in the camp’s development, the only environment stable enough to allow Swearengen to operate is one based in democracy, the rule of law premised upon individual rights (especially the right to property), and a locally financed and administered economy. When Swearengen meets with Alma to forge their alliance, we see that these social structures would also benefit nearly all the inhabitants of Deadwood, especially those whose lives or livelihoods are threatened by outside interests. The struggle between the corporate forces represented by the Pinkertons and the self-determining forces represented by Swearengen necessitates a choice between the two, as Swearengen insists to Bullock: “Our moment permits interest in one question only: will we, of Deadwood, be more than targets for ass-fucking? To not grab ankle is to declare yourself interested. What’s your posture, Bullock?” (2.8). Though Bullock has been smirking through much of Swearengen’s discussion, he immediately sobers, sits upright, and declares “as you see,” acknowledging the threat to independence and self-determination posed by governmental and corporate forces (2.8). Swearengen’s next move is to align the civil resources of the camp against the gathering storm of outside influences. He begins by enlisting Merrick’s Pioneer to help counter Yankton’s influence. While Merrick has resolutely resisted outside influences in maintaining the independence of his newspaper, most notably in refusing to print Yankton’s fictitious notice about abrogating property rights, he is willing to use the Pioneer to help preserve Deadwood’s right of self-determination. Swearengen suggests that Merrick help his and Bullock’s campaign by publishing a sly negation: “Sheriff Bullock would not

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confirm having met with representatives from the Montana territory to discuss their offer of annexation” (2.8). With his customary exuberance, Merrick prints an article that not only intimates Bullock’s Montana connections, but also raises the possibilities of Deadwood being annexed to Wyoming and even “an offer secretly proffered by certain elements in Washington D.C. to annex to America these our beloved hills as a separate freestanding territory, with an eye towards eventual statehood” (2.8). Swearengen is dubious about the Pioneer article, but it does have the desired effect of pressuring Yankton into allowing local elections and developing the democracy that Swearengen sees as a buffer to outside exploitation. This victory for self-determination is short-lived, as Hearst and the Pinkertons counter quickly. After Swearengen and Merrick’s conversation, Wolcott arrives to report that “a Cornishman at theft has been shot in Mr. Hearst’s claim” by one of his labor enforcers (2.9). Wolcott here reveals that Hearst is unafraid to exercise his power beyond the force of law: as Sheriff, Bullock is only notified perfunctorily and after the fact about the miner’s death. Without knowing precisely what he means, Charlie Utter then cries out: “It’s all fuckin’ amalgamation and capital, ain’t it, Wolcott?” (2.9). To Utter, “amalgamation and capital” signify the changes not only in the camp, but in the West more generally—the closing of the frontier that made Wild Bill a living anachronism. As he later explains to Bullock, “Some big-shot Eastern magazine reporter interviewin’ Bill said that was what’s changing things around” (2.8). Utter’s assessment unwittingly characterizes the camp’s precarious position: by combining the power of the Pinkertons with the authorization of government sanction, Hearst’s economic interests threaten the frontier town with national and international forces beyond its control. Wolcott mocks Utter’s challenge by asking “Mr. Utter, are you a student of Hume? Smith? A disciple of Karl Marx?” (2.8). While Wolcott simply means to underscore Utter’s lack of economic understanding, he ironically invokes Marx’s “general law of capitalist accumulation,” in which “all methods for raising the social productivity of labor are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker” (799).18 As Wolcott’s account of Hearst’s labor practices affirms, the situation of the workers in Deadwood is indeed fated to grow worse. In almost the same breath, Wolcott threatens to undermine the alliance being formed by Swearengen by discounting Bullock’s influence on annexation: “My employer, Mr. Hearst, has interests and connections in Montana, Sheriff, as are imputed to you in this morning’s Pioneer ” (2.8). Not only does Wolcott claim Hearst’s extra-territorial power to administer justice, but he also intimates that the legal structures Swearengen has mobilized against Hearst will be undercut by the untrammeled power of “amalgamation and capital.” Before Hearst arrives in the camp, then, the tentacles of his combine

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implement a system of interest that the camp can neither fully comprehend nor resist. Deadwood as a society of “regeneration” has been produced and destroyed by the forces of “amalgamation and capital” as embodied in the Pinkertons, rather than by the “dominant individualism” of the Western pioneer. But the viewer is still nostalgic for this impossible condition of “regeneration,” the iconic representation of the potential of the West. As Boym asserts, “nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.”19

“Take Them Amateurs off the Fuckin’ Sugar Tit”: Hearst’s Pinkertons Ultimately, the corporate and governmental forces of “amalgamation and capital” destroy the fledgling community they have unintentionally created. Swearengen might have been able to contain Pinkerton influence in the short term, but in the third season Pinkerton violence moves from the background to the foreground. In the second season Hearst surrounds himself with all the trappings of Pinkerton power—from Wolcott and Captain Turner to the guards at his diggings—but only in the third season are these entities specifically named as Pinkertons. When Hearst’s new Pinkerton reinforcements trot their horses through the town under the watchful eyes of Hearst and Swearengen on their respective balconies, even the increasingly marginalized Cy Tolliver recognizes that their arrival represents a change to the camp’s order: “Take them amateurs off the fucking sugar tit. Mr. Hearst brought the pros to town” (“Unauthorized Cinnamon” 3.7). The Pinkertons are indeed professionals: their campaign of intimidation seems indiscriminate at first, but there is a pattern to their violence that intimates a greater strategy. In their most dominant manifestation, the Pinkertons are directed by machinations that neither the short-tempered Bullock nor the shrewd but insular Swearengen can unravel. The ability of Hearst’s complex system of economic, political, and police power to dispatch its foes is seen in the Pinkertons’ dismissal of the potential threat posed by the legendary lawmen Morgan and Wyatt Earp, who arrive in Deadwood just before the mass of Pinkerton men in season three. As it had with Wild Bill before them, Deadwood trades on the Earps’ myth, developed through sensational contemporaneous news accounts, pulp fiction, and innumerable film versions of the showdown at the OK Corral. Within this sphere of Western Americana, the Earps represent the “dominant individualism” of the mythic Western lawman that might counter the power of the Pinkertons.20 Competent though they initially seem, the Earps are quickly rendered irrelevant to the larger struggles of the town: in what seems like a random attempt

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at intimidation, a Pinkerton agent goads Morgan into shooting him in the street, and while the Earps manage to avoid prosecution for unlawful shooting, they must leave camp, effectively giving Hearst his victory. The quick exit of the Earps demonstrates the power of the Hearst combine to dispatch any who stand in its way, however well armed with the literal or metaphoric trappings of Western individualism. Rather than simply acting as a violent force to intimidate his enemies, Hearst’s Pinkertons mirror his corporate complexity: able to harness frontier passions while containing their own, the Pinkertons use violence to provoke irrational responses from Swearengen and his allies. Moreover, the idea of heroic individualism is so foreign to the Pinkerton operatives that they are willing to sacrifice of one of their own men in order to force the Earps to leave. In Hearst’s plan for taking over the town, the Pinkertons are thus entirely subordinated to the larger interests they represent.

“Our Interests Are Extensive”: Hearst and the reach of capital As Deadwood ’s third season draws to its close, the forces marshaled by Hearst and embodied in the Pinkertons spin further away from Swearengen and Bullock’s grasp. Whatever temporary victories the allied forces of the camp have made vanish as Hearst exercises the full might of his economic, political, and physical power to bring Deadwood to heel. As the season builds toward its close, Hearst explains the economic philosophy that drives him and his mining combine across the West. Frustrated and ready to move on to his next venture, Hearst laments that his search for “the color” makes him an outcast in the places he must work. He explains his views to Odell, his cook’s son and potential business partner: Hearst: Gold confers power. Power comes to any man who has the color. Odell: Even if he’s black? Hearst: That is our species’ hope: that uniformly agreeing on its value we organize as to seek the color. (3.7) This scene plays on the dual meaning of the word “color,” For Hearst, it simply means gold; for Odell, it connotes race. Hearst holds out to Odell the possibility that capitalism’s valuation of gold will supersede the petty concerns of racism in favor of the principle of accumulation. But Hearst’s last line also plays on the homonym “species’” / “specie’s”: is it currency’s desire that we agree upon its value, or does our species choose to imbue capitalism with this transcendent power?

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The slippage of Hearst’s language, eliding the difference between a system based on an external, intrinsically valued specie, and one rooted in the fallibility of the human species , represents both the power and potential threat of the capitalist system. As an alternative to primitive commodity-based economies, capitalism has the ability to spur economic and social progress, but it will inevitably contradict the abstract notion of “social progress” that it simultaneously enables. Milch explains: “The agreement to believe in a common symbol of value [i.e. gold] is really a society trying to find a way to organize itself in some way other than, say, hunting or killing.”21 The series dramatizes the effects of this belief system on a community that is trying to resist incorporation into Hearst’s far-flung empire and the larger network of international capitalism. Hearst’s willingness to ignore the role of the species in determining the circulation of specie represents the rhetorical sleight of hand that overthrows the town’s independence: by agreeing that gold has value because of its circulation as currency, the town is helpless to resist the more pernicious effects of Hearst’s combine. Hearst’s defense of his enterprise to Odell is based upon the emancipatory potential of the broad project of Western liberalism, but this gesture of inclusion is undercut by Hearst’s simultaneous desire to incorporate Odell’s community in Liberia in order to exploit it financially, with any potential social benefits accruing accidentally. Rather than fearing the collapse of the social construction of capitalism, or celebrating its liberatory potential as justification for its excesses, Hearst is happy to manipulate the social ephemera of the system to serve his financially motivated ends. Thus, the very thing (gold-as-currency) that allows Deadwood—and potentially Liberia—to exist as a frontier space both incorporates the town into the larger circulations of global capitalism and precipitates the destruction of the frontier ethos that purportedly gives it life. The series’ close initially seems to be at odds with this operation of amalgamation and capital, as the town appears to rid itself of Hearst. In the penultimate scene of the series, Hearst rides ceremoniously out of town surrounded by a glaring assembly of the town’s principle characters. Hearst is off to his next concern, finished with Deadwood and with no plans to return. Neither the town nor the audience is fooled, however, because Hearst’s victory is now so extensive as to make his individual presence unnecessary. Having routed the local and mutually allied interests of Swearengen, Bullock, and Alma Garrett, Hearst has turned Deadwood into a company town, a simple extension of the international Hearst combine. By the time of his exit, Hearst has rigged the territory’s election, forced Alma to sell her claim, killed Ellsworth, organized the replacement of Merrick’s Pioneer, and caused Swearengen to kill one of his prostitutes as tribute. Quite simply, Hearst has vanquished the local interests of Deadwood, and as the

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men assemble to watch him leave they are denied even recourse to simple violence (that hallmark of individual Western justice over and above the law) by the protective Pinkertons. A seething Bullock watches the triumphant Hearst swagger toward his stagecoach before chasing after him, and for a moment it seems as if Bullock will effect justice in the manner of the slighted lawman. But even Bullock recognizes the futility of this gesture, and he simply glares impotently as the carriage drives on. Hearst’s leaving is a symbol of his success. Having created a system in which the individual Western hero is powerless, he can absent himself, leaving only the system powered by the faceless violence of the Pinkertons to serve in his stead. The system built by Hearst’s belief in “the color” extends beyond him and stays after him, leaving a town hollowed out by capital. The violence of this transition is captured in the same scene, though paradoxically not by any of the principal parties opposed to Hearst—Bullock, Garret, or Swearengen—but instead by Cy Tolliver. On the balcony overlooking Hearst’s departure, Tolliver pulls a Derringer and considers shooting Hearst. Tolliver’s temporary alliance with Hearst resulted in his estrangement from both the Deadwood community and the Hearst combine, and he seethes with the hatred of a jilted lover. His threatened assassination is an impotent gesture from the first, emphasized by his comically small firearm, one unable to reach the street below. But not only can Tolliver not kill Hearst, no one even seems to pay him any mind. Tolliver substitutes Leon for Hearst, stabbing the addict for seemingly no reason other than his desire to put his knife in someone. When no one notices Leon’s murder, and his resolve to assassinate Hearst fails, Tolliver turns the derringer on the prostitute who accompanies him. Unarmed and terrified by his madness, she is forced to use her only armor—her sexuality—and bares her breasts. As cowed by her femininity as he has been by the masculine drama of the street below, Tolliver crumples in his failure to kill either the threat to his economic prosperity (Hearst) or the witness to that failure (the prostitute). Tolliver’s impotence, however, reflects the ultimate powerlessness of Deadwood in the face of Hearst’s control: Hearst’s interests have utterly subverted individual agency in Deadwood, to the point of forcing its residents to turn on one another. The camera returns to Bullock and Utter following Hearst’s exit and Tolliver’s (unnoticed) failure, and the pair discusses whether or not they can consider this a victory. Al’s final comment—“[he] wants me to tell him something pretty”—serves equally well for both Bullock and the audience, who want to see this as a victory for the heroic Western individual (“Tell Him Something Pretty” 3.12). The audience is inclined to read the series generically as confirming a victory for the principles of “dominant individualism,” but while Deadwood does end with Hearst gone and the town’s local allies largely intact, the effect is far from triumphant. The series’ conclusion

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represents not simply the failure of individuals—Bullock, Swearengen, and Tolliver—but the failure of individualism itself in the face of the extensive interests of the Hearst combine. Bullock and Swearengen are welcome to assume the field of Deadwood as victors, but that field is now entirely in the service of economic interests beyond its borders. Though Bullock may not recognize this situation, both Tolliver and Swearengen have done so in their different ways, and Leon serves as the slowly expiring evidence of the combine’s saturation of the space of Deadwood.

Conclusion: “Tell Him Something Pretty”22 Beginning as it does with a yearning for a space with “no law at all,” Deadwood seems prepared to trace the grand march of American civilization as described by Turner: a transformation of the liberal democratic individual through the savage spaces of the West. As it progresses, however, the series instead offers a revision of the Western and a more complicated vision of how community is developed at the edge of the American empire. As Jane Tompkins observes, the traditional Western is masterfully ideological, in that it makes a certain set of beliefs seem entirely natural and unquestionable. According to Tompkins, the “ethical system [that] the Western proposes [. . .] vindicates conflict, violence, and vengeance” and creates a “social and political hierarchy” privileging the independent White male. 23 As in Slotkin’s Frontier Myth, the traditional Western uses the seemingly iconoclastic lone individual to naturalize a society built on unbridled competition. In contrast, Deadwood manipulates the conventions of the traditional Western in order to imagine a society built on rational cooperation, if only in the form of a reluctant collaboration that occurs in the face of a systemic threat to the town’s existence. Attempting to establish himself as a self-reliant individual in the Western mode, Swearengen is forced by the looming threat of Hearst and his Pinkertons into a cooperation that gives the lie to the myth of such iconic heroes, or rather shows how such individualism actually serves the needs of voracious capitalism. In his resistance to corporate control through constructing strategic alliances, fostering democracy, and championing a free press, Swearengen is an ironic mirror image of the lone Western hero, one for whom community, not individualism, is both the end and the means of his frontier project. Moreover, because these aspects of liberal democracy are byproducts of resistance to the powers represented by the Pinkertons, Deadwood exposes the tension between the Western and the American values it ostensibly promotes.

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The nostalgia thus produced by the series’ close does not pine for the rugged individualism of Turner’s frontier, but rather for a time when we could unironically endorse individualism as the foundation of American democracy. The series does not long for the wide-open spaces of a John Ford Western, vacant and perpetually open to settlement by the heroic American individual; indeed, long shots of the horizon are eschewed in favor of a focus upon the muddy streets of the town. Instead, the series traces the destruction of the belief in the ideological value of the Western hero, be he a legendary lawman or a pimp with political aspirations. At the series’ close, the camera focuses on neither the horizon nor an upright hero, but instead shows a midrange shot of Swearengen in his office: alone in the darkening room, Swearengen kneels to patiently wash away a bloodstain left by a dead prostitute he murdered as a sacrifice to Hearst’s voracious appetites. Unable to posit the iconic American individualism of the Western except as nostalgia, Deadwood refuses to tell us something pretty about either the history of capitalism’s conquest of democracy, or the possibility of individual agency in corporate America. Deadwood ’s heroes do not ride off into the sunset; they stoop to scrub the scene of their costly failures.

Notes 1 David Milch, Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills, interviews by David Samuels (New York: Home Box Office, 2006), 41. Hereafter, Stories. 2 Milch, Stories, 41–3. 3 Ibid., 43. 4 Ibid. 5 Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (1920; Huntington, NY: Robert E. Krieger, 1976), 59. 6 Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 15. 7 “Nostalgia (from nostos —return home, and algia —longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed.” See Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic, 2001), xiii. 8 Milch, “The New Language of the Old West” (supplementary material on DVD release of Deadwood, disk six), HBO Video, 2008. Milch explains the guiding premise behind his original pitch to HBO (for a series on police in ancient Rome): “‘I was interested in how people improvised the structures of a society when there was no law to guide them,’ he said. ‘How the law

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developed out of the social impulse to minimize the collateral damage of the taking of revenge.’” Mark Singer, “The Misfit: How David Milch Got from ‘NYPD Blue’ to ‘Deadwood’ by Way of an Epistle of St. Paul,” New Yorker 81.1 (February 14–21, 2005): 200. 9 The company exists today as a subsidiary of the Swedish security firm Securitas. AB. James MacKay, Allan Pinkerton: The First Private Eye (Edison, NJ: Castle, 2007), 238–9; Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations website, www.securitas.com/pinkerton/en/, accessed 12 July 2011. 10 The FBI was founded as the “Bureau of Investigation” in 1908. The Postal Service and the Treasury Department both had associated police forces during the nineteenth century, but while these operatives had a broad geographical range, they had a narrow object of investigation. Frank Morn, “The Eye Never Sleeps”: A History of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), 191. 11 The date is disputed: for 1855 see Morn, “The Eye Never Sleeps,” 17–26; for 1851, see MacKay, Allan Pinkerton, 70. 12 Pinkerton hired his first female agent in 1856 (McKay 74–5). 13 See Morn, 95; Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Perennial, 2001), 244. 14 For a reading of Deadwood that sees the series as “an allegory of how neo-liberal reasoning produces social effects” see Daniel Worden, “Neo-liberalism and the Western: HBO’s Deadwood as National Allegory,” Canadian Review of American Studies 39.2 (2009): 221–46. 15 Milch, Stories, 46. 16 Ibid., 43, 45. 17 Ibid., 45. 18 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1976), 799. 19 Boym, xiii. 20 Richard Slotkin points out in Gunfighter Nation that “[t]he national fame of [the gunfight at the OK Corral] was itself an artifact of Hollywood culture” (Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America [Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992], 384). In George Cosamatos’ 1993 film Tombstone, for example, the Earp brothers are reluctant lawmen comfortable employing spectacular violence in the name of the law. 21 Milch, Stories, 41. 22 Swerengen (3.12). 23 Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 46.

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4 “Securing the Color”: The racial economy of Deadwood Daniel Worden n the first episode of the HBO television series Deadwood, a Norwegian family is massacred as they travel from Deadwood back to Minnesota. This is a fictionalized account of the 1876 Metz Massacre, where the murders were staged to look like Indian killings but were, in fact, committed by White bandits.1 Like all plot elements in Deadwood, the massacre elicits multiple responses and opportunities for strategic maneuvering on the part of the show’s central characters. Formerly a sheriff in Montana, and soon to be sheriff in Deadwood, Seth Bullock and the famed Western gunfighter “Wild Bill” Hickok decide to ride out to the massacre site in the middle of the night, with the hopes of finding the surviving Metz girl, Sofia. Later that morning, Bullock and Hickok accuse a member of the bandit party of committing the murders and gun him down in the street. While Bullock and Hickok act as agents of the law—though, in this case, the law is simply a moral code rather than juridical system—the owner of Deadwood’s Gem Saloon, Al Swearengen, approaches the news of the massacre from a different angle. Knowing that the murders were committed by a road agent, Persimmon Phil, in his employ, and dreading that Bullock and Hickok’s posse will lose him money by emptying out his Gem Saloon on a busy night, Swearengen pleads caution:

I

Now, I know word’s circulating Indians killed a family on the Spearfish Road. Now it’s not for me to tell anyone in this camp what to do, as much as I don’t want more people getting their throats cut, scalps lifted or any other godless thing that these godless bloodthirsty heathens do. Or even if someone wants to ride out in darkness tonight. But I will tell you this. I’d use tonight to get myself organized. Ride out in the morning

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clear-headed. And starting tomorrow morning, I will offer a personal fiftydollar bounty for every decapitated head of as many of these godless heathen cocksuckers as anyone can bring in. Tomorrow. With no upper limit! That’s all I say on that subject, except next round’s on the house. And God rest the souls of that poor family. And pussy’s half price, next 15 minutes. (“Deadwood” 1.1) Swearengen’s speech, and his actions in the series more generally, privilege profit above all else. As Swearengen exclaims when he learns of the forming posse, “I guarantee it this minute, my entire fucking action downstairs is fucked up! Nobody’s drinking, nobody’s gambling, nobody’s chasing tail. I have to deal with that!” (1.1). His plea for continued consumption of the Gem’s products—alcohol, gambling, and sex—relies upon exaggerated Indian-killing rhetoric; Swearengen is motivated here by neither racial solidarity nor racial hatred, but instead by economic interest. In this scene, race is less of a stable hierarchical category than a tool of efficient markets, a tool that consolidates subjects into a consenting body of consumers. Swearengen’s bounty on Indian heads is just one instance of race’s central yet instrumental role in Deadwood. Race is invoked to solidify or erode relationships, where distinctions between Americans, Irish, Jews, and Chinese form part of both business and romantic connections. Imperial conquest explicitly entails the extermination of the Native American, as, for example, when Al Swearangen offers a bounty on Native American heads, or when Seth Bullock fights a Native American to the death in a later episode. Yet while race connotes cultural difference, it is not necessarily a site of sanctioned discrimination, as characters who aim to stir up trouble in the camp are often punished for their hate mongering and rabble rousing. When Pinkerton agents insult the “Nigger General” Fields as he waits in line to vote, Deputy Sheriff Charlie Utter intervenes on the part of Fields, though his instruction to “get your nigger ass back in line [to vote]” uses racist language in the service of an ostensibly anti-racist intervention (“Tell Him Something Pretty” 3.12). After the Pinkerton further threatens Fields by telling Charlie that he “better be walking him home afterwards,” Charlie responds to the Pinkerton, “You’d better see to that yourself, ’cause if he don’t make it, you’ll be eating your spuds running till I hunt you the fuck down” (3.12). Knowing that the Pinkertons have come to town in the employ of George Hearst, the mining baron, Charlie’s actions are motivated just as much, if not more, by his hatred of the Pinkerton’s interference in local matters and Hearst’s violent monopolistic tactics as by any strong commitment to the Fifteenth Amendment. What Swearengen and Utter’s seemingly different, strategic uses of race have in common are their ties to the economy, the force that both brings

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Deadwood into existence as an illegal settlement in Native American land and governs Deadwood, a town in a “state of exception,” outside of federal rule. Swearengen uses Indian-killing rhetoric to revive business at his saloon, and Utter enforces voting rights in a demonstration of local resistance to the Pinkertons, enforcers of Hearst’s monopolistic interests. By linking race to economic interests so explicitly, Deadwood demonstrates the free market’s role in “securing the color,” a phrase used in the series by George Hearst to describe his mining interest, but one that also usefully connects economic security, as well as Hearst’s own desire for monopoly, to the construction of clear racial boundaries (“Boy the Earth Talks To” 2.12). In this essay, I argue that Deadwood dramatizes connections between nineteenth-century racial imaginaries and neoliberal—or contemporary—racial imaginaries, especially in the way the show uses economic competition as a measure of both individual merit and racial hierarchy. 2 Deadwood, then, demonstrates how the discourse of free market individualism—whether it is about the nineteenth-century frontier or twenty-first-century neoliberalism—is bound up in instrumental racial categories, categories that are employed to achieve economic ends. 3

Race and economics in a twenty-first-century Western Deadwood’ s dramatization of race’s subsumption within capital has two historical valences. As a drama set in the American West of the 1870s, Deadwood resonates with both triumphalist and critical accounts of manifest destiny. It both repeats well-worn tropes of Western genre narratives about the extinction of Native Americans in the face of Anglo colonization and the untapped wealth of the frontier, while also emphasizing the ways in which Westward expansion held out the possibility for the construction of alternative forms of social belonging. At the same time, as a television show originally aired from 2004 to 2006, Deadwood ’s representation of history is also a representation of the present. Accounts of Deadwood routinely emphasize the show’s historical accuracy, and this accuracy has a dual function as Deadwood simultaneously represents 1870s’ Deadwood in a way that clearly takes into account, and even contests, “New West” approaches to American history and literature, and sublates that history into twenty-first-century economic and political realities.4 Central to this double signification is Deadwood ’s representation of race as a social reality that connotes merely arbitrary difference, in contrast to wealth and markets which are generators of a difference that always results

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in inequality. What makes Deadwood ’s representation of race and economics so notable is the way in which it captures the logic of our present moment; race appears to be a site of inequality, even as institutionalized and legalized racism wanes, while markets and wealth appear to be democratizing when, in fact, they are stratifying. The town of Deadwood’s founding principle is profit, and the television series dramatizes the unevenness inherent in the promise of prosperity offered by the frontier. In economic disputes, race often becomes a point of tension in Deadwood. For example, when Swearengen decides that he will kill only one of the two White men who robbed Chinatown boss Mr. Wu’s opium carrier, Wu responds with consternation. Swearengen replies, “When did you start thinking every wrong had a remedy, Wu? Did you come to camp for justice, or to make your fucking way?” (“Sold Under Sin” 1.12). Al’s question removes justice from the accumulation of wealth, disjoining equal treatment under the law from opportunity within the free market. Swearengen’s recognition of this disconnect—of the contingent rather than causal relation between justice and wealth—reflects, though inversely, the arguments made in recent works by Walter Benn Michaels, Adolph Reed Jr., and Kenneth W. Warren about race and economics. All three critics have argued that the promise of antiracist politics has reached a point of exhaustion, as economic inequality has only grown in the wake of civil rights and multicultural politics. Multiculturalism and, especially for Reed and Warren, African American studies have long connected identity politics to increased equality. For Michaels, multiculturalism yokes belief to identity, thus making any politics of equality impossible. Equality is, of course, what multiculturalism purports to value, but Michaels suggests that, in fact, multiculturalism values only cultural practices that have no bearing on equality: “The commitment to cultural diversity makes sense as long as the practices it asks us to value are those practices that seem to us neither better nor worse, neither true nor false—as long as they involve or constitute an identity.”5 For Adolph Reed Jr., advocates of mainstream Black politics have mistakenly cast racism as a dominant logic in the contemporary United States because it fits in with familiar civil rights political rhetoric: “academic and other advocates of what in an earlier time was called the ‘race line’ increasingly have seemed to elevate maintaining racism’s status as uniquely egregious among forms of injustice over the goal of challenging injustice itself.”6 Addressing African American literary studies more particularly, Kenneth W. Warren argues that in the contemporary United States, despite the best intentions of those who employ the term outside its proper historical boundaries, African American literature does little more than to

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summon the past as guarantor of the altruistic interests of current elites and to express this cadre’s proprietary interest in the tastes and habits of the more exploited members of our society under circumstances in which the success of these elites has less and less to do with the type of social change that would make a profound difference in the fortunes of those at the bottom of our socio-economic order.7 Today, these critics argue, it is clear that multiculturalism has not created a more equal world but has instead fed into the neoliberal erosion of the welfare state and dramatic increases in economic inequality. Swearengen’s question to Wu makes clear this difference—access to markets has no necessary relation to social justice, and in fact, the two are often at odds with one another. In light of these critics’ work, it becomes clear that the political project of multiculturalism has been appropriated by neoliberalism, an ideology for which access to markets promises, but does not in fact lead to, social justice or equality. As identity became the political core of multiculturalism under neoliberalism, any sense of the collective good becomes increasingly difficult to imagine, thus defusing the initial political promise of multiculturalism and replacing its egalitarian goals with free market ideology. This is not to say that Deadwood ignores racism or explains it away as a merely economic problem. Indeed, Deadwood offers a rich account of the varied and complex racial designations, ethnicities, and tensions present in the late nineteenth-century United States, and it foregrounds how race has very real effects on economics, and vice versa. In Deadwood, the Civil War still looms large, as, for example, when Al Swearengen debates whether or not a framed portrait of President Lincoln helps or inhibits business in his saloon. In the second season, the “Nigger General” Fields is tarred because he is wearing a Union general’s uniform, reminding one of the town drunks, Steve, that his cousin took over his family’s business as he fought in the Civil War. He blames Fields for his lost claim on the business: “You stole my look at riches, you and your fucking monkey cousins” (“Complications” 2.5). Earlier in the episode, Steve tries to lynch the county commissioner, who has threatened to nullify all property claims in Deadwood. Finding the commissioner protected, he then lashes out at Fields. Steve’s racism is clearly a refracted sense of economic alienation; his hostility toward federal regulations of the free market finds expression as racist resentment. Furthermore, Steve and the “Nigger General” are bound not only by mutual antagonism but also kinship. They have the same last name, “Fields,” and by the end of Deadwood ’s third season, the “Nigger General” takes over Steve’s business and Steve’s care after Steve is kicked in the head by a horse. Racial hostility does not dissolve as much as racial hierarchy is parodied in their relationship.

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The “Nigger General” and Steve become a perverse iteration of the Black and White, homosocial couple so common in American culture, from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Lethal Weapon. Along with the residual racial aggressions connoted by the Civil War, Deadwood also features relations and tensions between ethnic Whites— immigrants from Norway, Ireland, Cornwall, and Russia, as well as Sol Starr, repeatedly referred to as “the Jew”—along with Chinese, Native American, and Mexican characters. An ensemble show, Deadwood ’s wide range of characters and shifting foci have much in common with HBO’s other critically acclaimed drama about a place, The Wire. These two shows share an emphasis not on family, the other major structuring principle of HBO dramas (e.g. Big Love, Six Feet Under, and The Sopranos ), but instead on setting. Regarding The Wire ’s enormous cast of characters, Fredric Jameson remarks that the show “challenges and problematizes the distinction between protagonists and ‘secondary characters’ (or stars and ‘character actors’) in ways most often described, I guess, as ‘epic’ (War and Peace, Gone With the Wind ).”8 Discarding the term “epic,” Jameson goes on to argue that The Wire signals a shift in both mass culture and realism, wherein evil vanishes in the face of mere difference, and realism becomes not only the dramatization of necessity—the limits imposed on agents by society—but also of utopian possibility. These seemingly “epic” television serials feature heterogeneous casts, not in a reflection of diversity and contemporary politics of representation, but as a way of reclaiming realism, a realism that emerges after postmodernism undoes and complicates the arguably middle-class, White male focus of nineteenth-century realist narrative. Deadwood differs from its contemporary, urban HBO counterpart, however, through its use of realism as a way to recover melodrama. As Jameson remarks, melodrama and villains, in particular, can be thought of as waning in the contemporary moment: Thus today, paradoxically, the multiplication of consumer niches and the differentiation of “lifestyles” go hand in hand with the reduction of everything to the price tag and the flattening out of motivations to the sheerly financial: money, which used to be interesting in the variety of its pursuits, now becoming supremely boring as the universal source of action. The omnipresence of the word greed in all national political vocabularies recently disguises the flatness of this motivation, which has none of the passionate or obsessive quality of older social drives and the older literature that drew on them as its source.9

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What Deadwood presents the viewer with, however, is not the “flatness” of greed but the difference between “greed” as an inherently social desire and “greed” as a purely antisocial desire, and race is instrumental in defining the difference between the two. Greed as a social desire—the greed most consistently embodied in the show by Al Swearengen—functions as a libertarian politics, but one that ultimately embraces social institutions such as democratic elections, law enforcement, and public schools. For Swearengen, maintaining his own interests ultimately leads to the creation of a local government and public services, institutions that he helps to construct in order to stave off outside interference but that also produce an increasingly functional public sphere and local government over the course of the show’s three seasons. In stark opposition, George Hearst’s greed is entirely antisocial. He desires dominance over both people and the land, and he wishes everyone to “obey [him] like dogs” (“True Colors” 3.3). Hearst does not consider subjects, like his Chinese and Cornish workers, or even other Deadwood elites like Cy Tolliver, to belong to the category of the “human” while, at the same time, he trades in rhetoric about the transcendence over racial difference afforded by “the color,” his term for gold. Whether figured through Swearengen’s self-interest or Hearst’s logic of transcendence and dominance, race’s function is determined in Deadwood by competing visions of the free market and its limits. For Hearst, race is mere difference. It implies no meaningful qualitative distinctions among those subjected to his rule. In this sense, the logic of tolerance meshes quite nicely with Hearst’s monopolistic understanding of the free market. If all subjects are objects through which he gains access to wealth, then racial difference becomes the kind of difference that can be tolerated—that is, it becomes the kind of difference that does not violate any conditions of social belonging since, for Hearst, social belonging means only being subject to Hearst’s will. For Swearengen, however, racial difference remains meaningful, for his understanding of the free market relies upon the agency of others, whether his own employees, his business partners, or citizens of Deadwood. Race is not subsumed by his own desire for profit but is instead one factor among many that Swearengen must negotiate in order to engage with other individuals. Hearst’s nearly monomaniacal interest in gold registers as a perverse exaggeration of our contemporary discourse of racial tolerance, in which racial difference should be thought of as mere difference and in which access to the marketplace signifies equality. Swearengen’s close ties to the day-to-day workings of Deadwood, however, demonstrate how central race is to any conception of the marketplace that recognizes the existence of, and even values, public, social life.

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Al Swearengen and the common good Lasting only three seasons, the narrative arc of Deadwood can be broken into two parts. The first part spans from the beginning of season one to the beginning of season two, some months later, and is characterized by wealth’s accumulation in Deadwood, especially around the show’s central characters Seth Bullock, Alma Garrett, and Al Swearengen. In the first season, Swearengen decides to forego the easy profit to be gained by taking over the widow Alma Garrett’s prosperous gold claim, and the beginning of the second season demonstrates the wisdom of Swearengen’s decision, as Deadwood’s mining industry has led to increased prosperity for many, including himself. The second part spans from seasons two to three, and it involves the disruption of this accumulation of wealth when the mining baron George Hearst appears in town, after securing a number of gold claims around Deadwood through an agent in season two. This shift from wealth as social good to wealth as monopolistic greed is Deadwood ’s central historical narrative. The show thus charts the intrusion of corporate wealth into an economy and society organized around individuals.10 As mentioned above, Deadwood conforms to the picture of the American West produced by “New West” historians, alert to the logics of racism, misogyny, and imperialism that authorized Westward expansion.11 The show’s first season can be read as a textbook dramatization of what Dana Nelson has called “the imagined fraternity of white men,” as the self-appointed leaders of Deadwood constitute an ad hoc government that consists exclusively of White, male property owners.12 However, this “imagined fraternity of white men” is just that in the show: imagined. The rule of law and governmental structures are only ever provisional, and White privilege is a matter of mere custom rather than institutionalized hierarchy. For example, early in the first season, Mr. Wu enters Swearengen’s Gem Saloon through the front door rather than the back. After sending Johnny, one of Swearengen’s employees, into a panic, Swearengen’s parting instructions to Wu make clear race’s role as custom: “Now get the fuck out of here, Wu. The back way, you understand? The back way, or we’ll start getting people having the wrong fucking idea of things around here, huh?” (“Mr. Wu” 1.10). This incident is referenced in the show’s final episode, when Wu enters the back door of the Gem Saloon. Wanting Wu on his side, and wishing to enlist Wu’s Chinese workers as soldiers in what he thinks will be an impending battle between the town of Deadwood and Hearst’s Pinkerton agents, Swearengen orders his prostitutes to show some respect to Wu: “When [Wu] leaves, them that ain’t lining this

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fucking hallway like he’s the tallest, best-looking white man ever got fucking lucky better prepare for a fucking beating” (“The Catbird Seat” 3.11). This display works, as Wu mutters to himself, “Wu—big man,” on his way out of the saloon (3.11). Wu’s entrance through the Gem’s front door violates nothing but custom, and Swearengen’s later deference to Wu’s reputation is, on the one hand, an invocation of orientalist stereotypes of honor, but, on the other, a marker of the need to keep Wu happy because he is so necessary to Swearengen’s own operations. By making clear the fact that the “imagined fraternity of white men” is contingent and emphasizing Wu’s stature within the community, Deadwood demonstrates that Chinese immigrants in the American West were not merely one-dimensional victims of exploitation. As Liping Zhu has shown in his study of Chinese immigrants to the Boise Basin in Idaho, Chinese immigrants often thrived in late nineteenth-century mining camps, facing far less hostility and discrimination than in often-studied California: It is true that many Chinese immigrants in late nineteenth-century America encountered exploitation, injustice, violence, and discrimination on a daily basis. The collective story of the Chinese in the Boise Basin of Idaho, however, suggests positive experiences as well. Like many other immigrants, the Chinese on this Rocky Mountain mining frontier had remarkable access to economic upward mobility. A few lucky ones even made great fortunes. In terms of material comforts, economic mobility, justice, and social equality, the Chinese often enjoyed all the advantages offered on the western frontier.13 Zhu’s accounts of Chinese immigrants in Boise must, of course, be offset by the history of anti-Chinese sentiment, action, and legislation in the United States.14 As Eric Hayot remarks, “the Chinese ‘coolie’ was a person, but also a machine. It was this latter quality that allowed the ‘coolie’ to metaphorize both the process of industrial production and its product, as though the numberless faceless and identical Chinese workers had simply been stamped out on a production line like so many millions of pins.”15 In fact, Wu’s chief antagonist, Lee, is an agent of this industrialized, anonymous “coolie” labor force, which makes Wu seem all the more exceptional, like Zhu’s prosperous miners in the Rocky Mountains. While the opportunity afforded to some Chinese immigrants is featured in Deadwood through the character of Mr. Wu, the show also invokes the widespread anti-Chinese sentiment that would culminate in the 1882 Chinese

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Exclusion Act.16 These prejudices, though, are mocked. For example, during a meeting of Deadwood’s chief citizens, the owner of a local saloon, Tom Nutall, walks in uninvited. He then asks if he is welcome to the meeting: Nuttall:

If I’m excluded, say so, Al. Don’t leave me to die the death of a thousand cuts. Swearengen: Well, sit down, Tom. Nuttall: Don’t subject me to death by water torture. Al: Take a seat Tom, and toss whatever book you’ve been reading on the fucking yellow peril, huh? (“No Other Sons or Daughters” 1.9) Nuttall uses orientalist rhetoric, yet this rhetoric is identified and deflated by Swearengen. While this meeting of Deadwood’s leaders consists entirely of White men, they are not particularly interested in racial dominance. The “imagined fraternity of white men” in Deadwood has some social force, yet it is also represented as a matter of contingency rather than dominance. Deadwood’s local leaders are less of a formal fraternity, bent on exploiting others, than they are an ad hoc collective, committed to acting on behalf of what they believe to be the common good. In this scene, the legacy of conquest and the inherent racism of Westward expansion is both acknowledged and undercut; Swearengen’s own self-interest leads to public, even antiracist, endeavors.

