'Deadwood' Primer, Part 3: On Order and the Perceived Lack Thereof

"He didn't speak of havin' law man ambitions."

HBO

This is part of a series going deep into the 2000s era HBO show Deadwood.

If the town of Deadwood is the show’s main character—it’s Luke Skywalker, if you’ll allow the blatant Star Wars—then Al Swearengen (Ian McShane, incredible) is a mix of Darth Vader, Boba Fett, and Jabba the Hutt. You simply cannot talk about this show without also talking about Al. They’re one and the same. It’s frankly shocking we’ve gotten so far into this series without mentioning him other than in passing.

We are positioned to despise Al the moment we meet him.

Al is tending bar at the Gem, a saloon and brothel. He’s a frontier pimp wearing a dirty pinstripe suit and the meanest mug you’ve ever laid eyes on. Al isn’t a large man, but menace swirls around him like cologne. He’s dangerous in the same way as a crocodile.

A gun goes off upstairs; one of his working girls shot a customer. It isn’t without cause, but whores with pistols are bad for business. The acquisition of money—and through it, influence and power—is Al’s religion. The Gem, then, is his church. And there’s simply no justification for casting a pall over this den of inequity. As in the Old Testament days, such blasphemy must be dealt with severely, so as to prevent the sin from spreading.

Al studies the ruin of the girl’s face and actually seems sympathetic. The next moment he throws her into a wall, puts his foot on her throat, and grasps her arm as though to break it. This sudden change in temperature comes after she asks him to get on with her punishment, which only amplifies the viciousness. It’s an ugly scene, even allowing for the norms of 1800s America, when women were viewed not so differently from cattle—something to be owned and controlled. Property versus personhood. But abusing an already bloodied woman feels especially dastardly.

From that moment, we hate Al.

Until we don’t.

In any other show, Al would wear the black hat. The villainous character who exists to give the hero something to fight. That seems to be what the show is setting up in the early going: Al on one side, Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) on the other. But while their eventual fight feels like the realization of something long-brewing—a building storm that finally breaks—it ends inconclusively. The hero does not vanquish his enemy. Rather, incredibly, he joins him.

Like Bullock, we’re gradually won over to Al’s point of view. Familiarity breeds comfort—the more you watch Deadwood, the more you like Al—as we are given insight into what makes him tick. Apart from the obvious, surface level stuff, there’s a teeny sliver of warmth for his found family. The one he whores out, curses at, and employs in his murder-schemes. It’s this patriarchal quality that bears Al’s richest and most ironic fruit, as he becomes Deadwood’s champion in opposition to the forces marshaling against it. Deadwood’s own dark knight.

This dichotomy is one of the show’s great delights. But even at his best, Al remains someone who profits off the backs of girls selling their virtue in squalid conditions to filthy men.

If we’re honest, we identify with Al specifically because his interests are self-serving. It’s the most human part of the human condition—you cannot escape the innate me-ness of life. Little wonder some people think we’re living in a computer simulation, and everyone else (including you and me) are just NPCs to flesh out the experience.

We are each the center of our own universes, and it is through that selfish lens that we view the world. I get annoyed when someone rear-ends my car and saddles me with weeks of vehicular inconvenience; Al gets irritated when news of White folk getting massacred stalls his business. From a certain vantage and with enough distance, they’re the same problems. Crap someone left that we have to deal with.

Even Al’s schemes are conducted with consideration for the trouble they may cause him in the future. He has no qualms conning an East Coast rube out of $14k because that’s just good business. But he draws a line at taking the man’s full $20k because that’s liable to bring the Pinkerton’s sniffing around. As much as anything else, Al is a portrait of constrained greed. He has no loyalty to morality and happily personifies the lawlessness Deadwood is known for, but only to a point, and not in the light of day. He will order the murder of a little girl because he partners with the men who killed her family and that truth would seriously fuck up his action.

This is one of the most interesting things about Deadwood. Even in a place notorious for existing outside the law, there’s a healthy appreciation for order. The survival of the town is predicated on having it.

