The House Next Door

Jesus, man, that post was almost as long as the Godfathers and Deadwood 1 and 2. I'm gonna digest this for awhile before commenting further, but here's hoping that there's nothing Godfather 3-ish about Deadwood's finale.

...but here's hoping that there's nothing Godfather 3-ish about Deadwood's finale.

I must second that.

The part about viewership dropping off from the first season to the second kind of suprises me. I can't imagine subscribing to HBO and not watching Deadwood. Who knows the mind of an HBO subscriber though, and I include my own.

Sir, your noble effort has brightened my day and given rise to my near erotic anticipation of the coming season.

How fucking wonderful is that.

Cheers, and thanks.

Of all the major pop culture works influenced by the "Godfather" films, this is the one that most deserves extended comparison. The series learned a lot from Coppola, and I think in some ways -- particularly the portrayal of women, a subject tackled in Todd VanDerWerff's essay -- it's a huge improvement.

I also can't help noticing that a major component of the "Godfather" pictures alluded to in this piece -- the wedding/baptism sequence and other similar setpieces -- gets replayed, rethought and recontextualized in many episodes of "Deadwood." I'm talking about rituals (often public) intercut with bits of private business, some of it sinister, some mundane. The most obvious example that springs to mind is in the Season Two finale, which cuts away from the reading of Alma and Ellsworth's wedding vows to show silent footage of Wolcott writing his suicide note, Al finalizing the Yankton deal with Hugo Jarry, etc. Both Coppola and Milch are genuflecting in the same direction, using montage and dialogue-as-voiceover to suggest how individual lives intersect with, and affect, other individual lives, even if the individuals themselves don't realize the depth of connection.

My attempt to post a response earlier today got gobbled up in the blog-o-sphere, but Matt has seized upon the key issue I was gonna champion. As Coolidge famously pronounced, "the business of America is business" and the world of enterprise is what both Coppola and Milch have used as their work's organizing agents. Americans, and particularly American males, largely define themselves by the work they do. In these two monumental works, the folks in these two worlds are all business, in every sense of the word, and their sense of self-worth is closely tied to their actions in the public realm. The men also have to constantly balance private interests with public concerns, and are often tormented by the decisions this forces upon them. This is not necessarily a natural dichotomy, I hasten to add. Plenty of us are able to do things that are right for both ourselves, our families and the rest of our community without facing terrible dilemma. But in the Godfather films and Deadwood, this is a little trickier, for a number of reasons. Both movies give us people who are already in exile of sorts-- outsiders, immigrants, whatever--and are somewhat more likely to be driven by self-interest, and to have less of a stake in committing to the community at large. So, as Al et. al. (heh), and Vito, Michael and his family, pursue their business interests, they are also keenly aware of how these interests must be weighed against those of the larger community outside their metaphorical doors. It makes for a fascinating critique of the American business world, as the (again mostly) men in both worlds are in many ways prototypical of American ingenuity, entrepreneurship and enterprise. And they are also a pair of ruthless and homocidal bastards. Welcome to Fucking America! Er...I mean Deadwood!

One big difference, though, between the "Godfather" pictures and "Deadwood." The former suggests that it is impossible for a bloodthirsty criminal to ever truly go legitimate, no matter how much distance he puts between himself and those he exploits or kills. On "Deadwood," though, there are a number of characters on the wrong side of the law who are in the process of going legit -- there are at least three huge examples in the Season Three premiere, which I won't reveal here -- and not only does Milch not judge them for it, he seems to be cheering the process on.

Agreed. Deadwood argues that a person, not matter how filthy, lying and thieving a cocksucker s/he is, can be redeemed. Nobody knows that better than Milch himself.