Contingent destiny In keeping with this treatment of Westward expansion as less the effect of racial imperatives than the cumulative force of the marketplace, social organization, and moral codes, Deadwood ’s representation of Native Americans emphasizes contingency, as well. In Deadwood ’s first season, Seth Bullock rides out to find Jack McCall, the man who murdered “Wild Bill” Hickok. Bullock is attacked by a Native American, and they have a bloody fight. Bullock is wounded badly, yet kills the Native American. Charlie Utter then finds Bullock, unconscious. Charlie interprets the signs on the Native American’s horse and pieces together why the struggle took place: The three red hands on the pony’s flank, was three men killed, hand to hand. The red circle was one killed on horseback. The white lines on the pony’s legs was times that he had counted coup. With them, whether they mean to kill your man after or you’re just showing off, you hit them with

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a gun butt or a stick or a club. That’s counting coup. That’s why he come for you instead of picking you off with an arrow, like he did your horse. (“Plague” 1.6) Discussing burial with Seth, Charlie then goes on to explain why the fight happened in the first place, which links this encounter back to Swearengen’s bounty for heads: Seth: Charlie: Seth: Charlie:

We should dig a grave. I’d as soon not waste the fucking time. It won’t take long. You ain’t doing him no favor. I mean his way to heaven’s above ground and looking west. Seth: Well, let’s do that, then. Charlie: Don’t you want to take him over the ridge? This fucking hole in the ground and put him up there with his headless buddy? I mean, that’s what you nearly got killed for? Interfering with his big fucking medicine, burying his fucking buddy, over the fucking ridge! (1.6)

Bullock’s confrontation, then, was caused indirectly by Swearengen’s bounty, a bounty that is claimed in season one by a Mexican, not an Anglo. Deadwood here complicates the picture of manifest destiny common to Western genre narratives like John Ford’s classic film The Searchers, which represents Native Americans as inherently incompatible with national belonging. Bullock’s fight with the Native American and Charlie’s reading of the scene evidence the ways in which the struggle to colonize the frontier produces new contingencies, unpredictable competitions, and relations that demand expertise and interpretation. In the following episode, Seth broods over his fight with the Native American: Seth: That Indian fought like hell. Sol: Guess you did too. Seth: Charlie figured out how it must’ve been—the Indian had to kill me for coming on the burial place, and maybe it’d been me, too, that killed his friend, cut his friend’s head off so his friend wouldn’t have eyes to see the sunset all those years he’d be lying there dead. So he had to kill me for that too. And he couldn’t, before he laid hands on me or the killing wouldn’t be honorable. We fought like fucking hell, I’ll tell you that much. And I never once had the

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Sol:

upper hand, it just happened out the way it happened out. He was just trying to live, same as me, and do honor to his friend, make some fucking sense out of things, and we wind up that way, and I wind up after, beating him till I couldn’t recognize his face. For Christ’s sake. That Indian saved Jack McCall’s life, I’ll tell you that fucking much. Not for long. (“Bullock Returns to Camp” 1.7)

On the surface, Bullock’s struggle with the Native American is a standard Western trope, one codified by the widely influential American historian Frederick Jackson Turner. According to Turner’s triumphalist account, White Americans conquer yet also take on the qualities of Native Americans. The White settler “shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too harsh for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails.”17 Owing more to frontier stories like James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales than history itself, Turner’s account of the Western frontiersman’s hybrid ethnicity constitutes a quasi-racial typology that would be employed, for example, by Theodore Roosevelt, who identified Americans as a distinct race rather than a nationality.18 While Bullock’s murder of the Native American reiterates this “primal scene” of manifest destiny, as the White American eradicates the Native American presence, Charlie’s understanding of Sioux customs and Bullock’s own sense of the uncertainty, rather than the inevitability, of his survival also gestures to a departure from the necessity of civilization’s colonizing movement in triumphalist accounts of Westward expansion. Bullock’s victory registers less as an inevitable dominance than as a struggle between two equally matched forces. This egalitarian understanding of one’s odds and the contingency of one party winning out over another carries over from physical confrontations—between Bullock and the Native American, and also between Swearengen and Hearst’s muscle, Dan Dority and Captain Turner—into economic and even political struggles as well, such as the tenuous negotiations between Deadwood and Yankton over property claims and statehood. This lack of inevitable domination of the frontier by settlement is itself deflated, though, by Starr’s response to Bullock’s rumination: “not for long.” This reminds the viewer of historical necessity’s undoing of these uncertainties, of the ways in which these possibilities come, in hindsight, to seem like foregone conclusions. As a twenty-first-century Western, then, Deadwood cannily acknowledges both historical contingency and necessity, romanticizing neither yet implying that any historical moment, the present included, is saturated with possibilities that will, but perhaps should not, go unrealized.

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Similarly, Swearengen’s struggle against Hearst holds out the possibility that monopolistic corporations might falter against more intensely local self-interest. Swearengen thrives in Deadwood as an arbiter of access to the marketplace, which he identifies closely with his own self-interest, but which also entails the creation of public services and governance. George Hearst, in contrast, exploits racial difference for his own wealth, to more efficiently “secure the color,” his phrase for the mining of gold. The difference between Swearengen and Hearst’s understandings of how race relates to economics is clearly dramatized in their resolution of the conflict between Mr. Wu and Lee, the two bosses in Deadwood’s Chinatown. Swearengen champions Wu, the Chinatown boss that he has conducted business with for some time, against Hearst’s Chinese boss, Lee. Wanting to preserve Wu’s position and business, Swearengen constructs his argument against Lee by citing the San Franciscan’s cruelty toward Chinese prostitutes: Al:

Hearst: Al:

Hearst: Al: Hearst: Al:

Hearst: Al: Hearst: Al: Hearst: Al: Hearst:

Done a turn or two for me, Wu has. And well-liked enough among his own. His display against your chink was my first fucking inkling that he’s irrational. Mr. Lee, the man he tried to kill, has worked well for me in several camps. Then God bless Lee and off with fucking Wu’s head! You’ve got your finger on the cause of it too—your chink being forwardlooking. “Set the bodies ablaze, on with the day’s trade!” This one being longer in the tooth— Set what bodies ablaze? Custom holds stronger to what passes for his mind. What bodies, Mr. Swearengen? The whores for your workers. Not only does burning the corpses save cargo space far as the transporting of their bones back to the homeland—which, as I gather, they hold as their big fucking chance at the afterlife—what a tremendous tactic, terrifying the unburned here. Do you know prospecting, Mr. Swearengen? Fucking nothing of it. And the securing of the color once found? Not a fucking thing. All I really care about. I fucking hope so. I’d hate to think you’re this good at something that’s only a fucking hobby. Most often my finds are in wild places, which I prefer. When that is not so, I want friendly relations with my predecessors so that I can secure the color undistracted. (“Boy-The-Earth-Talks-To” 2.12)

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Swearengen’s casual racism rhetorically allies him with Hearst in a kind of White fraternity, again instrumentalizing race in the pursuit of his own, and also Wu’s, self-interest. Swearengen’s willingness to assist and protect Wu as a business partner, as well as his half-hearted attempts to understand Wu’s customs, eventually results in Wu’s declaration that he is “American” as he cuts off his hair braid at the conclusion of season two. What Deadwood dramatizes here is the expansiveness of American belonging, especially in contrast to Hearst’s indifference to others and willingness to tolerate cruelty in the name of efficiency. Swearengen’s self-interest blurs into something like friendship and even advocacy for human rights, while Hearst views these social problems as mere distractions. Hearst’s indifference to these social problems resonates with our contemporary discourse of tolerance. As Wendy Brown notes, tolerance might not be as emancipatory as it may seem: Tolerance as a primary civic virtue and dominant political value entails a view of citizenship as passive and of social life as reduced to relatively isolated individuals or groups barely containing their aversions toward one another . . . This depiction of citizenship stands in sharp contrast to a politically interested and mobilized citizenry, one that has certain solidarities, is capable of acting on its own behalf, and anticipates a future of ever-greater social equality across lines of race, gender, and class.19 Brown positions tolerance as “a technology of domestic governmentality” rather than a tool of liberation.20 Deadwood itself functions as a designated free trade zone, one that is structured around the free market, yet Deadwood’s distance from domestic rule also allows the citizens of Deadwood to imagine and enact modes of belonging outside of mere tolerance. Instead of passively accepting difference, Deadwood’s citizens unite against Hearst, in the name of common good, a good that involves not just the hope that free market individualism will reclaim Deadwood’s economy after Hearst’s intrusion but also the construction of social institutions such as public schools and open elections. In contrast, Hearst’s attitude toward all subjects operates according to the logic of racial tolerance that Brown articulates above. For Hearst, solidarity is a threat—he has Cornish workers killed who are interested in organizing a union—yet differences, like race, ethnicity, or nationality, that fragment potential collectives facilitate his designs, even if these differences are not placed in any kind of hierarchy. His desire for all subjects to be compliant instruments in his own designs to accrue wealth imagines citizenship as fundamentally passive; he thinks of himself as a sovereign, and like the state described by Brown, Hearst exhibits an indifference to racial difference,

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tolerating race as long as it does not interfere with his own monopolistic desire—that is, as long as race does not entail a strong sense of collective belonging that might undermine his sovereignty. Deadwood thus stages the confrontation with Hearst as a way of questioning what might seem to us now as a necessary, even causal, connection between the free market individualism of the camp and the formation of wealthy, corporate elites such as Hearst. The series questions this link, while also dramatizing the ruination of free market individualism in the face of consolidated, corporate power. In the figure of Hearst, Deadwood takes what might otherwise seem to be a liberal attitude—everyone is equal in the free market—and turns it into a nefarious position, one that is articulated by a monopolistic power and that clearly serves as a logic not for giving all equal access to the market but for subjecting all to the will of wealthy elites.

“The Original Slow Fucking Learners” Contrary to the nascent collective belonging in Deadwood, Hearst’s interest is not in circulation and diversity but in the consolidation of mining claims. As Swearengen says, in conversation with Hearst, “the strong call ‘consolidating’ bending the weak to their will” (“I Am Not the Fine Man You Take Me For” 3.2). Swearengen wants to guard his role in Deadwood, and therefore the town of Deadwood itself, from large-scale corporate operations like Hearst’s, which he views as an “unnatural” expansion of individual power outside of local limits. Yet, without limits beyond the free market, there is no way to control the accumulated wealth and power of Hearst’s monopolistic drive. Deadwood demonstrates the ways in which free market individualism cannot adapt to and therefore ushers in economic exploitation and the creation of a division between subjects and workers, a distinction absent from the community Swearengen envisions as he dictates an article to the town’s newspaperman, Merrick: Tonight, throughout Deadwood, heads may be laid to pillow assuaged and reassured, for that purveyor for profit of everything sordid and vicious, Al Swearengen, already beaten to a fare-thee-well earlier in the day by Sheriff Bullock, has returned to the Sheriff the implements and ornaments of his office. Without the tawdry walls of Swearengen’s saloon the Gem, decent citizens may pursue with a new and jaunty freedom all aspects of Christian commerce . . . A full fair-mindedness requires us also to report that within the Gem, on Deadwood’s main thoroughfare, comely whores,

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decently priced liquor and the squarest games of chance in the hills remain unabatedly available at all hours, seven days a week. (“A Lie Agreed Upon, Part 2” 2.2) Swearengen envisions Deadwood as a commercial wonderland, open to both the moral and the immoral. In Deadwood, Swearengen imagines, commerce transcends moral difference; Swearengen facilitates both his own “sordid” business and “Christian commerce,” while maintaining an illusory distinction between the immoral and the moral, self-interest and altruism. As Paul Gilroy argues, the erosion of racial difference in our contemporary moment leads to the possibility of a broad, perhaps universal humanism: [Race] stands outside of, and in opposition to, most attempts to render it secondary to the overwhelming sameness that overdetermines social relationships between people . . . the undervalued power of this crushingly obvious, almost banal human sameness . . . also confirms that the crisis of raciological reasoning presents an important opportunity where it points toward the possibility of leaving ‘race’ behind, of setting aside its disabling use as we move out of the time in which it could have been expected to make sense.21 This humanism, or “sameness,” is emergent in Deadwood, though alliances across racial boundaries seem far more possible than alliances across gendered lines, and it is both damaged and hastened by Hearst’s increased economic exploitation. Swearengen’s emergent understanding of how “sameness” might function to protect both his own interests and those of Deadwood as a social entity is halting and incomplete, and Deadwood spends much time in its third season demonstrating that Hearst’s racial awareness is more advanced. This advanced tolerance is, quite explicitly, a marker of Hearst’s desire to exploit everyone. Race is a tool for that exploitation. As Timothy Brennan argues, the most advanced cultural theorists and theories to emerge from the New Left go hand-in-hand with neoliberalism: “The neoliberal doctrine defining freedom as freedom from the state was emboldened by theory Americanizing itself as leftist, further weakening the flagging social democratic elements of Democratic Party liberalism whose virtues it cherishes only in the form of the holy individual reborn as the subject of difference.”22 In Hearst, Deadwood allegorizes the ways in which neoliberal reform uses the “holy individual,” and especially the individual as it is conceived of in the logics of multiculturalism and difference, to consolidate wealth among an elite. Instead of investing in institutions and the common good, Hearst hopes to destroy any possible

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collective solidarity. This consolidation of wealth entails the stripping away of human rights, or, as Hearst puts it in a rare moment of self-doubt, “The camp is galvanized. People scurry about. They’ve tasks to perform. They feel important. I oughtn’t to work in these places. I was not born to crush my own kind” (3.11). Hearst’s arrival at Deadwood ’s conclusion signals a contradiction within our contemporary moment. Corporations are reliant on, yet also fundamentally opposed to, free markets. This rift is intelligible in contemporary political debates, especially in the division in the Republican Party between party regulars and the insurgent Tea Party, as well as the division in the Left between the corporation-friendly Democratic Party and anticorporate Leftist groups, like the United States Social Forum, and thinkers, such as Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein. In conversation with the Bella Union Saloon owner Cy Tolliver, Hearst makes clear his desired relation to others: Hearst: Cy: Hearst: Cy: Hearst:

Cy: Hearst: Cy: Hearst: Cy: Hearst:

Yes, yes, yes, Mr. Tolliver. You wish to know your duties in my service. Well, I make my way through the muck to learn the details. Your duties will be to answer like a dog when I call. Like a dog? Complications of intention on your part in dealings with me or duplicity or indirection—behavior, in short, which displeases me—will bring you a smack on the snout. Ouch. When administered by a practiced hand such a blow can be more painful and grievous even than your recent sufferings. I don’t doubt the hand would be practiced. Mr. Swearengen recently discovered as much. I gather it cost him a finger. But I should say too that in these rooms just this afternoon such displeasure brought me near to murdering the Sheriff and raping Mrs. Ellsworth. I have learned through time, Mr. Tolliver, and as repeatedly seem to forget that whatever temporary comfort relieving my displeasure brings me, my long-term interests suffer. My proper traffic is with the earth. In my dealings with people, I ought solely have to do with niggers and whites who obey me like dogs. (3.3)

This desire to subordinate all to his will is clearly monstrous, and it is reflected in Hearst’s one apparently long-standing relationship. Hearst’s cook, an African American woman he calls “Aunt Lou,” seems, on the one hand, to be

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treated as an equal, with greater intimacy than Swearengen treats Mr. Wu. However, on the other hand, it later becomes clear that Hearst has the same dominant relation even to Lou, as she explains when gambling in Deadwood’s Chinatown: “I love your cobbler like sunset, Lou.” And back-broke niggers in the fields. George Hearst, he do love his nose in a hole more, and ass in the air, and back legs kicking out little lumps of gold like a fucking badger. No more use for them nuggets, either. Past counting them up, and saying that big number to astonish niggers to remind us we in the world. (3.3) Lou’s monologue makes it clear that Hearst thinks of all other people as subordinate, drawing a parallel between subordination to Hearst and racial hierarchy. Racial difference, however, is not central to Hearst’s desire to assert his dominance over others, a gap rendered explicit in Hearst’s treatment of Odell, Aunt Lou’s son. Odell arrives in season three with news of a Liberian gold claim. When Hearst and Odell initially discuss the claim, it is clear what kind of “color” matters to Hearst. He tells Odell, “I do take in partners with the understanding that in dealing with the color, mine is the deciding voice” (“Unauthorized Cinnamon” 3.7). In response to Odell’s immediate question, “Dealing with the color, sir?,” Hearst clarifies: “The gold—securing and exploiting the gold” (3.7). Like Aunt Lou, Odell associates the inequality implied by gold with racial difference. But, Hearst denies this connection. Later in the episode, Hearst even claims that gold serves as an instrument of equality; it allows subjects to transcend their differences: “Gold is every man’s opportunity. Why do I make that argument? Because every defect in a man and in others’ way of taking him, our agreement that gold has value gives us power to rise above” (3.7). “Color” is the only meaningful sign to Hearst, but “color” does not signify race. Instead, it signifies wealth, and while Hearst pays lip service to “color’s” transcendent qualities, he reserves that transcendence over social difference for himself. The disingenuousness of Hearst’s belief in equality within the free market is soon revealed in his subsequent treatment of Odell. After telling Hearst of his discovery and agreeing to launch a joint mining venture, Odell is found dead, according to Hearst, “near the road to Rapid City” (“Amateur Night” 3.9). While never explicitly acknowledged, Hearst is clearly involved in Odell’s death. The motives remain unclear; Hearst may have murdered Odell in order to claim full ownership of the Liberian mine, to eliminate a rival for Aunt Lou’s maternal care, or some combination of the two. Regardless, Odell’s murder resonates as another instance of Hearst’s monopolistic drive and a play on

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color as a site of difference. Color results in violence, but violence that is motivated not by racial difference but by Deadwood ’s other “color,” gold. Parallel to Hearst’s murder of Odell is Swearengen’s bounty on Indian heads. While Odell vanishes, the Indian head that Swearengen pays for following the bounty remains. Swearengen keeps the head in a box, and by the third season, Swearengen uses the Indian head as a mute interlocutor. In Deadwood ’s final episode, Swearengen decides that he must murder an innocent prostitute to appease Hearst and protect Trixie, one of Deadwood ’s major characters. He discusses the murder and his weapon of choice, a knife, with the Indian head: “I should have fucking learned to use a gun, but I’m too fucking entrenched in my ways. And you ain’t exactly the one to be leveling criticisms on the score of being slow to adapt. You fucking people are the original slow fucking learners!” (3.12). While Deadwood begins with Swearengen’s Indian-killing rhetoric, it ends with this perverse commonality between Swearengen and the Indian head. Both are becoming obsolete in the face of Hearst’s coroporate, monopolistic capitalism. Contrary to Hearst’s domination, Swearengen’s increased sense of social responsibility marks what Jamie Peck has described as “neoliberal adaptation in the face of crisis”; that is, Swearengen draws new lines of belonging and identification, while Hearst violently suppresses any common interests. 23 Swearengen forms an expansive collective in Deadwood, one that ranges from the “sordid” to the “Christian” to his fellow “slow fucking learners,” and he commits murder to maintain his own economic interests, to be sure, but also to preserve Deadwood’s public sphere, one that he has facilitated. Ultimately, what Deadwood dramatizes is the dual reality of race in our neoliberal era. Race persists as a site of difference, and that difference connotes historical inequality. However, today, racial distinctions are more often employed in the service not of equality but increased inequality. Deadwood finds utopia in a very unlikely figure, Al Swearengen, who understands that social institutions and collective belonging, not the politics of difference, may be the only ways to struggle against inequality. In this sense, Deadwood stages nineteenth-century history for a twenty-first-century audience to remind us all of the value of being “slow fucking learners,” of returning to residual, perhaps even obsolete, ideas of collectivity and the public good.

Notes 1 For a brief account of the massacre, see “Metz Massacre,” Deadwood Magazine, accessed August 23, 2011, www.deadwoodmagazine.com/ archivedsite/Archives/Metz.htm.

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2 For accounts of racial politics in the twenty-first century that all, in different ways, argue that antiracism has been exhausted as a way of producing equality, especially in the face of neoliberalism, see Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Adolph Reed Jr., “The ‘Color Line’ Then and Now: The Souls of Black Folk and the Changing Context of Black American Politics,” in Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought, ed. Adolph Reed, Jr. and Kenneth W. Warren (Boulder: Paradigm, 2010), 252–303; and Kenneth W. Warren, What Was African American Literature? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). My reading of Deadwood is informed by this scholarship. 3 For a reading of Deadwood and neoliberalism, see Daniel Worden, “Neo-liberalism and the Western,” Canadian Review of American Studies 39.2 (2009): 221–46. 4 For example, Mark Singer describes Deadwood creator David Milch’s research in a New Yorker profile: “The pilot script, which he wrote in 2003, grew out of two years’ research into the history of the West in general and Deadwood specifically, gold mining, Indian wars, whorehouse and casino protocols, public-health records, politics in the Black Hills, criminality and extralegal justice, the Gilded Age, the bank panic of 1873, and biographies of historical figures.” See Mark Singer, “The Misfit: How David Milch Got from ‘NYPD Blue’ to ‘Deadwood’ by Way of an Epistle of St. Paul,” New Yorker 81.1 (February 14, 2005), 192. 5 Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, 50–1. 6 Reed, “The ‘Color Line’ Then and Now,” 276. 7 Warren, What Was African American Literature?, 116–17. 8 Fredric Jameson, “Realism and Utopia in The Wire,” Criticism 52.3–4 (Summer–Fall 2010), 359. 9 Ibid., 366–7. 10 For readings of Deadwood ’s third season and its abrupt cancellation, see Sean O’Sullivan, “Reconnoitering the Rim: Thoughts on Deadwood and Third Seasons,” Electronic Book Review (July 30, 2010), www. electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/deadwood, as well as my response to O’Sullivan’s essay: Daniel Worden, “HBO’s Deadwood and Serial Necessity: A Riposte to Sean O’Sullivan’s ‘Reconnoitering the Rim: Thoughts on Deadwood and Third Seasons,” Electronic Book Review (July 31, 2010), www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/deadwoodrip. 11 The valuable accounts of US conquest and imperialism that I have in mind include Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1980); Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken

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Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987); Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985); and Richard White,“It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). It is not my claim that these histories are flawed, but rather that Deadwood, as an early twenty-first-century retelling of the late nineteenth-century frontier, is less interested in racial oppression and more interested in how race plays into economic exploitation. 12 Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 1–28. 13 Liping Zhu, A Chinaman’s Chance: The Chinese on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1997), 3–4. 14 For accounts of Deadwood’s Chinatown, both of which confirm in their detailed accounts of Chinese-owned businesses Zhu’s claim about Chinese prosperity in the American West, see: Grant K. Anderson, “Deadwood’s Chinatown,” in Chinese on the American Frontier, ed. Arif Dirlik (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 415–27 and Joe Sulentic, “Deadwood Gulch: The Last Chinatown,” in Chinese on the American Frontier, ed. Arif Dirlik (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 429–47. 15 Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 140–1. 16 For a convincing account of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and anti-Chinese sentiment more broadly, as a national rather than a regional pheonomenon, see Najia Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848–82 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 172–214. 17 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Does the Frontier Experience Make America Exceptional?, ed. Richard W. Etulain (Boston: Bedford, 1999), 20. 18 For an example of this thinking, see Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders, 1899, in Theodore Roosevelt: The Rough Riders, An Autobiography, ed. Louis Auchincloss (New York: Library of America, 2004), 43–4. Many other scholars have written on Roosevelt’s racial and gender politics; the most useful in this context are Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936,” Social Text 11 (Winter 1984–5): 20–64; Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Sarah Watts, Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 19 Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 88.

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20 Ibid., 87. 21 Gilroy, Against Race, 29. 22 Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 11. 23 Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 275.

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5 Listening to the thunder: Deadwood and the extraordinary depiction of ordinary violence Justin A. Joyce It is only because the Western has been everywhere before us for so long that it “works.” For over the years a highly sophisticated sub-language of the cinema has been created that is intuitively understood by the audience, a firm basis for art. It is not just that in approaching the Western a director has a structure that is saturated with conceptual significance: the core of the meanings is in the imagery itself. JIM KITSES1

eadwood ’s creator, David Milch, has written that “once Wild Bill Hickok dies . . . that’s when the show can properly begin.”2 In other words, the show cannot really proceed with its own plotline until this mythic hero is dispatched. Indeed, Hickok’s absence—the grief and loss over his death and the vacuum of authority created by his murder—marks a crucial turning point in the series. As Douglas Howard has suggested, “Bill’s death is important because it marks the end of an era.”3 The show can begin only when this emblem of frontier justice, of quickly drawn pistols delivering swift, retributive violence, is dead and buried.

D

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Reading Deadwood against contemporary televisual fictions that obsess over corporeality, this essay argues that Deadwood ’s meditation on the long historical development of contemporary subjectivities is especially interesting for its refusal to attach a mythic symbolism to acts of personal violence. Forgoing the traditional cathartic climax of personal violence, Deadwood ’s thematic focus on capitalist development within the camp is buttressed by a focus on bodily suffering. The messy interpersonal violence, dire bodily sufferings, and vivid corporeal vulnerability of Deadwood give the lie to the fiction of pure abstraction that fuels the engine of capital, insisting instead that there can never be pure abstraction; abstraction always acts on something or somebody. To proceed with such a plot, and to connect the miseries of a nineteenth-century mining camp with contemporary subjectivities, the show must first dispatch Hickok. To understand the importance of so monumental a character so unceremoniously dispatched so early in Deadwood is to see Hickok as a metonymic signifier of a traditional Western narrative of triumphal individualism. Since at least the widespread publication by George Ward Nichols of a fictionalized account of a shootout between “Wild Bill” Hickok and a man named Dave Tutt which appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1867, Hickok has stood for the mythical American West in the popular imagination. A core understanding of this mythic West has long been that questions of morality can be clearly deduced between the actions of good and bad people. When the hero shoots the villain, the Western would have us believe, the conflict is resolved. The threat of disorder has been tamed by the gunslinger’s morally sanctioned, justifiable, killing of another person. Violence, in other words, can be used for an overall social good. Another core tenet of the Western has long been its faith in “the law,” a faith, in fact, that is often explicitly opposed to the disordered killing constitutive of the notion of the “Wild West.” For it is the lack of law that makes the West wild, the development of authoritative law that propels the genre’s formulaic plots, and the promise of the equality and justice within the American legal system that valorizes the gunslinger’s spectacular skill with firearms. Put another way, the Western’s gunplay has long promised a secure future for American civilization by ridding the frontier of its unrestrained, lawless wildness. Further, the opposition between reckless violence and “law and order” is an established trope within the genre, producing a “ritual solution [that] is simple, permanent, and results in a satisfying emotional catharsis made possible by a dramatically satisfying narrative closure.”4 So when the first scene of Deadwood ’s pilot episode, set in the Montana Territory of 1876, begins with an exchange between a marshal and his prisoner in the jailhouse, we are in familiar territory. We are not surprised to

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hear the condemned man muse that the promise of Deadwood’s mining camp lies in there being “no law at all in Deadwood” (“Deadwood” 1.1).5 This promised lack of law, however familiar to Western audiences, bespeaks a surprisingly similar promise for these two men of very different social, economic, and indeed legal situations. For Marshal Bullock, lawlessness promises that Deadwood will be a place where he can retire his badge and open a hardware store; for the condemned prisoner, lawlessness promises Deadwood to be a place where he will be free to prospect, for with “no law at all” there will be “gold you can scoop from the streams with your bare hands” (1.1). As the Deadwood camp is situated outside of both the United States and its proper territories, in lands deeded to Native Americans by the Fort Laramie Treaty, its sovereignty, the legality of any of the claims or economic ventures ongoing within it, and its eventual annexation to the United States are questioned very early on and will remain an important part of the plot throughout the show’s three seasons. For both men at this early point in the pilot episode, though, it is important to stress that the promise of this lawless camp stems from the economic opportunities they see connected to its lack of a proper, codified law. Trained by the genre to accept this formulaic premise of an “epic moment,” we can expect one of two stories to develop.6 Either, as in My Darling Clementine (1946), we will have the story of a lawman, however reluctant, taming the town by dispatching the reckless, uncontrolled elements with fantastic gun violence. Or, as in Unforgiven (1992), we shall see a story of a hero forced to work outside of “the law”—whether because the administrative hurdles of due process prove to be too slow or because the justice already meted out is ultimately unsatisfying—to enact revenge or retribution with fantastic gun violence for a heinous initial injury. Whether Deadwood develops within the mold that Will Wright designated the “classical plot” structure for the genre, or instead chooses the darker course of the “vengeance variation,” Hickok’s presence in the opening episodes seems to promise a certain kind of story, a story of the triumphal march of American civilization or the triumph of retributive justice delivered by a moral authority backed by the spirit, if not the letter, of the American legal system.7 Within either plot variation, Hickok calls to mind a larger generic corpus in much the same way as other real historical persons like William “Billy the Kid” Bonney or legendary lawman Wyatt Earp, or even popular Western stars like Tom Mix and, of course, John Wayne. Two scenes from Deadwood demonstrate that Hickok (Keith Carradine) is meant to reify the traditional Western mode of justifiable violence intermixed with moral authority. The first scene occurs at the end of the pilot episode, when Hickok assists Bullock in killing a man in the street. A family has been massacred by road agents, and the man who rides into camp with the news

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is suspected of being involved. A group, led by Hickok and Bullock, rides out to investigate and discovers a little girl still alive and returns with her to camp. While everyone else is occupied in seeing to the girl’s medical care, Bullock takes it upon himself to confront the shady character about his involvement. Acting purely in service of some unspoken sense of justice, with no obvious self-interest, Hickok “backs Bullock’s play” here, accusing the man directly of having killed most of this family. When the man seems about to leave, Bullock somewhat ceremoniously pulls back his overcoat to reveal his holstered pistol and issues a stern warning to the road agent: “get down off your horse, or face the consequences” (1.1). With Hickok standing at his side similarly ready to draw, this warning is clearly an invitation to resolve the conflict with a shootout. As Bullock and Hickok are acting in no legal, official capacity, they are instead pursuing here, like innumerable Western gunslinging heroes before, a “justice” beyond the law, a justice to be enacted through gun violence. In any event, the threatened consequence proves to be null, for the man reaches for his gun and Hickok and Bullock—both firing together—shoot him dead in the street. By assisting Bullock here, Hickok’s gunplay acts as a reification of retribution and redemption, for it both punishes this offender for his crimes against this helpless family and rids the camp of his “savagery.” Whereas Hickok’s presence in the early episodes of Deadwood stands in for a larger generic tradition the show is out to disavow, his assistance of Bullock in this scene instructs the viewer to read their action as the right course, the proper resolution of this conflict. The second major instance of Hickok’s importance as a figure for the traditional Western’s formerly triumphal discourse of redemptive violence comes in the fourth episode, situated among other instances of preparation for Wild Bill’s death. The scene is remarkable precisely because it disavows the triumphal violence of direct confrontation. It is not a scene of violent action at all, but rather an earnest plea that leaving town is the only option—a far cry, to be sure, from the rhetoric and actions of High Noon ’s (1952) Will Kane. Acting out of desperation now that her husband has been murdered, the very recently widowed Mrs. Garrett seeks council from Hickok. He investigates the matter, and his discussion with the local saloon owner, pimp, swindler, and general criminal overlord Al Swearengen largely corroborates her suspicion that her husband has been murdered at Swearengen’s behest due to the value of the Garrett’s gold claim. Hickok urges her, as he had urged her husband before his murder, to leave town: Hickok: You know the sound of thunder, don’t you, Mrs. Garrett? Mrs. Garrett: Of, of course Hickok: Can you imagine that sound if I asked you to?

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Mrs. Garrett: I can, Mr. Hickok. Hickok: Your husband and me had this talk. And I told him to head home to avoid a dark result. But I didn’t say it in thunder. Ma’am. Listen to the thunder. (“Here Was a Man” 1.4) What is so remarkable about Hickok’s warning to the widow Garrett is that he refuses, in effect, to buy into his own mythology. She has come to Hickok because she believes that despite his drunken, defeated, state and attitude he is a man of honor and good character. Defeated by the burden of such honorable bearing, Hickok informs her rather bluntly that issues of honor and respectability, even justice, mean nothing in the face of the shady dealings in Deadwood. By suggesting that her only recourse is to leave, Hickok is revealing that the triumphalist Western’s faith in the lone individual’s ability to stand up to the violent force of unscrupulous mining interests is misplaced. If she continues to adhere to this fiction, the thunder warns, Mrs. Garrett will end up like her husband, dead. Though Mrs. Garrett ultimately does not heed Hickok’s warning, it is a particularly powerful scene. In part, the scene’s power comes from the legendary stature of the mythic Hickok. Like the various symbols in the opening credits, which Amanda Klein has suggested work connotatively to establish the “Westernness” of Deadwood, Hickok’s mere presence works through metonymy to call upon a rich legacy of triumphant Western tales of retributive justice and regenerative violence.8 By so powerfully repudiating this generic formula in the shocking, senseless death of Hickok that follows shortly on the heels of this moving image of thunderous warning, Deadwood starts at a different epic moment, in the diegetic location famous for having “no law.” Without either law or the gunslinging hero’s faith in rhetorically satisfactory justice, we are stuck in the piss and shit mining camp of Deadwood, and now the show can begin a different exploration of the violence of Westward expansion. This is not to suggest that no Western before Deadwood has ever attempted to refute the mythic morality of the gunslinger’s violence. Indeed, there is a rich tradition within the genre that attempts to debunk the Western’s powerful mythology. Films like Unforgiven, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), The Wild Bunch (1969), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), The Shootist (1976), The Searchers (1956), The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966), Ride the High Country (1962), and The Gunfighter (1950), have each portrayed a gunslinging protagonist as antihero, as killer, bandit, mercenary, a figure who time or technology is passing by, suicidal, and/or a sociopath. Furthermore, McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) also revolves around the establishment of a brothel in a mining town threatened by outside developers. Terry K. Aladjem

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has suggested in The Culture of Vengeance and the Fate of American Justice that “when Americans say they want justice, they want something angry and punitive.”9 Perhaps the vast majority of Western gunslingers have been heroic precisely because of their vengeful tendencies. In part, the appeal of many of these “revisionist” Westerns lies in their construction of narrative climax, the rhetorically satisfying resolution of irresolvable conflicts. Even when they don’t provide the clear moral sanction of a classical Western like My Darling Clementine, Shane (1953), High Noon, or Rio Bravo (1959), the violence of these darker, “revisionist” Westerns remains deeply satisfying because they represent violence as retributive justice. Despite their less romantic protagonists, many of these texts still end up, like so much of the classical Western triumphalism they seem out to repudiate, glorifying violent gunplay as a satisfactory resolution. Deadwood is unique within this tradition, as I will demonstrate, precisely for its refusal to champion its depictions of violence as a mythic solution. Deadwood seeks to unseat the celebrated mythos of Western gunslinging heroics through an extraordinary exploration of contemporary neoliberal capitalism and an anxiety over the function of violence within consumer capitalism. This exploration happens primarily through representations of bodily ailments and suffering; the anxiety is prompted by a blurred distinction within the standard Western opposition between “civilization” and “savagery.” As Klein has pointed out, “Deadwood implies not only that our present civilization was built on a foundation of savagery, but also that there was never a difference between the two in the first place.”10 What’s extraordinary about Deadwood’s depiction of violence is not its explicit nature, or even its possible correspondence to a nineteenth century historical reality. Rather, the show’s violence is interesting because in the process of repudiating the traditional, triumphal rhetoric of progress, Deadwood instead focuses our attention squarely on the squalid, the sordid, what Erica Stein has called the “everyday” of the contemporary Western.11 At the same time, as various critics have noted, Deadwood embodies a series of anxieties about our contemporary moment. To account for the unlikely success of this Western within the modern televisual landscape, Robert Westerfelhaus and Celeste Lacroix have read Deadwood as a continuation of the genre’s traditional role of exploring the value of violence, noting that show works as a “ritual of disquiet,” a special format of social, cultural, ritual that “simultaneously expresses and provokes the psychological discomfort that comes from posing unsettling questions about important matters.”12 They go further to specify that Deadwood “poses a similar challenge with respect to the value our culture places upon retributive justice.”13 Reading the series as an allegorical rendering of contemporary neoliberal polices, Daniel

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Worden has recently pointed out the market logic which helps solidify the growth of the camp as a community and the effect this market has on the subjectivities portrayed: In Deadwood, however, social order is maintained by the free market and not by the rule of law. Instead of an abstract principle governing and interpellating subjects as public servants, citizens, and criminals, the free market interpellates subjects as individuals . . . the neo-liberal subject thrives not through adherence to shared moral values or a shared sense of law’s sovereign hold on its subjects, but instead through self-interest and contingent, strategic alliances with other individuals.14 I join these and other commentators who have explored Deadwood ’s popular and critical success through the series’ narrative rendering of analogous and contemporary social, economic, and political tensions. I see my contribution to be unique in connecting the neoliberal content of Deadwood to the show’s distinctive representation of violence. I argue that Deadwood ’s success as a contemporary political and economic allegory depends upon its focus on bodily suffering and bodily vulnerability, as Deadwood forces us to endure the bodily suffering effaced by the abstractions of neoliberal capitalism. In short, we derive a unique contemporary pleasure from such a visceral rendering of the pains of winning the West precisely because of its relationship to our own concerns. The expectation of pleasure from televisual fiction has important implications for a study of violent representations within such commercial products. Influenced by Tom Gunning’s work on early cinema as a “cinema of attractions,” much scholarly work has concentrated on representations of violence as non-narrative, as spectacle.15 We must recognize, however, that violent representations operate within a narrative and are given coherence by the contours of that narrative. Scenes of violence, however aestheticized or explicit, are made salient within the contextual details of plot and character development; without this narrative context, violence cannot work as a meaningful representation. As Marsha Kinder has demonstrated with what she terms the “narrative orchestration of violent attractions,” violent representations in narrative fiction film exist in relation to a narrative trajectory in which “action sequences function like performative ‘numbers,’ interrupting the linear drive of the plot with their sensational audio and visual spectacle yet simultaneously serving as dramatic climaxes that advance the story toward closure.”16 While violent representations may have an immediacy and urgency that sets them apart from more obviously narrative elements like dialogue, violence within narrative televisual fiction only makes sense within the context of narrative.