When I picture a lawless town, I imagine people getting gunned down in the street just for being in the street. Buildings set ablaze. People refusing to say “thank you” when you hold the door for them. Just the most despicable stuff. But you can’t profit off anarchy. So the lawlessness of Deadwood is undergirded by a strict adherence to order. Nobody will bat an eye if you kill someone. But it’s a different matter if the violence portents bigger trouble, like Indians murdering a family on the road to Spearfish. Or the owner of the saloon implicated in said murder.

There seems to be a tacit agreement among the locals: don’t rock the fucking boat. Al’s selfish desire to sustain his own ends often dovetails with the interests of the town. Eventually those become one and the same, completing our inoculation to his means.

But all that is to come.

Deadwood’s order is balanced on the edge of a knife. That’s why everything that happens during the show feels like an existential threat. Anything could push the town into the chaos of true lawlessness. Especially since the people living there aren’t exactly what you’d call well-adjusted. This is precisely why you need someone like Al. Someone mean enough to ensure that when you buy a gold claim or a plot of land, its yours. This need to recreate the concept of ownership in a place without the laws to recognize and enforce a deed is richly ironic, but also telling. Order isn’t just good for business—it’s a vital human need.

Which is why the arrival of two former marshals threatens to disrupt Deadwood’s Jenga-like order.

“Wild Bill Hickok. Nothing can ever be simple.” ~ Al Swearengen

Wild Bill is the one dressed like your grandma’s doily. HBO

Bullock and Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine) are no different than anyone else who chased rumors of gold into the Black Hills. They have a pedigree, and a certain rough sophistication, but under their suits they’re just as lost as the worst ale-drenched wretch sifting for gold alongside streets equal parts mud and manure. Wild Bill is a functional degenerate who exists solely to feed his vices. Bullock seems normal enough until someone pisses him off, which happens roughly every 5 minutes. He’s Jekyll and Hyde without the gothic overtures.

However, it's funny how quickly the old lawman sensibilities kick in.

Here’s how it goes.

Bullock and his partner Sol Star (John Hawkes, severely underrated) have just concluded their first day selling hardware to miners and those cosplaying there as. They decide to take in the town, which more or less means drinking, gambling, or whoring, but only get a couple of steps outside their tent when they come upon a hobo-looking dude sitting on a horse. After awkwardly eyeballing each other, the man mumbles about seeing something horrible on the road.

Hobo: I seen a terrible thing tonight.

Bullock: What'd you see?

Hobo: I seen white people dead and scalped and... man, woman, and children with their arms and legs hacked off.

Bullock: Where? How many dead?

Hobo: Well, it was a whole family on the road to Spearfish. Oh my God, it's them heathens, bloodthirsty savages.

It quickly becomes apparent that this guy isn’t quite right in the head, and also may be a horrible liar and murderer; his empathy is clearly feigned and only offered after the fact. He’s human in the same way that Mark Zuckerberg is—awkward, alien, emotionless, as though he observed humans from a safe distance or took a Humanity For Dummies course, and is just now trying to practice what he’s learned.

Wise to this, Bullock suggests the man get a drink. And then marches him into the nearest saloon, where Wild Bill happens to be playing poker while learning that ‘bosom’ is a fancy newspaper word for ‘tit.’

The hobo just wants to get his beak wet and also some other parts, but Sol loudly and publicly shares the news: White people murdered by Sioux, and there may be a survivor still out there.

Everyone in the saloon stands.

It’s interesting how effectively a feared Other can unite even the sort of people who’d come to Deadwood.

At this point, the hobo has been backed into a corner because Whites getting killed by Non-Whites is an injustice that cannot stand. The hobo makes one last attempt, citing concern for the sanctity of his scalp. Wild Bill personally guarantees his scalp, which is frankly an all-time declaration, one that immediately quiets the hobo’s reservations. Such is Wild Bill’s legend, and his infamy for killing, that his word alone is assurance.

