Terribly Crowded

It’s List of Giant Things Day! (See previously, Twin Peaks and Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

It’s hard to even know where to start with Deadwood. This could easily be a 1,000-word blog post on any number of things about the show: its fascinating adaptation of a specific time and place in American history, its immense network of characters and plotlines, its distinctive and completely idiosyncratic dialogue, the detailed attention to set design and costume… it overwhelms. Ian McShane’s performance alone deserves 1,000 words.

And in truth, that’s the takeaway experience of Deadwood, a sense of an immense amount of stuff crammed into a relatively small container. The show is set in an American frontier town in what will eventually become Kansas, right at the beginning of Deadwood’s gold boom. Every shot of someone walking down the street overflows with people, mud, horses, signs for new businesses, price lists for food and hardware, laundry drying on a line, broken liquor bottles, piles of newspapers, dogs, sacks full of mail, wagons, stands selling food, two guys in a bar fight that’s expanded outside, women emptying chamber pots from balconies, prostitutes leaning up against porch railings soliciting tricks. Even in the camp’s many indoor spaces, rooms are crammed full of things hanging from the ceilings, things littering the floors, lanterns and glasses and pistols piled up on every flat surface. It’s an aesthetic mirrored in the show’s narrative structure, where a single episode can follow twenty-three characters and five plotlines, and even mirrored in the dialogue, which comes spilling out in arcane obscenities and multiple subordinate clauses.

Swearengen and Mr. Wu discuss business in Mr. Wu's very full meat locker

The dominant impression is perpetual movement. Deals constantly develop which shift balances of power and new characters arrive to con and be conned. The camp itself is always being pushed into a new status, reaching for new technologies and struggling to come part of American statehood. Al Swearengen, played by Ian McShane, may be the closest the show comes to a main character, the owner of the Gem Saloon who has a finger in every pie and oversees nearly every piece of business that enters the camp. And yet even Al can’t keep up with everything: there’s an amazing line at the end of the first season when Al stands looking out of his balcony into the window of Mrs. Alma Garrett, whose hotel room looks straight into his office across the street. The first season begins with Swearengen trying to swindle Mrs. Garrett’s husband by convincing him to purchase a gold claim thought to be worthless. When Mr. Garrett decides he’s bought a bad claim, and Swearengen’s henchman Dan Doherty simultaneously realizes the claim is actually immensely profitable, Swearengen orders Dan to kill Mr. Garrett. Swearengen causes the death of Mrs. Garrett’s husband, the camp sheriff is now in love with her, she’s taking care of a child Swearengen considered murdering to protect the camp from bad rumors, and yet, Swearengen looks at her across the street and says, “Do you know, I’ve never spoken to her once since she come to camp?”

Alma Garrett, seen from Al Swearengen's balcony

It’s astonishing. How is it possible that two characters with such entangled plotlines have never even met each other? A similar moment happens later in season two, when Jane Cannery (better known as Calamity Jane) stumbles into a whorehouse and meets Joanie Stubbs, who has had a great deal of contact with Jane’s best friend in the camp, Charlie Utter. They formally introduce themselves to each other, and it seems remarkable that these women have never met before. It’s an indicator of just how crowded Deadwood really is – the show follows so many different characters and plots that these relatively significant characters haven’t even met, even though they all live practically next door to one another. At one point, as several people all vie for a table at a local restaurant, Mr. Merick actually start to talk about how absurdly full the place is. “It is terribly crowded today. We were just remarking just yesterday that it couldn’t possible get more crowded. And yet today, it is!” Charlie Utter, waiting in a line to get a seat, puts it more directly: “Is it fucking crowded in here, or do you just got some big fucking feet?” he asks the man in front of him. “Maybe it’s a lethal combination of them both.”

There are a lot of crowded shows around these days – it’s become an important mark of complexity, or difficulty, or quality, or something. There probably aren’t that many more characters on Deadwood than The West Wing, The Sopranos, or Lost, and certainly not any more than The Wire. But there are a few things that differentiate Deadwood’s crush of people. For one, many of those shows build their multiple plotlines around something like a thematic unity, or at least make space for self-reflection. The West Wing often does this well: a Thanksgiving episode will unpack that holiday’s significance in American mythology through several interlocking plotlines that allow characters to muse about family, pilgrimage, heritage, history, and turkeys. For many of its earlier seasons, The Sopranos used Jennifer Melfi as a space to allow Tony to reflect on his life and livelihood, which gave viewers the same opportunity to engage in thinking about the show above the level of plot. When there’s a thematic unity or an internal system of self-consideration, the crowds seem much less crowded. Character systems and individual strands of the plot sort themselves into networks and hierarchies, and the inner organizing system is felt, if not seen.

William Bullock and Tom Nuttall examining Mr. Nuttall's new bicycle

Deadwood rarely uses those kinds of self-sorting techniques, and so the jumble of people remains a jumble, often frustrating, but also frequently astonishing. The other characteristic that distinguishes Deadwood’s mob from the hordes in other shows is the total emptiness that surrounds it. The Wire is set in Baltimore, and while the show seems to touch on characters from nearly every segment of the city, the city itself isn’t an isolated space. Characters in The Wire may feel trapped in Baltimore, but the show acknowledges the existence of New York, Annapolis, Washington DC, Philadelphia, all within an easy day’s drive. There is nothing within a day’s drive to Deadwood. People crush together, filling every corner and driving up the price of real estate, but the camp is surrounded by complete wilderness. The crowd is there because it chooses to be, because it’s a camp full of potential on the very edge of political legitimacy. Deadwood is full of people building new streets and hanging signs from every new building, because the throng is self-defining, and because the act of hanging a sign means that there’s something there to be named. On most shows, the mass of characters is a means to an end, allowing the show to incorporate more content and further expand its fictional world. On Deadwood, the crowd is the point.