The Godfather saga has really come to epitomize the morality found in the American Crime Film genre. You can become rich and powerful and successful beyond your wildest dreams but in the end you have to suffer for it (see The Public Enemy, Scarface, Goodfellas, etc…) What’s so startling about the way The Godfather handles this is it withholds Michael’s punishment until the third act of the second film, even though the mechanics behind his fall from grace were put in place years earlier. Had there never been a sequel to The Godfather, and the saga simply ended with Michael happily inheriting a criminal empire, having vanquished his enemies and attained complete and total power, I wonder how time would have remembered the film. Are we conditioned to see our monsters suffer and can we stomach it when they don’t?

Furthermore, his suffering is more of the rotting from within, existential, “what have I become” variety that can be seen as a corollary to the more recent seasons of “The Sopranos.” As I touched upon in my article, Michael’s descent only truly begins when his reach exceeds his grasp and he spurns the “ethics” put in place by his father; when he puts business ahead of family. Compare the way Vito passes away in the first Godfather with Michael’s own death in the third one. One, a happy man in retirement, playing with his grandchild in his garden, the other with no family to speak of, keeling over with zero fanfare against a desolate backdrop.

I think “Deadwood” on the other hand avoids making judgment calls against the crimes and morality of its characters because there is a lingering affection for what was required (good or bad) for the country to be built. Land was stolen, throats were cut, and bribes were used to sweeten the pot. The pioneer spirit has pretty much been wiped from the public’s consciousness as we mostly like to think of white guys in powder wigs drafting documents when we think of the birth of the nation, and Milch and company admire men like Swearengen who fight for legitimacy, sometimes at the end of knife. What’s interesting is the introduction of Hearst ostensibly as the series’ antagonist who really mirrors Al and his methods in several ways, yet our sympathies are clearly against him (I realize I’ve seen parts of season three while most here haven’t, but I think this is all pretty-well setup by the events of season two).

At first I thought this was because the show had placed him opposite Swearengen in a power struggle and my allegiances were simply with Al, but the more I thought about it, Hearst’s methods that is, the more I realized it was something else. With his workforces of faceless, voiceless foreign laborers, buying up claims and pushing out some of the more colorful characters (thank God the show found use for Pruitt Taylor Vince) Hearst’s goal is to make the town a sterile, personality-less place of industry where the only thing that matters is results. Strip-mine it as quickly as possible than breeze out of town. Even Hearst’s manner of speech is more clipped and to the point. Al and the gang represent the baroque, messy, hang-dog face of “Deadwood” that’s very much in danger of becoming extinct.

It would seem the greatest sin one could commit is to try and take our Deadwood away from us (anyone know if Gerald McRaney looks anything like Chris Albright?)

Great post.

I wouldn't have thought to compare Godfather to Deadwood, but you make it seem blatantly obvious.

There was an item in Time magazine when The Sopranos started its fifth season (I think) about how television, especially cable, had essentially captured the spirit of '70s filmmaking in America, taking neglected genres and turning them on their ear (Sopranos = mob drama, Deadwood = Western, ostensibly, The Wire = cop show).

I don't know how much I agree with that (there seems to still be little room in television for, say, a Cassavetes), but I think there's certainly a degree of FREEDOM in the corporate product produced for television that there isn't in the corporate product produced for film (by and large).

Of course, this is all skewed by the fact that if you don't want to watch the truly AWFUL stuff on television, DVDs and TiVo have made that easier and easier to do. Whereas if you go to see a film and you choose a bad one, you can't switch over to something else (well, you're not supposed to) so easily.

Ben Livant, my writing doppelganger, and I had a conversation about this post. Here's Ben's initial reaction to Andrew's article, to be followed immediately by my response. And then Ben. And finally Dan.

"Dan,

I have read Dignan's comparison of Deadwood and the two Godfather films as well as the various responses to it posted by the other contributors. As you could have predicted, I cannot refrain from commenting myself. I will first attend to the comparison with respect to form and then proceed to content.

