Messrs. Locke and Hobbes Arrive in Deadwood

I’ve been spending my time lately indulging in long ‘DVD weekends’ with my favorite TV shows. Who would have thought that DVD’s would do even more for TV than for film? But that’s the way things have gone with lower quality films lately and incredible TV shows, many of which are serial in nature. And if a serial show gets things right, that means you’re not going to sit down and watch just one episode.

And look at the lineup: The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Desperate Housewives, Lost and on and on and on. If you were too late to catch a series in first run you can catch it on DVD. That’s what happened with me and Buffy. In fact, Buffy’s popularity continues to grow even though the series ended in 2003.

So I’ve just recently caught up on what I missed in Boston Legal’s first season. Then I dove into Battlestar Galactica and got really upset when I made it to the last episode on the last disc. If the disc had been an orange I would have been squeezing it in a press for just a few more seconds of the action. Finally, I turned to Deadwood because I had been hearing a lot about it.

I suspect the main reason acquaintances recommended it to me was because of the swearing. I, ladies and gentlemen, am from Cape Breton where there are swear words you non-islanders have not yet heard tell of. We watch over these words as if they were nuclear plant runoff and we are careful not to expose them to an unprepared public. But when I watched my first episode of Deadwood, I’ll admit I blinked. I looked down the one-hour barrel of profanities and I blinked hard. Repeatedly.

I was home.

But the gold mining camp (later town) of Deadwood felt like home in more than that one way. What I like about the show is that you get to watch creator David Milch’s vision of civilization and community emerge. Yes, the town is full of murderous no-accounts and people who are running from pasts they would just as soon leave under the rock they crawled out from under. But gradually, as the series progresses, you can see the relationships forming, almost against the characters’ wills. His vision of people is that we are hard nosed individualists and yet we can’t help forming communities.

And with that world view he manages to capture the ongoing contradiction in American literary art – the tension between individualism and community. Especially compelling is the slow transformation of Al Swearengen in our eyes. Part of this is character growth, but part of it is also us being allowed to look closer over the time that a TV series allows and see that as much as he wants to be king of this small outpost, he also understands how the world works, how people want order after a while and they also want to be close to other people. Even Swearengen, despite his protestations and occasionally violence, has a soft spot for Mr. Woo, the head of the contingent from China. So even the worst of the worst can have a conscience and a need for being a part of things. Take that Locke and Hobbes!

Milch’s world is a very dark and very optimistic one. He shows us that the brutal period of no government that the philosophers Locke and Hobbes leveraged to bully us into being glad we signed the social contract (even though we must have been drunk when that happened because we had no recollection of it) can be short and productive. At the same time, as these no-account characters gradually take up positions of authority, we might want to turn back a few pages or so in our history books and see founding fathers everywhere as a little less noble and a little more human. Deadwood takes the piss out of the civilizing project and at the same time shows how necessary it is. You’d have to call that a draw.

The series also illustrates how TV can lead a return to the long-form story of the epic poem and the eight-hundred page novel. You can take the time to say the big things and still entertain with one cliffhanger after another. Sure, my anarchist soul might prefer that the citizens of Deadwood refuse to be drawn into power politics and instead form a separate communitarian culture, but as far as television goes this show is still one of the finest examinations of social development I’ve ever come across.

And those bastards Locke and Hobbes wouldn’t have lasted two rings of a spittoon in that place.