The Last Western: Deadwood & the End of American Empire

The Last Western 9781441164582_FM_Rev_txt_prf.indd i 10/10/2001 9:45:10 PM 9781441164582_FM_Rev_txt_prf.indd ii 10/10/2001 9:45:11 PM The Last Western Deadwood and the end of American empire Edited by PAUL STASI and JENNIFER GREIMAN N E W Y OR K • L ON DON • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY 9781441164582_FM_Rev_txt_prf.indd iii 10/10/2001 9:45:11 PM Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 175 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10010 USA 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © Paul Stasi and Jennifer Greiman, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The last Western : Deadwood and the end of American empire / edited by Paul Stasi and Jennifer Greiman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-2630-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4411-6458-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Deadwood (Television program) I. Stasi, Paul, 1972II. Greiman, Jennifer. PN1992.77.D39L38 2012 791.45’72 – dc23 2012025661 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-6458-2 PB: 978-1-4411-2630-6 Typeset by Newgen imaging Systems Pvt Ltd., Chennai, India Printed and bound in the United States of America 9781441164582_FM_Rev_txt_prf.indd iv 10/10/2001 9:45:11 PM Contents Acknowledgements vii Notes on contributors viii Introduction: Deadwood and the forms of American empire Paul Stasi and Jennifer Greiman 1 PART ONE Fabulous retroactivity and invisible agency: Democracy, capitalism, and the history of the present 23 1 “Vile Task”: Founding and democracy in Deadwood’s imperial imagination 25 Ronald J. Schmidt, Jr. 2 The gothic frontier of modernity: The “Invisible Hand” of state-formation in Deadwood Julia M. Wright 42 3 “It’s all f***ing amalgamation and capital, ain’t it?”: Deadwood, the Pinkertons, and the Westward expansion Jeffrey Scraba and John David Miles 9781441164582_FM_Rev_txt_prf.indd v 62 10/10/2001 9:45:11 PM vi CONTENTS PART TWO “No Law at All in Deadwood”: Race, violence, and the state in contemporary America 83 4 “Securing the Color”: The racial economy of Deadwood 85 Daniel Worden 5 Listening to the thunder: Deadwood and the extraordinary depiction of ordinary violence Justin A. Joyce 107 6 A terrible beauty: Deadwood, settler colonial violence, and the post-9/11 state of exception 128 Erik Altenbernd and Alex Young PART THREE “A Sovereign F***ing Community”: Gender, domesticity, and the sexual politics of Deadwood 151 7 “Messages from Invisible Sources”: Sight in Deadwood’s public sphere 153 Mark L. Berrettini 8 “The World is Less Than Perfect”: Nontraditional family structures in Deadwood Paul Zinder 173 9 The return of the Father: Deadwood and the contemporary gender politics of complexity David Greven Bibliography Index 225 194 215 9781441164582_FM_Rev_txt_prf.indd vi 10/10/2001 9:45:11 PM 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. T 9781441164582_FM_Rev_txt_prf.indd vii 10/10/2001 9:45:12 PM 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). 9781441164582_FM_Rev_txt_prf.indd viii 10/10/2001 9:45:12 PM NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix 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. 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. 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. 9781441164582_FM_Rev_txt_prf.indd ix 10/10/2001 9:45:12 PM x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 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. 9781441164582_FM_Rev_txt_prf.indd x 10/10/2001 9:45:12 PM 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. I 9781441164582_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 1 10/10/2001 9:45:17 PM 2 THE LAST WESTERN 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) 9781441164582_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 2 10/10/2001 9:45:18 PM INTRODUCTION 3 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 9781441164582_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 3 10/10/2001 9:45:18 PM 4 THE LAST WESTERN 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 9781441164582_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 4 10/10/2001 9:45:18 PM INTRODUCTION 5 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.” 9781441164582_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 5 10/10/2001 9:45:18 PM 6 THE LAST WESTERN 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 9781441164582_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 6 10/10/2001 9:45:18 PM INTRODUCTION 7 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 9781441164582_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 7 10/10/2001 9:45:19 PM 8 THE LAST WESTERN 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. 9781441164582_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 8 10/10/2001 9:45:19 PM INTRODUCTION 9 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 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 9781441164582_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 9 10/10/2001 9:45:19 PM 10 THE LAST WESTERN 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 9781441164582_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 10 10/10/2001 9:45:19 PM INTRODUCTION 11 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 9781441164582_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 11 10/10/2001 9:45:19 PM 12 THE LAST WESTERN 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 9781441164582_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 12 10/10/2001 9:45:19 PM INTRODUCTION 13 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 historic 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 9781441164582_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 13 10/10/2001 9:45:19 PM 14 THE LAST WESTERN 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 a 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 overt 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 9781441164582_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 14 10/10/2001 9:45:20 PM INTRODUCTION 15 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 9781441164582_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 15 10/10/2001 9:45:20 PM 16 THE LAST WESTERN 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 Milch)24 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 9781441164582_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 16 10/10/2001 9:45:20 PM INTRODUCTION 17 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 9781441164582_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 17 10/10/2001 9:45:20 PM 18 THE LAST WESTERN 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, Alenbernd 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. 9781441164582_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 18 10/10/2001 9:45:20 PM 19 INTRODUCTION 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. 9781441164582_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 19 10/10/2001 9:45:20 PM 20 THE LAST WESTERN 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,” 9781441164582_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 20 10/10/2001 9:45:20 PM 21 INTRODUCTION 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 9781441164582_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 21 10/10/2001 9:45:20 PM 22 THE LAST WESTERN 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. 9781441164582_Intro_Rev_txt_prf.indd 22 10/10/2001 9:45:20 PM