September Television Series Review

“Deadwood,” from HBO
by Hersius

Finally, we have a western that Goreans can watch without wincing!

American television has a long tradition of presenting sanitized westerns, from the 1950’s episodic programs right up to that recent and embarrassing television movie made by and starring Robert Duvall. In the American television west, trail dust doesn’t seem to stick; rain means getting very temporarily wet but never getting truly miserable; clothes look fresh; good guys are gallant; bad guys currently get killed but traditionally they just got shot but not killed until television grew up a little; sex is absent or perpetually in the courting stages;and language is clean. Thank the PKs for HBO’s Deadwood, which has released Seasons I and II onto DVD.

Deadwood is the adult answer to the Disney-West myths. The protagonists seem to almost live in mud. Their clothes contrast ratty with neat. Gallantry is a community value only as a facade - competition and perceived self-interest are the driving forces. People not only get killed - their bodies get eaten by huge hogs. Nudity and sex - including oral and references to anal - are casually commonplace. The “word of the day” is an expletive.

The storyline is cumulative - it’s a western-set soap opera, only fast-paced. The tale takes place in a settlement that shouldn’t exist. Greedy gold prospectors have trespassed onto Indian lands in violation of US treaty. Their support/predation system of shopkeepers, prostitutes, and gambling houses has transformed a tent camp into a town sporting wooden buildings, dubbed “Deadwood.” As an illegal settlement outside of US state and territorial jurisdictions, the town is subject to no law and has no law of its own. The best thing about this premise is that it is based loosely on a historical place and historical figures.

HBO’s official website provides info on the characters, actors, plot development, etc. Another website discusses which of the characters are based on real people and reveals the degree to which the events depicted take historical liberties. Only The Gorean Voice, however, tells you how Deadwood is a very Gorean show.

A number of Gorean themes arise in Deadwood. Every man is Ubar within the circle of his own knife or gun. People are not only wiley but are downright Machiavellian. Humor often has that touch of irony. The city becomes people’s political identification. Foreign sections exist without any pretext of anyone approving diversity - Deadwood has a Chinatown and has European miners, both of which are looked down upon. Strangers are enemies and indeed, even as strangers craft alliances they remain someone’s enemy since the town remains factionalized underneath some appearances to the contrary.

The characters categorize easily into stereotypes recognizable to fans of the Gor series. The Warrior Caste is analogized by the gunfighters. There is a town doctor and a succession of preachers. The drinking-prostitution-gambling houses remind one of paga taverns. Assassins are employed. Each segment of society acts according to its own rules: miners have their codes, the preachers act as would be expected of them, gunfighters have their own codes, etc. Even the women’s categories are represented: free women are stiff and formal and sexually repressed and are shown courtesy by men; the prostitutes, who are generally indentured and so are not actually free, are sexually open and obey the men and women who oversee them; even the panther girls are strongly suggested by the Calamity Jane character. The more you watch, the more areas you identify with Gorean themes.

Like the Gor series provides a vision of how life could be when lived according to certain biotruths, Deadwood provides a partial retrospective of some of the days and one of the places where people of Earth were given a chance and remembered some of those biotruths. Perhaps the mud and the anxiety about the legality of land title were small prices to pay for another chance at reinventing human self-actualization in what we would call, “Gorean style.”

I wish you well,

Hersius