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A large part of the series’ success both popularly and critically can be attributed to what Jason Jacobs has called its “filthy joy.”17 The show’s earnest focus on vulnerable bodies proceeds via two clearly distinct representative modes. The first mode involves the suffering of characters’ bodies that is entirely unrelated to violence, suffering that is instead the result of the harsh materiality of nineteenth-century life; in the second mode Deadwood highlights suffering due to violence that is not redemptive. Violence in this show, like in other televisual fictions, makes sense because of narrative contexts. Given the contextual details of bodies suffering unrelated to violent actions, Deadwood ’s depiction of violence is extraordinary because it is both an ordinary part of daily life and affectively powerful. As Deadwood ’s plot narrates the coming of a neoliberal version of corporate capitalism backed by state power, both types of suffering—bodies slashed by violent actions and bodies shredded by poor hygiene and an exacting existence on a frontier—are given meaning within this politico-economic organization. Deadwood, furthermore, is darker and more unsettling than its forbearers after it kills off the putatively heroic gunslinger Hickok because the rest of the series works so conspicuously to evacuate our faith in “the law.” As numerous critics have pointed out, the storyline which develops over the three seasons is grounded by an increasing suspicion toward the ostensible civilization that will proceed upon the arrival of American legal authority over the town.18 Indeed, Deadwood ’s powerful dialogue abounds with scathing jabs and scorching asides aimed squarely at the “civilized” government soon to arrive in Deadwood. From Farnum’s earnest proclamation that “taking people’s money is what makes organizations real,” through the innumerable bribes paid to commissioners and territorial representatives, to Swearengen’s repeated equation of governmental control with anal rape, Deadwood revels in the condemnation of legality (“No Other Sons or Daughters” 1.9). In this way, Deadwood refuses the easy succor of a triumphalist narrative about the building of a town with shared democratic values. At the same time, Deadwood calls into doubt many of the other core tenets of the traditional Western: the ethos of rugged individual opportunity, the ideal of Christian progress, and the faith in the equity and justice embodied by the administrative apparatus of “the law.” Deadwood tells instead the story of a community built on the back, and literally at the behest, of untrammeled capitalistic exploitation. With Bullock ensconced as sheriff by the ad hoc government of Deadwood, the first season ends with a semblance of order, and the hope of justice coming to town. Depicting a series of commissioners from Dakota and Montana vying for both bribes and Deadwood’s annexation that will culminate with the announcement of proper elections, season two ends with a wedding both actual and symbolic between the Eastern widow Garrett

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and the Western prospector Elsworth. Season three opens with the arrival of a metonymic representative of capitalism—the mining magnate George Hearst—and closes as the magically untouchable Hearst, having dispossesed the citizens of Deadwood of most of their claims, leaves to pursue exploitative operations elsewhere. The narrative trajectory of the series, then, is marked by different ways of representing violence. The first season’s narration of the coming of law to Deadwood seeks to unseat the Western’s traditional triumphalism, to undermine the ideal of regenerative violence. The second and third season’s narration of the coming of capital shifts the focus to the corporeal effects of abstraction, highlighting the material remainder of vulnerable, suffering bodies. As his intervention into the fate and future of the town is backed by his ability to rig the local elections in his favor, Hearst quite clearly is no ordinary nineteenth-century mogul. Worden points to this difference in his account of the show’s relationship to neoliberal capitalism: The sticking point, though, that makes Deadwood truly relevant to our contemporary neo-liberal moment is the fact that “multinational corporations” are often thought to be products of late-20th-century globalization. Yet, in Deadwood, George Hearst comes to represent the evils of the exploitative corporation, and he is multinational in the sense that he is dealing in Deadwood, which is not part of the United States, imports Chinese prostitutes and Cornish mine-workers, and expresses interest in African gold mines. There is a contradiction within Deadwood between the neo-liberal subjects who gather in the town and the neoliberal corporate interests that are viewed as foreign and nefarious. Neoliberalism is cannily allegorized as a dual force, one that interpellates all members of society as equals under the rule of the marketplace, and one that subordinates all interests to economic self-interests.19 The plot of all three seasons of Deadwood thus culminates in a story of the conversion of a mining camp into an annexed territory of “civilized” American capitalism, a tale of “finance capital intervention backed by state power.”20 As the show’s chief villain, Hearst thus refigures Deadwood’s plot as a dark warning of the congruence between our gruesome past of Westward expansion and the gory present of what David Harvey has called “dispossession by accumulation.”21 As Allison Perlman has noted, “If the citizens of Deadwood are defeated, it is not because they are unwilling to fight; it is because violence would be a fruitless response to the threat posed by Hearst.”22 Perlman further suggests that the success or failure of Westerns hinges upon their “capacity to render a mythic vision of the past consonant with prevailing

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tensions and conflicts of the present.”23 I contend that bodily suffering in Deadwood is particularly relevant, easily empathetic, if you will, to a modern televisual audience, especially one subscribing to HBO. For Deadwood came into the world not just within the formulaic vacuum of a staid genre, but in the midst of a wide array of popular televisual formats, series and genres against which this Western was nevertheless surprisingly resonant with audiences. The premium subscription cable channel HBO has distinguished itself through a brand that, reveling in its relative freedom from censorship compared to broadcast network television, reframes televisual content by relying on “profane language, nudity, and violence—the trifecta of HBO’s innovation.”24 Deadwood ’s profanity is certainly plentiful, and has been rightly examined by several commentators, though its nudity is relatively tame by current cable standards. Its violence, I contend, is especially attuned to contemporaneous trends in the wider televisual landscape whose tenure overlapped or exceeded Deadwood ’s airing from 2004 to 2006: the seemingly obsessive focus on the ailing body of medical dramas, and the fascination with the collection of clues from the bodies of both victim and perpetrator that propels forensic police procedurals. Enormously popular broadcast shows, like the seminal ER (1994–2009), House M.D. (2004), or Grey’s Anatomy (2005) are structured around the discovery, diagnosis, and treatment of traumatic, often mysterious, bodily ailments. Contemporary forensic police procedurals and investigative dramas like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000), its two spin-offs CSI: Miami (2002) and CSI: New York (2004), Bones (2005), and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999) focus their dramatic tension around all things corporeal, from fingerprinting to DNA matching and everything in between.25 Deadwood is similarly obsessed with the corporeality of its nineteenth-century setting. Gone are the widescreen panoramas of the vast prairies and splendid cattle drives of Red River (1948), magnificent ranches of How the West Was Won (1962), or ambitious homesteads of The Big Country (1958) or Shane. Lost also are the majestic celebrations of ranch work like the television series Rawhide (1959–66), whose memorable opening featured handsome men smiling jauntily on horseback, riding leisurely amidst their herd, visually championing this wage work as a lifestyle even within the reduced aspect ratio of television. Such visual celebrations are replaced in Deadwood by cramped, close shots of the muck-filled streets of a mining town facing its incorporation into the Union and the impending shift away from subsistence farming or artisanal craftsmanship toward an economy of alienated labor represented by the Hearst mining interest. Deadwood ’s excessively visceral fascination with filth, degradation, and messy personal violence that lacks a larger redemptive purpose thus

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narrates the coming of a decentered corporate capitalism that speaks not only to the anxieties of its nineteenth-century protagonists, but also underscores contemporary concerns over the changed economic landscape of global capital and the rise of immaterial labor in a post-Fordist system. This anxiety is evidenced by the contemporary televisual focus on immaterial labor and a corporeality that is rendered through fetishistic forensic detail. The protagonists from the above-mentioned series all labor in jobs far removed from a Fordist economic system marked by manufactoring and scientific management structures. Instead, this cast of detectives, attorneys, and medical professionals all perform intellectual labor of some kind, a labor whose chief material relationship to the body lies in its use value in detection, deposition, or diagnosis. In other words, the socioeconomic angst propelling these televisual heroes reduces corporeality to a litany of clues, cancers, or corpses. By extension, Deadwood ’s penchant for representing bodily violence in nontriumphalist terms, juxtaposing killing with the general mire and malaise of a host of bodily sufferings and vulnerabilities, participates in a contemporary angst over use-value and the body by highlighting what these other shows elide. One way that Deadwood resonates with this contemporary angst is by focusing on the literal work done by the camp’s denizens. Mostly everyone in Deadwood, for example, seems to be busy about their business; there are no idle cowpokes lazing in the sun or lingering on the trail here. Further, as in the case of Doc Cochran’s dissections of brains, or his abdication of a position in the ad hoc government due to previous accusations of grave robbing, some of this work is portrayed as shameful or abhorrent. This thematic concentration on the rigorous employment of Deadwood ’s characters is matched by the absence of majestic panoramic shots. The sex trade in Deadwood is shot with a marked closeness and the avoidance of panorama, as the rare shots of prostitutes plying their trade open abruptly or seem to occur in shaded corners of the Gem Saloon. Further still, some of the prostitutes in Deadwood, like those who “work” for Mr. Lee or the girls murdered by Wolcott at the Chez Amis, explicitly demonstrate the interchangeability of bodies as they are literally worked to death. The prostitutes of Mr. Lee particularly demonstrate the alienated body of labor in the neoliberal capital of Deadwood. Brought in by a foreign agent to undermine the price of the sex trade within the camp, these women are nameless, imported into the camp in cages like animals, like so much cargo to be bought, traded, and sold (“Something very Expensive” 2.6). After their shocking entrance, we do not see them again until they are dead, presumably from being overworked and underfed, and their corpses burned. This scene, which highlights the use value of bodies as fungible commodities

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within the economic system of Deadwood, opens with a medium shot of Swearengen walking down the thoroughfare, sniffing the air with obvious disgust. The camera then cuts to a rare panoramic view of the main street that deliberately shows a cloud of thick black smoke. This smoke, however, is from a remote location, removed from this main thoroughfare. The camera cuts back to a close-up of Swearengen, who curls his nose again at the smell, and then to a close-up of Mr. Lee as he nods to direct his men to throw another body on the pyre. As the camera pulls back to show them throwing a woman’s gaunt body—barely clothed in tattered rags—onto a fire off-screen, the flames rage up and briefly obscure the shot as they consume her body. We are made to understand, by the onlookers’ ashamed expressions and Mr. Wu’s enraged protests, that it is the burning of these women’s bodies that is polluting the air in Deadwood. The close-ups of Lee and Swearengen, along with the faceless bodies and ashamed reaction shots, serve as a brief but powerful visual reminder of the vulnerable, disposable body of alienated labor within Deadwood. Deadwood ’s focus on marketplace individualism and self-determination is thus radically refigured in the show’s disavowal of the triumphalism of the genre’s traditional panoramic celebration of work in the nineteenth-century frontier. Panaroma, here, is used to the represent loss of individuality, rather than its triumph. Distinguishing Deadwood’s fixation on bodily ailments from the contemporary televisual medical drama, Erin Hill has pointed to a key feature of the ailing bodies in Deadwood: While even medical dramas, which make the human body the site for their spectacle, tend to relegate bodily trauma to secondary characters, leaving their doctor protagonists unfettered by their own flesh, these ailments on Deadwood strike central characters down for episodes at a time.26 Hill is right to note the severity of the suffering for many of Deadwood’s chief characters. From E. B. Farnum’s recurring diarrhea and tooth decay to the painful withdrawal and detoxification of Mrs. Garrett, from Swearengen’s extended kidney stone sufferings and his gruesome cure at Doc Cochran’s hands to the outbreak of smallpox, from the tumor-induced seizures of Reverend Smith or the extended coma of young William Bullock to the enduring vegetative state of the unrepentant racist Steve, the pain of living and working in Deadwood is as palpable as the threat of dying there. Hill also keenly points to the ways these ailments and their treatment often serve as remarkably economic means to develop characters and advance plotlines quickly, like how Mrs. Garrett’s recovery from her laudanum addiction provides her the strength and confidence to initially oppose George

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Hearst, or how the smallpox outbreak prompts the formation of a town council that in turn becomes an ad hoc government. These varied ailments and suffering bodies serve as continual reminders of the relentlessness of life in Deadwood, the backdrop against which the show’s representations of violence take on meaning. The suffering of these bodies may move plots along, but it is not redemptive. No one ails for a greater good; they simply suffer the severity of life and work. It is thus unsurprising that violence in such a diegetic setting would be similarly devoid of redemption. In both its suffering bodies and its visceral violence, Deadwood is thus congruent with the contemporaneous corporeality of modern televisual fictions—to say nothing of the wide array of cosmetic surgery-based “reality” shows or the fascinatingly disembodied procedural focus upon fashioning bodies in a show like FX ’s Nip/Tuck (2003–10). Far from the all-ages, all-demographics broadcasting of Western television shows like Bonanza (1959–73) or Gunsmoke, Deadwood premiered in a landscape of television almost endlessly targeted to niche audiences through a subscription-based narrowcast system with seemingly a channel or show for every manner of viewer. Within this televisual landscape, the climate of focused corporeality corresponds to a politically disengaged, if not actually dispossessed, audience whose solitary consumption of premium television occurs within a confined domestic space that is readily attuned to the ways “neo-liberal reasoning produces social effects.”27 Deadwood ’s fixation on bodily defects and the filth and decay of being human is, however, more than merely a reflection of larger social concerns. It is instead constitutive, a social effect of the neoliberal reasoning that is not simply the driving force behind the diegetic Hearst’s “murderous engine” but also an active means through which neoliberal capitalism creates subjectivities (“Tell Him Something Pretty” 3.12). Within this landscape we are no longer recruited as nationalist citizens, nor are we still interpellated as subjects. Deadwood ’s audience, instead, is hailed as individuated, indeed disembodied, commodities within a marketplace logic of endless exchange not unlike the cable television apparatus on which it first aired. In this context, Deadwood reimagines violence as a more intimate, more personal affair. Like Swearengen, the series doesn’t rely on gunplay, but instead, “works better up close” (3.12). To illustrate the difference Deadwood represents, a close examination of some key scenes of violent conflict is in order. Surely bodies ail and people suffer in Deadwood, as the various ailments already mentioned illustrate. Further, Doc Cochran’s extensive ministrations to the prostitutes in the Gem and Bella Union saloons serve as a visceral reminder of the unforgiving corporeal conditions of life and labor in this mining camp and the toll that commerce there takes upon a body. Further still, Wu’s well-fed pigs suggest the continuing use value of these bodies

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even after their term as labor has expired. But Deadwood is more than a tale of the exacting corporeal toll of building a town, for amidst these brutal exchanges, conflicts continually arise which are often addressed through violent interaction. These interactions, typically between social or economic rivals, are pointedly without a satisfyingly cathartic resolution. When Swearengen and Bullock fight at the beginning of the second season, for instance, little is changed between them (“A Lie Agreed Upon, Part I” 2.1). Cast as a confrontation between the newly ensconced figure of “the law” and the town’s resident criminal overlord, the fight serves merely to further a grudging respect between these two opposing figures. Instead of “the law” winning moral authority from the decidedly corrupt criminal overlord, what results from this fight is a truce of sorts, a compromised working together between “the law”—as represented by Bullock—and the savage personal violence in service of commerce represented by Swearengen. That Bullock removes his badge and gun before the fight begins further signals that this conflict is of a personal nature; that Swearengen returns these symbols of Bullock’s office in the battle’s aftermath underscores the fact that this fight, in effect, solved nothing, being little more than a nasty brawl between two “alpha males.”28 Their fight, along with their markedly wounded bodies and ensuing recovery, serves powerfully to point out the material, bodily, remnant of the abstractions of law. Underpinning and upholding the abstraction—the binarism of law v. savagery— Deadwood insists, are two bodies grappling in the mud. The fight between Swearengen’s henchman, Dan Dority, and George Hearst’s bodyguard, Captain Turner, is similarly anticlimactic (“A Two Headed Beast” 3.5). It is, however, more dramatically orchestrated, and significantly more gruesome. The dramatic tension comes from Swearengen’s repeated attempts to understand Hearst’s reasoning behind orchestrating the fight, as well as the intercutting between each combatant’s preparation as Dority oils up and Turner stretches, and the heavy sadness that permeates Dority and Hearst’s musings after the fact. For Dority, the trauma comes from having killed a man in a fair fight, having to watch the “light go out of his eyes,” while Hearst mourns just as much for the loss of his aid as for the fact that his “object lesson for every man watching” didn’t go his way (3.5). The gruesomeness of the scene comes from a spinning subjective camera which leaves the audience disoriented amidst extreme closeups of biting, choking, drowning, eye-gouging, and, finally, Turner’s broken body beaten to death with a log. While more prolonged, more explicit, and more moving in its aftermath, this violent conflict also resolves nothing, either between Hearst and Swearengen or between the local business interests of Deadwood and the coming of amalgamated capital represented by the Hearst mining interest. As

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intermediaries in larger conflicts, Dority and Turner could very well have been lawyers for the two parties, and their fight is just as messy, complicated, and unsatisfactory. The violence of intermediaries is indeed portrayed in Deadwood as the most vicious of all. Howsoever ruthless in their practices, small, local entrepreneurs like Swearengen—or even the decidedly dastardly Cy Tolliver— are shown to be preferable by far to the advance agents, middle-men, and go-betweens of neoliberal capitalism. Hearst’s advance agents turn out to be especially heinous. His man in Chinatown, Mr. Lee, is particularly ruthless as he treats his prostitutes as little more than chattel, literally working them to death before burning their bodies. More shockingly monstrous, however, is the senseless violence of Francis Wolcott, Hearst’s advance agent who, in the midst of buying up mining claims to create a monopoly through deception, misinformation, and intimidation, displays his penchant for slaughtering prostitutes. As Paul Cantor has rightly noted, “Wolcott turns out to be the creepiest villain in the series, and Milch presents the business policies he pursues on Heart’s behalf in an extremely negative light.”29 Hearst eventually dismisses Wolcott after discovering his murderous proclivities, though this is not portrayed as a testament to any “moral outrage, but simply because Wolcott’s behavior is bad for business.”30 Repeatedly invoking Hearst as “the man I work for,” Wolcott is quite literally an agent of abstract power, the ruthless violence of the extraction of labor power that spills over into his sexual practices. A nineteenth-century incarnation of the abstract murderousness of American Psycho ’s Patrick Bateman, Wolcott embodies the corporeal violence of endless commodification.31 Deadwood ’s many violent conflicts fail to yield satisfactory resolutions, and, awash in a sea of suffering bodies, the violence of advance agents and intermediaries stands out in this sense, as well. One way of reading the show, then, suggests that the series doesn’t really work as a Western at all. For it neither serves, as Jane Tompkins would have it, as a “justification for violence,” nor does it seem to believe, as Robert Warshow argued of the genre, in “the value of violence.”32 Despite the apparent “Westernness” of its setting, something else seems to be going on in Deadwood as it champions a much different hero than its generic predecessors. While Deadwood eschews the triumphalist Western’s binary opposition between white-hatted heroes and black-hatted villains, thus ridding violent conflicts of adequate resolution, the series works conspicuously to represent the bodily exchange of neoliberal capitalism as a profoundly immoral violence. Deadwood thus turns out to champion a rather unlikely hero in Al Swearengen. For unlike the sly middle-man Cy Tolliver, or the murderous engine George Hearst, Swearengen quite literally cleans up his own messes. Swearengen, then, is attuned to the

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residue of his business affairs, aware that his machinations involve things and people, a materiality that cannot be entirely removed from all the abstractions of capitalism. The scenes where Swearengen is down on his knees, scrubbing blood, are illustrative of this important distinction. Swearengen first cleans up blood near the middle of the first season. The bloodstain in question here comes from a man murdered by Dority for looking too keenly upon a young girl Dority has come to fancy. As the killing was the work of his chief henchman, and occurred in his saloon, Swearengen has a vested interest in scrubbing away the stain. He seems to take some pride in the rigors of a brush roughly applied as well, triumphantly telling Jewel, “now that’s how you scrub a fucking bloodstain!” (“Suffer the Little Children” 1.8). More important than his readiness to perform menial labor, however, is the episode’s narrative trajectory that gives this mundane act meaning. Before cleaning the bloodstain Swearengen counsels Farnum that the better course in dealing with the Garrett claim and Bullock is to abstain from violence, explaining that it would better serve the camp’s security to have a man like Bullock as a figurehead for order among them and that the riches to come from further development far exceed the immediate gain in the Garrett claim. More important still is the episode’s penultimate scene wherein Tolliver beats and kills the young girl—who turns out to be a thief—and her brother. Tolliver’s vengeful violence against these young kids is very stylized, with disorienting, blurry, subjective camera shots that approximate the viewpoint of the two kids and swelling ominous crescendos of nondiegetic music that underscore the nastiness of Tolliver’s retribution. Framed by dialogue that establishes Swearengen’s shrewd abstention from using violence to solve a conflict and a scene that vividly portrays Tolliver’s sadistic pleasure, this first instance of Swearengen cleaning blood establishes him as a force for order within the camp. Swearengen again cleans blood in the first episode of the third season. Here too, the blood was spilled by his henchman in his saloon, and Swearengen repeats his proud proclamation, “now that’s how you clean a fucking bloodstain!” (“Tell Your God to Ready for Blood” 3.1). The larger narrative trajectory of this episode is also centrally concerned with repudiating the value of retributive violence. The foil against which Swearengen is measured in this episode, however, is not Tolliver, but Deadwood ’s chief villain George Hearst. The blood Swearengen proudly cleans is from a murder orchestrated by Hearst in the Gem, perhaps as illustration that he can control all that happens in the town. Swearengen takes offense at Hearst’s imposition into his place of business, and two more men are murdered, again by Hearst’s orchestrations. It is perhaps significant here that Hearst is shown lying down during the first murder and entirely absent during the subsequent killings, while Swearengen

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cleans up after the first and wields a knife in the second, himself killing one of the men Hearst sets up as an exchange for the initial offense. More significant, however, is Swearengen’s response to Dority’s question about dealing with Hearst: “Don’t I yearn for the days a draw across the throat made fucking resolution” (3.1). Explicitly disavowing the utility of violence in dealing with Hearst, Swearengen instead seeks other means. Repeatedly throughout the rest of the third season, Swearengen councils against a direct, violent confrontation, telling Bullock that “if blood is what it finally comes to, a hundred years from now the forest is what they’ll find here” (“A Rich Find” 3.6). Each of these scenes of Swearengen cleaning blood works to distinguish Swearengen from the other principle business agents in the show, Tolliver and Hearst, and each is framed by horrific representations, or explicit disavowals, of retributive violence. As Cantor has pointed out, Swearengen is representative of a limited, local violence within the camp: Al has become a sort of hero in Deadwood for leading the resistance to the outside forces trying to “modernize” the town . . . Swearingen is a tyrant, but he is Deadwood’s own tyrant. As a homegrown boss, he is by nature limited in his evil. When Al kills someone, he usually has to look him—or her—straight in the eyes. In general, he has to live with the consequences of his evil deeds. Indeed, he lives among the very people he preys upon. This fact does not stop him from preying upon them, but it does moderate the way he treats them. He never kills indiscriminately.33 As his violence is local, so it is limited, unlike the amalgamated, exploitative, and decidedly foreign violence visited upon the town by Hearst. Furthermore, these scenes of Swearengen cleaning blood, perhaps the most potent symbol of corporeality and bodily vulnerability, establish him as the show’s unlikely hero, heroic in his ability to restrain his violent impulses. By showing him as both willing to perform menial labor and proud of his ability in such distasteful tasks, Deadwood sets Swearengen up as emblematic of personal investment. Further still, Swearengen’s ritualistic blood cleaning demonstrates his adherence to a tacit knowledge of the materiality of the abstractions of both law and capital. Deadwood maintains that these abstractions, in short, must be enacted upon, and through, somebody. Swearengen’s scrubbing, in other words, insists that there is always a remnant, a corporeal remainder, to be washed away. Finally, this personal stake in the gritty affairs of his business is championed against the abstract, impersonal financial power wielded by Hearst. The third and final instance in which Swearengen cleans up blood occurs in the final scene in season three, the end of the last episode. Here Swearengen

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cleans up the blood he himself spilled when killing a prostitute to satisfy Hearst’s demanded retribution for Trixie’s attempt on his life. Due to his affection for Trixie, however, Swearengen cannot kill her and literally substitutes another woman’s body for hers. The narrative details that surround this mundane act of cleaning, the context that gives it meaning, radically undermine the value of Trixie’s attempted violence and Heart’s retributive demand. For, unlike earlier Westerns of personal revenge, Trixie’s violent action not only doesn’t resolve a conflict, but significantly is “resolved” through the exchange of another’s body for hers, thus revealing clearly the brutality of the capitalist exchange mechanism. The murdered innocent, Jen, also points up the corporeal remainder of this abstraction. The retributive justice demanded by Hearst cannot, Deadwood insists, simply be a legal action; Jen’s dead body and Swearengen’s ritualistic blood cleaning serve as visceral reminders of the materiality of abstraction. When one of his employees who was fond of the murdered, exchanged girl asks Swearengen if she suffered, he replies curtly “I was gentle as I was able, and that’s the last we’ll fucking speak of it Johnny” (3.12). Johnny’s sorrow is a potent final marker of the remainder left behind in such an abstract exchange of bodies, for his sorrow is powerfully affective, a deeply resonant mourning over the effects of the engine of murderous capitalism. As Johnny leaves, Swearengen points up this remainder also, and hangs his head in sorrow before muttering to himself, “wants me to tell him something pretty,” and resumes scrubbing the blood stain with his usual vigor (3.12). Deadwood ’s final scene and Swearingen’s closing solilioguy, “wants me tell him something pretty,” have been much commented upon as apt summaries of the shows’ disavowal of the traditional Western’s triumphalism. But the show’s finale, like Hickok’s warning to Alma Garrett, contains also a somber note of reflection, a call to introspection about our participation within both fantasies of retributive violence and the individualized, bodily violence of neoliberal capitalist exchange. His demand for retributive justice met, Hearst mounts his coach to ride away. Continuing to adopt the untouchable, condescending air of civility that Alma earlier noted to be “vapid and repulsive” he waves and tips his hat to passersby on the thoroughfare (3.12). Deeply offended, Bullock dismisses him, telling him in no uncertain terms that his time in town is up. Dissatisfied as he watches Hearst leave seemingly unscathed by all the havoc he has wreaked upon the camp, Bullock is offered solace by Charlie Utter: Utter: Bullock: Utter:

You done fucking good. I did fucking nothing. That’s often a tough one, in aid of the larger purpose.

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Which is laying head to pillow, not confusing yourself with a sucker? Far as I ever get. ‘Cause that’s gonna be a project tonight. (3.12)

The symbolic gunslinger gone—and with him all the mythical justifications and reifications of “law”—replaced by midnight reconnoitering mishaps, knife fights, brutal beatings, and bodies ailing only to expire and be fed to pigs, suffering and violence in Deadwood lacks aesthetic order and provides no climactic resolution. The violence in Deadwood is instead pragmatic, merely a way of doing business. As the exchange between Utter and Bullock points out, our complicity within, our joy at beholding, and our pleasure in consuming such a mess so vividly revealed, even when we romanticize it as emblematic of a higher cultural order or larger purpose to come, is a tough pill to swallow. Deadwood refuses to paint its history of the birth of modern America as “something pretty” to help us put our conscience-ridden head to pillow. The show’s visceral, grisly bodily violence may help us, however, not to confuse ourselves for suckers. For Deadwood’s rumbling, thunderous warning of the dark present of untempered, savage American capitalism works in the world to help us to come to terms with our participation in the violence that has always been merely another way of doing the business of developing America.

Notes I would like to acknowledge the contribution of Matthew Alan Lang, a student of mine at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who first brought the issue of corporeality within Deadwood to my attention. 1 Jim Kitses, “Authorship and Genre: Notes on the Western,” in The Western Reader, ed. Jim Kitses and Gregg Rickman (New York: Limelight, 1998), 64. 2 David Milch, Deadwood: Stories of the Blackhills (New York: Melcher Media, 2006), 201. 3 Douglas Howard, “Why Wild Bill Hickok Had to Die,” in Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By, ed. David Lavery (London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2006), 51. 4 Robert Westerfelhaus and Celeste Lacroix, “Waiting for the Barbarians: HBO’s Deadwood as a Post 9/11 Ritual of Disquiet,” Southern Communication Journal 74.1 (2009): 24.

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5 Throughout the text I will use italics to denote the series Deadwood, while employing standard type when discussing the diegetic setting, the mining camp turned burgeoning town of Deadwood. 6 The term “epic moment” comes from John G. Cawelti’s groundbreaking ideological analysis of the genre, The Sixgun Mystique, where he explains the importance of the genre’s setting “at a certain moment in the development of American civilization, namely at that point when savagery and lawlessness are in decline before the advancing wave of law and order, but are still strong enough to pose a local and momentarily significant challenge” (38). 7 See the third chapter of Wright’s seminal Sixguns and Society for a full development of these and other plotlines within the classical film Western. 8 Amanda Ann Klein, “ ‘The Horse Doesn’t Get a Credit’: The Foregrounding of Generic Syntax in Deadwood ’s Opening Credits,” Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By, ed. David Lavery (London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2006), 93–100. 9 Terry K. Aladjem, The Culture of Vengeance and the Fate of American Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3. 10 Klein, “ ‘The Horse Doesn’t Get a Credit,’ ” 99. 11 Erica Stein, “ ‘A Hell of a Place’: The Everyday as Revisionist Content in Contemporary Westerns,” Mediascape: UCLA’s Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (Fall 2009): 3, www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Fall09_ Western.html; accessed November 28, 2011. 12 Westerfelhaus and Lacroix, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” 21. 13 Ibid., 23. 14 Daniel Worden, “Neo-liberalism and the Western: HBO’s Deadwood as National Allegory,” Canadian Review of American Studies 39.2 (2009): 227. 15 Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its spectator, and the Avante-Garde,” in Film and Theory: An Introduction, ed. Robert Stam and Toby Miller (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 2000), 230. 16 Marsha Kinder, “Violence American Style: The Narrative Orchestration of Violent Attractions,” in Violence and American Cinema, ed. David J. Slocum (New York: Routledge, 2001), 63–100, 68. 17 Jason Jacobs, “Al Swearengen, Philosopher King,” in Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By, ed. David Lavery (London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd., 2006), 11. 18 Besides commentators explicitly quoted in the text, I’m particularly indebted to the insightful analyses and compelling readings of Deadwood put forward by David Drysdale, Mark Berrettini, Kyle Wiggins, and David Holmberg for helping me to see the importance of governmental suspicion to the arc of the series’s development.

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19 Daniel Worden, “Neo-Liberalism and the Western,” 232–3. 20 David Harvey, The New Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 136. 21 Ibid. 22 Allison Perlman, “Deadwood, Generic Transformation, and Televisual History,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 39.2 (2011): 108. 23 Perlman, “Deadwood, Generic Transformation,” 105. 24 Ibid., 104. 25 At the time of this writing, each of the shows that lack an end-date in the parenthetical citations is still on air. 26 Erin Hill, “ ‘What’s Afflictin’ You?’: Corporeality, Bodily Crises, and the Body Politic in Deadwood,” Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By, ed. David Lavery (London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2006), 171. 27 Daniel Worden, “Neo-Liberalism and the Western,” 231. 28 Paul A. Cantor, “The Deadwood Dilemma: Freedom versus Law,” in Damned if You Do: Dilemma of Action in Literature and Popular Culture, ed. Margaret S. Hrezo and John M. Parish (New York: Lexington Books, 2010), 26. 29 Cantor, “The Deadwood Dilemma,” 32. 30 Ibid. 31 The protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’ 1990 novel American Psycho, Bateman was vividly reimagined by Christian Bale in Mary Haron’s 2000 film version by the same name. 32 Jane Tompkins, West of Everything : The Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 227; Robert Warshow, “Movie Chronicle: The Westerner,” in The Western Reader, ed. Jim Kitses and Gregg Rickman (New York: Limelight, 2004), 47. 33 Cantor, “The Deadwood Dilemma,” 35.

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6 A terrible beauty: Deadwood, settler colonial violence, and the post-9/11 state of exception Erik Altenbernd and Alex Young n many ways, it is easy to account for the critical and popular success of Deadwood. An elaborately plotted series written and created by one of the most inventive and successful minds in television, Deadwood also checks all the boxes of what Allison Perlman has called “the trifecta of HBO’s innovation in television-programming content” (namely, violence, nudity, and profanity), and thus emerged as a worthy successor to programs like The Sopranos (1999–2007), The Wire (2002–2008), and Oz (1997– 2003).1 In other respects, however, Deadwood constituted something of a departure for HBO. It was, after all, a period piece—and a Western to boot. Set a decade after the Civil War amidst the pine- and spruce-covered valleys of the Black Hills, Deadwood might have acted like The Sopranos and The Wire, but it looked altogether different than the rest of HBO’s contemporary-minded fare. Deadwood ’s synthesis of historical content and contemporary sensibilities was not an accident. While numerous commentators lauded or critiqued the series for its historical veracity, or lack thereof, series creator David Milch conceived of—and advertised—the show as a paradoxical blend of historical accuracy and presentist allegory.2 In the barrage of publicity interviews he gave over the course of Deadwood ’s three-season run, Milch often stated his desire to transcend the conventions of the Western genre to offer a

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more truthful representation of frontier conditions. In one interview, Milch noted that he was “mystified” when he began conducting research on Deadwood and the Black Hills Gold Rush. “It seemed so obvious to me,” Milch recounted, that Hollywood Westerns “had nothing to do with the West that I was studying.”3 Despite his distaste for the Western genre’s lack of verisimilitude, Milch nonetheless seems to have embraced the Western’s tendency to allegorize contemporary American political life.4 He described Deadwood as a story intended to speak to the political anxieties of Americans following the trauma of 9/11: “I wrote Deadwood,” Milch explained, “to illuminate the present by setting it in the past, since the events of the present are too immediate and pressing in our minds to make for good drama. Nothing you see in Deadwood is irrelevant to our contemporary reality.”5 For Milch, the process of “illuminating the present by setting it in the past” operated in redemptive rather than critical terms. Milch quotes the poet Robert Penn Warren—one of his mentors at Yale—multiple times in describing the production of Deadwood as “the process ‘whereby pain of the past in its pastness / May be converted into the future tense / Of joy.’”6 The story of Deadwood also appealed to Milch because it offered a representational space in which he could explore American social formation alongside various processes of modernity. In Milch’s words, I think the human heart yearns to be lifted up . . . but it’s disingenuous not to recognize that certain moments in history make it hard to acknowledge all our familial connections. It was for something like that reason, in the aftermath of the events of September 11, I didn’t want to do a story with a contemporary setting. I settled on a story about Deadwood because the camp came together in the mid-1870s, deep into the Industrial Revolution, and yet it was a reenactment of the story of the founding of America, and a reenactment, too, of the story of Original Sin.7 Thus, for Milch, the story of Deadwood proved allegorically apt because it resonated with sacred as well as secular mythologies. The redemptive tone of these commentaries is rather remarkable, however, given the revisionist bent of Deadwood ’s aesthetic. Eschewing sublime vistas for noirish and claustrophobic interiors, lingering on images of violence and torture, and supplanting the laconic language of the “strong, silent” cowboy with an expansive Victorian-cum-Elizabethan patois dominated by sexual obscenity, Deadwood, in many respects, consciously avoids trading in the tropes of frontier nostalgia typically associated with the genre Western.

