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.

Roland Barthes’ “The Reality Effect” and Leo Braudy’s “The Open and the Closed” have at least one primary focus in common: they are each concerned with details, objects, descriptions that do not carry apparent meaning for the narrative of a story. The presence of these “useless details,” to borrow Barthes’ term, lends a given work—novels for Barthes and films for Braudy—the illusion of reality. Barthes makes this point when he returns to examples of useless details in Madame Bovary cited at the beginning of the piece to arrive at his conclusion: “…Flaubert’s barometer, Michelet’s little door finally say nothing but this: we are the real; it is the category of “the real” (and not its contingent contents) which is then signified; in other words, the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, becomes the very signifier of realism: the reality effect is produced…” (148). In humbler terms, if a detail is noted but that detail does not signify some deeper meaning with the other elements of the story, it’s inclusion now serves no other purpose but to represent reality.

Along the same lines, Braudy uses the inclusion of details like this as the basis for his distinction between two kinds of film, the open and the closed. A closed film contains nothing that does not signify, connect, or relate to something else: “In a closed film the world of the film is the only thing that exists; everything within it has its place in the plot of the film—every object, every character, every gesture, every action” (46). The details in the films Braudy describes here are never useless; they all carry meaning, and they are all created by the filmmaker within the self-sufficient world of the film. An open film, by contrast, suggests that a world exists outside the film and that not everything included in the gaze of the camera is tied to the story. Braudy writes, “In an open film the world of the film is a momentary frame around an ongoing reality… unlike the objects and people in a closed film, the story of the open film does not exhaust the meaning of what it contains” (46-47). (Even though I don’t do it here, I hope we get into the Mungiu film in terms of a world that goes on before and after the film, especially given Mungiu’s comments in the contextual interview about the camera and the characters.)

Returning to useless details, I’m interested in the term reality effect because it already acknowledges the deception or illusion involved in representing reality. This language reminds me of the André Bazin reading because he too is interested in illusion and deception, but I get the feeling that, based on “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” he might object to my outright comparison of Barthes’ reality effect in a novel and the realism of an open film according to Braudy. This objection, in my mind, would stem from the perceived difference in the act of reproducing reality between a writer and a cameraperson. Bazin writes in his article that an image of reality produced by a painter is fundamentally different than an image produced through the technology of a camera: “No matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to an inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a human hand intervened cast a shadow of doubt over the image” (161). He goes on to propose a relative effect of the personality of the artist on the image being reproduced and the importance of the technology of a camera in limiting that effect. “For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man. The personality of the photographer enters into the proceedings on in his selection of the object to be photographed and by way of the purpose he has in mind.” Suppose I were to extend this from painter to writer: is it necessary that a novelist leaves some mark on a useless detail contributed in the name of realism in a way that a filmmaker would not by choosing what to include in a shot? If so, we have an important distinction based on the difference between the means of reproduction and the alleged objectivity provided by the camera.

The lines in the above discussion are blurry to me already, but my grasp on the concepts become even more muddled when I attempt to apply these theories to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, or to distinguish between useless and useful details. For some details I am more or less confident of their uselessness, such as the fact that Palmolive soap gives Gabita dandruff. (A corresponding useful detail from Deadwood would be the fact that Jane has a connection with the little girl that later survives the attack on her family). I see direct parallels between this inclusion of the soap brand and Barthes analysis of a useless detail: “…and in Michelet’s sentence, we have the same difficulty in accounting structurally for all the details: that the executioner came after the painter is all that is necessary to the account; how long the sitting lasted, the dimension and location of the door are useless (but the theme of the door, the softness of death’s knock have an indisputable symbolic value)” (142). Just like the theme of the door, the necessity of a black market in the co-ed dorm for items like soap and cigarettes has symbolic value. But the exact brand of soap, like the “length of the sitting” and the “dimension and location of the door,” signifies nothing except reality.

Specifically, I am confused over a category of details including things like the plastic sheet, the knife, the presence of the police in the hotel lobby, and the fact that the doctor left his ID card at the desk. All of these are details that could have had meaning but didn’t. I’m sure I’m not alone in immediately thinking of Chekhov’s gun when Otilia stole the doctor’s knife from his bag. However, rather than signifying reality and nothing else, this category of details seems to signify the goal of the film as articulated by director Cristian Mungiu in the contextual interview provided alongside the readings and viewings: “Everything we put in the film in terms of style was to show the inner state of mind of this main character. The film is not about what happened: It’s about what could have happened—if the abortionist doesn’t show up, if the police show up. It’s a film about Otilia’s fears. It’s a film about someone with empathy for someone else.” If the point of the film is to tell a realistic story, if a primary goal is to achieve the reality effect, now it seems like this category of details does carry specific meaning for the narrative. Mungiu’s knife is an anti-Chekhov’s gun because, though it doesn’t reenter the plot, it is still a crucial aspect of the narrative about Otilia’s fears that Mungiu sought to capture.

Before wrapping up, I’d like to return to the differences rather than similarities between the Barthes and Braudy readings. Whereas the category of details mentioned above that relate to what didn’t happen seem not to match Barthes definition of details that do not signify, it is this category that to me best matches Braudy’s characterization of an open film. Specifically, I am reminded of Braudy’s competing imagery between the role of the open and closed filmmaker as different kinds of Gods: “If Lang’s films express a world of totally enclosed and self-sufficient meaning, Renoir’s exhibit a garden of potential flowers and weeds alike. Lang is God as the head of the spy ring and Renoir is God as the chief gardener” (49). Mungiu seems to have intentionally placed himself as the second sort of God, where things like his knife and forgotten plastic sheet are weeds, but they are, somewhat ironically, weeds that have been carefully cultivated. And yet, even as I make this distinction between Barthes and Braudy, the idea of carefully cultivated weeds seems to harken back to Barthes emphasis on the illusion of reality rather than reality itself, perhaps almost collapsing the distinction I’ve been trying to draw.

In turning towards class discussion, I have a few discussion questions/thing to bring up. I hope we spend some time on Deadwood and 4 Months comparatively, especially examining the aspects of the first episode of Deadwood that seem to match (or not) the closed film description. I’d also like to bring up the ending of 4 Months and to what degree it feels like Braudy’s assertion that: “The open film ends instead by focusing on the irresolvable in relationships and stories.” We can also bring in what the Ebert contextual review has to say about the ending as either “inevitable” or “anticlimactic.” I have a few additional questions that go beyond what I was able to touch on in the blog post, but I doubt we would be able to/want to get to all of them. What are the implications of the “closed” and “open” discussion on our viewing experience according to Braudy and how does that apply to what we’ve watched so far? How do you reconcile Bazin’s insistence on the mechanical objectivity of the camera with photography and the addition of dialogue or other elements of film (before editing) in cinema that seem more like a painting than a photograph? Can we frame some of the early film viewings we saw as examples of Bazin’s claim that “cinema is objectivity in time”? And can we also explore his suggestion that “the photograph allows us on the one hand to admire in reproduction something that our eyes alone could not have taught us to love, and on the other, to admire the painting as a thing in itself whose relation to something in nature has ceased to be the justification for its existence” (194)? Is it fair, for example, to say that we could consider the mis-en-scène as the photograph in this comparison and the film in total as the painting?