The juxtaposition of viewings this week naturally lends itself to a discussion of genre and form in Stagecoach and Deadwood. To hone in on a single piece of that discussion, my scrutiny blog post provides a reading of a sequence in Deadwood 1:5 beginning at 34:20 that has parallels to Nick Browne’s analysis in “The Spectator-In-The-Text.” Browne offers an interpretation here of the crucial table scene at Dry Fork’s station that elucidates the way the “implied spectator[’s]” (132) sympathy for Dallas is built from two competing camera setups: Lucy’s gaze and the representation of her perspective. Similarly, Deadwood 1:5 makes use of Alma’s interiority and perspective to advance the viewer’s regard for Trixie, another sex worker in a western drama who takes care of a child while negotiating tension between classes with an upper-class woman. However, the sympathy built for Trixie in the scene I’m examining differs from the way Browne suggests it’s built for Dallas, most obviously by the more complex portrayal of Trixie’s interiority. I’ll mention the three times we see Trixie, Alma, and the orphan child as a framework for a deeper dive into the mechanics of the middle scene. Overall, I propose that, despite the aforementioned similarities between the situations, the “implied narrator” (26) in Deadwood 1:5 weaves a narrative of sympathy for Trixie based on female agency and the moments of intimacy between Alma and Trixie throughout the episode.
Though I am primarily concerned with the second scene in Alma’s room after Trixie arrives, it’s worthwhile to view this scene in context with the ones before and after because each woman has a distinct character arc in this episode during the course of their time spent with the other. We first see Trixie enter Alma’s room at 27:30, and the close-ups of Alma’s face let us know that she finds Trixie’s presence to be awkward. We linger on Alma’s glaring discomfort when Trixie announces that she is not the disabled woman working at Swearengen’s—meaning that Alma can only assume she must be a prostitute. In fact, the only close-ups in the scene are of Alma’s face, here establishing a camera pattern that privileges her interiority. The shots of Trixie are mostly if not exclusively two-shots (either of medium close-ups or medium shots) with the orphan girl, suggesting that the implied narrator is more interested in how Alma sees the two of them together rather than Trixie’s point of view. This pattern is further developed when, in the shot closest to Trixie at 28:23, we linger on an even closer shot of Alma’s face a beat later as she glances between Trixie and child. In this instant, Alma seems to be trying to understand the beginning of the connection she senses between Trixie and the girl that she had not shared with the child herself. The camera exacerbates the intimacy established by the physical closeness of the women in the darkened bedroom, laying the groundwork even as it cuts away from this trio for when we see them again a few minutes later.
This camera pattern established in the first scene in Alma’s room is interesting because of the deviation from it in the second beginning at 34:20. Where we did not see a shot with only Trixie earlier, in this scene we see several medium close-ups and close-ups of Trixie, allowing the spectator access to the moment Trixie’s intent to give Alma the dope waivers. Trixie asks Alma about her symptoms presumably to give herself an opening, and the viewer can see the insincerity in Trixie’s expression when she asks “Does laudanum help?” Then, in the time between close-ups of Alma as she says first “It used to,” and then “It doesn’t anymore,” the camera presents its first close-up of only Trixie’s profile as she considers Alma’s words. When Trixie turns her head to Alma and asks her if she’s afraid, the viewer can sense the beginning of Trixie’s resolve to help Alma as she then makes herself vulnerable by sharing her own experiences with addiction as shown in Figure 1.
Fig. 1. Screenshot from Deadwood 1:5 (34:56)
Though I will not go so far as to establish a fully fleshed-out theory of whose point of view we are seeing in this scene as Browne did in “The Spectator-in-the-Text,” I do have a couple of observations in a similar vein. The first is that closeups and interiority do not automatically equal point of view, and the focus on Trixie’s profile when she is wavering gives us something different than the gaze at Dallas’ reaction when she is being judged by Lucy shown (see fig 2). With Dallas, Browne suggests that we are looking at her from Lucy’s eyes, and we as the spectator are able to read and sympathize with Dallas’ emotions in a way that Lucy either ignores or does not note. He writes, “Though I share Lucy’s literal geographical position of viewing at this moment in the film, I am not committed to her figurative point of view. I can, in other words, repudiate Lucy’s view of or judgment on Dallas, without negating it as a view, in a way that Dallas herself, captive of the other’s image, cannot” (133). In other words, this gaze for Lucy is one of derision, but what the spectator sees makes them disagree with that assessment.
In a parallel shot of Trixie from the eyes of Alma, there is more going on. The spectator is aware of the elements of the plot and can read into the look the flash of indecision (see fig. 3). Again, the spectator sees more than the upper-class woman whose gaze they are trapped in—it’s similarly true that “our feelings as spectators are not ‘analogous’ to their interests and feelings of the characters” (133) — but that contrast does not necessitate disagreement with Alma’s perspective. Instead, this scene collapses the distance physically and emotionally between the two women (and the spectator) including class difference and their own unique motivations. In this shot/reverse shot conversation, the child is removed from the camera’s view as the point of empathy between women becomes more personal than mutual care of an orphan child. Where Dallas was a victim of the society that excluded her and Browne argues that the audience pitied her for the way the camera framed that exclusion, the camera here seems to highlight Alma’s gradual identification with Trixie as a recovering opiate addict.