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In another reflective moment Milch alludes to a telling paradox regarding the show’s attempt to wrest contemporary significance from America’s frontier past: I think that there is, I guess as Yeats said, a “terrible beauty born” in Deadwood. The search for principles of organization . . . And the kind of lurching development, in Deadwood, of different principles of organization by which men and women deported themselves was something that I wanted to see; and I wanted to see it absent the idea of law.8 The Yeats reference, which is to “Easter, 1916,” a poetic meditation on the revolutionary struggles of the Irish Republicans against the British Empire, deserves further consideration. As David Lloyd has pointed out, the phrase “a terrible beauty” possesses an uncanny quality that emerges from its “imperious collapse” of two distinct aesthetic categories: the sublime, the aesthetic associated with “the masculine domain of production and transcendence . . . evoked in response to the terror of death,” and the beautiful, the category traditionally associated with “the feminine sphere” and “the harmonious reproduction of social forms.” Thus, in political terms, the phrase holds the productive terror of the revolutionary moment in suspension with an aesthetic tradition of cultural transmission that reproduces the “social forms” of the nascent nation-state. 9 This ambivalence speaks directly to the violent yet redemptive vision of the American frontier that Milch evokes in his commentary. For Milch, the Deadwood camp of the late 1870s was a space of regressive regeneration and revolutionary potential that allows contemporary viewers to witness the fundamental “principles of organization” of the nation-state. In this regard, Deadwood dramatizes the refounding of the United States, the individual and collective “rebirth” associated, in the words of the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, with the “return to primitive conditions” through which “American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier.”10 Of course, in the historical Deadwood, the terms of Yeats’s metaphor were reversed. The “terrible beauty” we see at work in Deadwood is a representation of the advance of empire rather than rebellion against it. The historical Deadwood was certainly an extralegal settlement, but it was not a regression to a “state of nature,” as Milch and some commentators have portrayed it.11 Deadwood’s pioneers contravened the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 in a process of settler colonial conquest that was systematic even when it was not legally sanctioned. While Deadwood’s settlers might have operated outside the formal bounds of US sovereignty, they were always operating in relation

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to it.12 In a recent discussion on the nature of settler colonial frontiers, historian Patrick Wolfe neatly sums up this paradox: The frontier represents the pre-national time that is nonetheless the postNative time. This contradictory representation is a way of talking about the disorder of violent dispossession (if you must, the space of the exception) without allowing that disorder to compromise the settler rule of law. The settler state both traces itself back to the frontier and disavows the frontier, which is disowned as the work of irregular mavericks rather than as the primary means of settler expansion.13 In Wolfe’s characterization, the settler colonial frontier is not a space entirely “absent the idea of law,” but rather a spatiotemporal moment in the ongoing and violent process through which settler sovereignty is extended and legitimated. The “criminal” nature of the Deadwood camp did not pose a threat to US sovereignty, but rather served as a means of extending that sovereignty while allowing the American nation-state to disavow the violence that made the annexation of the Black Hills possible. As Lorenzo Veracini has noted, one of the bedrocks of settler colonial sovereignty is “the ability [of a settler society] to will a collective identity and its institutions into existence” and the attendant “capacity for self-reification.” These features of settler politics, which stem from a sense of settler self-determination, paradoxically function within and against the sovereignty of the larger society from which settlers emigrate. Thus while “settler communities routinely express the notion of an inherent self-governing capacity,” the founding of splinter societies (which Veracini labels isopolities) always operate “in ongoing tension with external colonising agencies.”14 It is Deadwood’s status as a frontier “isopolity,” self-contained and yet also mythically representative of the national settler body politic, that allows Milch to utilize a narrative of territorial expropriation of indigenous land as a productive allegory for the exercise of sovereign power in contemporary America. Through a consideration of the “terrible beauty” of Deadwood ’s representation of the frontier space of exception, we can begin to see why Deadwood ’s project of converting the “pain of the [frontier] past in its pastness” into the “future tense of joy” spoke so powerfully to Milch and his audience in post-9/11 America. When Deadwood went on the air in 2004, the Bush Administration was undertaking a highly visible campaign to create a state of exception within which, as Giorgio Agamben has put it, “the normative aspect of law . . . can be obliterated and contradicted with impunity by a governmental violence that . . . nevertheless claims to be applying the law.”15 Through its representation of the frontier “space of exception,” Deadwood

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revitalizes the Western genre by once again refracting America’s frontier heritage into a useable past. Deadwood uses this frontier allegory to perform a dual ideological movement. On the one hand, Deadwood represents the origins of contemporary forms of extralegal state violence by confronting its viewers with the spectacular terror of violence on the settler colonial frontier. On the other hand, the series interweaves these representations with familiar tropes appropriated from the Western genre in order to interpolate that violence within a well-defined tradition of cultural representation that depicts the frontier as the mythic site of nation-building. In the reading that follows, we will work to establish how Deadwood allegorizes the post-9/11 state of exception by tracking how the series’ ambivalent representation of America’s frontier past spoke to US citizens confronted by contradictory representations of extralegal violence during the early phases of the War on Terror.

Generic conventions and settler colonial violence in Deadwood Narrative exploration of the relationship between extralegal violence and the American government is familiar territory for the Western genre. As Robert Pippin persuasively argues, many Cold War Westerns mounted nuanced critiques of the liberal nation-state’s dependence on extralegal violence to maintain its sovereign authority. By representing frontier communities as “modern bourgeois, law-abiding, property-owning, market-economy, technologically advanced societies in transition—in situations of, mostly, lawlessness (or corrupt and ineffective law) that border on ‘classic’ state of nature theories,” films like John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) remain, Pippin contends, important texts for understanding American political culture. For Pippin, the Western is politically signifi cant in large part because it “attempts to capture the fundamental problem in a founding, the institution of law,” namely the question of “how legal order . . . is possible,” and “under what conditions it can be formed and command allegiance.”16 If the classic Cold War Westerns, as Pippin contends, sought to dramatize and even critique the violent underpinnings of American liberal institutions, then Deadwood amplifies this tendency. Deadwood ’s most fundamental revision of the Western’s founding narrative (as described by Pippin) is arguably its refusal to represent a liberal American polity “created and reinforced by deliberative procedures guided by a common appeal to reason.”17 In this Western for the Abu Ghraib era, extralegal violence is posited as the constitutive power

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that undergirds and sustains an overtly illiberal political community in which, in Agamben’s terms, “the law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension.”18 Cold War Westerns like Ford’s iconic Liberty Valance spoke to Kennedy-era apprehensions about the contradictions between progressive rhetoric, such as that employed in JFK’s well-known 1960 “New Frontier” speech, and the violent actions undertaken by the growing Cold War security state. In this speech, which he gave in acceptance of the Democratic presidential nomination, Kennedy sought to allegorize the national struggle against the USSR as a potential reawakening of the democratic possibilities of the frontier as described by Turner.19 The Turnerian frontier myth, as Richard Slotkin has noted, functioned as “an authentic metaphor” for the way Kennedy and his advisors “hoped to use political power” as they situated the United States as a democratic alternative to the totalitarian USSR.20 George W. Bush, by contrast, relied on a very different imagining of the Western past when he sought to allegorize the “War on Terror” as a Western-style confrontation between outlawry and vigilante justice. Asked at a press conference at the Pentagon if he wanted Osama bin Laden killed, Bush famously replied, “I want justice. And there’s an old poster out West, that I recall, that said, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.’”21 Bush’s invocations of the mythic West were coupled, however, with more sinister rhetorical intimations of the state of exception that manifested itself in the form of preemptive war, torture, and extraordinary rendition during the War on Terror. Days after 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney offered his own metaphor when he went on national television to warn Americans that the United States would have to work “the dark side” in order to prevail against al-Qaeda.22 When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke just weeks after the premier of Deadwood in 2004, “the dark side” of the War on Terror was brought home to millions in the form of digital photographs of US soldiers torturing and sexually degrading Iraqi detainees. For the Bush administration, Abu Ghraib was a crisis not of policy but of representation. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it during a frustrated moment of his congressional testimony following the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs, We’re functioning in a—with peacetime restraints, with legal requirements in a wartime situation, in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon.23

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The Abu Ghraib photographs represented the possibility that the “dark side” would eclipse the familiar frontier rhetoric with which President Bush attempted to frame the conflict. As a Western that “works the dark side” with its own gruesome representations of violence, Deadwood was well-positioned to speak to the anxieties of the American public at a moment when traditional tropes of American national identification were being supplanted by images of state violence too traumatic to enfold within the national imaginary.24 As multiple scholars have argued, the first parallels in US jurisprudence to the exceptional status of detainees in the War on Terror can be found in the early US state’s construction of fundamental categories of exclusion applied to Native Americans.25 By dramatizing the federal government’s disavowal of the expropriation of Native lands carried out in the Black Hills during the 1870s, Deadwood could have drawn a telling parallel to the Bush administration’s disavowal of the violence carried out at Abu Ghraib. In its representations of the Black Hills frontier, however, Deadwood follows many Westerns’ tendency to elide the most violent and fundamental conflict of that frontier: the struggle between the Indians and the invading settlers. While the series does depict two acts of settler violence perpetrated against Native Americans—Bullock’s brutal killing of a Sioux warrior (“Plague” 1.6), and the arrival of a Mexican bounty hunter carrying the severed head of an Indian (“Here Was a Man” 1.4)— these representations adhere far more to genre conventions than to historical veracity. Indeed, the historical record of settler-Indian contact in the Black Hills between 1876 and 1880 is far richer than the show lets on. As a number of pioneer memoirs and histories attest, contact between Black Hills settlers and the native Sioux—especially during the Great Sioux War of 1876, the conflict made famous by George Armstrong Custer’s defeat at the Little Big Horn in June of that year—was not only routine but routinely violent. Conversely, whereas Deadwood portrays settler-on-settler violence as an almost daily occurrence within the town, the historical record suggests that civil violence within the settlement was actually quite rare. 26 Most of the violence associated with pioneer life in the Black Hills occurred during skirmishes between settlers and the Sioux along the roads and trails that connected the region’s various settlements. The most well-known and lamented Deadwood settler to fall victim to Indian violence was Reverend Henry W. Smith, the Methodist preacher who serves as the historical inspiration for Deadwood ’s character of the same name. The historical Reverend Smith did not die at the hands of Al Swearengen, as the show depicts in episode 1.12 (“Sold Under Sin”), but was killed by Indians in 1876 while traveling between Deadwood and Crook City. 27

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The regularity of Indian-settler contact in the early years of the Black Hills Gold Rush led to several attempts to quantify the number of settlers who died as a result of Indian-settler violence. In his memoir Pioneer Days in the Black Hills (1939), John S. McClintock completed a “Summary of Early-Day Fatalities” for Deadwood and the northern Black Hills region. The accuracy of McClintock’s summary is difficult to verify, but it is instructive nonetheless. For the years of 1876 and 1877, McClintock lists and describes a total of 78 settler deaths. McClintock identifies the responsible parties in 76 of the 78 deaths. Of these, Indians are accounted as responsible for 51; by contrast, the total number of deaths due to interpersonal violence among settlers is 25. By McClintock’s reckoning, then, Indians accounted for just over two-thirds of violent settler deaths during early days of the gold rush.28 In stark contrast to this record of ongoing Sioux presence and resistance in the Black Hills, Deadwood depicts but one living Native American in a scene that tells a tale of Native vanishing. Episode 1.6 begins with Bullock riding out of Deadwood in pursuit of Jack McCall. The scene opens with a shot of a Sioux burial scaffold, partially obscured by denuded trees in the foreground. In the next shot, Bullock’s horse is wounded by an arrow fired by a Sioux warrior hiding in the trees. A violent struggle ensues in which Bullock finally perseveres by bludgeoning the warrior with a rock. The camera then follows Bullock’s perspective as he gazes down at the face of the fallen Sioux, now almost unrecognizably mutilated. Following this shot, the camera reverses angles, revealing in Bullock’s partially bloodied face a peculiar expression of misrecognition before he loses consciousness. Bullock is later awakened by Charlie Utter, who is returning to Deadwood from Cheyenne. After a brief argument about what to do with the body, the two men decide to lay the warrior to rest in accordance with his own customs. The scene concludes with Utter and Bullock working together to place the warrior’s body atop of the burial scaffold, adjacent to the other body. The funeral is scored with a few bars of plaintive instrumental music, and ends with Utter and Bullock exchanging congratulatory half smiles, their faces and the colorful insignia of the burial scaffold illuminated by the low light of dusk. 29 This moment of sentimentality simultaneously celebrates the authenticity of the Sioux’s cultural traditions and the supposed fact of the Sioux’s vanishing—the only aspect of Sioux culture represented in the entire series is this allusion to their funeral rites. William Handley has addressed the contradiction apparent in this scene in a reading of early twentieth-century Westerns in which he notes that the White cultural producers “who most defended Indians—those who ‘valued’ what their culture represented—were the most vociferous about their vanishing.”30

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Just as early Westerns that celebrated Indian cultures were predicated on the notion that those cultures were destined to decline, so Deadwood represents “the failure of an Indian future, a failure upon which Americans depended to imagine their own.”31 Milch makes his representation of Native vanishing utterly transparent, while simultaneously drawing the relevant parallel to contemporary American imperialism, when he comments on Deadwood ’s representation of Indians in the series’ companion book: When a culture intuits that it is doomed, that the old symbolic order will not hold in the face of a more supple and powerful way of organizing reality, it finds a way to retreat into the notion of the afterlife, and commits suicide here on earth. The Indians developed responses to the pressure of a better organized society that wanted their land. In the 1880s that took the form of the Ghost Dance, a social phenomenon that promised some of the same otherworldly results that suicide bombers are promised today.32 For Milch, neither the pan-Indian Ghost Dance movement nor Islamic terrorism constitute desperate modes of insurgency against empire, but rather signal the self-immolation primitive cultures supposedly undergo when threatened by more robust societies. The series reinforces its portrayal of Native vanishing and the legitimacy of settler conquest in episode 1.7 (“Bullock Returns to the Camp”), when Bullock reflects back on killing the Sioux in an emotional discussion with his partner Sol Starr. Bullock remembers “We fought like fucking hell . . . And I never once had the upper hand—it just happened out the way it happened out. He was just tryin’ to live, the same as me.” The scene ends with Bullock’s declaration that “That Indian saved Jack McCall’s life,” and Starr’s wry and prescient reply, “Not for long.” By allegorizing the settler conquest of the Black Hills as a contest between equals—“He was just tryin’ to live, the same as me”— Deadwood actively reinscribes the convention of the vanishing Indian.33 Bullock’s triumph over the Sioux stands in for the US Army’s victory over the Sioux; it is portrayed not as an act of conquest but rather as an unfortunate historical contingency. Furthermore, the killing is portrayed as a redemptive experience, one that transforms Bullock’s desire for vengeance into an embrace of law. Bullock’s penitential decision to embrace formal justice rather than vengeance in dealing with McCall allegorically represents frontier violence as the “original sin” which the juridical order of the settler state supposedly seeks to transcend. As Sol Starr’s ironic comment on Bullock’s rumination makes clear, however, the process of settlement in Deadwood is not represented as

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coterminous with the successful containment of violence by the settler polity, as it is in so many Cold War Westerns. By marginalizing settler-Indian violence, Deadwood focuses almost exclusively on interpersonal violence within the settler community, allowing the show to offer a meditation on the relationship between ongoing extralegal violence and state power within the settler polity itself. This meditation begins in the first scene of the pilot episode (“Deadwood”). The scene opens on Bullock passing his last night as marshal by writing in his journal, while Clell Watson, a condemned man, converses with him from his jail cell. Their conversation is interrupted, however, by the arrival of a lynch mob looking for Watson. Realizing he can’t defend his prisoner alone, Bullock brings Watson out onto the porch of the jailhouse at gunpoint and hangs him, grotesquely adding his own weight to Watson’s body in order to break his neck. Bullock undertakes this action, however, only after declaring to the lynch mob that he is “executing sentence now . . . under color of the law.” The evocative phrase “color of the law” in this context speaks to the notion of law and order that colors the entire series. Judging that necessity demanded action outside the bounds of the law, Bullock performs an extralegal execution. His declaration that Watson is dying “under color of the law,” however, symbolically grants his violence the “force of law.” The paradox of this last phrase is productively explored in Agamben’s State of Exception, specifically when he argues that governmental acts carried out under “the force of law” are necessarily those which fall outside the juridical order, even as they are carried out in the name of the law: The state of exception is an anomic space in which what is at stake is a force of law without law (which thus should be written: force of law). Such a force of law is certainly something like a mystical element, or rather a fiction by which law seeks to annex anomie itself.34 This fiction, through which anomic violence, undertaken “under the force of law,” is read to be a legitimate expression of the law, is one that Deadwood comes to embrace. In this opening scene, Deadwood communicates the contradictions and brutality latent in Bullock’s role—the viewer is shocked by the gruesome vision of the impromptu hanging. Ultimately, however, the scene also argues for the fundamental decency of Bullock’s actions. The condemned man was executed in a more “humane” fashion in the hands of Bullock than he would have been at the hands of the lynch mob. The spectacular terror of the extralegal execution is not presented as an unambiguous critique of Bullock’s violence, but instead is represented as a disturbing yet necessary exigency of the lawman’s duty.

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Just as Deadwood departs from the precedent of the Cold War Western by amplifying anxieties about the relationship of extralegal violence and state power present in films such as Ford’s Liberty Valance, the series also develops the revisionist visual aesthetics of later Cold War Westerns in striking ways.35 One obvious and significant example of this phenomenon can be seen in the show’s near total disregard of landscape and its preference for interiors. For a series depicting the vagaries of a nineteenth-century gold-rush community, Deadwood spends little time out-of-doors, and pays very little attention to the processes through which gold was extracted from the Black Hills.36 Also absent, and remarkably so given their centrality to the genre, are the sublime vistas that dominate the visual aesthetics of countless Westerns.37 A list of the landscape shots in all 36 episodes of the series would be a short one. Perhaps the most prominent, however, is the panoramic view of Deadwood Gulch seen in the pilot episode. After the conclusion of the opening scene involving Bullock, the scene shifts to the Black Hills as the audience is introduced to “Calamity” Jane Canary and Wild Bill Hickok, who are stuck with their wagon on a gridlocked trail. After a brief exchange, Jane proceeds down the line to complain to the party whose wagon has tipped and caused the delay, and from there takes in the panorama before her in a state of utter exasperation. To the left is a wagon train slowly descending the trail ahead. As the camera pans right, the viewer is greeted with an extreme long shot of more wagons ahead, all of which are—slowly—filing into the camp below. From there, the viewer leaves Jane at the ridgeline and joins Bullock just as he makes his way onto Main Street and into the mise-en-scène that Jane’s panorama synoptically suggests. Through a series of point-of-view and close-up shots of Bullock, as well as medium and long shots of the camp—of its placer miners, butchers, carpenters, masons, arms dealers, ramshackle facades, and whiskey stands—the viewer gets his or her first view of the creative destruction that is Deadwood. This sequence is significant for two reasons. The first concerns the ambiguity and revisionist bent of its aesthetic. While the viewer has the option of taking pleasure in the panorama of Deadwood Gulch, Jane has no such privilege. Jane responds to the panorama not as a landscape but as a setting, one that embodies the tribulations of her passage into the restive and cacophonous disorder of the camp. Throughout the rest of series, the town’s alpine setting is largely kept at bay. Unlike classic Westerns such as My Darling Clementine (1946), where Monument Valley intrudes itself into nearly every exterior shot within the town, Jane’s panorama actively orients the audience toward the town rather than the scenery beyond. In Deadwood, a “terrible beauty is born” when, in contrast to the sublime pleasures of Ford’s arid wilderness, the viewer is invited to contemplate not the mountains but the burgeoning, disorderly, and violent settlement they shelter.

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The second important aspect of this shot concerns its status as a landscape. While it is panoramic, it is not, formally speaking, a landscape. The emergence of landscape as a discrete genre of art coincided with the naturalization of its representative conventions. The presumption that landscapes constituted natural or faithful transcriptions of nature situated landscapes, to use the words of Martin Lefebvre, not only as “autonomous” objects but also as objects divorced from narrative, and thus as “anti-setting” or “space freed from eventhood.”38 Analyzing cinematic landscapes in this context, Lefebvre concludes that filmic media engage this tradition in one of two ways: either through a “narrative mode,” which treats natural landscapes primarily as a setting or background, and thus as secondary to the narrative; or through a “spectacular mode,” which treats natural landscapes as autonomous and therefore wholly separate from the narrative. 39 The panorama that the audience sees through Jane in the pilot episode of Deadwood falls squarely within the narrative mode of visuality. Jane’s subjectivity is well-developed, but, again, it is not one of aesthetic pleasure but rather of social agitation. Likewise, while the panorama from atop the ridgeline where Jane stands provides a sweeping view of the town’s setting, the shot draws the viewer’s attention not to the independent status of the Dakota wilderness, but rather to the road that leads to the Deadwood thoroughfare. By refusing to revel in the panoramic landscapes that establish the West as an autonomous spectacle, Deadwood rejects an aesthetic that would allow its audience to perceive the West as a sublime space that reaffirms the autonomy of the citizen subject, and thereby undercuts one of the primary modes through which Cold War Westerns represent the frontier as a seedbed of liberal democracy.40

Settler sovereignties and the isopolity of Deadwood As the series progresses into its representation of life in the Deadwood camp, it continues to work against generic tropes that establish links between liberal values and the frontier. By the end of the first season, the Deadwood camp has transitioned from an outlaw settlement on Lakota land with no political authority into one that, in anticipation of annexation by the United States, has established an ad hoc political organization. As Deadwood transitions from a frontier space of exception into a community in which the “form of law” is beginning to emerge in the form of basic rules and statutes, the character Al Swearengen stands outside and (often quite literally) above this structure, legitimizing it with his authority but always free to decide when the rules do not apply to him.

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Perhaps no aspect of the series better illustrates how Deadwood accustoms its viewers to the supposed necessity of extralegal violence for governing a political community than the story of how Al Swearengen transitions from being portrayed as a “not quite diabolical pimp” into the show’s lead character and an allegorical figure for sovereign power in the camp.41 The claim that Swearengen’s power is analogous to that of a “sovereign” (in Carl Schmitt’s sense of the word), within the extralegal polity of the Deadwood camp, is one that is paradoxical, yet also of central importance to a nuanced understanding of how Deadwood allegorizes the exercise of sovereign power in the United States. While theorists of settler colonialism like Veracini have considered how extralegal settlements form isopolities that operate outside of, yet also in relation to, the sovereignty of the metropolitan states from which they emerge, these same theorists also posit these isopolities as being productive of internally egalitarian forms of republicanism.42 Deadwood, in contrast, presents a different scenario. While the show does dramatize the political life of the town as being largely self-actuated, with sovereignty “emanating from within the community of settlers” (Veracini’s italics), the figure of Swearengen suggests that sovereign power in a settler polity is exercised in an authoritarian rather than egalitarian manner.43 Swearengen assumes direct responsibility for the ad hoc organization of the camp in a bid to further his business interests, and the nascent “form of law” produced by that organization serves to legitimize Swearengen’s self-serving exercise of coercive violence rather than contain it. Deadwood’s political organization emerges as a response to two existential crises the camp faces mid-way through the first season: the biological threat posed by a smallpox outbreak and the economic threat posed by the possibility that capitalist interests outside the camp will convince the Dakota territorial legislature to nullify the property claims held by the town’s proprietors and miners. It is in response to the biological crisis that Swearengen first demonstrates his skills as a political leader by organizing the camp’s business owners to put up a fund for a vaccine, and to establish a pest tent for the treatment of the infected. The ad hoc political organization of the town is thus, in a peculiar sense, biopolitical: Al establishes his authority by demonstrating that he can effectively manage the biological life of the camp’s population. The smallpox outbreak is only the first example of the show’s preoccupation with the health and sanitation of the camp. One of Deadwood ’s most marked departures from the conventions of the Cold War Western is its representation of multiple crises relating to the health of the frontier community it portrays. One of Deadwood ’s most disturbing subplots concerning the health of the camp’s residents involves the death of Reverend Smith, who is reduced to a

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vegetative state by a brain-tumor over the course of season one. Swearengen takes a particular interest in the minister’s condition, often expressing his desire to euthanize him. Al is finally given the chance to put the superannuated minister out of commission when Doc Cochran admits to Al that Reverend Smith is beyond his care (1.12), and asks Swearengen to have the prostitutes care for him in his last days at the Gem. Al takes the minister in, and promptly smothers him while simultaneously delivering a lesson to his henchman Johnny Burns about how to kill: “Make a proper seal. Stop up the breath. Apply pressure even and firm, like packing a snowball.” After this demonstration, capped off with its incongruous and infantilizing metaphor, Al shifts his attention to Reverend Smith, addressing him in a sympathetic whisper, saying “you can go now brother” as the minister’s convulsing body begins to go slack. The horror engendered by the suddenness and professionalism of Al’s violence is coupled with a moment of cathartic release.44 While it could be argued that this act of euthanasia only illustrates Swearengen’s peculiar sense of ethics, the scene in fact works to reaffirm the necessity of sovereign violence for managing the biopolitical life of the camp. Agamben addresses how the question of euthanasia extends beyond the ethical and into the biopolitical: The concept of “life unworthy of being lived” is clearly not an ethical one, which would involve the expectations and legitimate desires of the individual. . . . in euthanasia, one man finds himself in the position of having to . . . isolate in [another man] something like a bare life that may be killed. From the perspective of modern biopolitics . . . euthanasia is situated at the intersection of the sovereign decision on life that may be killed and the assumption of the care of the nation’s biological body. Euthanasia signals the point at which biopolitics necessarily turns into thanopolitics.45 Al’s decision to euthanize the minister represents just such an attempt to isolate and exert power over bare life itself. While Deadwood ’s viewership was being confronted with the US state’s construction of “bare life that may be killed” during the War on Terror, the story of Swearengen euthanizing the minister offers a dramatization of this same process whereby power lays claim to biological life. As Swearengen is organizing the camp to address the biological threat represented by smallpox, he is also working to negotiate the camp’s annexation by the United States. It is toward this end that Al organizes the business leaders of the camp into an “ad hoc municipal organization” (“No Other Sons or Daughters” 1.9). Swearengen’s lackey, E. B. Farnum, is appointed mayor, and the corrupt Con Stapleton becomes the sheriff. Stapelton promptly uses

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his new authority to order the assassination of a Chinese storekeeper (1.12). Sickened by Stapleton’s abuse of his position, Bullock goes to the seat of power—Swearengen’s office—to seek redress. The relationship between sovereign power and the nascent form of law emerging in the camp is clearly illustrated by the scene that follows. Bullock finds Swearengen in his office, where Al has just finished overseeing the assassination of the magistrate with whom he had been negotiating various bribes. As Bullock enters the room, he points out the blood stain on the floor, but receives no explanation from Al. Bullock goes on to issue his complaint about Stapleton, and Swearengen tells Bullock that he should consider taking on the position himself if he thinks he can do a better job. Bullock takes him up on the challenge. After watching Bullock put on the sheriff’s badge, Al congratulates him on his new position and says “I’m going to walk past this blood stain that mysteriously appeared on my floor and attend to the affairs of my business.” Bullock lets him walk out without turning around, tacitly acknowledging that whatever his new role as sheriff is, it is not to limit the violence that attends the affairs of Swearengen’s business. Bullock, like the lawmen heroes of so many Cold War Westerns, takes up the badge once again because he believes he is the only person who can adequately defend the welfare of the community by investing its juridical order with the “force of law.” The community Seth Bullock defends in Deadwood, however, is not a peaceful democratic polity, but rather a community united by shared economic interests under the leadership of a charismatic despot, for whom instrumental violence is the essential mode of governance. Bullock’s tacit acceptance of Swearengen’s violence demonstrates that Deadwood’s emergent political community is one in which the form of law must allow for the exception. The scene thus simultaneously represents the foundation of the law, the violence of that foundation, and the forgetting of that violence as an ongoing condition of its existence. As David Lloyd puts it in a recent article on the state of exception and settler colonialism, “the state of exception repeats the violence in which the state is constituted, a violence which founds the law but whose ongoing operation in and through the law the law prefers to forget.”46 As the scene (and the first season) concludes, Al leaves his office and emerges onto the interior balcony of the Gem, where he surveys the scene below him. On the floor, several of the principle characters are peacefully gathered, watching Doc dance with Jewel, who has been newly mobilized by a leg brace. The nostalgic strains of a ragtime piano swell as the camera switches between the happy faces below Al’s gaze and the enigmatic expression upon Al’s own. The credits concluding season one roll to the sound of Mississippi John Hurt singing the gospel standard “Farther Along:” “Farther

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along we’ll know more about it, / Farther along we’ll understand why; / Cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine, / We’ll understand it all by and by.” The “terrible beauty” of Deadwood is on full display in this juxtaposition of the most disturbing and hopeful elements of the series’ vision of political community.

Settler sovereignty and the threat of capital Yet what is the “beauty” to be found here? One potential answer is found in Deadwood ’s appropriation of the Western genre’s concern with the preservation of sole proprietorship in the face of corporate capitalism. In a characteristically profane commentary on this fantasy, the character Ellsworth explains to Swearengen why he came to Deadwood in the show’s pilot episode: I may have fucked up my life flatter’n hammered shit, but I stand here before you today beholden to no human cocksucker, and holding a working fucking gold claim, and not the U.S. government telling me I’m trespassing, or the savage fucking red man or any of these other limber-dick cocksuckers passing themselves off as prospectors had better try and stop me. Ellsworth offers here a classic account of precisely that which the frontier has traditionally signified in texts ranging from the essays of Frederick Jackson Turner to the Westerns of Owen Wister and John Ford: a space where a masculine subject can prove himself free of bureaucratic constraints in a contest against his fellows, the wilderness, and “the savage.” As noted above, however, the first season of Deadwood departs from the tradition of the Western in representing this fantasy of masculine autonomy and material freedom as being under siege from both a biological threat and the various incarnations of the nation-state, which loom in the background, threatening to invalidate the claims of the town’s pioneers. The fantasy of frontier sole proprietorship is further jeopardized in seasons two and three, when those pioneers are pitted against the mining magnate George Hearst and his henchmen. Hearst is portrayed throughout this conflict less as a real man and more, to use Milch’s words, as “an abstraction” symbolizing something close to capital itself.47 Hearst’s goal in Deadwood is to use any means necessary to buy out and consolidate the claims of the pioneering prospectors of the camp. In the process of doing so, Hearst not only employs increasingly violent means to achieve his business goals, he also co-opts several key members of the territorial government in order to rig Deadwood’s first

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territorial election so as to keep Bullock, the public face of the pioneer community, out of his way. Throughout the show, the settler community of the Deadwood camp is depicted as directly antagonistic to, rather than productive of, the institutions of the liberal state. While the Cold War Western began to raise questions about the utility of the liberal state in protecting the dream of sole proprietorship, Deadwood, by figuring the liberal state as antagonistic to that dream, opens the door for a consideration of alternative modes of political community. These alternative modes of political organization are most clearly figured in the events surrounding the final confrontation between Hearst and the settler community in episode 3.11 (“The Catbird Seat”) when Hearst, in order to break the backs of the pioneers still resisting his attempt at consolidation, orders one of his Pinkerton thugs to murder Ellsworth. Following Ellsworth’s murder, Trixie attacks Hearst with a Derringer pistol, wounding him, but not mortally. This scares Hearst to the point that he decides to present Swearengen and the camp with a deal: he will buy out the claim of Alma Garret (Ellsworth’s widow) at a reasonable price, forego his plans to instigate further violence against the town’s pioneer community, and leave the camp, providing that Swearengen can deliver to him the dead body of the “whore” who shot him. This presents Swearengen with a quandary, given his personal affection for Trixie, but he formulates a plan that will save both Trixie and the camp. He decides to murder a prostitute from his brothel, Jen, who bears a reasonable resemblance to Trixie, dress her corpse in Trixie’s clothes, and deliver her to Hearst, who only caught a passing glimpse at Trixie as she shot him. Swearengen tasks Johnny with Jen’s murder. As Johnny approaches Jen in her room, he delivers a speech in which he compares the Gem (and by extension the town) to an ant colony. “They got a whole operation going,” he tells her. “They got soldier ants and worker ants and whore ants to fuck the soldiers and the workers, and . . . baby ants. Everyone’s got a task to hew to, Jen. You understand me?” Johnny’s grotesque entomological metaphor is set up not to repulse us, but for us to identify with—its absurdity is presented as arising from Johnny’s lack of eloquence rather than its substance. In fact, it echoes the biblical passage, 1 Corinthians 12:15–26, that Reverend Smith recites during the Hickok’s funeral in episode 1.5 (“The Trial of Jack McCall”), and that Milch is fond of paraphrasing when describing life in Deadwood: “My feeling about ‘Deadwood’ is that it’s a single organism, and I think human society is the body of God. . . . Well I think we are all vessels of God, you know. As Saint Paul Says, if the hand doesn’t know, that doesn’t mean it’s not part of the body, that just means it doesn’t know.”48

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Through this corporeal metaphor, Milch reveals the vision of the body politic that Deadwood, through its attempt to “illuminate the present by setting it in the past,” presents to its viewers. In Deadwood, the price of maintaining even a semblance of the material freedoms promised by America’s frontier myth is a radical reimagining of American political community. In this vision, individuals are not citizen subjects participating in rational discourse within the public sphere; rather they exist like organs whose own roles are mutually unintelligible to each other, but who all serve the common purpose of a biopolitical community. While the conclusion of Deadwood is far from triumphalist, it does leave its audience with the sense that, given the conditions within which the Deadwood pioneers were operating, it was the best they could hope for. Thanks to Swearengen’s decision to sacrifice Jen, Hearst leaves the camp without further violence, even if he does so owning the lion’s share of its gold claims. The most potent lesson of the story of Jen’s sacrifice thus seems to be that the violent realities of capitalism, allegorically figured in the brutal dealings of Hearst and his forces, demand that sovereign authority must extend itself even to the bare life of individuals. This is the troubling model of political community that Deadwood offers an American audience vexed by the crisis of representation brought on immediately by the Abu Ghraib scandal, and inevitably by the discordance between the rhetoric of American exceptionalism and the increasingly illiberal modes of sovereignty employed by the US government during the War on Terror. By allegorizing life in post-9/11 America through a violent yet redemptive narrative of the “terrible beauty” of American territorial expansion, Deadwood works to expose—and yet also reinscribe within a familiar representational tradition—the model of sovereign power that underwrites the contemporary state of exception. By arguing that Deadwood amplifies the anxieties about the relationship between sovereign power and extralegal violence expressed in the Cold War Western, and in so doing presents a disturbing view of political community in the United States, we do not intend to suggest that the series should be dismissed as reactionary, but rather to reveal the show’s peculiar political genius. Unlike much of the protest art issued in response to the actions of the Bush administration, Deadwood refuses to pit a nostalgic fantasy of liberal democratic rule against the Bush administration’s framing of the War on Terror as a “state of exception.” Instead, Milch’s series paradoxically works to defamiliarize and refamiliarize its viewers with the conventions of the distinctly out-of-fashion Western genre in order to dramatize the United States’ contemporary state of exception through the mythically rich annals of its frontier history. While Deadwood, like so many Westerns that preceded it, takes

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extreme liberties with the historical record, it does so in the service of a powerful allegorical vision of sovereign power in the United States. By representing contemporary modes of US sovereignty through an engagement with the aesthetic tradition of the Western, the “terrible beauty” of Deadwood closes the gap between America’s imperial ideologies—those of nineteenth-century settler colonialism, the “new frontiers” of Cold War liberalism, and the “homeland” of Bush’s security state—and thereby asserts that “the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception, but the rule.”49

Notes 1 Allison Perlman, “Deadwood, Generic Transformation, and Televisual History,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 39.2 (2011): 104. 2 See, for instance, Carl Swanson, “Cussing and Fighting,” New York, April 19, 2004, http://nymag.com/print/?/nymetro/ news/people/ columns/ intelligencer/n_10191/; accessed January 31, 2012; Ann Oldenburg, “Cussing in Deadwood Sets Tongues a Wagging,” USA Today, May 2, 2004, www. usatoday.com/life/television/news/2004–05–02-deadwood-cursing_x.htm; accessed January 31, 2012; and John Mack Faragher, “HBO’s ‘Deadwood’: Not Your Typical Western,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 57.3 (Autumn 2007): 61–2. 3 David Milch, interview with Heather Havrilesky, “The Man Behind ‘Deadwood,’ ” Salon.com, March 5, 2005, www.salon.com/2005/ 03/05/ milch/; accessed February 3, 2012. 4 See Daniel Worden, “Neo-liberalism and the Western: HBO’s Deadwood as National Allegory,” Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’etudes américaines 39.2 (2009): 221–46. See note 44 below for more on Worden’s argument. 5 David Milch, Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills, interviews by David Samuels (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 53. 6 Robert Penn Warren quoted in Milch, 26. See also Mark Singer, “The Misfit: How David Milch Got from ‘NYPD Blue’ to ‘Deadwood’ by Way of an Epistle of Saint Paul,” The New Yorker, February 14, 2005, www.newyorker.com/ archive/2005/02/14/050214fa_fact_singer; accessed January 26, 2012. 7 Milch, 11. 8 David Milch, interview with Elvis Mitchell, The Treatment, 89.9 KCRW FM, March 31, 2004, www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/tt/tt040331david _milch; accessed January 31, 2012. 9 David Lloyd, “The Poetics of Politics: Yeats and the Founding of the State,” Qui Parle 3.2 (Fall 1989): 94, 95.

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10 Frederick Jackson Turner and John Mack Faragher, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: The Significance of the Frontier in American History and Other Essays (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1994), 32. 11 See Paul A. Cantor, “Order Out of the Mud: Deadwood and the State of Nature,” in The Philosophy of the Western, ed. Jennifer L. McMahon and B. Steve Csaki (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 113–38. 12 Howard Roberts Lamar, Dakota Territory, 1861–1889: A Study of Frontier Politics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1956), 148–76. 13 Patrick Wolfe, “A Note to T.S. from Patrick Wolfe Re: T.S. Note to Patrick Wolfe . . . .,” Tequila Sovereign Blog, comment posted May 4, 2011, http:// tequilasovereign.blogspot.com/2011/05/ note-to-ts-from-patrick-wolfe-re-ts. html; accessed February 8, 2012. See also Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London and New York: Cassell, 1999), esp. 166–79; and Patrick Wolfe, “Corpus Nullius: The Exception of Indians Other Aliens in U.S. Constitutional Discourse,” Postcolonial Studies 10.2 (2007): 127–51. 14 Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2010), 61–2. 15 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 87. 16 Robert Pippin, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 20. 17 Ibid., 101. 18 Agamben, State of Exception, 3. 19 Toward the end of his speech, Kennedy states the following: “I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch three thousand miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West . . . we stand today on the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of the 1960’s—a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils—a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.” John F. Kennedy, “Address of Senator John F. Kennedy Accepting the Democratic Party Nomination for President of the United States—Memorial Coliseum, Los Angeles,” July 15, 1960, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index .php?pid=25966#axzz1rHeRsbBR; accessed April 6, 2012. 20 Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 3. 21 George W. Bush, Press Conference, September 17, 2001, CNN.com/ Transcripts, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/17/se.09.html; accessed January 31, 2012. Such frontier rhetoric continues to frame the War on Terror. The US Navy, for instance, used the code word “Geronimo”

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during the raid that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011, to signify the death or capture of bin Laden. CNN Wire Staff, “Native Americans Object to Linking Geronimo to bin Laden,” CNN.com, May 5, 2011, http://articles.cnn.com/2011–05–05/us/bin.laden. geronimo_1_bin-harlyn-geronimo-military-service?_s=PM:US; accessed January 31, 2012. 22 Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney, interview by Tim Russert, Meet the Press, National Broadcasting Corporation, September 16, 2001, http:// emperors-clothes.com/9–11backups/nbcmp.htm; accessed February 8, 2012. 23 “Iraq Prisoner Abuse ‘un-American,’ says Rumsfeld,” Washington Times, May 7, 2004, www.washingtontimes.com /news /2004/may/7/20040507– 115901–6736r/; accessed February 8, 2012. 24 David Drysdale argues that Deadwood “enables its audience to address its own complicity and guilt regarding the nature of law and authority in the United States since the World Trade Center terror attacks” by developing a revisionist narrative that comes to “question the triumphal nature of its own story.” Our contention is that the politics of Deadwood are conflicted and partially complicit in associating American frontier images and rhetoric with the post-9/11 state of exception. David Drysdale, “‘Laws and Every Other Damn Thing’: Authority, Bad Faith, and the Unlikely Success of Deadwood,” in Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By, ed. David Lavery (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 134, 144. 25 See Wolfe, “Corpus Nullius”; and Mark Rifkin, “Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the ‘Peculiar’ Status of Native Peoples,” Cultural Critique 73 (Fall 2009): 88–124. 26 See Harry H. Anderson, “Deadwood: An Effort at Stability,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 20.1 (Winter 1970): 42. For a recent overview of the literature on frontier murder rates, and the methodological problems associated with such analyses, see Robert R. Dykstra, “Quantifying the Wild West: The Problematic Statistics of Frontier Violence,” Western Historical Quarterly 40.3 (Autumn 2009): 321–47. 27 The death of the historical Reverend Smith is recounted in several of the memoirs written and published by Deadwood’s earliest settlers. See, for instance, Richard B. Hughes, Pioneer Years in the Black Hills, ed. Agnes Wright Spring (Glendale, CA: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1957), 154, note 34; Annie D. Tallent, The Black Hills or, The Last Hunting Grounds of the Dakotahs (1899; New York: Arno Press, 1975), 275–6; Estelline Bennett, Old Deadwood Days (New York: J.H. Sears and Company, Inc., 1929), 169–71; and John S. McClintock, Pioneer Days in the Black Hills: Accurate History and Facts Related by One of the Early Day Pioneers, ed. Edward L. Senn (1939; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 120–8. 28 McClintock, 270–3.