Regarding the formal comparision I have two points. The first is that Deadwood is a series whereas Godfather II is a single sequel to a film that initially was made to stand alone in its own right. This is not to suggest that Dignan does not unpack some dramatic and stylistic parallels in his comparision that are convincing. And insofar as some of these are compelling and illuminating, it would be reasonable to reckon that Milch was not merely cognizant of Coppola's classic but actively influenced by it while making Deadwood. Be this as it may, however, it remains that Milch has necessarily crafted his programs to meet the demands of a series. Coppola did not. I have previously compared the formality of a cinematic series to periodical narration in print, so I won't develop this too much here. Suffice to recall that the series or periodical demands a kind of elasticity in the story enabling it's elongation. (Charles Dickens provided genuine closure, of course, having too much artistic dignity to jump a shark). Contra this, a sequel is, what exactly? Usually it is just an excuse to "do it again," squeeze a few more golden eggs before people decide it's all so much goose shit. But in the case of Godfather II, we are dealing with an extension - not an elongation - an extrapolation on themes only given cursory treatment in the first film. Dignan is correct that Godfather II is more intellectually challenging than the original, but at the same time it is so because Coppola was provided with the opportunity to respond to himself, deepen his perspective and raise the profundity stakes of the project as a whole. "As a whole" is the key formal issue here. Coppola's achievement - singular in the history of film? you tell me - is that his sequel is in effect not a sequel at all but a true "part two" or "second act" in which the first installment is contextualized at a higher level, is essentially explained by it, and the work as a whole is indeed a whole work of art. (I have not seen Godfather III and never will.) With all due respect to the "loftier ambitions" of Deadwood's second season, identified as such by Dignan, nothing of this sort is happening and simply cannot happen given the nature of the form in which Milch is story-telling.

My second point concerning the difference in form between Deadwood and Godfather has to do with the much celebrated language of the former. Again, we have knocked this around quite a bit already with respect to varacity and style. All I mean to mention now is that the poetics employed by Milch are entirely absent in Coppola's two films. The Godfather dialogue is straight out of the scenes depicted, which is to say absolutely committed to realism of the most linguistically disenchanted, ruthlessly prosaic sort. It is true that watching The Godfather brings Macbeth to mind but this does not include Shakespear's language.

I turn now to content. And for this I aim directly at the ideological heart of the matter. Dignan and some of the other contributors too are right to see similarities in how American capitalism is portrayed in a domestic, historical setting. Sort of. Up to a point, but no further. We can debate the degree to which Deadwood offers an ethical judgement of what it describes and further what that judgement might entail. But when it comes to The Godfather - we are hit up side the head by critique! That Coppola was pretty much a Maoist in the early 70s, nevermind, biographical ad hominem argumentation is not required. The film is throughly saturated by a condemnation of the system and its discontents. On this score, I feel some of the blog conversation misses the point when certain contributors attend to the distinction between criminal-illegitimate and legal-legitimate activity in the political economy as displayed by The Godfather. One of the central messages of the film is that this distinction is illusory and serves entrenched power, institutionalized gangsters, the ruling class, pick your term. Indeed, it is precisely this quasi-Marxist critique that Coppola was only able to explicitly advance in the sequel and it must be read back into the first film. It is something of a miracle that he had the commercial clout to advance such an ideological agenda and it is a testament to his political-artistic integrity (way back then) that he went for the guts of the beast.

Milch and company are simply not on this level. The comparison breaks down. I can establish this by referring to Dignan. He observes: "Michael Corleone, like Al Swearengen, is forced to adapt to 'progress' which, as we learn, is as devious and challenging as barbarism." Now, I think so-called progress requires more of a critique than calling it devious and challenging but I follow that Dignan is correctly weaving a braid of progress and barbarism. And he is right that Micheal and Al are similarly compelled by certain structural forces. But there the commonality ends. As Dignan himself points out:

Michael’s grasp for power and inability to trust those around him dooms him to a life of solitude and misery, Al proves to be a forward-thinking pragmatist, sacrificing personal gain in the form of a spurned bribe to help insure the lasting legitimacy of a newly rectified charter. Michael is insistent on moving against those who have wronged him, but men like Bullock and Swearengen put aside their differences, placing the strength of the camp above all else.

