Deadwood by Grace + 1 Comment

Though I was a fan of both The Sopranos and The Wire on HBO, I was very resistant to watch Deadwood. In part, my reluctance was due to the show's historical inaccuracies--I'm a little bit of a Western U.S. history buff, so they were glaringly obvious to me whenever I caught a clip of it. In part, my reluctance was due to the horrible way I was sure the show would treat its female characters. Even in the modern worlds portrayed in The Wire and The Sopranos, female characters usually get the short shrift on HBO. I thought it would be even worse with Deadwood.

I was, happily, mistaken. Even given the constraints of a show set in an 1870s Dakota gold mining camp, Deadwood's female characters are, for the most part, varied, complete, and strong. They hold their own playing against incredibly written male central characters (most notably Ian McShane's Al Swearengen) and are given the time and opportunity to develop over the show's three-year course.

The show's major female characters are Trixie (Paula Malcomson), Joanie (Kim Dickens), Alma (Molly Parker), and Jane (Robin Weigert). There are also a few notable supporting female characters, namely Jewel (Geri Jewell) and Martha (Anna Gunn). These six women comprise a prostitute (Trixie); a madam (Joanie); a very rich widow, mine owner, and banker (Alma); a drunken cowpoke, gunslinger, and sometime nurse (Jane); a housekeeper with serious physical handicaps (Jewel); and the taciturn schoolteacher wife of Deadwood's sheriff (Martha). Though all of them have ties to men in the show, Martha is the only one whose main purpose in the plot is to serve as an under girding for a male character. The other five women, to greater and lesser degrees, have story lines of their own.

Trixie and Joanie, both of whom begin on the show as prostitutes with unhealthy ties to and abusive relationships with their pimps (Swearengen and Cy Tolliver respectively) each spend three seasons finding a path to independence. Both of them falter, make mistakes, and eventually build both healthier relationships and other careers and interests. While neither woman escapes her history or her pimp completely, the show takes pains to shown growth in these characters. Neither of them is a drug addict, neither has a heart of gold--they are allowed to move outside of the roles usually proscribed for prostitutes. Making these characters' paths even better, what I wrote off as titillation meant for the pleasure of men in the first season turns out to be an actual lesbian relationship for Joanie by the third season.

Alma, too, spends the course of the show moving outside the role she's originally proscribed. She begins as the snotty laudanum-addicted wife of a pompous and stupid man, then morphs into the extremely rich, snotty, and laudanum-addicted widow of same. Slowly, though, Alma gets smart, and she gets brave, and she learns to be a little bit selfless. As is the case with all the other characters, Alma has setbacks--including a brief return to laudanum in Season Three--but from the time of her first husband's death to the end of the show, she is a financially independent woman with her own ideas and the mettle to see them through, a rare species both in a gold camp and on television.

Deadwood's most impressive female character, to my mind, is Jewel. I've written extensively about Jewel elsewhere, so I'll not repeat myself, except to say that Jewel's character is a woman with serious physical handicaps (she's routinely referred to as "The Gimp" or "The Cripple") who demands to be treated as a person and specifically as a woman. The part is played by Geri Jewell with both humor and gravitas. She's the most amazing part of the show, and it would be worth watching for her sake even if nothing else recommended it.

The only female character who really disappoints me in Deadwood is Jane. Though she's meant to be Calamity Jane, the legendary female gunslinger, Jane never shoots, never fights, never does anything much except talk tough and get drunk. The show makes a practice of humanizing Western legends (Wild Bill Hickok in the first few episodes and later Wyatt Earp and George Hearst), which is fine, but it goes too far with Jane. It seems as if her legend was based on nothing but proximity to Hickok. If just once Jane had been allowed to react to a scary situation appropriately, rather than with cowardice, it would have been OK; I waited until the very end of the show hoping that would happen, but it never did. While it is interesting that the female characters who don't have Jane's Wild West pedigree do a better job taking care of themselves than Jane does (particularly the Derringer-wielding Trixie, whom we first meet after she shoots a john who beats her), I still would have liked to see something from Jane herself. Most of the characters in Deadwood are broken and have massive psychological problems, but it is only Jane who seems immobilized by them.

Let there be no mistake--the men in Deadwood are, by and large, misogynists. Horrible things happen to women on this show--abuse, rape, and murder are not uncommon, and the perpetrators as often as not get away with it. It's not easy to watch. However, the characterization of women, in general, is positive and diverse, and that impresses me.

Though the treatment of race on Deadwood doesn't impress me the way the treatment of gender does, it's not bad. There are four significant characters of color. Interestingly, Mr. Wu (Keone Young), the head the Chinese section of the camp and a friend and ally to Swearengen, is the only one featured on HBO's Deadwood page. The other three are all African-American: Aunt Lou (Cleo King), Hearst's cook; Hostetler (Richard Grant), the proprietor of Deadwood's livery; and Samuel Fields (Franklyn Ajaye), an itinerant drunk who wears a Union army uniform and who is referred to in Deadwood as the "Nigger General." None of these characters are major parts of the larger Deadwood narrative, but they each have their own feature episodes, and they are mostly treated very respectfully in those episodes, given the historically racist reality Deadwood is portraying. None of the characters of color are stupid, and Aunt Lou is the only one who plays into a stereotype (Hearst clearly sees her as his "Mammy"). Again, though, bad things happen--this show isn't portraying a nice reality. Fields is nearly tarred and feathered, all of the African-American characters face constant racism, and the treatment of the Chinese is historically pretty accurate in its brutality. This isn't a show for the weak of heart.

All in all, Deadwood is an unlikely and impressive portrayal of women and characters of color. I would have liked to see more featured non-white characters, and I would have loved to see Jane treated more reasonably, but other than that, I have no major complaints with the show on the grounds of race or gender. I give it an unexpected three stars.

Posted by Grace in 3 Stars: Strong Contenders