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29 Legal scholar Rebecca Johnson offers a similar and powerful reading of this scene in “Living Deadwood: Imagination, Affect, and the Persistence of the Past,” Suffolk University Law Review 42.4: 809–27. Johnson contends that the series “makes visible the injustice of this colonial appropriation of Indian land,” a claim we believe is complicated by Deadwood ’s elision of the Indian presence, and the show’s presentation of settler invasion as an historical contingency. Johnson, 821. 30 William Handley, “The Vanishing American,” in America First: Naming the Nation in U.S. Film, ed. Mandy Merck (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 46. 31 Ibid., 54. Like the White audiences of the early twentieth-century Westerns Handley describes, Al allegorizes the threat of his own decline (posed primarily by Hearst’s increasing influence in the camp) by seeing his own predicament as analogous to that of “the vanishing race.” 32 Milch, 53. 33 In his commentary on the scene, Milch makes it clear that he intends the equivalency drawn by Bullock regarding, settler violence and native resistance to be read as a legitimate one: “In the aftermath of that scene . . . I wanted Bullock to kill the Indian and bear the mark of Cain. . . . That scene is a completely fabricated incident, but I did not want to exempt Bullock from the more general sin of what we did to the Indians. Not that it makes us any worse or better than any other race. It’s what we do. We take things from other people.” Milch, 201. 34 Agamben, State of Exception, 39. 35 For more on Deadwood ’s visual aesthetics, see Drysdale, 139–40. See also Nicolas S. Witschi, “ ‘Down these Mean Streets’: Film Noir, Deadwood, Cinematic Space, and the Irruption of Genre Codes,” in Dirty Words in Deadwood: Literature and the Postwestern, eds. Melody Graulich and Nicolas S. Witschi (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming). 36 See Amanda Ann Klein, “The Horse doesn’t Get a Credit: The Foregrounding of Generic Syntax in Deadwood ’s Opening Credits,” in Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By, ed. David Lavery (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 93–100. 37 For general commentaries that address the importance of landscape in Western films, see Jane Tompkins, West of Everything (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 60–87; Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1981), 47–52; and Philip French, Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre and Westerns Revisited (1973; Manchester: Carcanet, 2005), 62–9. 38 Lefebvre, 23, 22. Also see: Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 25–51; and W. J. T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, 2nd edn, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (1994; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5–34.

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39 Lefebvre, 29. 40 See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 52–66, 70–100. 41 Singer, “The Misfit.” See also, James Poniewozik, “So Wicked, He’s Good,” Time, February 20, 2005, www.time.com/time/magazine/ article/0,9171,1029858,00.html; accessed February 9, 2012. 42 Veracini, 61–74. Also see Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2010). Rana, 3. 43 Veracini, 61–2. 44 Worden argues that this moment constitutes a sort of ethical excess that stands in stark contrast to Al’s usual motivation: his economic self-interest. We read the euthanizing of Reverend Smith in the context of Al’s consolidation of power, and thus as an act of self-interest. Worden 238, 239. 45 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 142. 46 David Lloyd, “Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel,” Settler Colonial Studies 2.1 (2012): 73. 47 Milch, 46. 48 Milch, interview with Heather Havrilesky; see also Singer, “The Misfit.” 49 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Concept of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1965), 257.

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7 “Messages from Invisible Sources”: Sight in Deadwood’s public sphere Mark L. Berrettini arly in episode one of Deadwood ’s season two (“A Lie Agreed Upon, Part 1”), several scenes revolve around viewing, seeing, being seen, and exchanging looks—terms and activities that have some distinction, but that I will characterize as sight in this essay. Most prominent is the representation of the sight of the intrepid, brutal, and occasionally sentimental crime boss and camp leader, Al Swearengen, a character who possesses a “knowing, planning gaze,” as Jason Jacobs describes him.1 As is usual in Deadwood, Swearengen has many issues on his agenda, several of which relate to his long-term vision for the camp: boosting the illegal Deadwood camp into offi cial status as a territory in the United States, negotiating with politicians who threaten his stature and interests within the camp, keeping a lid on the daily potential for chaos within the camp, running the Gem Saloon and its associated brothel, and managing his more clandestine and illegal concerns.2 Swearengen’s sight is central when he receives a letter from Governor Pennington of the Dakota Territories announcing the division of the Black Hills into three counties and the appointment of outsiders to serve as county commissioners. To read the letter, Swearengen relies on the use of a magnifying glass, noting to his loyal right-hand man, Dan Dority, and Silas Adams, a man who has delivered the letter and was formerly the employee of Magistrate Claggett, that “yes, it has fallen to this” (2.1). Although the governor’s letter does not mention it, Swearengen understands that the camp bribes paid to politicians external to the camp have not held sway in this situation, and he is uncharacteristically flummoxed. (Heavy drinking in this scene does not clarify

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matters, and although Swearengen does not yet know it, he also suffers from the beginning stages of a kidney stone.) After reading the letter, Swearengen moves to his usual perch on the balcony over the Gem where he needs no magnifying glass to see important events that take place on the camp’s main muddy thoroughfare. The balcony is the site of the second sequence that starts with a quick close-up of a surly Swearengen as he squints, looks off-screen, and points. The close-up cuts away to a wide shot from Swearengen’s perspective of an undeveloped area near the camp boundary where a team of oxen and men raises telegraph poles, and over the two shots, he describes what he sees with disgust in his voice as “messages from invisible sources, or what some people think of as progress” (2.1). Dan tries to calm Swearengen and present an alternative assessment of the poles, but the crime boss only becomes more agitated when, in a third sight-related moment, his line of vision intersects with another situation that draws him away from the telegraph poles. From Swearengen’s point-of-view, viewers see the widow Alma Garret’s gold shipment loaded into a stagecoach under light guard in front of the Grand Central Hotel (a building across the street from the Gem). The former Montana marshal, hardware store owner, and Sheriff of Deadwood, Seth Bullock, exits the hotel to oversee the loading. Viewers know that Bullock is leaving Mrs. Garret’s room in the hotel since earlier scenes depict a meeting between Bullock and Garret intercut with Swearengen’s magnifying glass scene and with other scenes: the movement of the stagecoach that brings Bullock’s family and the new women for Joanie Stubbs’ brothel; Joanie keeping watch for the stagecoach from her current residence, the Bella Union, a high-end brothel and casino; the owner of the Bella Union, Cy Tolliver, watching the arrival of the stagecoach; prospector Ellsworth and hotel owner E. B. Farnum in the hotel; and Mrs. Garret’s ward Sofia and her tutor, Miss Isringhausen, as they eat breakfast in the hotel’s dismal restaurant. The private meeting between Bullock and Garret starts out as a basic review of her accounts since Bullock helps to manage her gold mine and segues into vigorous sex between them (one shot of Sofia and Miss Isringhausen shows that Bullock and Garret’s actions have knocked plaster loose from the ceiling below Mrs. Garret’s room). Swearengen does not have access to the details of the Bullock-Garret meeting, but he is aware of the affair. The sheriff and the crime boss “paddle in the same direction” (Swearengen’s words in “Suffer the Little Children” 1.8) in their support of the camp by the conclusion of season one, but early in season two, Swearengen is irritated with Bullock for at least two reasons, both of which relate to his difficulty controlling Governor Pennington’s actions. Swearengen first misplaces his anger by interpreting the light guard on Alma’s

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gold as an insult from Bullock, a sign that Bullock assumes Swearengen could be stopped by four guards if Al wanted to steal the gold. The second source of Swearegen’s anger, which might be more valid, is his impression that Bullock is not doing his part to bolster the nascent official status of the camp because he is too invested in his affair with Alma. (Swearengen’s more crude description is that Bullock, “don’t know if he’s breathing, or taking it in through fucking gills, he is that fucking cunt-struck” (2.1).) Near this point in Swearengen’s rant, the episode cuts to a shot of Alma standing in the closed window of her hotel room, watching Bullock on the street below in a manner entirely opposed to Swearengen’s perspective. The scene moves quickly as a gunshot rings out from down the street, sending Bullock to investigate just as Swearengen looks down and hails him. Bullock, apparently unaware of Swearengen’s location above him, is shown in a reverse shot as he looks up to meet Swearengen’s gaze, but he continues to walk in the beginning of a short shot/reverse shot pattern between the two men. Swearengen yells out, “Sheriff! About his duties to the camp, huh? Lucky trouble didn’t jump out earlier, huh, Bullock? Might have found you mid-thrust at other business” (2.1). Bullock stops and stares back at Swearengen, who glares back, points at the sheriff, and replies, “What is it? Taken by a vision? You would not want to be staring like that at me.” Bullock responds, “Be where I can find you,” and Swearengen mocks, “I ain’t going no place” (2.1). The Swearengen-Bullock conflict escalates after the sheriff investigates the sound of the gunshot (part of a subplot concerning a shooting at Nuttall’s Number 10 Saloon) and returns to face Swearengen on what he notes to his deputy Charlie Utter is personal business. Then, in Swearengen’s second floor office, Bullock removes his badge and his gun, and he and Swearengen engage in an unrestrained fight that moves out to the balcony and spills over the rail into the muddy street. Swearengen gets a brief upper hand and produces a hidden knife (he had assured Bullock that he did not have one), but he stops short of slitting Bullock’s throat when he has an exchange of looks with Bullock’s newly arrived, “cow-eyed” son, William (2.1). William’s look ends the conflict, and Bullock and Swearengen are left to recuperate in the rest of the episode; notably, they do not have additional conflicts for the remainder of the program. Bubbling under these moments for Swearengen is his discomfort with not being able to rely on his own sight as a source of accurate information. The play between vision and messages, unreliable politicians, control from outside, a new disembodied information age, and invisibility itself troubles Swearengen. He confronts potential limits to his sight in these moments, and such limits complicate the kind of knowledge that he might glean and thus his ability to manage camp affairs vis-à-vis his own interests. We might then understand that Swearengen’s insult to Bullock advances not only from his

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own perceived affront and his frustration about Bullock’s level of involvement in camp affairs, but also from his basic inability to see (and therefore to know) what transpires between Bullock and Alma behind the closed door of her hotel room. Throughout the program, Bullock confounds Swearengen since Swearengen cannot always believe what he sees when it comes to Bullock, which leads him to name the sheriff a “fucking insane person” in season three (“True Colors” 3.3). Swearengen is not alone in Deadwood in the ways that his concentration on sight, seeing, and being seen are crucial components of how he and others will (or will not) function within the camp, especially as the camp becomes an official part of the United States. As we see early in this episode from season two, several sequences foreground sight: the camera’s unrestricted perspective in shots not attributed to a character’s point-of-view; Joanie’s and Cy’s anticipation of the stagecoach; Alma watching from her window; Bullock’s returned gaze (“taken by a vision”); and William’s “cow-eyed” perspective. Additional characters on the street between the Gem and the hotel also see the conflict between Swearengen and Bullock, including a prostitute from the Gem, Trixie, who smokes a cigarette on the lower front porch of the Gem when she hears Swearengen call out Bullock and then looks up to the balcony. Trixie had been Swearengen’s favored prostitute until the eleventh episode of season one, when she had “unauthorized free sex” with Bullock’s business partner, Sol Star (“Jewel’s Boot is Made for Walking”). In this scene from season two, she leaves her pimp’s domain to go to Bullock and Star’s hardware store to alert Star about the developing conflict between Bullock and her pimp. Star’s response is that Swearengen should be like him and “learn to look the other way” when it comes to the Bullock-Garret affair (2.1).3 While the scenes of the characters’ sight differ in tone, construction, and the social viewing positions that are represented, as a cluster they exemplify the recurring centrality of sight that threads throughout the program’s three seasons, especially as sight-related scenarios and discourse outline both the emerging dominant public sphere within the camp and its counterpublics. I propose that Deadwood’s depiction of sight consistently functions in support of a major theme within the Western genre, what Amanda Klein identifies as “the archetypal struggle between civilization and savagery” (95). In “ ‘The Horse Doesn’t Get a Credit’: The Foregrounding of Generic Syntax in Deadwood’s Opening Credits,” Klein writes that the Western presents conflicts in which: both sides are appealing. While we demand, on the one hand, the establishment of law, order and democratic regulation in order to build a stable society, we also chafe against these restrictions and long for the

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anarchy, independence and freedom associated with America’s frontier days. These two sides of the Western’s central conflict can be represented by numerous antimonies: East versus West, government versus self rule, white man versus Indian, lady or schoolmarm versus prostitute, homesteader versus rancher, garden versus wilderness, compromise versus integrity, etc. As an example of [Tom Schatz’s] ‘genre of order’, the Western resolves its central conflict through the violent elimination of one side of this binary, . . . it is almost always the savage side of the conflict, typically embodied in the character(s) of an outlaw, a hostile Indian tribe, or an entire depraved community, which must be eliminated in order to make way for the establishment of social order.4 Deadwood represents the appeal of these sides, the conflict between them, and the elimination-establishment dyad in distinct ways as Klein and other writers have noted. The representation of such struggles highlights the existence of competing public spheres within the camp, especially when these publics help to define the future organization of the camp and, in turn, its future configuration of public and private spheres. In the remainder of this essay, I extend my consideration of sight, competing publics, and Deadwood’s narrative concerns about how the camp will or will not be civilized and included within the United States. I frame this examination with a conception of the public sphere that develops in dialogue with and as a critique of Jürgen Habermas as I first make a few general observations about Deadwood’s prolific deployment of sight within dialogue, cinematography, editing, and mise-en-scène. I then move into specific situations where aspects of sight and competing public spheres cohere around three characters—Swearengen, Garret, and a latecomer to the program, the ruthless mining magnate George Hearst who first appears in the final episode of season two (“Boy the Earth Talks To” 2.12). My consideration of these characters attempts to demonstrate how Deadwood associates competing notions of “the public” within the camp with sight in different and sometimes intersecting forms. Throughout the program, we see three versions of the public sphere that both overlap and come into open conflict with each other as counterpublics: one connected to surveillance (Swearengen); another prescribed by gender discrimination, scrutiny of personal life, and Victorian and/ or Eastern propriety (Garret); and a third public that is wholly structured to aid the flow of power in the service of private business interests, as signified and enacted by public displays, economic advantage, and brute force (Hearst). Nancy Fraser’s “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” is a helpful place to summarize both Habermas and the limitations of his vision of the public sphere. Fraser

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writes, “the idea of ‘the public sphere’ in Habermas’s sense is a conceptual resource that . . . designates a theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk. It is the space in which citizens deliberate about their common affairs . . . an institutionalized arena of discursive interaction [that] is conceptually distinct from the state [and] also conceptually distinct from the official economy.”5 For Fraser, and others, Habermas’ idea of the public sphere has two key limitations: its exclusion of citizens based upon gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and class; and its related failure to recognize the existence of alternative public spheres and counterpublics that challenge the notion of a singular public sphere. As Fraser notes: the bourgeois public was never the public. On the contrary, virtually contemporaneous with the bourgeois public there arose a host of competing counterpublics, including nationalist publics, popular peasant publics, elite women’s publics, and working-class publics. Thus, there were competing publics from the start, not just from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as Habermas implies. Moreover, not only were there always a plurality of competing publics but the relations between bourgeois publics and other publics were always conflictual.6 Within these critiques, Fraser et al. maintain an interest in public spheres as “institutionalized arena[s] of discursive interaction” distinct from the state and the official economy, even when the state and the official economy threaten to seep into them. More precisely, Fraser tries to specify “the character and quality of discursive interactions [within] intrapublic relations [and] interpublic relations”; these conceptions of public spheres inform my reading of Deadwood, with sight and the visual figured as the preeminent form of discursive interaction.7

“Blocking My Fucking View”: Counterpublics and competing points-of-view The 36 episodes of Deadwood present us with sight-laden mise-en-scène and dialogue along with a complex visual representation of the program’s diegesis that makes heavy use of motion picture conventions related to sight. In addition to props, such as Swearengen’s magnifying glass (and later, his reading glasses) and the repeated use of mirrors according to their typical function and as devices to allow for “extended” viewing when characters

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use mirrors surreptitiously to watch others, there is A. W. Merrick, the publisher of The Deadwood Pioneer, who dogs the camp’s residents with his camera (it arrives in 1.11). There is also “Wild Bill” Hickok’s compatriot “Calamity Jane” Canary, who is terrified by a look from Swearengen in season one (“Deep Water” 1.2), and who confronts people on the street who look at her on other occasions. Further, in season two, she exclaims, “I’m going blind as a fucking bat,” presumably a side effect of her excessive drinking (“Complications” 2.5). Not surprising for a man obsessed with seeing, Swearengen’s dialogue makes frequent use of sight images: he describes his “visions” of Pinkertons swarming and “vipers” from the federal government (1.4; 1.5), and he slights Sol Starr with an anti-Semitic backhanded compliment that he “marked [him] for an earner the minute [Sol] come into [his] sight,” before saying under his breath, “Jew bastard” (1.2). After getting a sense of Cy’s plans in season one, Swearengen tells Dan that he is impressed by Cy’s long-term vision for the future, and when Swearengen meets Charlie Utter, he says in relation to the new sign for Utter’s freight business, “nice sign, blocking my fucking view” (1.9). Deadwood’s mise-en-scène and dialogue compliments the program’s use of cinematography and editing to construct perspective and restricted points-of-view for a large ensemble cast in what we might consider to be “networks of looks.” Similarly, the program presents unrestricted perspectives to display dense interior and exterior spaces, layered and busy screen action, and a confusing organization of screen space.8 I have not catalogued the many scenes of shot/reverse shot constructions or the use of eyeline matches in the program, but it is worth noting that while one of Deadwood’s hallmarks is its compelling dialogue, it also stands out among contemporary television in the United States for its use of shot/reverse shots and eyelines to construct visual, nondialogic narration.9 Here we might also include the program’s reliance on rack focus shots, deep focus cinematography, and layered staging in which a rack focus is not completed, yet the image is understood—the background, while out of focus, is recognizable enough to us—to construct its narrative. Over 40 scenes take place in which characters other than Al Swearengen, Alma Garret, or George Hearst look through windows, spy holes, from exterior balconies and porches, and from interior balconies and stairwells. (As I will discuss, Swearengen appears on his balcony in over 60 scenes, Garret is shown behind windows looking to the outside over 20 times, and Hearst appears on his “veranda” or in windows in at least 13 instances.) Sight is also central to explicit public moments in the program when we see crowds gather on the main street of the camp as well as in the minor alleys, including the Chinese-populated alley that is dominated by Mr. Wu, to watch different

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spectacles. Celebratory and mundane events, like General Crook’s triumphant parade in season one, Tom Nuttall’s bicycle ride in season two, or the amateur night sponsored by Jack Langrishe’s theatre troupe in season three show how the camp’s communal viewing of events allows it to appear to be and to perform as a unified, civilized public. Yet these community-building events butt up against more ominous occasions of communal viewing, such as Cy’s beating of two grifters that leads to their deaths behind the closed doors of the Bella Union in season one, or William Bullock’s trampling by a wild horse in season two. The brutal public displays accelerate in season three with the arrival of Hearst, most notably in Dan and Hearst’s agent Captain Turner’s hand-to-hand combat in the fifth episode, a planned response to Dan’s public insult of Hearst in the fourth episode. Hearst advises the Captain to make the fight a public “lesson” for the camp, but the Captain suffers a reversal, and in a macabre reference to sight, Dan plucks out his eye before killing him. Events like these allow viewers and camp dwellers to see that the camp’s claim to a unified public sphere is tenuous and that civilization itself has the possibility of backsliding into brutality; in all of these celebratory, mundane, and brutal moments, we discern just how much sight undergirds any sense of intrapublic and interpublic relations within the camp. With some of these general aspects of Deadwood’s use of sight in mind, it is toward Swearengen that I again want to turn as the character whose point of view is the most consistent example of sight represented within the program. Throughout Deadwood, Swearengen recognizes the important links between his sight and his ability to track the camp’s growing populations, the potential diversity of its inhabitants, and the different types of intrapublic and interpublic discursive interactions that might take place. Swearengen is a forward thinker, and in season one, he reassures himself with a motto of sorts, “I don’t look fucking backwards,” while he recounts his troubled childhood and his mother’s abandonment of him at a Chicago orphanage for the first time in the program (1.11). As a purveyor of vice with major plans for the future, Swearengen must have a keen sense of his clientele’s backgrounds, interests, and predilections in order to maintain a broad, legal, and illegal enterprise that includes liquor and drug sales, gambling, prostitution, murder, confidence schemes, robbery, gold exchange, and fetish-based services for, in his words, “specialists.” Swearengen’s actual ability to see the camp from his balcony allows him to enact direct surveillance of the camp’s inhabitants and their activities, which in turn helps him to shape and advance his plans for the camp’s multiple publics, present and future. Here, Swearengen plans for the camp’s dominant public sphere to benefit him directly, but this does not mean that he wants

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to eradicate its counterpublics. Like the bosses in so many gangster films and television programs, the success of Swearengen’s criminal enterprises depends upon more people (strangers) moving into the camp and organizing themselves into publics, thus giving him more opportunities to perpetrate crimes and to operate his saloon-brothel-casino at a more productive level. A thriving public sphere (or at least the appearance of one) along with counterpublics create spaces for nascent citizens to organize, participate, and function within the overall developing trajectory of the camp, which in turn offers Swearengen a varied, diverse customer base. Swearengen hopes to shape and guide these publics as part of his deployment of power, and such actions necessitate that he is able to see into these publics. Thus, he recognizes that his influence and interaction with the publics will be limited when his sight is confronted with other interests, as represented by the telegraph or by the arrival of unknown newcomers into the camp. For Swearengen’s work to succeed, his view must not be blocked. To this end and in addition to his own direct surveillance of the camp, Swearengen maintains a spy network that includes E. B., Trixie, Johnny, Dan, and Wu, and these characters circulate within different public spheres and function as “his eyes” in spaces where he cannot or does not circulate regularly (e.g. Trixie in Alma’s hotel room and in Star and Bullock’s hardware store; Wu in the Chinese alley and the not shown Chinese portions of San Francisco; E. B. at the hotel). On some occasions, Swearengen does travel throughout the camp—he gives Langrishe a tour in season three, on several occasions visits the Bullock home, and he repeatedly calls upon other camp leaders to discuss camp business—and these forays provide him with much to see. But these moments are rare and far out numbered by the scenes that show him observing the camp from his balcony. Swearengen also seems to have the ability to “see through” people and recognize when they have masked agendas or unspoken desires (e.g. Magistrate Clagett and Miss Isringhausen), or to see the potential value that someone might have for him in the future (e.g. Bullock as a “perfect front man” and sheriff (1.8)). Even without the aid of his spies or his supernatural insight and foresight, Swearengen performs as a nearly all-seeing if not exactly omniscient figure within the camp’s cramped, often chaotic public spheres. As I note above, his most prevalent form of sight is represented in the more than 60 scenes of him looking from the Gem’s balcony or a window in his office/ apartment attached to it, a considerable number since he is immobilized in his apartment by his bladder ailment for part of season two. Sight, then, either direct or indirect, supports Swearengen’s attempts to shape and to participate in the flow of power within the camp’s public spheres as related to, but not solely in service of, his own interests.

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Importantly, many of Swearengen’s balcony scenes are significant in relation to his negotiation of the camp’s public spheres and in support of his moves to “civilize” the camp—what he sees, when he sees it, and that he is seen to be watching. When he calls out Bullock at the start of season two, what he sees—Bullock’s impropriety with Alma—is likely to be seen by others and potentially undermine Bullock’s stature within the camp. If the perfect front man is seen to be having an extramarital affair, according to Swearengen’s unstated logic, how might this information eventually jeopardize attempts to establish the camp within the United States? Hardly a prude, Swearengen draws on a normative Victorian sensibility to shame Bullock and by extension, Alma, which in turn allows him to display his own stature in relation to the sheriff for others. Bullock might be the sheriff, but Swearengen exerts some power behind the badge. Further, Swearengen attempts to redirect Bullock’s attention to the public aspects of the camp’s business and away from his private, personal affairs. Alternatively near the end of season two, Swearengen negotiates his own appearance on the balcony in relation to propriety while most of the camp goes to the Bullock home for William’s funeral. Swearengen makes a point of noting that he will not attend, but once all others have left him at the Gem, he sneaks out onto the balcony to look up the street toward the funeral. When his minions Dan, Silas, and Johnny come toward the Gem at the funeral’s conclusion, Swearengen sneaks back into his office and then pretends to come out onto the balcony at that moment. Here, Swearengen’s desire to be a part of the joined publics of the camp and to see what takes place at the funeral—he is, in part, concerned that the Gem prostitutes will make a scene and embarrass him—collides with how he wants to be seen within the camp. Just as he calls out Bullock to present a proper appearance, Swearengen maintains his own twisted appearance, at a distance from the funeral so as to appear callous and not a part of any specific public. Instead, he will present himself as a villain to be feared, barely moved by the death of the child, lacking the proper and understandable response to the tragedy. Yet viewers and Bullock know that Swearengen’s self-presentation is not quite accurate since earlier in the episode in the morning when he is not seen by other characters, he expresses his private condolences to Bullock, who builds a coffin. Swearengen’s relationship to power within the camp’s public spheres is here connected to a sight that does not originate from his position as a viewing subject, but instead frames him as the subject of others’ points of view. As the character who most often uses sight as a means of control, Al reveals himself here to be acutely aware not only of how the visual aspects of power work, but also of the fact that he is the subject of the visual power he so clearly prizes.

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Another figure who is linked closely to sight, but is more often the subject of others’ points of view when compared with Swearengen, is Alma Garret, a woman whose gender and class identity is bound by a heteronormative convention that in turn “justifies” her exclusion from participation in some of the camp’s public spheres. Deadwood creates an odd connection between Alma Garret and Al Swearengen, first as antagonists who are drawn together by Brom’s purchase of the gold claim, even though they have not met, and ultimately as two allies working toward the successful development of the camp as a “going concern,” at least until Hearst unsettles them. While the program develops this parallelism between Alma and Al, it does not overlook the gendered aspects of their characters and depicts them accordingly. Whereas Swearengen uses sight to advance his agency as he traverses the camp and occupies the balcony, Garret is shown placed behind window glass looking out for much of the program’s first half in over 20 scenes that visually reinforce her exclusion from the camp’s exterior world and its public contexts.10 Many characters in the camp have heard about “Mrs. Garret” / “the Widow Garret” (and later in the program, “Mrs. Ellsworth” / “the Widow Ellsworth”) or have seen her at her windows, in the hotel lobby, or in the hotel’s restaurant, but most have not met Alma. Alma initially does not function as an active public figure in the program per se, but rather appears to many in the camp as an inaccessible individual, almost as royalty or as a celebrity who does not mingle with most publics. Indeed, a scene in season two signals Mrs. Garret’s inaccessibility through her aforementioned names when she tells Trixie, well into their close relationship—which has included Trixie aiding Alma as she quit her drug habit—that her first name is Alma. Trixie, of course, already knows this, but Alma is detached enough from the camp’s publics to imagine that others in the camp, even an intimate friend, would not have this basic information. As an upper-class woman, Alma does not take part in the public life of the camp while her husband is alive, nor does she regularly travel through it unaccompanied. And even though she has moments where she fails to appreciate the ways public interactions might function (e.g. telling Trixie her first name), Alma is, like Swearengen, a careful watcher of the camp. She also resents being relegated to private realms (as she tells Sofia in “Jewel’s Boot is Made for Walking”), so when her husband dies, she takes over his business concerns and gradually enters into some aspects of public life by making connections with reliable men like Bullock. It is worth underscoring that Alma is not able to transition into public life without men, but she does use what she has seen of the camp to make sound judgements about the men she trusts. When she meets Bullock in the fifth episode of season one, for instance, she notes that she saw Bullock and Hickok confront and kill Ned

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Mason on the main street. Despite being confined to her room, then, Alma is often an astute observer of the public sphere that excludes her. The gendered and class-based aspects of Alma’s character are emphasized further by her relationship with Trixie, a woman who functions “on her own” and as one of Swearengen’s spies/representatives within the camp. The relationship between Trixie and Alma begins not with an actual meeting, but through an exchange of looks while Trixie stands on the Gem balcony at night and sees Alma returning her gaze through a hotel window. This exchange draws a significant charge from the information disparity between the women since viewers and Trixie know what Alma does not: Trixie is on the balcony so that Dan and Swearengen, inside Swearengen’s office, can discuss the successful murder of Brom and the fact that his supposedly fake gold claim has proved to be rich find. Their conversation plays as a voice-over over the shots of Trixie and Alma looking at each other, and Alma, of course, has no knowledge of her changed life status. Here again, her placement behind the window presents a concrete visualization of her lack of access to the public spheres and to agency within the camp.11 On the one hand, Trixie as a prostitute and “fallen woman” is given some freedom to roam the camp by her pimp Swearengen and act as his agent. She is able to be seen on her own within the camp and therefore express some agency; she starts a relationship with Star that Swearengen eventually endorses, she learns accounting, and she stops working as a prostitute. Alma’s gendered and class-based identity, on the other hand, interferes with her status and persona as a public figure within the camp and sets her apart from its publics. After her claim is confirmed to be a “bonanza,” and after she uses her gold to open a bank at the encouragement of Star and later Swearengen, Alma still does not travel unaccompanied within the camp on a regular basis, though she does sometimes venture out alone (1.8). She begins to oversee the day-to-day operations of the bank and signs off on loans in season three, but even this greater presence within a portion of the camp’s public does not afford her complete access to it. For instance, when Swearengen calls a camp leader meeting at the Gem in the second half of season three, one of the prostitutes notes Alma’s absence and pointedly remarks, “guess if you have a pussy, owning a bank doesn’t get you to that table” (“Unauthorized Cinnamon” 3.7). Further, Alma’s status as a rich woman does not afford her the opportunity to flaunt convention in relation to her personal, private live within the outlaw camp. Unlike men of every class background and marital status who openly visit prostitutes, Alma cannot be seen to have a sexual life that has any public component. Thus, while her affair with Bullock functions as an “open secret” for many in the camp who know about it, the emphasis must remain on the

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secret aspect, which also helps to explain why Swearengen’s “calling out” of Bullock is such a breach of decorum. When Garret learns that her affair with Bullock has resulted in a pregnancy in season two, and since she cannot marry the already-wed sheriff, she instead marries Ellsworth in a plan devised and brokered by Trixie as a thin cover story that will be believed by others “as much as they care to see” with their “passing glance[s]” (2.12). The marriage plan appears for naught in terms of propriety since Alma does not take her pregnancy to term, but it does draw Ellsworth more into her gold mine business. (Alma maintains the bank as her domain.) Crucially, though in a roundabout way, this cover marriage and Ellsworth’s participation in the mine help to bring about the successful buyout of Alma’s business, which she has fended off for most of the program’s three seasons, and thus curtail her ability to participate in the camp’s public spheres. Since Ellsworth has past bad blood with Hearst’s operation in another mining camp, he immediately announces his contempt for the mining magnate to Hearst’s advance agent Francis Wolcott and later on to the man himself. Hearst is clearly motivated by this conflict and, likely more so, by Ellsworth’s position in the Garret enterprise and as Alma’s husband, and he orders Ellsworth murdered late in season three. Ellsworth is shot while sitting in his tent at the mine in the program’s penultimate episode, and his body is brought back into camp on a wagon, a sequence of events that effectively forces Alma to sell her claim to Hearst in the program’s final episode (The Catbird Seat” 3.11, “Tell Him Something Pretty” 3.12). Alma’s brief foray into the public sphere is thus curtailed by Hearst’s forceful consolidating purposes, as the murder of Ellsworth becomes a crucial moment in his plan to extend his expansive financial control of major mines across the Western United States. Within this overall plan, Hearst is less concerned about publics, communal institutions, or the development of the state within the West, and is instead invested in his own accumulation of wealth and monopolization of mine claims. Hearst’s attack on Alma via Ellsworth thus exploits muddled private-public elements—the sham marriage protects her public persona and maintains her business concerns—and advances his own private interests over that of “the public” or any disinterested investment in the public (as an investment in a community for the common good).12 Ellsworth’s murder is but one of part of Hearst’s strategy to extend his control over the mining enterprises within the entire camp, an exercise of power that concludes in his rigging of the territorial elections at the end of season three. Hearst’s business will, in this way, become coterminous with the camp’s offi cial government, even though he places no importance on either the governmental organization of the camp or its public spheres unless they support his business structure. Hearst thus represents the arrival of a new form of public

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sphere: one that eradicates the competing counterpublics that have existed in favor of the homogenizing influences of the alliance between nation-state and monopoly capital. Before this conclusion to the program, and before Hearst himself “goes public” and arrives in camp, viewers have seen his plan gradually emerge in season two with the arrival of his advance agent, Francis Wolcott. Wolcott first acts as Hearst’s public agent and mediator when he buys claims, spreads rumors about contested land titles, and intimidates camp dwellers. The Wolcott plotline also includes elements of propriety and public scrutiny related to Wolcott himself, and these elements eventually interfere with Hearst’s interests. Wolcott appears to be a civilized, proper Victorian gentleman who represents Hearst and Hearst’s investors, but his calm, reserved demeanor masks sadistic and murderous desires linked to sexuality. Wolcott’s cruelty is deviant even within the outlaw camp, and his compulsion to abuse and to murder women, which he does under the name “Mr. W,” bursts forth when he kills three prostitutes at Joanie Stubbs’ new high-end brothel, the Chez Amis. Tolliver helps to cover it up, and later uses this information in an attempt to blackmail Hearst about Mr. W and “the public eye” at the conclusion of season two; Hearst consequently severs his relationship with Wolcott, and in response, Wolcott hangs himself off a balcony. Hearst arrives in the camp at the end of season two, and continues Wolcott’s work by using his formidable assets to purchase the loyalty of the state and the Pinkertons. Throughout season three, Hearst amplifies the violent aspects of his strategy and engages in few attempts to appear to be a member of any public sphere, a narrative illustration of what Bruce Robbins, in another context, describes as a scenario in which the, “public falls while the private rises.”13 Hearst’s private interests rise to overwhelm the camp’s public spheres, and his perceived importance and access to capital help to create a situation in which he contests other publics primarily as an individual. Like other Western villains, Hearst’s reputation precedes him, and being a known figure, along with his access to capital and state support, allows him to maintain his own potent force set against much of the camp. The more established camp inhabitants rightly have no faith in Hearst’s reassurances that his consolidation will benefit them, and Hearst responds to their concern with brutal schemes as the camp leaders expect and a determination to, in his words, “take this place down like Gomorrah” (3.7). This taking down commences in the second episode of season three, before Hearst articulates his plan as such, when he purchases Farnum’s hotel and sledgehammers a hole through his room’s exterior to create what he calls a veranda. Hearst never finishes the construction, and his rough opening looms over the camp for the remainder of the program as a reminder of his destructive

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capacity, his contempt for the camp, and his disregard for presenting the façade of refined, polite, civil society. (When the Englishman Swearengen points out Hearst’s hole in the wall to the Irishman Langrishe, Langrishe remarks, “Americans, it never occurs to them to try the window” (3.3), an observation that suggests Hearst’s disregard might also develop from his rough national identity.) Hearst’s unfinished veranda functions as a direct visual counterpoint to Swearengen’s formal balcony, as do his reasons for having a veranda. Whereas Swearengen primarily uses his balcony to survey the camp and secondarily to be seen by camp inhabitants, Hearst regularly appears on the veranda as a basic communiqué to the camp: he stands above their publics, and, like a king appearing before his subjects, his appearance signifies his (eventual) rule over them, or at least over their gold claims and work lives since he expresses no interest in political structures. One of Hearst’s earliest veranda-messages is staged as a direct contrast to the power of Swearengen’s balcony, as Hearst invites Swearengen to watch the election speeches with him from the upper vantage point. Swearengen warily attends, and in a sequence threaded through with a complicated exchange of looks, Hearst uses the veranda to display his proximity to Swearengen to the camp’s assembled publics, including Swearengen’s agents. At the same time, Hearst is able to have Swearengen call upon him, not vice versa, in a venue shift that moves the seat of power from Swearengen’s balcony to Hearst’s hotel. Yet Hearst is not satisfied by this public display, so as this scene develops, he also has Captain Turner sneak up behind Swearengen and surreptitiously pull a gun to coerce him back into the privacy of his hotel room. There, out of view, Swearengen refuses to bend to Hearst’s will, so Turner holds Swearengen down while Hearst chops off one of his fingers with a pick ax, an act that is not meant to be directly viewed by the public. The combination of the Hearst-Swearengen appearance on the veranda along with Swearengen’s physical appearance upon leaving the hotel, however, is meant to convey much about Hearst’s ability to traverse public and private divides. His benign appearances and faux congenial conversations are followed by intimidation and violence, even if he does not claim the violence as his own. Hearst thus presents a shrewd, potentially confusing organization and display of power intended to destabilize his enemies. His indirect messages from the veranda, alongside the visible aftermath of unseen acts of violence, offer him plausible deniability, even while the import of these messages cannot be overlooked. Hearst thus manipulates the public constructs of the camp for an interest that he, nevertheless, is able to publicly disavow. Hearst, that is to say, exemplifies the emergence of an interest that, in contrast to Swearengen’s, works to conceal itself.

