Category: Events

Cross-posted with my newsletter.

Book Tour!

Note: contains major spoilers for the TV series Deadwood and discusses the death of a child.

Deadwood, David Milch’s fictionalized and highly stylized retelling of the story of boom town that rose up around a mining camp in what would later become South Dakota, is a deeply problematic show. It depicts racism, misogyny, and violence, among other notable elements. While I would argue that the show depicts these elements, rather than endorsing them, it is a difficult watch. (To pick one example: its failure to meaningfully engage with the Native American peoples who suffered mightily at the hands of colonialism is a massive flaw.)

Despite that, it is, to my mind, the best show of the “golden age” era of television, telling the story of a group of people, many of whom are capable of monstrosity, nevertheless discovering they need each other to survive. Underneath all the violence, language, and nudity is a show about community.

It’s also a show where terrible things routinely happen, and I want to talk about one of those events, because it’s the kind of storytelling choice that I generally find abhorrent, but in Deadwood, I think it works. And the reason it works has to do with the nature of plot and of the tools of characterization.

At the end of the 9th episode of season 2, 8-year-old William Bullock is trampled by a runaway horse. During the next episode, he dies of his wounds. The sequence of events is shocking, even in a series as heartbreaking and unpredictable as Deadwood. While the decision to kill of William was apparently made as a result of behind-the-scenes drama, Milch and the series’ writers take one of my least favorite tropes—a dead child used to motivate our hero—and turn it into something powerful.

To understand how they do that, we need to reflect on the situation the characters find themselves in when the tragedy strikes. William’s parents’ relationship is collapsing. An outsider has committed a series of horrific murders. Political maneuvering threatens everything the town has built; and George Hearst, fantastically wealthy and legendarily cruel (in the show’s depiction; I can’t speak for the historical figure), is on his way to Deadwood, where he will immediately be a threat to anyone and everyone.

This is the moment when poor William dies. Everything about his death, from the timing to the unpredictable nature of it, is devastating. And here is where the show makes the choice that changes this death from what could be just another “fridging” to an event that reveals to us how this community can maybe—just maybe—come together to survive the existential threats it is facing.

To do so, it forces us, and the town, to sit with the horror of what has happened. So shocking and deeply felt is William’s death that daily life in Deadwood shuts down almost entirely. Enmities aren’t forgotten, but they are at least put on hold. Almost the entire town gathers for the funeral, and even Al Swearengen, who doesn’t attend, consents to let the sex workers in his employ join the miners, businesspeople, criminals, and men of the cloth (categories that, in Deadwood, have significant overlap), to pay respect to this boy, the son a sheriff many of them loathe and more than a few of them love.

During the funeral, the camera lingers on faces in the crowd. We see every heartbroken expression, every shattered visage. William’s mother, who has held herself at a remove from the rest of the town, invites everyone into her home for a viewing. Even Swearengen, who can’t bring himself to face the event, is deeply rattled by it. Only a few figures, those who are actively working with Hearst against the town, are set apart from a town that is learning, at great cost, that it is in fact a community.

If the typical death-of-an-innocent trope is about motivating a hero (examples abound, but think of the motivating event in John Wick), then here we have something much rarer: a group of people who have had to live with the daily reality of violence suddenly face something they can’t hide from, a loss even more random and unfair than the show has taught us to expect. And, as people tend to do in a tragedy, they come together. They mourn, they offer each other what words and actions they can manage. What they can offer isn’t nearly enough, but what consolations ever are in such a situation?

Here, Deadwood tells us: sit with this grief. Watch the characters, almost all of whom are complicit in truly terrible things, face the fundamental unfairness of life. Watch them offer what they can to each other. Watch them realize, maybe for the first time, what they mean to each other.

Deadwood is a show packed with plot. But incidents like Williams’s death are rare, because most of the plot proceeds from the terrible logic of characters’ choices. It’s a plot that unfolds by carefully showing us who characters are and allowing conflict to arise from those similarities and differences.

But while plot can be a series of consequences for choices, life itself isn’t always that tidy. That’s one reason why I think of plot less as a series of related events, and more as the results of characters trying to get what they need from each other. Almost every interaction in Deadwood can be thought of in those terms, and when something like William’s death occurs, it forces characters to think of matters beyond their own wants and even needs. It defies the capitalist, everyone-for-themselves logic that most of the shows characters accept, and makes them realize the limitations of that logic.

In lingering over William’s loss, Deadwood rejects easy answers and rote motivations. In bringing its marvelous ensemble cast together to face this tragedy, it hints at the arc of the entire series, an arc that will be defined by this fragile, violent, wildly flawed community, and will show us—and them—why none of our burdens can’t be borne alone.

And if that isn’t a cool alternative to “lone hero” plot-lines that shape so many westerns and so much storytelling advice, I don’t know what is.

Do you have thoughts on Deadwood, plot, or using the deaths of innocents in storytelling? If so, I’d love to hear from you!