Figure 2. Screenshot from Stagecoach (28:33)
Figure 3. Screenshot from Deadwood 1:5 (34:38)
My second observation on camera point of view relates to the full shot (see fig. 4) immediately following Trixie’s lines about being free from opium, and it explores the significance of the distinction between public and private spaces in these competing scenes. The intimate connection between the two women and the viewer is shattered when the camera cuts to the full shot of the three of them, bringing the child back into the scene and providing relief from the intensity for the spectator. Alma mimics that distance on the part of the viewer by looking away from Trixie’s gaze, signaling that she is the one to have created the distance emotionally. Full shots in the Stagecoach table scene, according to Browne, signal the perspective of society, and especially Lucy’s notion of that social order. He writes that the second setup of shots not tied to Lucy’s gaze “shows a field of vision that closely matches Lucy’s conception of her own place in that social world: its framing corresponds to her alliance with the group and to her intention to exclude the outsiders, to deny their claim to recognition” (131). The resulting empathy with Dallas depends on the view of the other people in the room and the performance of class delivered by Lucy.
By contrast, in Alma’s dimly lit bedroom with only a child who cannot even understand the conversation she overhears, the privacy of the moment allows the women to relate to one another in a way they would not be able to had they met in public where Trixie must show allegiance to Swearengen and Alma blames him for the death of her husband. Whose view is it then in the long shot where Alma looks away from Trixie? I might suggest that it belongs to the implied narrator as a neutral perspective with insight into both characters’ thoughts here rather than linked to the dominance of one character. Furthermore, the implied spectator is significant as the only other observer of this intimate exchange before Alma changes the conversation to something less personal. But I think there’s also room to propose a similar argument as Browne by implying that this full shot is still Alma’s perspective, but that the class distinction coded into the relationship between them has a different function here and is not something Alma is outright concerned with perpetuating in this scene.
Figure 4. Screenshot from Deadwood 1:5 (35:01)
Leaving that up for debate, I’ll mention the final scene with these three because it shows the trajectory of the women’s character arcs in this episode as resisting (but not necessarily overcoming) the things that oppress them and points to how those things are tied to gender. At 52:50, Trixie hands Alma a cup of tea with powder from Doc that might help her withdrawal symptoms while the camera makes a note of the marks on Trixie’s neck put there by the abuser she shot in the first episode. It’s no accident that the spectator is reminded of a physical symbol of Trixie’s abuse as she acts to defy Swearengen’s commands. Through the cuts between the close-up of Trixie’s profile, the extreme close-up on the tea, and the zooming out from the tea to a close-up on Alma, we switch focal points. If Trixie’s arc in this episode is her claiming some measure of agency by undermining her pimp, then Alma’s is taking the first steps simultaneously towards accepting Trixie and towards recovery. Alma looks up at Trixie when she accepts the tea, the only time in the episode when Trixie stands over her. Immediately after, Trixie returns to the floor to play with the child; she doesn’t hesitate to position herself on the orphan’s level and beneath Alma’s in this episode, but when Trixie was caring for Alma, exhibiting agency, Alma looks up, signaling that her estimation of Trixie has grown even if she doesn’t fully understand the significance of Trixie’s action the way that the spectator does.
Further discussion on these moments might continue speculation about the point of view of the camera and the position of the spectator. It might also include a comparison of the notion of insider and outsider between Stagecoach and Deadwood. Browne builds a contrast between “Lucy, an insider, a married woman and defender of custom; and Dallas, outsider and prostitute who violates the code of the table” (139). In Deadwood, this structuring of society is more complicated. When Alma’s husband was alive, the couple’s position was of outsiders in the society internal to the town. After his death, Alma, now a much more interesting character (or at least one with more agency now that she makes her own decisions), seems to be more a fabric of the town than she ever was before, even as she tries to untangle herself from it in this episode. Trixie would seem to be an insider in Deadwood due to her proximity to Al Swearengen in a way that Alma never could be, but the abuse and oppression she experiences show that this position as an insider does not offer her any advantages. In any case, the shared genre and story elements between the two narratives contrasted to the extreme distance of time and cultural values in which they were produced offer rich grounds for comparison on the role of the spectator and the construction of empathy for characters.
Works Cited
“The Trial of Jack McCall.” Deadwood Season One: Episode Five. Created by David Milch, performances by Molly Parker and Paula Malcomson, HBO, 2004.
Stagecoach. Directed by John Ford, performances by Louise Platt and Claire Trevor, Walter Wanger, 1939.
Browne, Nick. “The Spectator-in-the-Text: The Rhetoric of Stagecoach.” Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, pp. 125-140.