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We can add to the list of Hearst’s messages and displays his assault on Alma prior to Ellsworth’s murder, an assault that draws her together with both Hearst and Swearengen and captures much of what I have identified to be Deadwood’s sight-related representations of contestations within and between public spheres (“A Constant Throb” 3.10). This extended action includes multiple scenes that occupy much of the episode’s runtime, and it starts with a scene inside the hotel restaurant where Hearst is dining with Commissioner Jarry, a government official from outside the camp who aids him in a vote-buying scheme. Hearst stares out a window, and in a reverse shot from his perspective, we see Alma walk alone down the sidewalk. In the three shots that follow, the perspective then shifts from Hearst to a shot-reverse shot pattern between Alma walking and Swearengen on his balcony as they acknowledge each other. After a cutaway to the theatre troupe inside the hotel, we see a close in medium shot of Alma (head on) and hear a gunshot, which acts as a sound bridge into a wide shot of her from behind, slowly reacting to the shot. The episode quickly moves through reaction shots, including one of Hearst, and a second set of shots of Alma in which another bullet is fired in her direction. Utter runs toward her in this second set, as does Swearengen, who is shown running on his balcony and jumping over the rail into the street—an echo of his tumble over the rail with Bullock—in three shots intercut with other characters’ actions. As mayhem takes over the public thoroughfare, Swearengen and Utter reach Alma and hustle her into the Gem, while Hearst casually strolls to the hotel’s lower porch. These wide shots are cut together so that Hearst’s eyeline meets the gazes of Alma and Swearengen, who half-mockingly calls out to Hearst, the man likely behind the gunshots, “Oh, just some nonsense among the ordinaries, sir. Getting Mrs. Ellsworth under cover. Excessive fucking caution, but you yourself, sir, are absolutely safe” (3.10). The sequence continues and cuts between several parallel scenes of “ordinaries” meeting, including: Alma, Swearengen, Trixie, and others at the Gem; Adams, Utter, Joanie, and Jane guarding the school in case Hearst attacks Sofia; and Dan holding back Ellsworth in a backroom at the Gem. The consensus position on the shooting is that Hearst’s “bullets from invisible sources” were meant to scare Alma and draw Ellsworth and Bullock into a rash retaliation. (Ellsworth is at the mine, Bullock is campaigning for sheriff elsewhere.)14 Or, as Tom Nuttall says in a description that relies upon a conceptual link between power, sight, and public spheres, a bored Hearst wants to see that he has made people afraid and is, therefore, “a fucking bigshot.” Jarry, Hearst, and a Pinkerton agent meanwhile meet in Hearst’s rooms (in a scene that is intercut into the sequence) and confirm the interpretations of the shooting as Hearst looks out his window and plans his next move against the camp.

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Swearengen anticipates and thwarts Hearst’s move once he reassures Alma that she is not a target—“you were bait, not quarry”—and encourages her to continue her solo walk to the bank to “confound” Hearst (3.10). He does not want Hearst to see that he has unsettled any interpublic/intrapublic interactions, and Alma agrees, so she leaves the Gem and exchanges a look with Hearst, now on his veranda. Then in a series of shots that visually concretize the notion of competing counterpublics, we see the unescorted Alma walk in the center of the street from the Gem to the bank as she looks warily at the Pinkertons and at Swearengen’s henchmen “strategically loitering” on either side of her. These shots in turn are intercut with shots of Hearst watching from above and closer shots of Swearengen and Ellsworth, somewhat out of view under the roof of the Gem’s lower porch, watching Hearst watch Alma. Hearst is confounded by Alma’s actions and the apparent actions of others (Bullock, Ellsworth, Swearengen) because what he sees means that the publics that he views as antagonistic and beneath him have not responded as he planned. He thus again attempts provocation and sends the Pinkerton agent to deliver a written message to Swearengen, a message which Hearst first compels the man to read aloud to prove that he has not lied about being able to read: “Thanks from all for your rescue of Mrs. Ellsworth. Who could have shot at her? Do you wish her guarded at the bank with the sheriff away? I saw you let her walk alone. Answer via bearer” (3.10). This is the only time that the message is presented in its entirety, and it reveals some of Hearst’s confounded state, especially in relation to his muddled understanding of the publics’ actions and inactions. In the space of this short note, he positions himself as a representative for a unified camp (“thanks from all”) and a concerned, civic-minded member of portions of the camp’s publics (“Who could have shot at her?”; his offer to guard her while the sheriff is away) before he lets slip a phrase that is more in character. “I saw you let her walk alone” is a sentiment that emanates from an overlord who is angered by an affront, a returned message that counters the desired response to his action/command. With this phrase, Hearst admonishes and further threatens Swearengen and Alma, while also indicating that he does not believe that Alma has the agency to make this decision on her own. Alma’s walk to the bank, before and after the shooting, is the most prominent display of her circulating within the camp’s public realm on her own. In season one, she and Sofia run to Bullock and Star’s store without an escort once Alma realizes that her father plans to cheat her out of her gold claim. Contrasting these scenes, we see that Alma has developed as a public figure in the program, which makes the related decrease in her public status vis-à-vis Hearst’s successful takeover of her mine all the more troubling.

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The sequence that starts with the attack on Alma moves toward its denouement as it cuts from the agent’s reading of Hearst’s note to the Gem where Swearengen is shown reading it before he invites the Pinkerton into his private office. Continuing a pattern established early on in the program, Swearengen uses his office as the space for violent retribution and beats the man for his involvement in Hearst’s mayhem. The episode crosscuts between this beating and Hearst standing on his veranda looking at the empty balcony and closed office door of the Gem (his veranda rises above the balcony, so the camera position on the veranda is in a slight high angle, and vice versa from the Gem). Exploiting the very movement between public visibility and private secrecy that Hearst used on him, Swearengen takes to the balcony, looks to Hearst, and taunts, “passing a little wind,” before he returns to the office, which propels an agitated Hearst downstairs to confront E. B. and spit in his face before returning to his veranda (3.10). Swearengen’s next move is to slit the Pinkerton’s throat and then return to balcony to converse with Hearst, pretending that the agent has left the Gem through the backdoor. Hearst appears uneasy, while Swearengen hams it up and laments, “where do we find good help” in the “delivery of communications?” (3.10). In a mock pleasant tone, Swearengen tells Hearst that Alma needs no guard, but thanks him for asking. With no verbal response, Hearst, shown in a low angle medium shot standing next to the hole to his room, moves inside as the shot cuts on his action to an exceptional deep focus shot: the camera is placed inside Hearst’s room, and its darkened, close-up foreground includes the hole’s rough opening as a frame-within-a-frame and Hearst’s head and chest as he ducks through the hole and off screen. Small traces of daylight leak through the edges of the shot, but Hearst mainly blots out the light until he moves off screen, at which point the shot doubly frames Swearengen standing on his balcony in the background wide shot, sunlit, as he asks, “How’s your back, Mr. Hearst? How’s the fucking back, there, pal?” dropping any pretense of civility (3.10). Hearst is able to turn away from Swearengen without a word because even though he has lost the skirmish that started with his attack on Alma, he remains a well-funded murderous engine who will not stop until he prevails over all participants within all public spheres. When the program ends, he has consolidated his interests so that, for instance, the contours of Alma’s future as a public figure are uncertain since she no longer has a gold mine to back her bank. Hearst has bent the camp’s publics to his will, and he is thus able to leave the camp that he hates after firming up his consolidation. While this does not mean that the camp’s publics are totally “neutered,” to use Hearst’s phrase, it does seem that the efficacy of interpublic/intrapublic discursive

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interactions will be restricted significantly even though Hearst himself will not reside in the camp. We cannot know for sure how these newly restricted public spheres would have been represented in the program’s unproduced fourth season, but the deep focus shot from Hearst’s room presents us with a hint. From this position of perspectival prominence, we see Swearengen in his usual location on his balcony, outside looking in.

Notes Thanks to Jennifer Greiman and Paul Stasi for encouraging me to write this essay and for their comments. 1 Jason Jacobs, “Al Swearengen, Philosopher King,” in Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By, ed. David Lavery (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 12. 2 The abandoned fourth season might have resolved some of this tension and concluded some of the narrative uncertainty about the camp’s status. On the negotiations around the never-produced season four, see Jesse McKinley, “‘Deadwood’ Gets a New Lease on Life,” New York Times, June 11, 2006. Also informing my thoughts about the historical context of Deadwood are: Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (New York: Penguin, 1992) and Thomas Powers, The Killing of Crazy Horse (New York: Knopf, 2010). 3 Jacobs discusses some of the sight aspects of these same scenes with a focus on Swearengen, 18–20. 4 Amanda Ann Klein, “ ‘The Horse doesn’t Get a Credit’: The Foregrounding of Generic Syntax in Deadwood ’s Opening Credits,” in Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By, ed. David Lavery (London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2006), 95–6. 5 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 2–3. Among other work, Fraser refers to Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Fredrick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). 6 Ibid., 7–8. 7 Ibid., 13. Also see Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 49–90. 8 With these features, Deadwood is reminiscent of another Western about a burgeoning mining camp, McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Altman, 1971).

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9 See Brad Benz, “Deadwood and the English Language,” Great Plains Quarterly 27.4 (2007): 239–51; Joan Richardson, “Deadwood : Unalterable Vibrations,” The Hopkins Review 3.3 (2010): 376–405; and the behind-the-scenes documentary,“The New Language of the Old West” (supplementary material on DVD release of Deadwood , disk six), HBO Video 2008. 10 On women in the nineteenth century, notions of a public/private dichotomy, and critcal appraisals of this dichotomy, see: Kathy Peiss, “Going Public: Women in Nineteenth-Century Cultural History,” American Literary History 3.4 (1991): 817–28. 11 For a reflection on windows and the public sphere, see: Thomas Keenan, “Windows: Of Vulnerability,” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 121–41. 12 On self-interest and Deadwood, see Daniel Worden, “Neo-liberalism and the Western: HBO’s Deadwood as National Allegory,” Canadian Review of American Studies 39.2 (2009): 221–46. 13 Bruce Robbins, “Introduction: The Public as Phantom,” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xi. 14 Thanks to editors of this collection for their phrasing of Hearst’s message in this sequence.

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8 “The World is Less Than Perfect”: Nontraditional family structures in Deadwood Paul Zinder ver the course of three seasons, the HBO series Deadwood charts the development of a cluster of nontraditional frontier families. Archetypical patriarchs with figurative “children” often compose these family units, although powerful women also assume roles usually attributed to male characters in the Western. Typically, the significance of the dynastic family in the Western genre relates directly to the importance of property and the “appropriate” distribution of wealth within the family, and true to form, the pursuit of the land that is passed on to Alma Garret after her husband’s murder proves to be the catalyst for the narrative arc of the series as a whole (“Reconnoitering the Rim” 1.3).1 Property and family are tightly bound in the show, as the search for gold on the outskirts of Deadwood, and the formation of business interests related to this valuable natural resource, come to rely on the familial structures that form in the camp. This kindred makeup catalyzes the people in Deadwood’s “domestic” community when an external, “foreign” menace arrives to imperil the interconnected branches of the local populace. George Hearst targets these nontraditional families for apocalyptic destruction in the third season of the series. However, while Hearst succeeds in empire-building, he fails in his strategy to crush the people of Deadwood “like Gomorrah,” as the camp unites against a man unwilling to acknowledge the importance of affective community when building his personal wealth (“Unauthorized Cinnamon” 3.7). Hearst, an outsider aligned with the capitalist public sphere, escapes Deadwood with more gold, but without destroying the bonds of the nontraditional families who remain.

O

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This revision of family is key because, as Elliot West contends, “the most important institution in Westward expansion [was] the family.”2 Historically, families in the developing west were composed of male authority figures and women confined to the private sphere as homemakers.3 As Cathy Luchetti writes, “the average frontier woman spent her life bearing children,” and “while men flooded into the world of trade, business, and government, women could succeed in maternity.”4 Here we find the origin of those conservative archetypes celebrated in cinematic Westerns that would define the West for generations. Such stories, Richard W. Slatta posits, have “a decidedly masculine flavor,” in which women assume “a few stereotypical roles: hapless heroine in need of saving, schoolmarm spreading civilization or prostitute.”5 In contrast, David Milch approaches his vision of America’s nineteenth-century development by expanding traditional definitions of both male and female characters in the Western, by deconstructing the meaning of archetypes like the male hero and prostitute, and by placing these characters in nontraditional familial structures, thereby creating an amalgamation of people striving to connect on very personal levels. Ultimately, Deadwood’s “flavor” is neither masculine nor feminine, but human. Crucially, Milch’s series-long narrative arc highlights the parallel formation of these nontraditional families with the expansion of the nation and the capitalist Hearst’s effect on such proceedings, making the residents of the camp participants in a national journey. As Amy Kaplan has argued, “the language of domesticity suffused the debates about national expansion,” for the “domestic has a double meaning that not only links the familial household to the nation but also imagines both in opposition to everything outside the geographic and conceptual border of the home. The earliest meaning of foreign . . . [is] ‘at a distance from home.’ ”6 The actions taken by the nontraditional families in Deadwood are thus connected to the personal disruptions (and horrors) engendered not only by the financial invasion of George Hearst but also by the national invasion of the United States Government, as characters fashion unconventional unions in an effort to survive in a town with no civil law, unwittingly originating a true “home” from which to defend their intimate relations from powerful “foreign” assailants. The community actually strengthens with the arrival of the insensate and impersonal Hearst, whose business methods offend Deadwood’s leading capitalists who cannot themselves compete with a nationally recognized gold baron. And while the end of Hearst’s self-appointed reign as the camp’s de facto patriarch leaves the camp’s residents emotionally shattered by their attempt to slow the engine of his government-endorsed monopoly, they remain standing in nontraditional families that have become stronger than ever.

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The show’s establishment of the nontraditional begins with its dismantling of the traditional. Deadwood critiques traditional marriage as a convenience birthed by business and/or societal interests, linking spousal coalitions to the potential annexation of the surrounding area to the rapidly growing United States, which the camp’s leaders fear will remove the civil freedoms they moved to Deadwood to cultivate. The nuclear families in the diegesis of the series are arrangements that have little bearing on the happiness of their participants/subjects, and when a shift in the role of chief patriarch in the camp from Al Swearengen to George Hearst looms, the former’s enemies become fierce allies. Furthermore, the creation and development of these relationships metaphorically mirror the consistent deal-making undertaken by local and federal officials regarding Deadwood’s future as a “free camp.” For Milch, a happy traditional family has no place in a community with or without “law.” In Deadwood, laws are formed by governments ruled by financial interests that seek to collapse the freedom of individuals within the nontraditional family unit. Traditional families, in turn, are seen to be ruled by the same freedom-limiting interests. This essay traces the evolution of the camp’s families over the series’ three-season run, tying their growth to the building of wealth in the town, and reading their development as a microcosm of nineteenth-century American expansion and “progress.” Ultimately, Deadwood critiques Hearst’s indurate pursuit of wealth by showing how interrelated it is with the configuration of traditional families in the Western.

Annexation: Personal and otherwise I bet your wife and son are overtook by that lovely home you built them. Charlie Utter (“A Lie Agreed Upon: Part II” 2.2) Deadwood begins with the threat of impending death and a reminder of the significance of family, as Marshall Seth Bullock prepares to hang a man in Montana without trial to avoid the rush of a posse of drunks who demand personal retribution for the stealing of a horse. As he stands on the front porch of Bullock’s office under a noose, Clell Watson insists that “this isn’t right. My sister was comin’ in the morning.” When Clell realizes that he cannot escape the capital punishment before him, he says, “you tell my sister, if my boy turns up, raise him good . . . tell her to give him my boots . . . Tell him his daddy loved him” (“Deadwood” 1.1). Although Clell’s son is missing and will unknowingly become an orphan when his father dies, his sister will have

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the opportunity to take the boy in, and raise him as her own. The series’ first family is thus a broken one, but one that also presages the hastily constructed families of Deadwood, each assembled to survive a hard, uncaring world. In Deadwood, distinct nontraditional families form and fortify due to the bonds they forge in the camp that grows around them, and the progress of each of these nontraditional families becomes increasingly interdependent as the series continues. To David Milch, “marriage, like gold, is a lie agreed upon that serves a larger human purpose.”7 While the wife was often seen to embody a “civilizing force” in the nineteenth-century West, Alma Garret Ellsworth of Deadwood initially has no such effect on her surroundings.8 Indeed, Alma’s arranged marriage to Brom Garret sets in motion the plot that will eventually lead to the violence spearheaded by George Hearst in the third season of the series, making her a catalyst of a series of public events, even though she spends most of her first marriage in her private room, floating away her days in a laudanum haze. Brom’s death, in turn, prompts her to question the veracity of Dan Dority’s account of the “accident,” an inquiry that eventually guides her to a more intimate relationship with Bullock. The loss of her first marriage thus leads her directly to what may become a second one. But she and Bullock may never marry, because other prearranged considerations take precedence over their passion. Bullock is already married to his brother’s widow, who is on her way to Deadwood with her adolescent son. Since historically, a successful male was considered a “good citizen” if he built his own house and became a father, the arrival of Martha and her son places Bullock in the position to achieve that time-honored goal.9 Furthermore, if, according to G. Christopher Williams, “a domestic situation” is necessary “for the taming of the gunslinger,” Martha Bullock’s arrival in Deadwood offers him the perfect opportunity to become domesticated.10 In this, she is largely successful. Bullock kills no one else after her arrival, and though he does suggest to Alma that they “leave the camp immediately,” he does so to avoid “[renewal of Martha’s] humiliation daily,” while also offering the alternative of severing their connection (2.2). That they pursue the latter course demonstrates the restraining influence Martha’s presence has on Bullock’s passions. The complications of their lives continue, however, as Alma soon finds out she is pregnant with Bullock’s child. Choosing to marry the prospector Whitney Ellsworth to hide this fact, Alma is, in effect, creating a faux-nuclear family similar to the Bullocks. But the attraction to Bullock remains. At Alma and Ellsworth’s wedding celebration, for instance, Swearengen sees Bullock lock eyes with his former lover and orders him to go home, reminding the

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Sheriff, “I believe it’s to your fucking right” (“Boy the Earth Talks To” 2.12). Their passion persists despite their respective marriages of convenience. The character arcs for both Alma and Bullock thus comment on the dichotomy of their private and public selves, and offer a critique of the disingenuousness of traditional marriage as well as the camp’s burgeoning “civilization.” Amy Kaplan contends that “domesticity draws strict boundaries between the home and the world of men.”11 Alma begins Deadwood as a character who spends most of her time self-medicating, standing by the window in her room considering the public lives of men like Seth Bullock. Her love affair with the Sheriff as well as her pregnancy are both treated in the private sphere of her home, keeping the genuine feelings of both characters, and the consequences of those feelings, out of the public eye. As Alma and Bullock’s public selves rise in prominence, so does their unhappiness at their inability to be together; Alma returns to her addiction and Bullock sits inert in an obligatory marriage. In the third season of the series, after she accepts her nontraditional daughter Sofia, Alma opens the camp’s first financial institution, taking the traditional male reigns of the public sphere in her hands. This move outside the private sphere commits Alma to a loveless marriage, a consequence of her newfound public visibility. As Bullock watches Alma dance on stage at her wedding, marriage is proven to be a guise that operates to appease the mores of nineteenth-century culture. Deadwood also employs nonelective annexation as an analogical comment on traditional marriage. On the night of the Ellsworths’ wedding, Bullock and Al Swearengen, having begun the season engaging in violent fisticuffs, ally so that they may brave the coming annexation together. The final sequence of the second season finale cuts from the wedding celebration to the establishment of the unlikely Bullock/Swearengen alliance, linking the Ellsworths’ matrimonial union (a marriage of convenience) to concerns over Deadwood’s potential national union (a marriage of force). Virginia Wright Wexman contends that the Western genre includes scores of “affectionless” marital unions “held together by considerations of property and lineage.”12 The Alma-Ellsworth pairing fits into such a category as precisely as her first marriage to Brom Garret did. Ellsworth is virtually dumbstruck when Trixie asks him if he will “do the right thing” and marry Alma to save the expectant mother and the Bullocks from embarrassment (“Something Very Expensive” 2.6). But would the necessity of such a marriage stand if Alma was not the proprietor of the richest gold claim in Deadwood? Alma’s avowal that, “I trust you, Ellsworth, as an honorable man. I take great pleasure in your company” is made before their engagement, which probably explains why her attitude regarding his company lacks such enthusiasm after they marry (“Jewel’s Boot Is Made for

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Walking” 1.11). After Alma returns to the pleasures of laudanum and clumsily attempts to seduce Ellsworth, her husband moves out in discomfiture. When she eventually informs him that she plans to “forego” the drug “forever,” Ellsworth tempers his pleasure by insisting that “not having me in this house is going to improve your odds” (3.7). While the couple maintains a mutual concern and respect for each other, the Ellsworths become victims of a marriage birthed by societal expectation. Further, Ellsworth himself will die as an innocent drawn into Hearst’s ring of intimidation, his murder impelling Alma’s sale of her gold claim to Hearst, the facilitator of monopolistic practice and government intrusion. The marriage of convenience between Alma and Ellsworth thus fails to prevent the larger coercive annexation that it mirrors. Given that the entire reason for the marriage also disappears when Alma miscarries, their marriage ultimately seems to have failed in both its public and private aims. The Garrets, the Bullocks, and the Ellsworths all share a common attribute. Their marriages are products of coercion, pressure placed on each participant to engage in a union that lacks private affection and is only genuine as a public practicality. In contrast, the nontraditional unions in Deadwood, based on personal choice rather than the demands of societal mores, have an integrity that counteracts the pain expressed in the series’ conventional marriages. By the third season, one couple in the camp acts like long-tenured spouses though they never exchange vows. Sol Star, Bullock’s partner in the hardware business, and Trixie, a prostitute at the Gem, develop what may even be described as the healthiest relationship in the series. The Star-Trixie connection emerges as innocently as a teenage crush, beginning in “Plague,” when Trixie’s “Hello, Mr. Star!” is gifted with an exuberant smile and answered by the beaming recipient (1.6), prompting Star to offer her a 100 percent discount on anything in the hardware store, his “special get acquainted with those we’d like to get acquainted with sale,” as well as lessons in accounting (“Bullock Returns to Camp” 1.7). Crucially, Star refuses to allow Trixie’s work for Swearengen to obstruct their potential coupling, even visiting her at the Gem. When she tells him that it’s embarrassing for her to see him there, Star requests that she “Come to our store, then” (“No Other Sons or Daughters” 1.9). Trixie prompts their first tryst with a proposal that’s both defensive and sincere: “Anyways . . . would you want a free fuck?” (1.11). Although she initially hesitates when he tries to kiss her on the mouth, she relents upon his repeated request. Their bond deepens with time, too. At the opening of the second season, after Star is shot by Johnny during the brawl between Bullock and Swearengen, Trixie stays by Star’s bed like a nurse-maid in love. She finds escape from her deeply imbedded inferiority complex difficult,

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however. Star’s anger at Trixie’s refusal to consider the serious potential of their relationship (after she bluntly suggests that if he teaches her accounts, she’ll pay him in “cunt”) propels her from the store (“New Money” 2.3). And yet Star eventually welcomes her back, displaying an acceptance of both her difficult circumstance and the emotional volatility it creates. Acceptance, not coercion, keeps this couple together. At the same time, the potential roadblock to the couple’s happiness, Al Swearengen—Trixie’s “father”/pimp/lover—never truly leaves her life. In fact, he also demonstrates an acceptance of her new attachment that keeps her close. When Swearengen lies suffering from kidney stones, unable to speak, Trixie comforts him like an empathetic ex-wife, assuring him that “it’s all right, honey,” after telling his new lover Dolly to “get the fuck out of here” (“Requiem for a Gleet” 2.4). Later in the series, Swearengen symbolically (and publicly) “accepts” Trixie’s choice to love Star while the couple walks arm in arm at Alma and Ellsworth’s wedding celebration, tossing the letter and money he bribed out of Miss Isringhausen to Trixie as a wedding gift for the new bride. When Trixie looks to the balcony with a luminous smile in response, she seems to recognize that Swearengen has severed the tie he formerly held tight—a tie which, as noted below, borders on the incestuous. By the third season, Swearengen arranges for Star to purchase a house to make it easier for the couple to be together. Doubts about their compatibility have thus been alleviated. The series’ final sanction of the union occurs after Trixie voices anger and anxiousness over Alma’s return to drug addiction and the impact it may have on Sofia. Star’s suggestion that he and Trixie consider taking the child moves her and completes the circle of this symbolic marriage—they are receptive to becoming parents together. One of the more affecting relationships in Deadwood, that of Joanie Stubbs and Jane Canary, never reaches the standing of a trusting “marriage,” but it nonetheless boasts the potential to make both parties happier than they’ve ever been in a fashion similar to the relationship between Trixie and Star. Joanie, the head prostitute at the Bella Union and the former companion of Cy Tolliver, fails in her early attempts at love. Tolliver, a vitriolic and sadistic pimp, only expresses his affection for Joanie after his acts of violence. He insists that “my worry’s you. And my concerns and feelings of fucking affection,” directly following a threat to break her jaw (1.6). Subsequent to his beating of two grifters, Flora and her brother Miles, into disfigurement, Tolliver forces Joanie to “put that [thing] out of its misery,” only to remind her that “your happiness is important to me . . . You bring warmth into my life. I can’t bear to see you unhappy like this” (“Suffer the Little Children” 1.8). When Joanie extricates herself from Tolliver to open her own brothel, only to return to him

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for help after the Wolcott massacre, Tolliver acts like a betrayed spouse, cynically observing that “It’s no picnic, is it honey, running pussy?” (“E.B. Was Left Out” 2.7). Tolliver’s jealousy—and continual violence—suggests a measure of domination noticeably absent from Joanie’s relationship to Jane, which begins when both characters are at a particularly low point. Joanie’s depression, following the slaughter of the young women she brought to Deadwood, leaves her sitting alone in the dark in her newly deserted brothel, the Chez Amis. Jane appears outside on a drunken evening to exclaim that her visit was prompted by their “pain-in-the-balls mutual acquaintance, Charlie fucking Utter!” (“Childish Things” 2.8). This gives Joanie the impetus to allow the bibulous woman inside. Joanie takes naturally to her role as protector of damaged women (she had attempted to shield Flora from Tolliver’s wrath even after the young woman’s betrayal and quietly shoos off the surviving prostitutes under her employ on the night of the massacre with all of the money she can scrape together). This makes her sympathetic to Jane’s obvious weaknesses, and her compassion will eventually have romantic potential as well. For her part, Jane evinces a wish to befriend Joanie after she’s found unconscious on the front porch of the Chez Amis with a gun in her hand, afraid to enter for fear that Wolcott may have returned to attack Joanie as well. And when Joanie insists she “favor me and stay,” Jane jokes that she gets “top fucking dollar,” the sexual innuendo flavoring the exchange (“Amalgamation and Capital” 2.9). In direct contrast to the control of a patriarch like Tolliver, Joanie ignores Jane’s inability to remain sober and tenderly insists on Jane’s company, cognizant that relationships mature over time. As Joanie attempts to sponge-bathe Jane, the latter protests, pointing out that she never had any sisters so she’s never experienced such pampering. Joanie responds by admitting that she had romantic relations with both of her siblings, but that Jane was safe from her advances if she wanted to be. Jane’s invitation to kiss is happily obliged. The contented couple draws the attention of the camp as they lead the children down the thoroughfare to the schoolhouse. And in the final episode of Deadwood, Joanie wraps Wild Bill Hicock’s robe around Jane, explaining that she wants to be good to her, implying a future that the viewer will never see. The Trixie-Sol coupling and the Joanie-Jane relationship epitomize the concept of the “happy marriage” in Deadwood, underlining the series’ critical commentary on traditional marriage. Each of these women in particular chooses her mate based on her own free will, without concern for the potential consequences of each union. These choices are affirmed by the narrative arc of the series, which leaves both couples satisfied with their personal

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companions. In both cases, we find characters who leave controlling and violent patriarchs for relationships of their own choosing. In the analogy between marriage and nation-building, then, Deadwood clearly demonstrates a preference for elective affiliation that allows us to read the coercion involved in Joanie’s relationship to Tolliver and Trixie’s relationship to Swearengen as a figure for the coercion pressuring the camp to join the nation. In much the same way that the show foregrounds nonsanctioned heterosexual unions and homosexual bonds, it also produces a number of surrogate, impromptu parent and sibling relationships. Both literal and figurative parents have children, and the series includes a plethora of nontraditional sibling relationships, prompted by the dearth of biological relations in the camp. In Deadwood, legitimate siblings usually affiliate around a death. The demise of Robert Bullock compels Seth Bullock to marry his sister-in-law. Wyatt and Morgan Earp make a passing appearance in the camp, but are persuaded to leave by Bullock after Morgan kills a man in the thoroughfare. And when Wolcott offers Mose Manuel $200,000 for the gold claim he co-owns with his brother Charlie, Mose shoots his brother dead to collect. Like so many of the other nontraditional familial associations in Deadwood, symbolic sibling relationships prove more lasting than their official counterparts. Star and Bullock, for instance, arrive in the camp together and work together to build their trade, sharing a kinship of private thoughts like a pair of brothers. Star asks Bullock if he thinks Trixie is pretty, as though requesting approval for the affair, while Bullock confides in his partner that he fears that his dead brother “sees me borrowing his life so I didn’t have to live my own” (“Mister Wu” 1.10). Star stands with a gun, ready to protect Bullock from potential aggressors in both Montana and in Deadwood, while Bullock only admits his love for Alma to his surrogate “brother” who was shot trying to protect him (2.2). Their fraternal partnership far surpasses the hardware business. Similarly, the “sisterhood” of Alma and Trixie mirrors that of each woman’s lover. After Alma overcomes her addiction under Trixie’s guidance, they maintain a personal, if volatile symbiosis. Alma turns to Trixie first when she believes she’s pregnant, and later Trixie playfully tells Alma that she’s learning to do accounts at the hardware store and is “fucking one of the owners as well” (“Complications” 2.5). After admitting, “I’m delighted by that,” Alma requests a drag off of Trixie’s cigarette, a rare and sisterly move for a woman accustomed to the finer things (2.5). On a grander note, Trixie, concerned with the reputations of Alma, Bullock, and his newly arrived family, “arranges” the marriage between Ellsworth and Alma by pushing him to propose (2.6) and will furiously confront Alma’s supplier as well as Alma herself after her return to the drug, which leads to Trixie’s firing from the bank. Forgiveness comes soon enough, however, and Trixie stays by her side

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after gunshots ring out near Alma on the thoroughfare. The alliance may have begun as a side-job organized by Trixie’s pimp, but the commitment from each woman to the other increases as their stakes in the camp do as well. Once again personal choice trumps coercive violence. Along with its nontraditional lovers and siblings, the camp is also filled with surrogate sons and daughters. The “sons of Swearengen” form a motley group, led by Dan Dority. Silas Adams’ arrival in the Gem unleashes a sibling rivalry in Dan, who feels unjustly replaced by the newcomer. Even though Adams tells him “I ain’t your enemy,” Dan beats Adams’ partner upon his arrival in the Gem, until Swearengen threatens him with a shotgun blow to the head (2.1). Dan’s jealousy is that of a displaced child, and like a child, his tears are stemmed with Swearengen’s assurance that “whatever looks ahead of grievous abominations and disorder, you and me walk into it together” (2.2). Perhaps the most affecting children in the series are the mostly nameless group of youngsters unofficially fostered by many characters in the series. Martha and Joanie negotiate with Jack Langrishe to assure the children a space for schooling, Jane, Mose, and Adams all participate in the guarding of the schoolhouse, and continued shots of the children parading down the thoroughfare on their way to school provide intense reminders of the children’s public significance, despite their anonymity. William Bullock notwithstanding, the exclusion of these children’s parents from the series’ narrative designates the youngsters “children of Deadwood,” and the camp a place where the safety of the young (the future) becomes an urgent concern for the adults in the process of formulating an affective community. The possibility of such a community— made up in part of symbolic, surrogate, and nontraditional couples—stands against the coercive bonds of marriage and the patriarchal family, both of which bear the structures of domination inherent in both nation and capital.

Patriarchs, transgressive women, and the domestic sphere Blood don’t always prove loyalty. Whitney Ellsworth (“No Other Sons or Daughters” 1.9) If the formation of nontraditional families serves as the series’ organizing principle, with surrogate parents often leading each individual group, at the beginning of the series, these de facto parental figures—Swearengen, Tolliver, and to a certain extent Bullock—tend to be fairly standard patriarchs. But as the series progresses, female characters begin to accept leading roles in what

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will become a community built on affective attachment. Indeed if, as David Milch has argued, the show primarily concerns “individuals improvising their way to some sort of primitive structure,” one of the most striking elements of this improvisation is the change we can observe in Swearengen, who is forced to give up his patriarchal control and transform into a more cooperative member of a camp that becomes something more than his personal fiefdom.13 Deadwood thus illustrates Heikko Patomaki and Colin Wight’s contention that “social systems are open systems, that is, susceptible to external influences and internal, qualitative change and emergence.”14 Indeed, the establishment of Deadwood’s affective community is in direct response to both the advancing federal government and George Hearst’s relentless search for gold. In this way, the series creates a dichotomy between the domestic sphere (Deadwood as “home”) and the foreign sphere (the federal government and Hearst as “foreign”). But as Kaplan argues, “domesticity not only monitors the borders between the civilized and the savage but also regulates traces of the savage within itself.”15 The arrival of the “foreign” influence of the nation-state, then, forces a reorganization of the show’s initial patriarchal fathers. In line with its emphasis on nontraditional marriages, Deadwood also focuses on nontraditional father figures and the transformations they undergo throughout the series. The introduction of Al Swearengen confirms exactly how difficult life will be for those settling in the camp. As the proprietor of the Gem Saloon and the brutal patriarch of the town in the first season, Swearengen treats his women as he does anyone with lesser power. Since prostitution was one of the few employment options for women on the frontier, Swearengen’s hold over his female employees is both economic and violent, evidenced when Swearengen informs Trixie that shooting a customer in self-defense is bad for business, just before he beats her (1.1). Milch asserts, however, that Swearengen’s insistence on buying his whores from the orphanage where he was raised actually designates him the rescuer of said women, which places him in the dual role of pimp and adoptive father.16 Furthermore, Milch posits that “prostitution is the fundamental violation of the family unit. If we are the family of man, when we turn a woman into a whore, whether or not she’s literally our daughter, it’s a form of incest.”17 This is most clearly represented by Swearengen’s response to Trixie’s affair with Sol Star, a reaction which, as we have seen, eventually changes due to Swearengen’s feelings of parental responsibility. While the Trixie-Star connection begins with a moment of shared flirtation, the possibilities for true connection are evident from the beginning. In “Bullock Returns to Camp” (1.7), after Alma notes that Star has been very attentive to Trixie, Trixie looks through the window and sees Swearengen standing on his balcony, the

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mise-en-scène forcing her to consider her “father’s” potential reaction to the pairing. The blurring of incest and prostitution in Swearengen’s treatment of Trixie is further exacerbated when Swearengen informs Star that he must pay $5 after the couple’s first sexual escapade. When Star refuses, Swearengen dismisses a potential future for the couple by saying: “Don’t think I don’t understand. I mean, what can any one of us ever really fucking hope for, huh? Except for a moment here and there with a person who doesn’t want to rob, steal, or murder us? You pay or she pays” (1.11). After Star throws the money on the bar, Swearengen instructs Trixie to “sleep among your own,” his hurt apparent in his glassy eyes (1.11). By the second season of the series, however, when Trixie returns to Swearengen claiming that she’s finished working at the hardware store because the owners care too much about decimal points, Swearengen speaks to her like a caring patriarch. “Do not fucking fault them, Trixie, for your own fucking fears of tumbling to something new” (2.7). As a father figure to Trixie, Swearengen recognizes that her tumble could lead to a different kind of love, a love she deserves. Abandoning his role as pimp, and transitioning from lover to father, Swearengen here becomes, at least in this scene, an image of a fatherhood that might allow a measure of freedom to its dependents. In a small, but nevertheless significant, way, the change in Swearengen demonstrates his assumption of a more positive fatherly role built on an acceptance of Trixie’s independence. Importantly, Swearengen’s parental authority extends past Trixie in Deadwood, and onto a series of male figures who treat him like the father they never had. Dan Dority, Swearengen’s right hand; Johnny Burns, Al’s pupil in violence as well as the slower but earnest partner to Dan; and Silas Adams, the former bagman for Yankton: all of these men depend on Swearengen to teach them how to live. Dan is introduced as Swearengen’s mouthpiece, informing Bullock and Star that they must pay his boss $20 a day for the rental on their hardware tent. Most of the time, however, Swearengen sends Dan to execute a more sinister kind of chore. When Doc Cochran confronts Dan after the latter arrives to kill the orphaned Sofia on Swearengen’s instructions, Dan shakes like a little boy at the prospect of betraying his father. Faced with a shotgun pointed at his head, Dan spouts, “You’re pittin’ me against Al!” (“Deep Water” 1.2). Dan’s devotion is paid back regularly with fatherly praise and advice. After Dan throws Brom Garret into a gulch in “Reconnoitering the Rim” (1.3), Swearengen tells Dan that he appreciated his “foresight and loyalty” when Dan informed him first about the gold he found on the Garret land (1.4). In “The Trial of Jack McCall” (1.5) Swearengen infers that Dan will one day run his own bar and strongly suggests that his “son” learn how to express his affection without murdering someone after Dan attempts to

