The Bourgeois Virtues in 'Deadwood': Challenging American Ideology

Abstract

The western is a cultural phenomenon of the U.S., but the genealogy of its ideology—aristocratic honor, courage, and justice—extends back to ages of conquest and stories of heroes like Beowulf, Achilles, and Odysseus. Audiences in the infancy of the western craved an idealism taken from the white knight of medieval kingdoms, a hero known as the cowboy, whom they believed, built the country. Deirdre McCloskey argues that the modern world, not just the U.S., was built on a recasted set of ideals, a bourgeois ethic that is cause of our material improvement over last 300 years. The American ideology that attracts audiences to the western is thus at odds with the ideology in McCloskey’s economic history. Altogether independently, David Milch exploits this mismatch of ideas in the HBO series Deadwood (2004-2006). He creates a world that likewise challenges the ideology that the U.S. was built on aristocratic conquest. The transition from an aristocratic to a bourgeois ethical system plays out in the first 14 episodes of Deadwood, culminating in a classic showdown that the hero in a western must win. The questions are, who is the hero, who is the villain, and how did the hero win?