Set aside what may or may not constitute forward-thinking pragmatism, Dignan is right that for all his individualism and viciousness, Al is also community-minded, a de facto public official with a genuinely social outlook. (He is Machiavelli's Prince, contrary to misconceptions of Machiavelli.) This makes Al objectively, behavioristically, a much more complex character than Michael. Subjectively, inner-psychologically, Micheal is as complex as, well, Macbeth. But his demonstrated conduct is completely one-dimensional. That's the point! And Dignan implicitly gets to this when he declares that "Michael ceases to be human." But the deeper point, past character to theme, is accessible if we recognise that Micheal is categorically representative or symbolic of the ethos or rationality of the capitalist system. When he has Fredo executed, his own brother, this echo of Cain and Abel is reverberating in the chamber that the so-called free market built. This is the ultimate signal. The Sicilian immigrant family was excluded from mainstream opportunity in the status quo, hence the Mafia and Al Capone is as American as Apple Pie. But by the end of the second act of The Godfather, the family has canibalized itself, just a little too good at doing business, and all that remains is money; bloody, clean, it doesn't matter any more.

I enjoy Deadwood tremendously. It is a remarkable show and I eagerly anticipate the third and final season. Still, I have focused some serious attention on The Godfather in order to argue that Dignan's comparision is valid but only in a relatively superficial way. I will concede that Deadwood is refreshing for not moralizing while simultaneously giving us solidly humanistic and culturally respectful treatments of its subject matter, but the historical development of capitalism in America is taken for granted, naturalized or ontologized, whereas in The Godfather, it is exactly this historical development that is highlighted for critique."

And my response:

"Ben,

And we can go back and forth all day regarding which (I or II) is the superior film. On the one hand, pt. 2 IS bigger and is more clearly on the attack. Gone is the myth-making of pt. 1; this is the real shit. On the other hand, this same scope results in just a hint of narrative flaccidity (!) whereas pt. 1, while not quite as sophisticated, is about as tight as a film can be.

In the end, I prefer not to choose. And I am pretty sure you are right; if there are any two films that achieve this same level of greatness, I certainly have not seen them.

Anyways, while I may quibble with you about the level of systemic critique in Deadwood, you'll get no argument from me that the first two Godfather films aim higher and cut deeper than Deadwood. Part of the problem with determining whether Deadwood has any real critique is in the nature of the television series format. You can't help but grow attached to characters like Al; he's one charismatic cocksucker. I sure as hell don't wanna see him terribly punished, even though he's doing some pretty terrible things. But Al does balance private interest and public concern in a way that Michael doesn't; I touched upon that a bit in my response to Dignan's post. Al's complexity is also a reason that you don't want to see him too terribly punished, and why all of Deadwood (and its audience) seems to hold its collective breath when his death appears imminent (In these ways, the characterization of Al actually reminds me much more of Vito than Michael. As Coppola was for much of G1, Milch is myth-making.) Anyways, just how critical can you be when you've hitched your wagon to that sorta magnetic star? In the end, probably not terribly much."

Then Ben:

"Dan,

I think you are right to designate G1 as mythmaking as long as I get a couple of (coupla, Coppola) qualifications down on this. First, what do we mean by "myth" here? I certainly want this to mean more than what cultural anthropology and literary studies have in mind. I take it now to indicate an historical account intended to not just explain the origin but also politically validate the existence of the subject. In other words, ideology. G1 is the American Dream in negative relief. This holds even without reading G2 back into it. However, I insist on the latter and this is my second qualification. Because doing this exacts yet a further negative relief of this negative relief, which is to say that the American Dream is not merely given it's dark underbelly, the Dream is turned completely inside out, revealed as the American Nightmare, so to speak. These dialectics are understood by me to be contained in the term "critique," which I use with a German sensibility.