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defend the con artist Flora in “Suffer the Little Children” (1.8). Johnny, a character whose position in the “family” (and activity within it) increases in stature as the series progresses, epitomizes the abused child in the first season of the show. Swearengen punches a stunned Johnny in the jaw for allowing a drug-addicted snitch to spread the news about Sofia’s massacred family around the camp before bringing him to Swearengen’s office. Later, after Al offers Johnny a playful tap on the cheek (an apology of sorts), Johnny makes his unconditional love clear by offering, “It’s all right, Al. I know you got a lot on your mind” (1.1). Silas Adams, the bagman for Magistrate Clagett, becomes Swearengen’s final surrogate child, but only after murdering a government official to prove his worth. Milch suggests that Swearengen is the father that Adams always wanted, and the men’s first few exchanges imply the patriarch’s recognition of Adams’ potential as a surrogate son.18 In “Mister Wu,” Swearengen decides to kill his own dope informant instead of Cy Tolliver’s, in an effort to reduce the options open to his camp competition and to appease Mr. Wu. Adams impresses Swearengen by deducing how the choice of victim was made: “You give Tolliver’s dope-fiend to the boss Chink instead of your own guy, gives Tolliver the opening to make [Mr. Wu] look wrong in the eyes of the whites” (1.10). After introducing Adams to Dan, who will become his figurative brother, Swearengen instructs Adams to “get a fucking haircut” (1.10). The vernacular utilized in this line suggests Swearengen’s authority, though a nontraditional familial bond between the men cannot be truly recognized until after Adams acknowledges that he’s willing to forgo his position as a mouthpiece of the foreign (the government) and earn a role as the surrogate son of Deadwood’s domestic patriarch. When Adams slits the Magistrate’s throat in front of Swearengen and Dan, he officially joins the “family.” During the second season, each of these “children” occupies an increasingly important role in both Swearengen’s life and the happenings in the camp, demonstrating once again Swearengen’s willingness to grant at least some measure of independence to his “children.” In “A Lie Agreed Upon: Part I,” for instance, Adams advises Swearengen that Bullock should be spared because Yankton is concerned over the Sheriff’s connection to Montana, and he reviews the counteroffer from Yankton before Swearengen signs it with the County Commissioner, which secures his place as Swearengen’s cleverest “son.” When Swearengen is too ill to speak, Dan sits at his bedside, literally translating his boss’s twitches for Doc Cochran. For his part, Johnny confirms his devotion to his father-figure when he shoots both Star and Utter in an effort to protect his mentor during Swearengen’s hand-to-hand combat with Bullock, and later pulls Wu away from a potentially lethal confrontation

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with Mr. Lee, as he knows Swearengen needs to keep the peace in Chinese alley. Each member of Swearengen’s posse sacrifices himself as a dedicated family member would. Swearengen, while undoubtedly the camp’s initial patriarchal leader, is not the series’ only surrogate parent, however, as women also take on nontraditional parental roles in the development of the camp’s citizens. Sofia, the sole survivor of the family killed by road agents in the first season, is handed to no less than three maternal replacements, the passage of one to the next a recognition by each woman of her limitations as a potential mother. After the family is discovered massacred in a passage not far from town, Jane jumps wholeheartedly into the role of caretaker for the young survivor, at whom she had winked on the trail into Deadwood. After Jane retreats in fear when Swearengen enters Doc Cochran’s shack to discover that Sofia is alive, Jane crumbles in shame, telling the Doc, “I couldn’t look out for the little one” (1.2). When Bill Hickok dies, Jane withdraws from the camp in a drunken stupor, and Sofia is left in Alma’s room. Although no longer able to tackle maternal duties, Jane continues to hold affection for the child, even stammering to herself, “I carried that fucking child! No not in my belly, but none of that fucking blood in me!” (1.6). Alma, stunned to be left with a little girl she never wanted, claims “I cannot see to this child” (1.5). Trixie slides naturally into the loving position of new mother to both the orphaned child and to Alma herself. Even though Swearengen originally sends Trixie to the widow’s room to help feed Alma’s laudanum addiction, Trixie instead encourages Alma through the withdrawal period. Trixie recognizes, however, that the “little one needs someone to care for her and maybe get her the fuck outta here. And I knew it wasn’t gonna be me” (1.7). When Alma offers Trixie the opportunity to take Sofia out of Deadwood and to New York City, Trixie calls Alma a “rich cunt,” insists that she consider selling her gold claim, and attempts suicide, defensive moves that pass the maternal baton back to Alma. Although Alma underestimates herself when she divulges to Bullock that Sofia is “safer under my care than traveling in a covered wagon with strangers,” Trixie’s departure from the scene catalyzes her maternal instinct (1.7). Alma demands that her poisonous father Otis Russell “get away” from Sofia as though his falsity might infect her new daughter (1.12). She informs Miss Isringhausen that Sofia has “been with me for seven months. She’s a part of my life as I am of hers” (2.2), and then reviews vocabulary words with her “daughter” after dismissing her tutor (2.4). Eventually, Alma requests that Sofia “Trust me with your sadness, and I will trust you with mine, so

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that even when we are sad, we will be grateful for how much we love each other” (“The Whores Can Come” 2.11). By the end of the second season, this nontraditional mother–daughter bond stands unbreakable. Against these surrogate parents, active biological (traditional) parents are small in number, and are mostly proven ineffectual, unreliable, or dangerous to their offspring, buttressing Milch’s postmodern criticism of the traditional family unit. Martha Bullock laments that William would never have been trampled had they remained in Michigan and Aunt Lou acknowledges that her association with Hearst will lead to Odell’s death even before it happens. Both women lose their sons due to their decisions to relocate to the camp. Biological mothers, then, fare less well than do their nontraditional counterparts. As with marriage, Milch seems to stack the deck in favor of elective affiliation. If biological mothers unwittingly bring about tragedy for their children, the show’s only “legitimate” fathers commit shockingly callous and devious acts that damage their offspring, providing a furious critique of biological patriarchs. Otis Russell’s unannounced arrival in Deadwood creates new competition for Alma’s newly discovered gold claim. As Milch explains, “Alma is a high-class whore whose father pimped her out so that he could pay off his creditors.”19 After her husband Brom Garret’s death, Alma inadvertently escapes her father’s original sin, but Otis’ return proves him a repeat offender. His threat to report to the Garret family that Alma admitted she’d had Brom murdered, coupled with his insistence that “you’ll help me” relieve repeated debts, forces his daughter’s hand (1.12). She silently watches as Bullock beats her father on the Bella Union floor, the battering a severe punishment for a “natural” parent. When Joanie Stubbs produces Otis’ teeth for Alma, she reveals that her own father was an iniquitous man and wishes him the pounding that Otis received. When she was a young girl, Joanie’s father convinced her and her sisters that their mother, who had passed away, desired that they sexually service both her father and his friends. Joanie’s father would eventually sell her to Cy Tolliver. This story echoes the pain expressed by Swearengen, whose biological mother handed him over, leaving him alone and destitute, to “Mrs. fat-ass fucking Anderson,” the head of the orphanage where he purchases his prostitutes (1.11). By relentlessly undermining biology as the basis for affection, Milch clears the way for his own nontraditional families to emerge. Doing so within the context of a story about national annexation further undermines the nation’s pretension to represent an organic community. Biology is just as coercive as the forced annexations of the Bullock, Garret, and Ellsworth marriages and the development of the nation-state.

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Affective community and the Hearst empire: Bitter fucking enemies The world is less than perfect. Jack Langrishe (“The Catbird Seat” 3.11) The nontraditional families that emerge in Deadwood unite against a common enemy, George Hearst, in the third season of the series. Unlike the other major characters in Deadwood, Hearst is openly antagonistic to all forms of familial association; as he says himself, “My only passion is the color” (3.1). Indeed, Hearst’s obsession with gold and the land that contains it demonstrates Virginia Wright Wexman’s point that “What is most conspicuously at issue in Westerns is . . . the right to possess land.”20 The thrust of the narrative construct of season three of Deadwood revolves around the gold-enriched land held by Alma Ellsworth, the community’s attempts to protect her as one their own, and Hearst’s attempt to destroy them. Although Hearst does relate to two men who worship him like an unattainable father, as well as one “Aunt Lou,” none of these characters is permitted to rise above the level of disposable employee. Francis Wolcott, Hearst’s Chief Scout, spends most of his time collecting mines for his boss to control, reporting back to Hearst that “we will control, save one—the Garret property—every considerable deposit now discovered,” bragging that he looks forward to introducing his boss to “the largest and most forward-looking gold operation in the world” (2.8). Milch allows that Wolcott is the “son” of a “father [who] refuses to raise him,” which is made evident upon Hearst’s discovery that Wolcott murdered three women at the Chez Amis.21 Even though Wolcott’s assertion that “there is no sin” reeks of Hearst’s business acumen, he hangs himself after his potential “father’s” final admonishment and rejection (2.12). Similarly, Hearst demonstrates that his feelings for Captain Turner and Aunt Lou, the only characters to whom he verbally claims closeness, are ephemeral if not disingenuous. Hearst encourages Turner, another potential “son” and his personal body guard to make his brutal street fight with Dan last as long as possible, which inadvertently leads Turner to lose his early advantage when Dan gouges his eye out and clubs him to death. Aunt Lou, a woman whose history as Hearst’s cook makes him giddy at her arrival in Deadwood, actually holds no maternal influence over him, instead occupying the lesser station in a master/slave relationship. Hearst, already suspecting that Aunt Lou’s son Odell is attempting to fleece him, allows Odell to continue the ruse,

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later heartlessly delivering the news of Odell’s death, a death he has surely caused, to his stricken cook. Hearst simply cannot relate to the importance of family, actually shedding tears in admitting to Odell that “I hate these places . . . because the truth that I know, the promise that I bring, the necessities I’m prepared to accept make me outcast” (3.7). His self-imposed solitude, however, is mostly spent instructing his minions on how to encourage Alma Ellsworth to sell her claim, his cardinal strategy the disruption of the Deadwood family. And though his attack on Alma is successful, as he is able finally to purchase her claim, it only solidifies the budding community in Deadwood, even managing to unite Alma with the man who had killed her first husband: Al Swearengen. Although Alma begins the series as an unhappy traditional spouse in an arranged marriage, her evolution into a maternal figure in a nontraditional family feeds her adversarial relationship with Hearst, the man who wants her gold-rich land and disregards her “kin.” Furthermore, after Alma warms to her position as Sofia’s surrogate mother and agrees to marry Ellsworth, she breaks out of the home in an overt demonstration of her financial power, by opening and leading the first Bank of Deadwood. If it is “transgressive” in a Western, “for a female character to assume primary agency,” then Alma’s initial refusal to adhere to the will of George Hearst while rising to become one of Deadwood’s most respected public faces makes her a heroic figure, albeit temporarily.22 Her attempt to forgo Hearst’s relentless pressure by deepening her roots to a community that accepts her butts against society’s definition of appropriate gender roles. That this move results in Ellsworth’s death suggests that the positive force of this choice is limited. Ultimately, Deadwood qualifies what seems liberatory in Alma’s move out of the home—her lifting of what Kaplan has called the “anchor” of domesticity, which provides a “counterforce to the male activity of territorial conquest”—as this is seemingly the cause of her great losses to come, all at the behest of George Hearst’s personal Manifest Destiny.23 Richard Slotkin notes that frontier mythology typically relies on “the sanctifying burst of violence that resolved all issues.”24 Hearst adheres to this philosophy by directing a series of violent acts meant to establish his prominence in the camp, though the affective community that has formed in response to his threat is left mostly intact. The third season of Deadwood begins as Swearengen overlooks the camp from his perch above the Gem. Dan’s warning to his spiritual father that they are “fixin’ towards a bloody outcome” soon proves legitimate, as a Cornishman is killed by an aggressive pistolero sent by Hearst to disrupt the peace (3.1). After Hearst concludes that Swearengen is “dangerous to my interests,” he generates more violence, first by sending

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his men back to the Gem (a throat is slit by Swearengen before Hearst’s men are given the opportunity to kill anyone), and then by severing Swearengen’s finger, the symbolic castration a vicious attempt to claim the camp’s patriarchal role as his own (3.2). But Hearst does not wholly succeed. The nontraditional families of Deadwood have learned to survive. Swearengen’s belief that Hearst’s insistence on dominance is “out of proportion . . . [a] warped unnatural impulse” and his request that Bullock “stay within hailing distance” edifies a new cooperation between former enemies, and strengthens Swearengen’s status as the camp’s de facto leader (3.1). In response, Bullock restrains himself from immediately arresting Hearst, instead offering a shoulder to assist the physically shaken Swearengen on his walk back to the Gem. Alma’s initial refusal to sell her claim to Hearst spurs him to create still further violence, having a Cornish union organizer killed and deposited on the street with a knife through his chest. Newly allied “brothers” Dan and Adams convince Bullock to consider Swearengen’s logic and delay an arrest of Hearst for the time being. But the Sheriff’s patience dissipates as quickly as the camp’s options. The morning after Bullock drags Hearst through the camp and into a cell next to the murdered Cornishman, Swearengen visits Bullock’s house, as the personal nature of the camp’s predicament makes the family home the perfect place to meet. Swearengen’s plea to “stay close and confide” affects his intended audience (3.6). The third season’s solidification of Deadwood’s affective community is expressed repeatedly through such meetings between members of the camp’s nontraditional families in response to Hearst’s increasingly violent initiatives, as social activity indicates the town’s plans to protect its own. Swearengen’s suggestion that they “collect the camp elders, be baffled among friends” serves as a call-to-arms of sorts, as the longest-tenured leaders of the town meet to discuss their options (3.6). Kaplan writes that “when we contrast the domestic sphere with the market or political realm, men and women inhabit a divided social terrain, but when we oppose the domestic to the foreign, men and women become national allies against the alien.”25 This applies to the clash between the domestic community of Deadwood and the outsider-foreigner, Hearst, whose means of attempted control only draw the camp closer together. The true cooperation and familial care filtering through Deadwood’s affective community transform into visible public support when gunshots smash into buildings near Alma’s head as she strolls down the thoroughfare. Immediately, Swearengen and Utter dart to her side, and moments later, Swearengen sends Adams to the courthouse to guard the town’s children (and Martha Bullock), dispatches Utter to wire Bullock to hasten his return, directs Trixie to comfort Alma, who is in shock, and orders Dan to inform Ellsworth of Hearst’s latest perpetration.

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The potency of the townspeople’s support is felt by Alma, who agrees to continue her walk to the bank alone, while Hearst watches from above. Hearst’s final act, however, strikes the very soul of the Deadwood family. The assassination of Ellsworth affirms two separate truths: that George Hearst will do anything to secure Alma’s gold claim, and that he believes the murder of a family member will force her to sell. The visual strategy employed to mark the arrival of Ellsworth’s dead body into the camp by cart places the viewer’s sight in line with what Ellsworth would have seen if he was alive. As the cart lumbers on, Alma looks directly at the viewer in horror, placing the weight of this loss above all other concerns in the camp. Alma’s figurative sister responds; Hearst gets his gold, but not before being shot by Trixie (3.11). Alma realizes that she has two choices—to leave Deadwood and hire men to guard her claim day and night, or to stay with her camp “family,” the affective community which took her in. She decides to sell. Alma’s narrative thus continues to demonstrate the connection the show develops between the public and private realms. On the one hand, she has symbolically been punished for her fatal step into the public sphere: it has cost her her second husband. On the other hand, she has chosen to remain in Deadwood, a move that is simultaneously public—she will be part of a community—and private, based on a range of personal affections. With Alma, then, Deadwood illustrates an intertwining of public and private that refuses to read the private as the world that helps uphold a coercive and patriarchal public. Here the two realms are seen to be constitutive of each other. While Hearst’s bloodlust is not satiated by the signing of the gold lease (he orders the death of Trixie as penance for her impertinent shooting of him), his demand gives Swearengen the “father” one final opportunity to prove to Trixie how much he cares. Swearengen’s cold and dispiriting decision chooses the life of Trixie, one of his former prostitutes (the one he loves), over one he hardly knows, marking an emotional choice that spares the life of one member of Deadwood’s affective community at the expense of another. When he slices Jen’s throat against Johnny’s objection so that he may fool Hearst into thinking that she’s the woman who shot him, he takes away his “son’s” lover so that he may save someone of “higher rank” in the Deadwood family, a move that is paradoxically a sadness and a relief. Charlie Utter’s declaration that the trials of Hearst’s final days in the camp were “in aid of a higher purpose” may be difficult to accept, considering that Alma has lost her gold, corrupt politicians have rigged the local elections, and an innocent prostitute lay murdered (3.12). But as Frank Kermode contends, “Apocalypse, even in its less lurid modern forms, still carries with it the notions of a decadence and possible renovation, still represents a mood finally inseparable from the condition of life, the contemplation of its necessary ending,

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the ineradicable desire to make some sense of it.”26 While Hearst departs Deadwood a most successful capitalist in the public sphere, he does not negate the personal progress of the camp’s domestic community. Trixie and Sol will survive, as will Alma and Sofia, Joanie and Jane, Bullock and Martha, Swearengen and Dolly, Dan, Johnny, and Adams. The calamity of the Hearst reign costs the camp essential civil freedoms, but he leaves the camp alone, while the close-knit nontraditional families of Deadwood endure.

Notes 1 Janet Walker, “Captive Images in the Traumatic Western: The Searchers, Pursued, Once Upon a Time in the West, and Lone Star,” in Westerns: Films Through History, ed. Janet Walker (New York: Routledge, 2001), 228. 2 Elliott West, “Family Life on the Trail West,” History Today 42.12 (1992): 33, accessed June 16, 2011, http://search.ebscohost.com/login/ aspx?direct=true&db =aph&AN=9212211858&site=ehost-live. 3 Ibid. 4 Cathy Luchetti, Children of the West: Family Life on the Frontier (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001), 16 and 33. 5 Richard W. Slatta, “Making and Unmaking Myths of the American Frontier,” European Journal of American Culture 29.2 (2010): 88. 6 Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70.3 (1998): 581 and 585. 7 David Milch, Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 97. 8 Kim Akass, “You Motherfucker: Al Swearengen’s Oedipal Dilemma,” in Reading Deadwood, ed. David Lavery (New York: Palgrave Macmillam, 2006), 27. 9 Luchetti, Children of the West, 77. 10 G. Christopher Williams, “Pimp and Whore: The Necessity of Perverse Domestication in the Development of the West,” in Reading Deadwood, ed. David Lavery (New York: Palgrave Macmillam, 2006), 146. 11 Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” 586. 12 Quoted in Janet Walker, “Captive Images in the Traumatic Western,” 229. 13 Mark Singer, “The Misfit: How David Milch got from NYPD Blue to Deadwood by Way of an Epistle of St. Paul,” The New Yorker, February 14, 2005, Web. 14 Heikki Patomäki and Colin Wight, “After Postpositivism? The Promises of Critical Realism,” International Studies Quarterly 44 (2000): 232.

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15 Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” 582. 16 Akass, “You Motherfucker: Al Swearengen’s Oedipal Dilemma,” 28. 17 Milch, Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills, 91. 18 Ibid., 143. 19 Ibid., 67. 20 Quoted in Walker, “Captive Images in the Traumatic Western,” 228. 21 Milch, Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills, 169. 22 A. Susan Owen, Sarah R. Stein, and Leah R. Vande Berg, Bad Girls: Cultural Politics and Media Representations of Transgressive Women (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2007), 44. 23 Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” 583. 24 Quoted in Richard W. Slatta, “Making and Unmaking Myths,” 85. 25 Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” 582. 26 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 187.

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9 The return of the Father: Deadwood and the contemporary gender politics of complexity David Greven No law at all in Deadwood. Is that true? CLELL WATSON (“DEADWOOD” 1.1)

Are we some sort of vicious, filthy outpost of Brook Farm? ALMA GARRETT (“A LIE AGREED UPON, PART II” 2.2)

What’s the girl’s end of it? I wouldn’t rule out a wooden box. JOANIE STUBBS AND MADDIE (“NEW MONEY” 2.3)

ark, intermittently brilliant, and consistently vexing, the cultic but prematurely cancelled HBO Western, Deadwood, makes issues of gender and sexuality central to its thematic concerns. What is simultaneously compelling and maddening about the series is that, while its ability to critique social orthodoxies is not negligible, its gender and sexual politics are, overall, inescapably conservative and orthodox. If Deadwood demonstrates a resistant awareness of the horrors of misogyny, sexual enslavement, and racism, on the one hand, on the other hand, the series openly and brazenly traffics in all

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of these pernicious cultural attitudes. As I will show in this essay, the series exploits its no-holds-barred, raw, garish Western setting precisely for the opportunities it affords both series and viewer to indulge in openly un-“PC” scenarios and situations; in this manner, the series has much in common with other notable cable shows that use either period (Mad Men ) or genre (The Sopranos, Dexter ) trappings to explore—but more emphatically to revel in—transgressive possibilities, if we understand transgression in this context as a defiance of “liberal,” “enlightened,” and, again, PC attitudes. To be clear, my essay is not meant to extol these values as an incontrovertible good: representation has a right to be disturbing and also to be inconclusive, indeed, incoherent. What I attempt to explore in this essay is the manner in which a series of obvious intelligence, thoughtfulness, and care such as Deadwood can still perpetuate some of the least attractive, most reactionary gender and sexual tropes precisely by first installing liberalism as a standard against which to situate its own sensibility and, second, by openly defying and undermining this standard while all the while claiming that what it is presenting is, at heart, a “real,” “authentic,” vision of the West of the mythopoetic pop imagination. Cable television generally revels in its seeming lack of constraints: “Showtime: No Limits”; “It’s not television, it’s HBO.” The cable network’s own billing as a special realm that has transcended the medium itself corresponds to the seeming freedoms of the HBO Western’s frontier utopia. Indeed, the notion that both the show and the camp are imagined as utopian spaces is made explicit, albeit through negation, during the second season, when Alma Garrett, the enterprising widow left to fend for herself, rails against new social innovations in the South Dakota camp, asking “Are we some sort of vicious, filthy outpost of Brook Farm?” (2.2). Alma’s allusion to the great, failed social experiment of Brook Farm—which Nathaniel Hawthorne satirically immortalized in his equally great 1852 novel The Blithedale Romance —evokes one of the crucial thematics of Hawthorne’s novel. As the first-person narrator, the cryptic poet Miles Coverdale, remarks of Blithedale at one point, it represents a new Golden Age that authorizes “any individual, of either sex, to fall in love with any other, regardless of what would elsewhere be judged suitable and prudent.”1 In some surprising ways, Deadwood extends and makes palpable the utopian hopes Coverdale associates, at least at this early stage in Hawthorne’s ultimately bleak novel, with this experiment in communal living. That Deadwood almost willfully rejects the new possibilities it presents as tangible makes its limitations and failures all the more keenly felt. While Deadwood hardly presents its frontier milieu as a new Golden Age, it shares with Hawthorne’s novel a similar setting and a special community

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cut off from the normative world of the established social order, one that is thereby endowed with the freedom to make up society on its own terms and fashion new lives. Like Blithedale, Deadwood appears to give its characters an extraordinary license to remake themselves in its not-quite-American, renegade setting. While certainly not a conventional utopia, the historical Deadwood, in its fantasy incarnation in the series, emerges as a special realm of surprising possibilities, where a whirling array of socially disconnected characters finds opportunity for self-reinvention and exploration. Deadwood, then, situates itself between the historical nineteenth-century utopia and the contemporary utopian possibilities of cable television—one of the many reasons why the deeply constrained political vision of the series is worth exploring. David Milch, the TV-auteur behind the ABC series NYPD Blue (co-created with Steven Bochco) seizes upon the liminal nature of community in Deadwood—its floating status as neither real nor unreal, lawful nor unlawful, social nor asocial—to explore complex issues of gender and sexuality as they are always already mediated through national constructions of individual and communal identity. From the outset, I wish to make it clear that my focus is not on the “real,” historical Deadwood but on Milch’s fantastical imagining of it. What I am interested in here is the ways in which representation both contends with and exploits the historical reality of potentially alternative social spaces. In keeping with the classic dynamics of the utopia, the seeming distance from society that defines this alternative community quickly shrivels up. The forces of the “law”—nation, civilization, the normative social order—threaten to invade lawless Deadwood, rendering this frontier town a properly nationalized and continuous part of the United States rather than a fearsome outlier. There is a dynamic push–pull attraction to the outside world in this text, one that problematizes the ardent desire to escape the social order that it foregrounds. Even as certain characters revel in and exploit the lawlessness of Deadwood, what the Deadwood community hopes for overall is precisely the annexation that will give them national legitimacy. Moreover, the seemingly opposed villain and hero—the Gem Saloon proprietor Al Swearengen and the sheriff Seth Bullock—end up working together to create the semblance of law and order that would makes them seem viable to their potential annexers in Yankton. My chief interest here is the fate of sexuality within this apparently lawless community that at least appears to be governed by its own dictates rather than those of the larger social order, even as this order remains the model for the special community’s own structure and self-governance. I would argue that Milch’s text (much like Hawthorne’s) maintains a powerful interest in exploring sexuality’s relationship to the law and to its seeming absence. If

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Milch presents us with an ostensibly lawless community that, however haphazardly, pursues opportunities to remake the world, one of the chief areas of interest is Deadwood’s treatment of gender, a crucial battleground for power roles in culture, as the classic theorists of gender have long maintained. It is in its gender politics that the conservatism and political rigidity of the series comes through most clearly. As I will show, however, interpreting the series’ political stances is no mean feat given its ingenious strategies for keeping its politics consistently indeterminate.

Complexity and sentimental manhood In a famous moment in Mythologies, Roland Barthes discusses a concept he calls “rhetorical inoculation,” a maneuver that allows bourgeois culture to escape a thorough critique of its larger failings by conceding culpability for one of its minor lapses.2 I propose here that an aesthetic mode that I call “complexity” functions in an analogous manner. Complexity is the layered, multifaceted, expansive, and generally humanizing process through which difficult, even morally reprehensible characters as well as narratives are made acceptable to the critical audience, which is made to feel that a questionable character’s exploits or a questionable narrative can be followed and even enjoyed with impunity precisely because of the complexity of the representation. Richly textured and realized, characters like Al Swearengen cannot simply be denounced as villains because they suffer too much and, moreover, are introspective enough to question not only their own moral failings but those of their larger social world. It is the villain’s complexity that emerges as the stand-out preoccupation of the notable cable show. On the one hand, the complexity of the villain speaks to the depth and the maturity of a series’ narrative vision, its refusal to offer a cardboard representation of evil, and its determination to create one that is layered and nuanced. On the other hand, it is within this very complexity that the surprisingly sentimental and disturbing conservatism that attends the mode manifests itself. In showing us that Al is capable of benevolence, of generosity, and even of simple human feeling, Deadwood refuses any easy moral judgement of him. At the same time, it offers in Al an idealized portrait of ferocious yet benevolent patriarchy. All of this is to suggest that in Deadwood, complexity simultaneously allows the series to condemn and to revel in Al’s abundant brutality. Moreover, the series exculpates Al for his brutality through the evidence it consistently presents of his authentic tenderness and his traumatic psychological backstory of abandonment.

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Taciturn, unstable, murderous—yet always sentimentalized—manhood is the logic of Deadwood. Al, Cy Tolliver, owner of a rival saloon, the second season’s dandified serial killer Francis Wolcott: these men all commit murderous deeds that carry with them dubious penalties. Lawless Deadwood does not put them behind bars; these powerful men can act, apparently, with impunity. But their acts of brutality nick their psychic insides. We see them thrash in their own psychic torment. Moreover, conflicted feelings of love and anger toward women motivate their most brazen stratagems and actions. The sentimentalism that I argue is rife even within Deadwood ’s most blistering portraits of individual psychology and intersubjective dynamics is, perhaps, its most acute correspondence to the historical nineteenth century. A proper discussion of the sentimental genre far exceeds the scope of this essay; let me establish for the purposes of this analysis that sentimentality and the coeval construct of sympathy were increasingly important modes and methods of performed selfhood in nineteenth-century America. In terms of masculinity, they rapidly transformed into compulsory features of male gender performance. “By the late 1840s and 1850s, even respectability was not enough in many social circles—a man had to be a person of sentiment: sympathetic, affectionate, and compassionate, especially towards members of his family.”3 Deadwood ’s tendency toward sentimentality does not so much reflect the tensions within normative constructions of gender as it does the series’ rather cunning ideological strategy of having it both ways in political terms. The series’ sentimentality is studied and cynical—a counterintuitive humanizing of the rabid potential for cruelty inherent in its principle male characters. The sentimentality that is one of the aesthetic modes in which the series most vividly traffics relates to one of the most politically relevant aspects of the series: the question of how we receive and interpret history. I will discuss the meta-historical aspects of the series below. For now, let me establish that, in my view, sentimentality is handled differently than the other aesthetic modes that the show revises and revisits. Whereas a competitive auteurist gamesmanship characterizes the series Shakespearean mock-homages— Milch going mano-a-mano with the Bard—and a deep self-consciousness characterizes its continuation of the pessimistic tradition of the revisionist Western, the series’ deployment of the sentimental mode is less a selfconscious citation of an available style, genre, and affective mode than it is the means whereby the series handles its own messy investments in certain archetypal aspects of the Western, frontier male power in particular. Deadwood is a sentimental revisionist Western that only tentatively and hesitantly explores its own darkest themes while, paradoxically, making these very themes the manifest content of the series.

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Split heroes, conflicted villains, and the marriage question In its exploration of the varieties of masculinity in the Western genre, Deadwood explicitly evokes John Ford’s Westerns, especially his late masterpiece The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). In her essay “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946),” a sequel to her most famous article, Laura Mulvey frames Ford’s film as an exemplary instance of the “common splitting of the Western hero into two.”4 Unlike in the Proppian folk-tale, which stages a battle between the hero and the villain, the issue now becomes not how to defeat the villain but rather “how the villain’s defeat will be inscribed in history.” And because the hero is now split into two, the question becomes “whether the upholder of the law as a symbolic system will be seen to be victorious or the personification of the law in a more primitive manifestation, closer to the good or the right.” John Wayne’s unmarried rancher Tom Doniphon exemplifies the latter, James Stewart’s educated and idealistic lawyer and future senator Ransom Stoddard the former. The leering, perverse villain of the title, played by Lee Marvin, is a “dragon-like” presence in the film. While Stewart/Stoddard morally opposes him, it is finally revealed that it was Wayne/Doniphon who really shot and killed Liberty Valance. Importantly, the social order is chiefly symbolized by marriage, and the “rejection of marriage,” Mulvey writes, “personifies a nostalgic celebration of phallic, narcissistic omnipotence.”5 Not only believing that it was he who shot Valance but also getting the public acclaim for having done so, Stoddard gets to fulfill his political ambitions. Moreover, Stoddard marries the woman, Hallie, that both he and Doniphon love. Doniphon, in contrast, gives up his love and burns down the house he built for his would-be bride. Following the patterns of the Fordian Western, Deadwood specializes in split masculinities and conflicted protagonists. The detached, cryptic, honor-bound sheriff Seth Bullock is presented as the flawed but handsome, haunted hero of the series. Bullock represents, at once, the outside world’s orderly, rational adherence to law and order and, just as intently, a frightening instability in the face of the very lawfulness he wields and seemingly embodies. The latter comes through most vividly in his undeniable attraction to the violence he ostensibly quells. The formidable presence around which all the other characters revolve, Al Swearengen is clearly the central “heavy” of this series, with some strong competition from other dubious males. Yet, as I will discuss, Al is also presented as surprisingly benevolent in certain respects, the almost fatherly center of a wayward, motley frontier brood.

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The romantic figure of Wild Bill Hickok initially represents a noble lawlessness, an individual force of order, that can counterbalance Al’s ignoble one. Wild Bill adheres to the nostalgic lawlessness of the classic cinematic Western most distinctively embodied by Wayne’s unmarried rancher in Liberty Valance. Following historical continuity, Wild Bill’s presence in Deadwood is cut short when he is shot in the back of the head by the lowlife Jack McCall. This leaves Bullock as the major opposition to masculine tyranny. By the end of season two, however, Al and Bullock, like the pigs and the humans at the end of Animal Farm, look almost indistinguishable from each other. Another significant character is Francis Wolcott. An agent for the mining magnate George Hearst, Wolcott, with his debonair clothing, fancy leather bags, and taste for brutalizing and killing women, offers a master class in sexually suspect diabolism. Hearst himself becomes a character, and a formidably murderous one at that, in the third season. These and several other characters represent the series’ attempt to show masculinity as complex, often through characters who represent a merger of conflicting attributes. If split masculinity links Deadwood to the classic Western, so does its treatment of marriage. Marriage functions in Deadwood as a socializing and structural force that, true to the paradigms of the genre, synthesizes many of the unresolved tensions in the series. In several respects, it would appear that Deadwood actually calls social institutions such as marriage into question. To take the character of Alma Garrett Ellsworth as an example, her first marriage is a sham to save her father, her second is a sham to cover a pregnancy, and throughout, she is an opium addict. Moreover, her torrid affair with Bullock is tightly linked to his brutal beating of her father, which works to contextualize their attraction as, on some level, and outgrowth of his attraction to chaotic forces (a woman he cannot have, the violence he would appear to oppose). Bullock is tormented by his desire for Alma, in part because he is now married to his now-dead brother’s wife, Martha. Yet there is also another level on which, in my view, the series explores adulterous passions only to reaffirm sexual normativity: the heterosexual authenticity of the brazen enterprising capitalist woman (Alma) and the phallic forcefulness of the threateningly sensitive rational law-man (Bullock). The second season finale, “Boy the Earth Talks to,” in which Bullock and Martha symbolically renew their marital vows after William dies, confirms the importance of institutionalized marriage to Deadwood. The newly reinforced bond between Bullock and Martha works—along with the Pottery Barn aesthetic of their home, built by Bullock and lovingly tended by Martha—to uphold marriage as both desirable social norm and tranquil, attractive alternative to the maddening, increasingly chaotic turbulence of Deadwood. Even if marriage is loveless, its capacity as a sign of normativity is indispensable; if it surges

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with renewed tender force, it is an unquestionable good. Much like James Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard, Bullock pursues a political career. And much like Stoddard, Bullock is presented as a man who wants to uphold the law. What is perhaps most ingenious as a solution to the problems of “soft” Western masculinity embodied by Stoddard—shown to be courageous but also repeatedly, shockingly brutalized by the villain Valance—is Deadwood ’s figuration of Bullock as an equally sensitive, morally conscientious male who nevertheless has full recourse to the phallic force of masculine violence. Marriage emerges as an effective form of suture. If Bullock’s building of the house for his not-yet-present wife links him as well to the outsider Tom Doniphon of John Wayne, its solidity gives him stature and socialization, linking him to the progressive social values also seen in his politics. Far from burning down the house, Bullock inhabits it, along with his ultimately redemptive marriage, like equally stalwart fortresses. While the relationship between Joanie Stubbs and Calamity Jane receives a surprising amount of development in the third season, the polyamorous possibilities that always already hover as simultaneously alluring and threatening options for the characters of Blithedale never really impinge upon Deadwood or Deadwood. Almost predictably, the queer romance that tentatively blossoms on the series occurs between two women. Whatever else one can say about the depiction of this romance, given the strict gender-role-typing on the series, its version of queerness as lesbianism corresponds to the prevailing sensibility of much of the show: heterosexual male fantasies of power and domination, especially control over women and weak men. Indeed, the lesbian sub-plot of the show is a telling example of just how effectively complexity works. Providing a potent counterexample to its own heteronormative structure, lesbianism as presented in Deadwood in no way jeopardizes, disrupts, or denatures these structures; it does little to alleviate the preponderant attitudes of the series. Indeed, Joanie and Jane are always minor, and therefore comfortably minoritized, characters. If marriage sutures messy social relations on the series, Deadwood also resolves the Western genre’s split-hero conflict—here embodied by Wild Bill and Bullock—with astonishing narrative speed, dispatching Hickok almost immediately to focus on Bullock. This narrative alacrity is especially striking given the strong impression that Carradine’s Wild Bill makes. On the one hand, the erasure of Wild Bill allows us to focus on the emotional conflicts within Bullock: his longing for old-style frontier violence even as he enforces the law and embodies conservative consumer-culture values with the sturdy hardware “bidness” he builds with his friend Sol Star. On the other hand, it leaves several key characters adrift—symbolically and almost literally fatherless, none more resonantly than Calamity Jane, who sinks into ever-deepening

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levels of debilitating dissolution. This symbolic fatherlessness is crucial, I argue, to the show’s reactionary neo-oedipal gender politics. Bullock, the “reluctant sheriff,” is “both a man of principle and a morally flawed pragmatist.” In an interview with The New Yorker, David Milch explains his characterization of Bullock this way: Psychologists talk about the binding of one thing to another, taking a feeling that is absolutely unacceptable and suppressing it by binding it to another feeling which is completely acceptable. For Bullock, the law was a binding against his impulse to violence—in particular, I suspect, against his old man.6 For Milch, Bullock is more than just a reluctant sheriff who opposes Al’s tyranny. Rather, he is Everyman, the essentially conflicted male ego, forever torn between benevolent and murderous impulses, a more tenderhearted version of the hard, stoic, isolate, masculine killer of D. H. Lawrence’s indelible description.7 Indeed, one of the more palpable suggestions the show makes about the enigmatic Bullock is that his behaviors are a masquerade of masculine identity. Bullock feels he is essentially a cipher: as he confides to Sol in “Mister Wu” (1.10), he fears that he has borrowed his dead brother’s life because he didn’t have one of his own to pursue. Indeed, he claims in this episode hardly to know either Martha or her son William. Al’s characterization further reinforces the Lawrentian paradigm. He has no compunction about killing off his enemies, competitors, and the other fools who get in his way. Ferociously foul-mouthed, he fulminates wildly in every episode and routinely brutalizes his whores, mainly through his attitude toward them and the way he regards them first and foremost as “pussy,” as cash. At the same time, we are meant to understand that his treatment of his whores is a kind of gruff, ill-tempered, but ultimately benign protectiveness of them and the other minions, male and female, who do his bidding. When the “imbecile” quivering straggly bearded Richardson delivers a message from E. B. Farnum to Al in the episode “A Constant Throb” (3.34), and Al orders Johnny to poke one of Richardson’s eyes out, Johnny comforts the yelping messenger by saying, “He’s not gonna do it.” This is a flyspeck moment, but it encapsulates the series’ own self-presentation to the viewer, especially where Al is concerned: he’s scary, he’s intimidating, he threatens, but he’s not going to hurt you. A typical representation of Al depicts him receiving dutiful fellatio from a young whore whose head he keeps fastened on his groin. In one key episode, Al showily rants—while the curly haired prostitute “sucks his prick and shut[s] up”—about his embittering experiences in the orphanage where his mother

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abandoned him “on the way to sucking cock in Georgia” (“Jewel’s Boot Is Made for Walking” 1.11). Explicitly, the show psychologizes Al’s brutality as the product of his horrible upbringing as well as his abandonment by the prostitute-mother who should have nurtured him. As I will demonstrate in the next section, it is precisely in the series’ psychologically rich depiction of Al that its technique of complexity is most evident—along with its political conservatism. The complexity of Deadwood ’s portrayals of masculinity extends to several other characters. Bullock’s “sensitive” manliness can be bolstered by our ever-present assurance of his capacities as a cold-blooded killer, just as his adulterous passions for Alma can convince us of what his marital affiliation resolutely does not: his aggressive heterosexual desire. Indeed, the moral indistinguishability of Bullock and Al emerges as one of the defining themes of the series. While it would be easy to read this theme as an example of Milch’s refusal to see the world in black and white, Deadwood uses complexity as a means of justifying masculine violence. The series may not go so far as to justify that violence intentionally, but the point I want to make is that complexity as deployed by the series fails to mitigate or explain that violence in the way that it is imagined to do.