The two former lawmen agree to ride out and search for survivors. Which is more or less what you’d expect if you’ve ever seen a Western. And though I love the heroism of the moment, and the basic decency to look for a little girl who may yet live, I think it’s more interesting that they’re acting in this manner even though they no longer wear a badge, in a place where nothing can ever be illegal because the law doesn’t exist. If nothing else, Wild Bill and Bullock deciding to ride out and face down the dark of night suggests they were the right sort to put on a badge in the first place.

Here’s what always draws me to this sequence.

The group finds the lone survivor, a young girl left unconscious, and brings her back to town. Bullock decides to conclude matters with the hobo, telling him to stick around until the girl regains consciousness. The hobo refuses and tries to draw down, which amounts to suicide via marshal. Bullock and Wild Bill shoot him dead.

Deadwood is a place outside the law. Not even morality holds much sway here. But this crime cannot stand. And so the lawmen execute justice as they see fit.

It’s unquestionably justified. What I find interesting is that the former lawmen care in the first place. Maybe it’s just old habits, but Bullock wants the hobo to be held accountable for what he did. Just like he does in the prologue, he executes sentence, but there’s no longer any color of law under which to take shelter for his actions. Just the morality of the thing, and a need to make things right, or at least a desire to kill the bastard who did it.

It fits in a frontier justice sort of way, and checks the boxes we’ve grown used to seeing in a Western. But it doesn’t fit Deadwood at all. Not really. If anything, this scene fools us into thinking we know this story and will be able to predict the moves it makes. But Deadwood is not that kind of Western.

This is why Al greets the news of Wild Bill’s arrival—and his involvement in killing the brother of Al’s associate—with mild annoyance and growing concern. Not because Al’s up to some shady shit and is afraid of being brought to justice. Such a concept has no currency here. But a famed marshal regulating up and down Main Street will put a serious crimp on the ‘anything goes’ status quo. All roads lead back to Al’s doorstep, which is another way of saying that with Al goes whatever passes for order in Deadwood. Unless you believe Tom Nuttall or E.B. Farnum are up to the task?

Al is more than the town’s mouthpiece and its foremost citizen—he’s Deadwood’s ego. The rational, thinking component of the town’s psyche, in contrast to the innate impulses and dark desires of its id. The town is a reflection of Al, and vice versa.

Here morality becomes less a universal law and more a value judgment, a privilege afforded the kind of people who’d never come to Deadwood in the first place. For Al, morality is a personal proposition weighed out like ounces of gold. Anything can considered for the right price, so long as order is maintained.

Order—not gold—is Deadwood’s most precious commodity. Order is what allows the townspeople to enjoy gold’s perceived intrinsic value; without it, gold is just a pretty rock.

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Okay, that’s now 7k words on episode 1. And there’s still a lot of meat left on the bone.

When I launched this series, it was with the half-formed notion that I would write one article per episode. Not a review, exactly—I don’t think there’s much value in reviewing 20-year-old TV shows—but something that adheres to the episodic nature of the show while also sitting apart from it. We would exist outside of the bounds of time, talking about things that happen earlier or later in the series, but within some context established by an individual episode. Using the curse of foreknowledge to our advantage.

I’d like to move deeper into the show. Nothing outrageous. I hear Episode 2 is nice this time of year. But there are still stones to turn over from the premiere. Crazy but true.

I’ve decided to treat these first three articles as a prolonged intro. From here, I’m going to segue to something that hews closer to the episodes. I’m not sure exactly what that will look like. We’ll discover together. Though I’ve written about pop culture for almost 7 years, I’ve never actually done this before.

I will occasionally detour from the episodic entries to delve into meaty or interesting side quests.

This is all just a way of saying: The next one of these you see will look different, and will come like Raylan Givens putting Wynn Duffy on notice.

One last thing before we part…

This took me over 3 weeks to write—not consecutively, or consistently, but in dribs and drabs as the idea took shape. Not to get all “my writing process,” but I tend to write iteratively, going back over the piece from the beginning every time I open it. I liken it to how a blacksmith folds steel to make it stronger (a fact you probably don’t know unless you’re a history nerd or a D&D geek, or both, like me).

Even though this took a serious commitment of time, I’ve made it free to read.

If you enjoyed this, give it a heart. That signals to Substack that this is good shit, and should be read widely.

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