As for which is the better FILM G1 or G2, I reject the question outright. If the films had been made even half a decade apart, but they are so chronologically close to each other, hell man , even the Academy realized they were two parts of one picture and awarded both parts.

The comparable lack of critique in Deadwood is not the result of the series format. It is due to the fact that ultimately Milch is not out to make a radical statement. You say you think Al is objectively more appealing than Michael, that Al reminds you more than Vito. But Michael is the inevitable product of Vito. All you are saying is that you like the myth of the early growth years, when the business was successful in an open competitive market; whereas you dislike the disclosure of the imperial expansion years, when the enterprise becomes monopolistic without any fetters on accumulation. Vito is the pre-Michael, Michael is the post-Vito. Milch's Al is just not located in this negative development model. Honestly, if the town residents put up a statue in his honor after he dies, it will be credible.

Then - Ben"

And finally Dan:

"Ben,

This is indeed what I mean by myth making; I'm talking about the stuff that gets to the core of who we are and what we do, I'm not simply gussying up a word like "meme" or "trope." G1 establishes the grand, operatic themes, the archetypal characters, and G2 shreds them. You are probably right in suggesting that Milch is not interested in shredding his characters or the industrious world of Deadwood, but he certainly doesn't shy away from some pointed criticism of the whole endeavour. And I still maintain that serialized television makes demands that a self-contained movie (or two) does not. With a film, we're willing to allow a central character to become so depraved and beyond redemption that he simply must die. After all, we know going in that we're only in it for a couple of hours. But with a series, these people become like family members, people we hope to hang out with for a long time. Dozens and dozens of hours. So they have to be redeemable, there has to be enough complexity in the character to allow us to continue to hold out some hope. Otherwise, people stop watching. And the series goes kaput. Like Deadwood. Errr....ummm...shit."

I strongly disagree that Milch doesn't critique capitalism. He does, and he makes its effects plain, economically, politically, socially and racially.

"The Godfather" pictures only seem more radical if you share Coppola's college Marxism, which to me is one of the weakest aspects of that trilogy. Coppola's movies insist on the hypocrisy of that economic system as practiced in America; Milch acknowledges the hypocrisy as well, and notes ruthlessness with the same acuity as Coppola, but goes further, suggesting that what we're seeing here is human nature in action, and the economic system is just a means to an end, the acquisition of power. It's the drivers on the road who interest him, not the road or how it's constructed.

Milch likens capitalism to an extension of the biological urge to conquer, acquire and reproduce, and has no illusions about it at all. Women are sold like sheep on this show, there's a racial/ethnic pecking order, and Hearst himself even says, in one of the Season Three episodes, that all he cares about is "the color," i.e. green. There is nothing soft or approving in the show's presentation of capitalism. It's Hobbesean and completely unsentimental. Dickens had a similar outlook. And no other series on television, and very few American films made after about 1975, dare lift up the shiny statue of the capitalist mythology and show the bugs wriggling beneath.

I have a problem with the idea of critiquing capitalism, at least as the word "critique" is deployed in Ben's comments. It suggests a definitive and delimiting perspective, a boiling down, a summary and final word -- Coppola's strategy in the first two films, at least.

"Deadwood" is more open ended, even ragged, and more complex and mature on this point. It doesn't say, "capitalism is a bad thing," or "capitalism is problematic," but rather, "capitalism is the system under which this town, and America, operates -- now sit back while we present an unvarnished view of its potential for economic/social advancement, and also vicious, systematic repression. (The vast majority of women and minorities on the show are either low-caste workers eking out a precarious living, or de facto slaves, particularly the prostitutes, who are basically indentured sex servants ruled by figurative bad daddies; Native Americans are shut out almost entirely, the lowest caste of all -- just bogeymen that the powerful deploy to scare the populace into embracing a course of action that might not be in their self-interest.