The return of the Father Writing about the representation of American manhood since the 1990s, Sally Robinson conjectures that the “idea that men are emotionally blocked owes its sense and its dominance to a particular construction of male heterosexuality and the male body” as being in a state of constant fluidity.8 In one of the most significant plots of the series, developing at the start of season two, Al experiences a grotesque medical mishap—a kidney stone—that temporarily disables him. By the middle of season two, when Trixie, the hard-bitten, emotionally volatile, and conscientious head-whore at the Gem Saloon, the Doc, and Al’s henchman all rally round his mortified form, Al suggests a bleary-eyed, ruined Christ figure, in a welter of sympathies and torments. Al’s near-death experience allows the characters to discuss his essential goodness, only superficially hidden beneath his ursine gruffness. Trixie talks about the ways in which he rescued Jewell from the orphanage, and the men who work for Al also offer choked-up testimonials. The series mines Al’s near-fatal blockage for all of its literal and symbolic worth. As Al forces his stone out through his urethra in the climactic resolution to this plot arc, the series stages a telling scene of instruction for its audience. In effect, we are told to go, like

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Al, with the flow—to model our own responses to the series on his caustic, cynical, yet essentially sentimental attitudes. We are also put in the position, an inevitable and inescapable one, of rooting for Al’s heroic, embattled fortitude. I will return to this key episode below. In showing us that Al is capable of benevolence, of generosity, indeed, of simple human feeling, Deadwood refuses us any easy moral judgement of him. But it also ends up idealizing Al. Deadwood ’s complexity is a means of reveling in frontier violence while maintaining the compensatory refuge of the sentimental. It can simultaneously revel in Al’s abundant brutality while exculpating it with evidence of his wounded tenderness. As I will further develop below, one of the most ingenious means of simultaneously indulging in masculinist violence and maintaining an “admirable” distance from it is the creation of a foil for the main villain, the “Big Bad” (to use Joss Whedon’s phrase) of a particular season or a recurring character whose moral perfidy runs even deeper than that of the villain-protagonist. On Deadwood, characters like Cy Tolliver—as exemplified by the hideous brutality of his retributive violence in his torture and killing of two young thieves, a brother and sister, in the episode “Suffer the Little Children” (1.8)—the diabolical dandy Wolcott, and the more Establishment but also more pitilessly brutal Hearst in the third season all exist to make Al seem downright benevolent in contrast. In this way, the series consistently finds means of counterbalancing the primal violence at its core. Ruthless lawless violence is often juxtaposed against benevolent behavior. In “Mister Wu,” Al dispatches one of the two opium addicts who stole Wu’s opium shipment, holding, with his foot, the thief’s head down in the bathtub until he drowns and then taking the body over to Wu’s butchershop to be fed to the “Celestial’s” ever-ravenous pigs. Before this happens, Al throws Reverend Smith out of the Gem. Afflicted with a brain tumor and increasingly losing control of his faculties, the minister now sits wild-eyed, childlike, and clapping before Al’s new piano, as prostitutes dance around him. Alone, disoriented, and fearful, he ends up at Bullock’s and Star’s hardware store, asking them if they are really his old friends or devils sent to torture him. The men confirm that they are indeed his friends and both offer to walk him back to his tent. Like everyday archangels transcending this world of common devils, Bullock and Star rescue the ailing minister, if only provisionally. We are made to feel not only in this episode but throughout the first season that, beneath his increasingly hoarse complaints and gruffness, Al truly feels for the minister, whom he euthanizes himself by the end of the first season. The more humane and respectable benevolence of Bullock and Star and Al’s more primitive, brute compassion are distinct yet mutually reinforcing aspects of the same sentimental masculinity.

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If Deadwood represents a utopian space freed from the constraints of lawful society, Al’s—and Bullock’s—ability to kill emerges as the chief freedom of Deadwood ’s reconfigured utopia. But beyond this joyful murderous license, Deadwood constructs Al as the restored father of Freud’s Totem and Taboo —not the murderous tyrannical patriarch the defiant fraternal order must annihilate, but the murderous tyrannical patriarch whom they reverentially honor and obey.9 Far from being annihilated or even challenged, the Father becomes an entire system of exchange, affect, and identity in Deadwood. It is in this context that I want to return to the aforementioned kidney-stone-emission scene. When Al becomes grievously ill during his kidney stone crisis, Trixie, Doc, and his henchman all rally round him, the murderous Dan and the more inept Johnny sniveling like traumatized children over Al’s suffering and seeming doom (“Requiem for a Gleet” 2.4). Doc’s invasive nineteenth-century medical technology figures prominently in this scene, as he jams a probe within Al’s urethra. On the verge of experiencing a frontier surgery to remove the stone, Al surprises everyone around him by strenuously defeating his blockage and bloodily urinating. Al’s heroic micturation plays like a monstrous male birthing scene, with Doc, Trixie, Dan, and Johnny acting as midwives. I believe it is fair to say that it is Al who gives birth to them. The Father becomes the Male Mother, giving birth to a demonic community who feed him strength, power, love. The violation/potential castration becomes a primitive rite that restores phallic masculine power by reaffirming its unvanquishable resilience.10 What deepens both the resonances and the oddness of the representation of Al as not only the Law of the Father but also the Male Mother is the notable absence of conventional mothers in the series. Alma is appointed to mother Sofia; Mrs. Bullock becomes a childless mother; both Trixie and Joannie reflect on many aborted pregnancies, but nowhere does the series represent traditional motherhood. Al as the frontier father must, therefore, also function as the symbolic mother, giving weird birth to his own heroism (the kidney stone he has the heroic stones to emit) and to communal ties all at once. Presiding over his oddball frontier family, Al is the linchpin of a new sentimentalism within revisionist realism and genre violence. While there is a decidedly queer potential here—Al uniting a family consisting of nonbiological ties—the squarely heterosexual typing of the major characters mitigates the queer valences. Again, exceptions unsettle the narrative—Cy Tolliver’s business partner in the first season, Joanie Stubbs and Jane, and even the perverse Wolcott are all demonstrably queer characters, as are the actors who arrive in season three. And the friendship between Bullock and Sol certainly has its queer aspects in that it is one of the few openly tender male–male relationships on the series (even as this tenderness is always highlighted as

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an explicit break with the taciturnity of all of the characters, including Bullock and Sol). I am speaking to what is, on balance, an almost fanatical allegiance to male power in its most theatrically violent form exuded by the series— one not so much counterbalanced as it is facilitated by its equally consistent recourse to sentimentalism. The scene of Al’s emission of the kidney stone is worth lingering over, providing, as it does, so succinct a visual as well as emotional summary of the series’ major themes. Al’s horrifically conveyed physical pain mobilizes the most emphatic and emotionally charged actions and responses of the other characters associated with him—there are several shots of brutal Dan crying quietly by himself; of the Doc, rattled and anxiously prepping for surgery, his hands unsteady; of Johnny being rendered even more obtusely flummoxed by the situation; of Jewel desperately trying to get Al to let her come into his office and change his “piss pot;” of Trixie hollering out loud in frustration as he speaks outside to Jane. Al’s debilitation, a storyline carried over the course of several episodes, galvanizes feeling and unites community. Reinforcing these resonances, Trixie explains Jewel’s presence at the Gem to Jane. Al rescued her from the orphanage, and her labors at his saloon are—though they do not at all seem this way to the untutored—his “fucking way of protecting her” (2.4). The entire ordeal concludes with the scene of Doc, Trixie, Johnny, and Dan all converging around Al. Just as Doc, nearly incapacitated with nerves, is about to cut into the area beneath Al’s abdomen, Al rallies, signaling that he does not want surgery and will attempt to push out the stones himself. One way or another, Al’s penis has been the central symbol of the series, as we alternately view him urinating into his piss-pot, receiving fellatio, and hurling out his favorite term of abuse, “Cocksucker.” In addition, his enigmatic banter with his customers often includes discussion of their phallic powers— “You look the sort could turn right around and drop the hammer again in a minute or two” (“Tell Him Something Pretty” 3.12) or their actual organs— “Put your iron away now, Tom” (“Deep Water” 1.2). Now, Al’s phallus of force becomes a force of liberation, freeing Al from his torments in a scene shot as if it were a depiction of a woman giving birth after grievously strenuous labors. Once Al has begun to urinate again successfully, to the peals of relief from his assembled attendants, the party of five collapse on the bed, in one of the many extraordinary painterly shots that distinguish this television series. Reinforcing the Christian themes suggested by the pieta-like image of his attendants holding Al, the image of all sharing a collective embrace on the bed suggests nothing less than the related archetypal image of Christ descended from the Cross, with his followers—Mary Magdalene, John, the Apostle Christ Loved, his mother, Mary, and, at times, one of the Roman

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guards, reformed at the last moment by Christ’s love—converging around his fallen form. Indeed, the lighting in this shot, particularly over the Apostle-like Johnny (whose sunlight-dappled body and rapt, penitent, grateful expression evoke submission to the divine), intensifies these resonances. This is at once an image of the dead and the risen Christ, with the resurrected Al giving birth to the ragged but resilent denizens of Deadwood anew. The episode ends with the image of Al still on the bed in his darkened room—battered but intently alert, his less afflicted eye wide open, his expression apprehensive but undaunted. In Al, Deadwood presents us with a monstrous brute who nevertheless deserves our respect, our love, a bear with a human heart. In a pivotal return to the gender codes of Jacksonian America, Deadwood ends up arguing for a primitivist manhood as the only hope for the oppressed in a brutal, barren world.11 His monstrous gruffness merely a protective shield against an oppressive world he challenges, Al emerges as a reconfigured masculine hero, a hero of shocking barbarism and much more shocking compassion. T. Walter Herbert rightly observes that “a fraternal mystique of individual selfsovereignty” for White men exclusively characterizes American manhood.12 Deadwood enlarges the mystique by both ennobling its monstrously selfmade man Al as a perverse hero and making him an object of worshipful love. Little wonder that Deadwood so speedily dispatches Wild Bill Hickok, who represents, at least insofar as Deadwood and Carradine depict him, a much more tolerant and compassionate primitivist manhood.

The diabolical dandy Lawlessness in Deadwood becomes an alternative means of achieving the Law of the Father, of reinstating the most normative patterns and codes of identity. In this manner, Wolcott, who kills women for twisted pleasure and kills himself in the last episode of season two, represents not a critique of male power and misogyny but a reinforcement of the show’s masculinist biases.13 Wolcott wears his depravity in his fussy clothing, hyperself-conscious diction, and fastidious bearing. Deadwood treats Wolcott’s unconscionable treatment of women, culminating in a staggering sequence of carnage, with appropriate contempt. Yet, because it does not extend its critique of murderous misogyny to Al, but in fact, localizes and contains this critique in Wolcott (and Cy, both brutal and cowardly), Deadwood ends up reinforcing the underlying homophobia of its characterizations. Wolcott,

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who self-terminates after experiencing the rebuke of the pale paterfamilias Hearst, comes to seem a figure who suffers censure not primarily because of his misogyny but for his poor gendered performance, for his deviant foppish effeminacy. With the suggestion that he actually enjoys the intense beating Charlie Utter administers to him, Wolcott, as masochistic as he is sadistic, emerges as a sign of gendered depravity at the level of performance, not action. Deadwood impugns Wolcott for his diabolical intentions and actions toward women, and his suicide at the end registers as a just punishment. Yet it also, on some level, registers as an escape—for the audience—from his unsettling performance of diabolical dandyishness. In an obscure manner, a whiff of homophobia permeates the entire Wolcott plot, his fastidious dandy persona ultimately readable as a failure to live up to the more conventionally masculine standards of the main male cast members. Wolcott’s death ultimately symbolizes an acquiescence to the Law of the Father—the eradication of perversity—rather than necessary retribution. And as I suggested earlier, he exemplifies the conservative uses of complexity. His villainy, depicted in the most intricate and “psychological” terms throughout the course of the second season, so far exceeds Al’s and even Cy’s in variegated depth as to make their villainy seem comparatively mild and “average.” Moreover, his sustained and particularized sadism against women makes their misogyny seem comparatively garden-variety, nondescript, and average as well. A considerable amount of anxiety thus inheres in the series’ representation of masculinity, particularly in relationship to the privileged characters of Al and Bullock. In many ways we can read Wolcott as Bullock’s queer foil as well— they share a disdain for uncouthness, an outsider status, and a general air of alienation from the proceedings. In existing primarily as a foil to the other male characters, Wolcott fascinates precisely because he seems so thoroughly to index the varieties of sexual perversity. Wolcott surpasses in this regard even Cy and his twisted love and loyalty as well as cruelty to Joanie. As a foil to the other male characters, Wolcott threatens to explode the maintained atmosphere of male heterosexual authority that governs the series. The sexual disturbance Wolcott represents is, in a word, complex. The particulars of his dandy identity reinforce, amplify, and heighten—rather than constitute —his role as the embodiment of sexual perversity in the series. His fussiness, linked to a feminine and therefore gender-disruptive aspect of his persona, is an example of his dandyish excessiveness that further deepens the specifically sexual threat of his idiosyncratically specific desires for women, both in terms of sexual contact (if any is even desired by him) and in terms of his desire to “harm” women, as Maddie puts it. Other characters are typed as dandies without being presented as threatening in any way, for

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example the two actors in Langrishe’s troop in season three. Though clearly marked as dandies and as queer, they are also not presented as particularly ostracized. And Cy, after all, quite a diabolical dandy himself, is not extirpated. Wolcott would seem, then, to represent all of the other male characters’ sexual peccadillos in particularly grotesque and menacing form, a heightened version of their own perversity. Expelling him from the narrative allows for the other male characters’ own sexual perversities—quite considerable, but crucially not quite as ornate, not quite as mannered as Wolcott’s—to continue unabated.

Radical womanhood? Complexity is no less peculiar and politically suspect a device in the series’ representation of femininity, but while analogous to the representation of male complexity, feminine complexity also functions distinctly. The character of Alma Garret Ellsworth is a case in point. A prickly, peculiar woman with odd episodes of tenderness and anger—she decides to stay on in Deadwood after her enterprising husband is killed at Al’s command—Alma owns a claim in the biggest gold strike in town. She is, therefore, a woman of means and the mingled advantages and risks that come with her unusual financial power. Alma remains a very ambiguous character, and it is difficult to know if her unflinching resolve and “street smarts” in her dealings with Al and his henchman make her heroically resilient or a female Al-in-the-making. Her powerful financial assets matched with her increasingly formidable business sense, Alma could be the breakout female character of the series. Yet there is something off-putting and rather maddening about her; she remains a sympathetic but ambivalently drawn character. The chief marker of her human warmth is her relation to her adoptive daughter Sofia. Giving the otherwise unconventional Alma a daughter—and so exquisitely well-mannered and conventionally attractive a daughter clearly in keeping with the new Victorian idealization of the child—is precisely the kind of normalizing detail on which Deadwood depends. Though pitched as complexity—for example, Alma has a “nontraditional” relationship to a child not her own—this mother–daughter relationship domesticates a character who is often shown to be chafing against her domestication. Complexity serves here to make Alma readably and safely feminine even as she pursues masculine business interests. Indeed, the underlying message seems to be that, beneath her capitalist and even ruthless air, at times, Alma is still a “true woman” at heart, a very antebellum safeguard.

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Perhaps the character who best represents the female version of Deadwood’s technique of “complexity” is Trixie. Trixie maintains two complicated relationships, one with Al, who alternately brutalizes and relies on her, and one with Sol Star, Bullock’s Jewish friend, right-hand man, and co-owner of their hardware store. Al steps on her neck at one point but she crawls back into his bed later that night. Sol loves her even though she’s a whore; she appears to have sympathies for him but also reports, in tones of contempt, what Sol says—both his romantic gushings and business intelligence—to Al. Where do Trixie’s real loyalties lie? Outfitted in a tight bustier that makes her look like a performer in an Expressionist cabaret in the Weimar Republic or Madonna in her Blonde Ambition tour, Trixie most accommodatingly conforms to the deepest stereotypes of whoredom. The most attractive aspect of her persona is her willingness to help Alma, her sisterly solidarity with a woman who is, in every way—on class, social, personal levels—the enemy. Calamity Jane displays no allegiance to Al’s tyranny; indeed, she opposes it. She also represents a startlingly vivid queer sexuality. Surely, then, she must represent the radical dimension in Deadwood ’s conceptualizations of gendered identity? While Robin Weigert’s courageously brusque, swaggering, wounded portrait of Jane is always provocative, and while the series often depicts Jane as one of its moral centers, however unmoored, Deadwood also uses her as a buffoonish source of hilarity. And it undermines her status as a formidable cowboy, while demonstrating how recognition as such is clearly Jane’s chief aspiration. In one first-season scene, Al enters Doc’s office, in which he and Jane are hiding little Sofia. Initially unflinching in her opposition to Al, Jane collapses into tears, later revealing that Al made her feel scared “just as if I was a little girl.” Deadwood casually dispenses with Jane’s toughness to bolster Al’s here. If Jane’s queer sexuality would appear to be an attribute the show embraces, some scenes troublingly undercut this acceptance. In “A Lie Agreed Upon, Part II,” to Charlie Utter and Bullock’s quiet amusement, Jane tells them the story of a “Finnish guy, from Finland” who developed amorous feelings for her and paid her tributes (flowers, presents). Jane continues: “and, uh, one night, he takes my arm, and he starts in, and . . . he, uh, whispers in his Finland accent, ‘I want to suck your cock.’” The mingled reactions of the men, who alternately say they do not hear this punchline and say nothing, communicate a certain level of respectful bewilderment on their part in the face of Jane’s gender and sexual alterity. Ingeniously, the scene uses Jane as a conduit for queer sexuality generally—the “Finnish” guy appears to desire, from Jane’s story, sex with another man. Homosexual male desire gets entangled with issues of threatening sexual androgyny, lesbian desire, and female sexual desire itself, all of which generate anxieties and phobic

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responses that simultaneously cohere in Jane. One could read the men’s silence as the sensitive response of embarrassed but well-meaning men. One could also, however, interpret the scene as one that marks off Jane’s gender-bending deviance as something unspeakable. What reinforces the idea of Jane’s desire as unspeakable is how frequently the series depicts her as either inarticulate or as so convoluted and rambling in her speech patterns as to be effectively unintelligible. Competing sympathetic and ambivalent attitudes thus characterize the series’ disposition toward Jane.14 The most impressive female character, surprisingly, emerges as Joanie Stubbs. She defies Cy Tolliver, depicted as cold-bloodedly monstrous (in his murder of Flora and her brother Miles, especially), and sets up her own whorehouse. She doesn’t endorse her business partner Maddie’s plan of entrapping Wolcott for financial gain, maintaining an attitude of concern for the young whore who will be injured. When Wolcott does murder several whores, including Maddie, whose throat he slices, Joanie’s first concern is not for herself but for the young women in her employ, for whom she gathers enough money together to send on their way to safety. Joanie also takes a compassionate interest in Jane, whom she doesn’t condescend toward despite Jane’s extravagant, bullying drunkenness, and her compassion appears to precede the development of her erotic feelings for her. In its exploration of Joanie’s lesbian desires (such as the scenes in which she bathes other women, Flora, with aching longing, and Jane, with a maternal as well as an inchoate eroticism), the series is at is most affecting and resistant. In the third season, it even goes so far as to suggest that she and Jane might find lasting fulfillment in each other, as exemplified by the shot of them holding hands as they lead the procession to the new schoolhouse built around, rather than over, an unfelled tree, a symbol, along with the children, of new beginnings and enduring ties at once (“Amateur Night” 3.9). The outcast-whore and the female cowboy are potential lovers as well as sisters under their skin of their shared oppression. It is in the annihilation of Maddie that the show’s ultimately suspect attitudes toward womanhood most clearly make themselves intelligible. Clearly, Maddie is a terrible person, willing to sacrifice the lives of young women to ensure the successful realization of her blackmail plot. But surely Maddie is no less a monster than Cy or Al—she plots with the very same fiendish foresight as they. Yet she is destroyed, whereas their exploits are sustained by the ongoing narrative. To be sure, the third season depicts both Al and Cy as severely diminished. Both are rendered impotent by Hearst: Al is mutilated and then totally defeated by Hearst and Cy is turned against his will into Hearst’s minion. Nevertheless, Maddie is expulsed from the narrative entirely. It would have been interesting to see Maddie—a kind of female

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Cy or Al—allowed to develop as a rivalrous female counterpart to their own competing versions of masculine authority. Maddie’s villainy is, thus, that of a woman’s power overstepping its bounds. (The Pinkerton agent Miss Isringhausen is also ejected for similar reasons, though less spectacularly). Flora’s associations with a similar unfeminine heartlessness—exemplified by her association with phallic knives (cutting off the skin of an apple she feeds to her brother, stabbing Cy in the leg, grabbing for the knife Cy waves in front of her brutalized face before ordering Joanie to shoot her)—also seem to anticipate her grisly demise. The women who get to stay on in Deadwood are the women who conform to standards of male dominance or who represent the socializing forces of conformity—loyal whores, neurotic if enterprising housewives, maternal schoolteachers. Apart from Joanie Stubbs, no female character on Deadwood sustains her defiance of masculinist power. And even Joanie, as she does in the very last episode of the series most emphatically (3.12), returns to Cy to thank him for his efforts on her behalf. Milch gives us, in characters like Trixie, strong women with the even stronger desire to accommodate masculine power. Ultimately, Deadwood perpetuates the deepest stereotypes of femininity in the Western. The stalwart schoolmarm, the loyal whore, the amoral seductress, the sexually bankrupt masculine woman all rather comfortably find a place in Deadwood ’s bustling but strangely settled world. Where Deadwood does, however, present a more radical vision of womanhood is in the possibility it suggests of Joanie’s ongoing relationship with Jane. If the show is irreducibly vexed and vexing on the issue of queerness, among other dimensions of sexuality, it is also in its exploration of queerness within a traditional, masculinist, frontier setting that the series offers its least predictable depictions of gender and sexuality. Indeed, the last episode of the series contains, as already noted, a particularly affecting shot of Joanie draping a bear-fur cover over Jane, an image of female connection forged through the world of men. (The cover belonged to Wild Bill and was given to Joanie on Jane’s behalf by Charlie Utter.)

Life and death in Deadwood Along with its affecting portraits of female queerness, Deadwood does offer some resistant depictions of masculinity. Certain male characters defy the sentimentalized brutality at the core of Deadwood. Indeed, some of the supporting characters are amazingly nonstereotypical. If the “Doc” figure is a Western cliché par exemple, Doc, as played by so poignantly by Brad Dourif, is odd, pained,

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and quirky in ways that transcend the clichéd role. Moreover, Doc is definitely one of the most morally conscientious characters on the series. However gruff, Charlie Utter and Ellsworth are sensitive, courageous men. Along these lines, John Hawkes makes Bullock’s partner Sol Star a study in mournful rectitude. In one of the most moving scenes in Deadwood, an already nearly incapacitated, gunshot Sol staggers out to lend support to Bullock when he faces off Al again in “A Lie Agreed Upon, Part II.” Indeed, one of Deadwood ’s most courageous accomplishments is its nonstandard construction of Jewish manhood in Sol. As noted, the relationship between him and Bullock pulses with buried tensions breaking through their masculine taciturnity. Deadwood rewards the constant viewer with intelligently designed, overlapping, subtle plots; dialog that occasionally reaches heights of strained but appealing rough melodiousness; quirky and sensitive and original acting; and characters that occasionally seem to breathe new life into old archetypes. What Deadwood does not represent, however, is a progressive vision. Intelligent and affecting though it is, Deadwood may indeed represent a regression of sorts. Whereas a program like The Sopranos may be guilty of idealizing its cast of mobster-monsters, its overall agenda is to expose the pervasiveness of corruption and hypocrisy in normative American life. But Deadwood offers a rather different vision. It exploits the vaguely utopian frontier pastness of the historical Deadwood and the Western genre as a brilliant new strategy for representing updated versions of old and offensive tropes, particularly garishly racist representations of Otherness—those damn “Celestials,” Wu and his English-illiterate Chinese para-community, for example—and openly misogynistic representations of women. To a certain extent, racism and misogyny are built-in, stalwart elements of the Western genre, and it would be the truly radical film or television program that transcended those inherent limits. Yet the difficulty of Deadwood is that it exploits its own updating of standard genre as an excuse for the deployment and proliferation of stock racist and misogynistic images. Its ultimate difficulty, perhaps, is that it promises to critique and to resist, with knowing and vigorous force, these standard tropes but more pervasively and pointedly perpetuates them.

Notes 1 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (New York: Bedford/ St. Martins, 1996), 90. 2 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. A Lavers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), 164.

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3 My emphasis: see Randolph A. Roth, “Spousal Murder in Northern New England, 1776–1865,” in Over the Threshold: Intimate Violence in Early America, Eds. Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 1999), 85. 4 Both Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure” and “Afterthoughts” are collected in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham (New York: New York University Press, 1999). 5 Mulvey, “Afterthoughts,” Feminist Film Theory, 126–7. 6 Mark Singer, “The Misfit,” The New Yorker, February 14 and 21, 2005, 192–205. 7 “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” And this is the crucial next line: “It has never yet melted.” See D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; reprint, New York: Doubleday, 1951), 73. 8 Sally Robinson, Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 136. 9 In Freud’s Totem and Taboo, an “anthropological” study of the mythic origins of modern society, the fraternal order competes against the Father, whom they kill and then cannibalistically ingest, both to gain access to Woman/The Mother and to free themselves from the patriarch’s rule. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, 1913, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989), 177. 10 As E. Anthony Rotundo has argued, “As much as they were concerned with the bodies of other men, late nineteenth-century males were most concerned with their own. . . . men of the late nineteenth-century. . .treated physical strength and strength of character as the same thing.” See E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 223. 11 For an extended consideration of Jacksonian masculinity, see David Greven, Men beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), especially the introduction. 12 T. Walter Herbert, Sexual Violence and American Manhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 70. 13 See Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 26–7, 70–1, for a discussion of the historical development of the dandy as a homophobic caricature. 14 See, especially, the scene in which Jane recounts her dream to Joanie in “A Constant Throb” (3.10), which culminates in Joanie kissing Jane.

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Warner, Michael, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 49–90. Warren, Kenneth W., What Was African American Literature? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). Warshow, Robert, “Movie Chronicle: The Westerner,” in The Western Reader, ed. Jim Kitses and Gregg Rickman (New York: Proscenium Publishers Inc., 1998), 35–48. Watts, Sarah, Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism: and Other Writings (1905), trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (New York: Penguin, 2002). West, Elliott, “Family Life on the Trail West,” History Today 42.12 (1992): 33. Accessed June 16, 2011, from http://search.ebscohost.com/login/aspx?direct =true&db=aph&AN=9212211858&site=ehost-live. Westerfelhuas, Robert and Celeste Lacroix, “Waiting for the Barbarians: HBO’s Deadwood as a Post 9/11 Ritual of Disquiet,” Southern Communication Journal 74.1 (January–March 2009): 18–39. White, Richard, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). Wiggins, Kyle and David Holmberg, “ ‘Gold is Every Man’s Opportunity: Castration Anxiety and the Economic Venture in Deadwood,” Great Plains Quarterly 27.4 (2007): 283–96. Williams, G. Christopher, “Pimp and Whore: The Necessity of Perverse Domestication in the Development of the West,” in Reading Deadwood, ed. David Lavery (New York: Palgrave Macmillam, 2006), 145–56. Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Wills, Garry, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). The Wire: The Complete Series, created by Davis Simon, HBO Home Video, 2008. Witherspoon, Wendy Anne, “The Haunted Frontier: Troubling Gothic Conventions in Nineteenth-Century Literature of the American West,” PhD dissertation, University of Southern California, 2007. Witschi, Nicolas S., Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. London and New York: Cassell, 1999. — “‘Down These Mean Streets’: Film Noir, Deadwood, Cinematic Space, and the Irruption of Genre Codes,” in Dirty Words in Deadwood: Literature and the Postwestern, ed. Melody Graulich and Nicolas S. Witschi (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming). Wolfe, Patrick, “Corpus Nullius: The Exception of Indians and Other Aliens in U.S. Constitutional Discourse,” Postcolonial Studies 10 (2007): 127–51.

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Index Abu Ghraib 132–3, 134, 145 accumulation 45, 75, 77, 115 African American 32, 88, 101, 104nn. 2, 7 Agamben, Giorgio 131–2, 133, 137, 141 annexation 34–6, 39, 73–5, 114–15, 131, 139, 175–82 Andriopoulos, Stefan 43 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 13 Barthes, Roland 50–1, 197 Boym, Svetlana 64–5, 76 Brown, Wendy 98–9 Bush, George W. 1, 131, 133–4, 145–6, 147n. 21 capitalism; see free market; monopoly capitalism; neoliberalism Chase, David 1 Cheney, Dick 39, 41n. 24 Chinese 20n. 9, 92–4, 105n. 14 representation of, in Deadwood 70, 73, 86, 88, 91–2, 102–3, 92–4, 97, 213 Clinton, William J. 1–3, 15, 19n. 1 colonialism; see settler colonialism Cooper, Gary 1 Cooper, James Fenimore 11, 96 corporeality 108, 116–25 and suffering 112–17 counterpublics 157–8 Custer, George Armstrong 29–33, 37–8, 39–40, 134 Deadwood, SD 28–32, 39–40, 134–5, 148nn. 26–7

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Deadwood (HBO series), characters in Al Swearengen 5–10, 14–15, 33–8, 52–4, 66–7, 71–6, 85–7, 88–9, 91–4, 97–103, 139–41, 203–7 Alma Garrett 13, 47–8, 163–6, 176–8 George Hearst 6–10, 57–8, 71–2, 76–80, 97–103, 144–5, 166–71, 188–92 Seth Bullock 4–5, 33–8, 49–51, 85, 94–6, 134–7, 176–8, 200–3 Wild Bill Hickok 5, 11–12, 49–52, 85, 200 Deadwood (HBO series), episodes of “Amalgamation and Capital” (2.9) 45–6, 75 “Amateur Night” (3.9) 47–8 “Bullock Returns to the Camp” (1.7) 95–6, 135–6 “Boy-the-Earth-Talks-To” (2.12) 97–9 “The Catbird Seat” (3.11) 144 “Childish Things” (2.8) 6–7, 70–1 “A Constant Throb” (3.10) 168–71 “Deadwood” (1.1) 4–5, 85–7, 50–2, 137–8 “Here Was a Man” (1.4) 67–8 “Jewell’s Boot is Made for Walking” (1.11) 14–15 “A Lie Agreed Upon, Part I” (2.1) 120, 153–6 “No Other Sons or Daughters” (1.9) 35–6, 55–7, 140–3 “Plague” (1.6) 94–5, 134–5 “Reconnoitering the Rim” (1.3) 66–7

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“Something Very Expensive” (2.6) 68–70, 117–18 “Tell Him Something Pretty” (3.12) 9–10, 57–8, 79–81, 123–5 “Tell Your God to Ready for Blood” (3.1) 71–2 “A Two-Headed Beast” (3.5) 120–1 “Unauthorized Cinnamon” (3.7) 52–3, 77–8 democracy 73–5, 80–1, 139 Derrida, Jacques 25, 40 disinterest 43–8 domesticity 57, 119, 157, 162–7, 173–7, 182–7, 189–92, 209 Earp, Wyatt 36, 76–7, 82n. 20, 109, 181 economics; see free market; monopoly capitalism; neoliberalism empire 1–4, 15–16, 25–6, 80–1, 130, 132–6 Enlightenment 17, 42–5, 53–4, 58 expansion 3–4, 12, 64, 72, 174–5 family nontraditional parents 179, 181–7 nontraditional siblings 180–2 see also domesticity femininity 79, 130, 174 see also gender; women Fort Laramie Treaty 35, 109, 130 founding 25–7, 30–8 Frank, Andre Gunder 20–1 Fraser, Nancy 157–7 free market 42–3, 86–91, 97–103 frontier 11–12, 28–32, 63–4, 75, 80–1, 95–6, 129–34, 143–6, 173–4, 195–6 gender 67–8, 79, 157–8, 163–4, 174, 189, 196–8, 207–12 see also gender; masculinity; women genre 1–4, 10–16, 21n. 15, 116, 194–5, 98

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see also gothic; sentimental, novel; Western (genre) Gilroy, Paul 100 gothic (genre) 12, 38, 42–3, 47, 54–8 greed 90–1 Habermas, Jürgen 53, 157–8 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 195–6 HBO 1, 26, 39, 90, 116, 128, 195 Herbert, T. Walter 207 Hobbes, Thomas 34, 53–4, 57 homophobia 207–8 Hogle, Jerrold 43, 47, 51, 58 Hume, David 45 imperialism see empire; expansion; settler colonialism Indian see Lakota Sioux tribe; Native Americans interest 7–10, 20n. 10 see also disinterest; self-interest isopolity 131, 139–43 James, Henry 13, 21n. 21, 60n. 17 Jameson, Fredric 21n. 15, 90 Kaplan, Amy 174, 177, 183, 189–90 Kennedy, John F. 133, 147n. 19 Klein, Amanda 111, 156–7 Lakota Sioux tribe 28–32, 33, 134–6, 139 law, establishment of 11, 48–51, 71, 108, 132–3, 137 and lawlessness 4–5, 32–7, 40, 42–3, 65–7, 73–5, 105–11, 132, 137–8 paternal 203–7 Lefebvre, Martin 139 Lincoln, Abraham 26–7, 30–1, 89 Lloyd, David 130, 142 Locke, John 34, 37, 55 Machiavelli, Niccolo 26 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 38, 48–9, 54, 132–3, 138, 199–201 Marcuse, Herbert 4

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marriage 176–81, 199–201 nontraditional 178–81 see also domesticity Marx, Karl 5–6, 20n. 8, 45, 57, 75 masculinity 48, 130, 142, 174, 197–203, 212 and violence 203–9 Melville, Herman 14, 47 Metz Massacre 85 Mezey, Naomi 49 Milch, David 2, 11, 13, 16, 40, 41n. 20, 63–5, 71, 78, 104n. 4, 107, 128–30, 136, 143–4, 149n. 33, 176, 183, 187, 188, 202 misogyny 92, 194, 207–8, 213 Molloy, Robin Paul 44, 57 Molly Maguires 28, 69, 71 monopoly capitalism 3, 5, 10, 70, 87, 121 multiculturalism 88–9 Mulvey, Laura 199 My Darling Clementine 109, 112, 138 nation 28–32, 130–5, 174–82 Native Americans 20n. 8, 28–32, 33, 39, 109, 131, 134, 147n. 21 representations of, in Deadwood 8, 11–12, 35, 86–7, 90, 94–6, 135–6 see also Lakota Sioux tribe neoliberalism 18, 45, 87, 89, 100, 103, 104n. 2 “New West” History 87, 92 Pinkerton Detective Agency 65–6, 67–8, 69–70 Pippin, Robert 11, 132 politics, contemporary U.S. 1–4, 26, 38–40, 87–8, 100–1, 112–13, 128–32, 136, 145–6 see also Abu Ghraib; September 11, 2001; War on Terror primitive accumulation 5–8, 20n. 8 private sphere 53, 157, 163–7, 174, 177, 191 see also domesticity

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public sphere 91, 103, 145, 156–8, 160–71, 173, 177, 190–2 queerness 179–81, 201, 205–6, 208–12 race 28–9, 77, 86–91, 97–9, 100, 103 see also African American; Chinese; Native American Reconstruction 27–9 refounding 26–8, 30, 39–40, 130 see also founding regeneration 31, 63–4, 71–2, 130 Rhodes, Cecil 8, 20n. 10 Robinson, Sally 213 Rumsfeld, Donald 133, 148n. 23 Ryan, Cheney 49 Schmitt, Carl 140 The Searchers 11, 95, 111 self-interest 43–4 sentimental, novel 12–13 tradition 197–8, 204–6 September 11, 2001 129, 131–3 settler colonialism 130–6, 146 sexuality 39, 67–8, 79, 117, 164–5, 179–80, 194–7, 208–12 Shakespeare, William 10–11, 15, 198 Simon, David 3 Sioux see Lakota Sioux tribe Slotkin, Richard 27–8, 31, 64, 80, 82n. 20, 133, 189 Smith, Adam 42–8, 56–7 Smith, Anthony D. 53 The Sopranos 1–2, 90, 128, 195, 213 sovereignty 45, 98–9, 130–2, 139–46 spectacle 113, 118 state 3–4, 44–5, 55–7, 98–9, 130–4, 143–6, 157–8, 165–6 see also annexation television 90, 116, 119, 129, 159, 195–6 tolerance 91, 98–100 Tompkins, Jane 80, 121 Turner, Frederick Jackson 63–4, 80–1, 96, 130, 133, 143

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Unforgiven 109, 111 Veracini, Lorenzo 131, 140 violence 2–10, 54–5, 69–70, 76–81, 107–10 and founding 25–6, 39–40, 49 frontier 29–30, 80–1, 107–8, 131–2, 134–7, 189, 204–5 non-redemptive 110, 114–19 and the state 132, 137–42 Walpole, Horace 16, 43, 46–7, 58 War on Terror 132–4, 141, 145

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Weber, Max 6 Western (genre) 87, 107–11, 116, 128–39, 145–6, 156–7, 173, 177, 199–202, 213 see also genre Williams, Raymond 30 The Wire 1–3, 11, 21n. 15, 39, 90, 128 Wolfe, Patrick 131 women 46–8, 56–8, 67–8, 117–18, 164, 173–4, 182–3, 190, 201, 208–13 Worden, Daniel 45, 57, 113, 115 Yellow Peril 94

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