Deadwood
Hey Kathryn,
So I finally finished Deadwood. Wow, what a show! I can’t get the last line out of my head. I don’t know if you remember it – Swearengen has just had Jen killed in Trixie’s place to appease Hearst’s request. He is on his hands and knees scrubbing her blood up off the floor (in a true Lady-Macbeth-like fashion) and Johnny (Jen’s lover and Swearengen’s loyal employee comes in to ask if she suffered. As Johnny leaves, Swearengen mutters to himself, “what does he want me to tell him? Something pretty?” as he continues to scrub. And that’s how the whole show ends.
I’ve loved how the whole series, but the second and third seasons especially, has this great Shakespearean quality to it – with the ornate and often poetic language use, the employment of soliloquies and asides as well as the use of nature to reveal internal or psychological states of characters. And so it seems that this final line of the show functions as a summary of the whole series – what do we want David Milch to tell us? Something pretty?
Of course, Deadwood isn’t pretty. I think you can argue that it is beautiful in many ways; at least that it has a sublimity…that its aesthetics deploy a pretty complex meaning. That it ain’t pretty, that it ain’t ever pretty, matters. But the line evokes even more than that. To me it seems so gendered. First, he’s mopping the blood of an innocent women, killed in place of another woman. His action is evoking a historically significant (and Shakespearean, again) female character, Lady Macbeth. He’s doing a typically feminine, domestic task of scrubbing the floor. And even the language of ‘pretty’ itself is a feminine gendered word in the history of aesthetics. So what’s going on here, I wonder? Is it a political statement about how the West was built on the backs of nameless women – certainly a theme throughout the whole series? Why does Milch end the whole series on such a gendered note?
I see all these levels of power in his action too – for example, Swearengen has this special relationship with the prostitute, Trixie, so he doesn’t want to kill her, so he kills the prostitute with whom his employee has a special relationship, Jen. And so it’s like these two men have their property, and the more powerful man’s property survives. But then Swearengen cleans up the mess himself, indicating a type of responsibility and willingness to serve, to get down on his hands and knees and scrub, to humble himself in a way and assume that feminine position rather than have his employee do it for him. So there’s a whole mess of power relations at work heightened, I think, by the fact that Hearst has created this mess at the societal level and simply run out on it, leaving Tolliver – the man who is basically in his employ – to take care of it all.
So all these thoughts and more are swirling around in my head, convincing me that Deadwood really is the one of the best shows out there. I’m thinking I need to start over and watch the whole thing again!
Hope you’re well!
Natalie
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Hello Natalie,
I am so glad you loved Deadwood – I think it is some of the most amazing TV ever made, though I keep thinking about why that is (the complexity of the language, the development of characters, coupled with a page-turner kind of plot, the serialization of the story, the great cussing). I just started re-watching the entire series and am just into the second season for the second time. Here are some general thoughts in response to your reflections, though they are mostly based on season 1 (which if you haven’t watched in a while is well worth a return – I remember liking seasons 1 and 2 much more than season 3, but we’ll see if that plays out in a second go-through).
First off – Al on his hands and knees. You are so right that this is a reversal of some of the power dynamics that dominate the show, and a really important layer to Al’s character in general. Having already read your comments when I was re-watching season 1, I was struck by the motif of Al cleaning blood off the floor. Early in the first season we meet Al reprimanding Jewel for her improper stain cleaning and then getting down on his hands and knees to show her how to scrub a bloodstain. He does so again in his own office after he kills Persimmon Phil. In the final episode of season 1, Al tells the newly self-elected Sheriff Bullock that he is going to “step over that bloodstain that mysteriously appeared on my floor” – the stain left by the murder of the Yankton official who was trying to squeeze Al on an old murder warrant. Al’s work, quite often, involves scrubbing bloodstains, literally and metaphorically.
I think you are absolutely right that this implicates Al in a kind of feminine labor that he is not embarrassed to take on himself when need requires. It is something we cannot imagine Tolliver doing in a hundred years. In it, I think we see the thing that separates Al from Tolliver and Hearst as power players: Al may be relentlessly self-interested, but he has tied his interests to the collective in a way that requires him often to, if not turn the other cheek, at least suffer temporary incursions on his pride (as he does in that incredible scene at the beginning of season 2 when, after sustaining the worse beating in his fight with Bullock, he returns Bullock’s gun and badge proverbially offering a capitulation).
I also think you are right that the blood scrubbing, especially in that final scene of the entire series, is laden with the symbolic weight that women bear to make the burgeoning society of Deadwood possible. One of the things I am most struck with this second time round is how parallels between women are developed, even as their relationships are always truncated. All the women are trying to negotiate survival in this very, very male world, where being a woman is reason enough to be expendable. Joanie and Trixie are both the prized women of dangerously powerful men, who each try to negotiate a kind of freedom, or at least some modicum of self-determination from their pimp/destructive father figures/owners. Alma and Martha are both women with some degree of social standing and the capacity to move in male dominated circles, even if they cannot do anything to exert real power over men. Alma is alive not because of her standing, but because Swearengen agrees not to kill her for Bullock’s sake. And the scene where Hearts almost rapes her is one of the most chilling reminders of her oppression, despite her finery and fortune (it reminded me of the scene in the very first episode where Al pins Trixie to the floor with a boot to her neck). Trixie and Alma, despite the vast chasm that separates them, recognize in each other their similar conditions of helplessness. Jane and Alma, who meet only in the care for Sophia early on, are both women with some power to move in circles of men’s power (Alma because of her wealth and Jane because of her masculine trade). And yet, other than the friendship/erotic attraction that develops between Joanie and Jane, these women are barely given opportunity to form real relationships. They come together, sympathize, commiserate, take pity on each other – and then they are separated by the machinations of men. Notice how often men meet together to decide their fates and the fate of the camp. Not once do the women gather, except in brothels – and there we are not given the greatest examples of camaraderie, especially when we see that Maddie is willing to sell one of her girls for a nice retirement.
This fact seems very profound when I think about the show as a visualized narrative of civilization’s creation: built on women’s backs, demanding their blood, the very form of civilization does not allow their congregation, which is a form of recognition by the law.
I want to think a lot more about the law and about models of power: Swearengen vs. Bullock, Swearengen vs. Tolliver, Hearst vs. them all. I am intrigued by the way that law is a force that promises some forms of order and justice, but is so clearly just another power play by men to make way for smoother forms of capitalism. Tell your god to ready for blood, indeed!
I can’t wait to hear what you think of all this or many other things.
More soon, cocksucker (meant affectionately, of course)!
K
[...] and oscillates between terror and exhilaration at her own freedom. As we discussed in our brief conversation about Deadwood, if that show is in some ways about the birth of free market capitalism, the brunt of that birth is [...]
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