“Welcome To Fucking Deadwood.”

Deadwood‘s vision of America is not one of reverence to the myths of its creation, but is instead steeped in its casualties, in its shocking brutality, and in its frequent hypocrisy. Leone and Peckinpah were ahead of their time. Their visions of the Wild West were just as “Un-American” in their way as High Noon was over a decade before. Western heroes did not shoot women; they were not people who reveled in violence. Most of all, America and its government certainly could not be seen as complicit in such horrendous treatment of Mexicans, Native Americans, and anyone inconsiderate enough to take those pesky claims of freedom seriously. They were, after all, simply a backdrop to exciting shoot-outs and beautiful scenery.

Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview
There Will Be Blood, 2007

Yet, in being self-critical, in being willing to tear apart the mythology, they showed what is great about America, and the Western. There are heroes here. Heroes who must first realize their frailty, their contradictions, and their cruelty, before they can be true to their ideologies, their jobs, and their families. Deadwood is America, in all its ambition, in its beauty and its imperfections. Deadwood is humanity. We should be better. We can be better.

The 1990s showed us that the Western could be as intelligent and unremitting as Peckinpah intended and still find an audience. Tombstone, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, and the cannibalistic horror of Ravenous all showed that when done right, the Western still appealed to the modern audience. The failure of Heaven’s Gate was not the last word, after all. The mini-series Lonesome Dove, starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones, also certainly paved the way for quality Westerns on television. So by the time Deadwood blew through in 2004, the world was ready to fully appreciate the hard Peckinpah style.

Along with Deadwood, the 2000s would show it in even more explicit detail. The Australian Outback set, The Proposition; the tale of Cowards & Outlaws, The Assassination of Jesse James (By the Coward Robert Ford); the wonderful remake of 3:10 To Yuma; as well as the epic tale of power and corruption and contender for film of the last decade, There Will Be Blood, all showed the scope and popularity of the Modern Western.

In comparison to its cinematic contemporaries, Deadwood is closest to The Assassination of Jesse James in its way of projecting the worst parts of a person and refusing to glorify them, while still empathizing with them. The murder of Wild Bill Hickok in “Here Was a Man,” moves in similar ways. The resolute thought, expressed through his eyes during his last hand of cards, that one day someone would get him, some ugly scrote coward who didn’t have the balls to look him in the eyes, showed a man who knew his time had passed him by.

Where Deadwood was able to surpass these films, and indeed its influences, was in the intensity and the focus with which it was able to look at the genre and time period. Much in the same way as The Sopranos and The Wire, Deadwood showed how television, when released from the childish manacles of network censorship, could be capable of intensely plotted storytelling that was out of the reach of even the best films. Even comparing it to the great Westerns, you feel they somehow fall short in comparison to Deadwood in its bleakness, scope and usage of real world events to tell timeless stories. Nowhere has there been such a sense that the struggles and stories of these people are real. Nowhere has the Western proved itself more capable to address all issues—political, personal, emotional, and spiritual—than in Deadwood.

Deadwood‘s influence, and continuation of the hard hitting Peckinpah style, can be seen in Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption, from 2010. If television allows a much wider scope and running time over which to tell a story, then the symbiosis and interactivity of the videogame allows for the Western to attain unique moments of personal examination.

Red Dead Redemption tells the story of John Marston, a man much like Pat Garrett, pulled into the service of the United States government to hunt down his former friends. It is an ambitious game, with incredible landscapes and intricate stories, all told in that symbiotic way, through the player’s actions. Its conclusion is as affecting a rumination on the futility of revenge, as any within the genre.

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