There is nothing sentimental about Milch's depiction of capitalism, and for that matter, nothing approving. This is a western, but it's not just about the American west, or America. If more or less the same story were set in a once-lawless town in Russia circa 1930, or China, or Zambia, the cultural details would change (particularly the details of politics and economics) but the characters would require no real alteration, just translation.

Compare this with the "Godfather" movies' critique of capitalism -- which is America-specific and less expansive, given the format -- and I have to give the contest to Milch.

Granted, Milch has an unfair advantage coming 30 some years after the first two "Godfather" pictures, which were made at a time when a particular brand of collegiate Marxism was finding its way into American films. But I agree with some 70s criticisms of both films that Coppola's "critique" of Marxism is the least rich, least resonant aspect of his masterworks.

Which isn't to say there aren't biting, relevant observations in there. ("Now who's being naive, Kay" is still a chilling line, and I love how all three movies disabuse Americans of any received wisdom about America being an inherently decent and caring place, or that there was some golden era when we were all innocent.) It's just that many of his larger points and specific images -- the conflation of gangsterism and capitalism, the scene with the gold telephone being lovingly passed around in "G II," the macho sentimentalization of Castro's rebels in the same film, etc -- seem dated and vague to me now, and not indicative of the complexity and contradiction of capitalism itself.

The "Godfather" movies are powerful and convincing when discussing morality and ethics in context of the individual, the family and the larger society, but the films' treatment of capitalism is not nearly so multifaceted. In fact it sometimes strikes me as verging on glib.

The obvious way to counter this argument is to say that Coppola's observations about capitalism are integrated into the fabric of the pictures. Fair enough. But I still find those observations less provocative, less insightful, frankly less brilliantly illuminating than the other aspects of these prismatic classics.

These admittedly mild misgivings do not hamper my appreciation of the films, and I don't think they detract too much from the films' overall quality (I ranked them number 1 and 2 on a recent list of the best Oscar winners of all time). But Bertolucci, Bunuel, Kurosawa, Tati, Kubrick and probably a solid dozen other directors in Coppola's weight class are more original, nuanced and convincing on this subject than Coppola. It's the only major area of the trilogy where I feel as if he's not doing his own homework and coming to his own private, idiosyncratic conclusions, but rather repeating something he read somewhere.

Also -- Yeah, Deadwood would put up a statue of Al. And we would be expected to have mixed feelings about it.

PPS -- How, exactly, is Milch's attitude toward Swearengen less complex than Coppola's attitude toward Michael? I think Milch clearly has the edge here. To the end, Michael remains representative of certain attitudes, a certain type of man, a certain view of masculinity itself. Sweareangen is just Swearengen, and all the contradictions and complexities flow out of his essence as a man.

That he changes over time, and becomes more sympathetic, is a direct result not of TV writers' bad habits (wanting to make everyone lovable) but the theme of the series itself: civilization displacing barbarism, and what that process does to violent men.

As you've both indicated, "Deadwood" and the "Godfather" pictures are apples and oranges, but it's still fun to compare them because they spark discussions like this. Also, I don't think Andrew ever intended the piece to argue that the two works were exactly the same, or that they were even trying to make the same points about this or that subject, just that there were similarities in plot, characterization and aesthetics that made a comparison instructive, so that we can see how one work flows out of, and owes a debt to, its predecessor.

Ben has asked me to post this response:

Matt does not oppose the thesis that The Godfather is informed by a Marxist perspective. What he opposes is the idea that this perspective is a vital factor in the excellence of the film. This perspective Matt disparages as “collegiate,” which he attributes to Coppola explicitly and myself implicitly. I won't take umbrage with this because in my original comment I referred to the “quasi-Marxist critique” in The Godfather. So Matt and I agree that the Marxism under discussion is at best theoretical and peripheral and at worst academic and chic, (in the early 70s, that is...was).
But this is really neither here nor there. Because what's really going on is that I'm all for some sort of Marxism, whereas Matt is having none of it. I could accept this as the ideological divergence that it is except that Matt wants to have his cake and eat it too. In keeping with the supposedly post-Marxist present, he suggests that Deadwood provides a critique of capitalism not merely equal to but in fact surpassing that provided by The Godfather.

