The theme of 1883 is overstated in its opening scene:
“You speak English. How can you do this?” Elsa cries to one of the scalp-wielding Indians who have just murdered everyone.
“You speak English, and all your people do this,” the very modernist Indian replies.
Did actual Indians defend their own savagery on an intellectual basis of “I learned it from you, Dad!”? Of course not. But Taylor Sheridan and the producers of 1883 feel it necessary to make their fashionable thematic moral ambiguity painfully unambiguous. Let there be no mistake! White man as bad as Red man! We are not white supremacists! Do not deplatform us!
Earlier in the same scene Elsa (Faith Hill) informs us that “this is Hell,” to round out the mission statement. It’s a tired refrain, isn’t it? The revisionist, ‘naturalist’ Western, all shades of gray, most tending to black. Life as Hell. The days of John Ford, John Wayne, of fond reminiscences of American exceptionalism, are long gone. From Sergio Leone to Clint Eastwood to Taylor Sheridan, we keep circling the drain, rewriting our history as grittier, more raw, more ambiguous, less heroic, less Romantic.
Still, a lot of critics on the Right praise 1883 as an antidote to wokeness. 1883 star Sam Eliot amusingly ranted on a podcast about how The Power of the Dog is a piece of shit because it consists of a bunch of gays wandering around in chaps. I’m sure I never want to see that film. But is historical revisionism based on cultural self-loathing any less “woke”, even if everyone is straight? Makes me wonder at the validity of the concept. I prefer to use the more inclusive term “modern”.
I know what you’re thinking: one scene doesn’t define the whole damn show, Mark. Give it a chance.
OK, let’s move on. A badass settler along the lines of John Wick books his family into “Hell’s Half Acre” in Fort Worth, where he proceeds to kill a pickpocket and then a guy who tries to rape his daughter. Why Hell’s Half Acre? That’s like a city block or two, no? He’s even told there are better parts of town, but this is not a show about the better parts, so his daughter must suffer the rapist, however briefly.
Compare to HBO’s 2004 series Deadwood, which also paints this era as a Hellscape, but throws us Romantics a bone in the form of Tim Olyphant’s uncompromising sheriff, who manages to impose some order on a lawless town. Better, we are cleverly forced to love the villainous Al Swearingen (Ian McShane), as ever worse characters roll into town and try to take over, with the effect of making him look ever better in comparison (this sort of onion-peeling arc has a long way to go before becoming remotely cliche). We delight as our hatred of Swearingen turns to love. A typical, tiresome modern robber baron type finally cements Swearingen’s slow ascent to heroism. But we forgive Deadwood its flaws because its characters are not so hip as the Indian in 1883, shedding a tear over lack of recycling or whatever.
Deadwood’s innovations are mostly lost to 1883; Taylor Sheridan is no David Milch. Sheridan does carry on the Deadwood tradition of liberal use of “fuck” as substitute for anachronistic cursing along the lines of “Gol darn it”, which, while more historically accurate, sounds silly to the modern ear.
Working for Paramount+, or Fox or whatever, Sheridan will be given no opportunity to compete artistically with Milch/HBO. This is the belly of the corporate media beast. We are met with a focus group approved trio of tough but fair types: Sam Eliot as a Pinkerton agent with his equally noble colleague, along with the aforementioned John Wick of the West. These 3 will confront the abundant evil lurking in the heart of every man, of every race, creed, and culture, in carefully equal measure, over the course of their journey. It’s clear there will be no Swearingen type character development. I don’t need to see more than episode one.
Our heroes will also confront raw nature, of course, and Sam Eliot will be damned if he doesn’t offer a lecture series on the perils of poison oak and snakes before leading these peacenik Germans to their doom.
Good entertainment - let alone art - is generally lacking, so I understand why people like 1883. Go ahead, give it a shot - it won’t kill you. But critics of the right are being outflanked in the culture wars by this sort of stuff. These shows are intended to impress a sense of history on us. Is our history lawlessness, rape, banditry, murder, rapacious greed, etc.? I don’t think so. But honestly, I’ve been force fed so much of this sort of revisionism that I am not so sure any more.