‘Deadwood’ is more about U.S. now, than then

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On another coach arrives Jack Langrishe (Brian Cox), an actor and the harbinger of a troupe from back East that wants to establish a theater in town — the representation of modern popular culture as another force descending upon the town. "The place," Langrishe says of Deadwood, "is yearning for elevation."

And there is the new bank, run by Alma Ellsworth (Molly Parker) with the help of Sol Star (John Hawkes), a Jew who faces insinuations that became all too common in America — namely that he represents a tentacle of a larger conspiracy of control.

Each of these is an expression of the fears that mass communication produced in Deadwood in the 1870s — and, not coincidentally, is producing in America in the 2000s.

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"The introduction of a new communication technology disrupting established communications networks ... presages what we see today with digital media, wireless networks and the Internet," Shawn McIntosh writes in an essay about Deadwood and journalism in the upcoming book "Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By."

The show's would-be protagonist, the ever-enraged Bullock (Timothy Olyphant), seems perpetually confused as he wanders through town, trying to parse the complicated communications. Though Swearengen has grown into the marquee character, it's hard not to identify with Bullock and his angry eyes gazing out at the bewildering society that swirls around him.

Through its three-year incarnation, "Deadwood" — set on the eve of the telephone's introduction into American society — has become a document of our own times, an era when every other pundit compares the new media landscape to the "Wild West." Can it be coincidence that the ultimate force of evil in "Deadwood" is Hearst, patriarch of a clan synonymous with what many consider the birth of Information Age tyranny?

"Please do not kill me. I am only messenger," Blazanov, the Russian telegraph operator, says when confronted with a loaded gun as he delivers a telegram.

But in the emergent society of Deadwood, and in our own, isn't his kind the most potent threat of all, the breed we absolutely must learn to understand?

"Those who know how to negotiate the old, the new and the between," Sean O'Sullivan writes in another "Reading Deadwood" essay, "are the ones who survive."

True then, truer today.

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