But just look at what is subjected to critique in Deadwood according to Matt. In order:. “Human nature in action,” “the biological urge to conquer,” sexual, racial and ethnic oppression with particular attention to the (albeit imprecisely indicated) indentured servitude of female prostitutes, monetary greed as such, Hobbesian brutality, more about cultural oppression, and the generality of “the lawless town” in any national context.

Now, my Marxism may be merely of the school-boy sort, but it seems to me that none of this directly addresses what The Godfather directly addresses; namely, “the ethos or rationality of the capitalist system,” to repeat myself. I do not mean to exaggerate the Marxism in The Godfather. It's not as if it penetrates to – oh no, how unfashionable! – the class struggle. No, that's why the critique is quasi-Marxist. It projects capital accumulation manifested as corporate growth onto the personal psychological dynamics of the corporation's chief executive officer. Not a word about the exploitation of the workers. In this respect, The Godfather is as much a fetish of capital as a critique of it. But to develop this thesis would lead me too far astray from Deadwood as well as necessitate more interest in and respect for Marxism than I suspect this forum is prepared to sustain. The point at hand is that most of what Matt identifies as being Deadwood's critique of capitalism is, in fact, not directed at anything we might designate as fundamental, structural, call it what you will, about the system.

Matt objects to what he takes to be my conception of critique, which he dislikes for being “a definitive and delimiting perspective.” I counter that I find his notion of capitalism to be entirely undefined and unlimited, which is to say, a sort of postmodern indeterminate object wherein it becomes impossible to recognize what is capitalist about capitalism, never mind criticize it. This is especially evident when it comes to what I regard to be the strongest aspect of the critique in The Godfather and what I do not see at all in Deadwood. I am thinking now of the recognition of capitalism as a historical process. In The Godfather, the family is a corporation and we see it evolve, as I mentioned to Dan previously, through the competitive market phase to the monopoly capital phase. In Deadwood, the historical development of the capitalist system is entirely invisible, taken for granted, naturalized or ontologized, as I put it previously. Matt confirms this when he says that for Milch, “it's the drivers on the road that interest him, not the road or how it's constructed.” The history we are shown in Deadwood is – for all its politically correct identity politics and rough grit – a sort of birth of a nation account that the Chamber of Commerce could screen with pride.

I turn now to a matter of clarification in order to display a point of agreement. Matt asks: “How, exactly, is Milch's attitude toward Swearengen less complex than Coppola's attitude toward Michael? I think Milch clearly has the edge here.” I can't see why this is being asked of me considering I stated: “This makes Al objectively, behavioristically, a much more complex character than Michael. Subjectively, inner-psychologically, Micheal is as complex as, well, Macbeth. But his demonstrated conduct is completely one-dimensional.” Admittedly, I did not say that Swearengen is also Macbeth inside, but nor did I deny this and I did declare Al more complex than Michael on the outside.

To finish, I certainly agree with Matt that Coppola is hardly the exemplar of a director who critically observes capitalism. But I was responding to the initial comparison of Deadwood to The Godfather. So rattling off the names of other directors is hardly germane. Mind you, if The House Next Door ever hosts a conference on “Directors Who Attack The Scum-Sucking Bourgeoisie and Celebrate the Glorious Proletariat,” please let me know. In the meantime, thank you for letting me participate in your Deadwood conference.

Actually, "“Directors Who Attack The Scum-Sucking Bourgeoisie and Celebrate the Glorious Proletariat" is scheduled for August.

Thanks for the detailed response, Ben. I'll come back with some more points later.

Matt,I take this opportunity to thank you again for opening the door for me to enter The House Next Door. As you know, Dan Jardine has hitherto forwarded my comments to you. This is the first time I have ever posted a comment myself, not just to The House - to any site on the web. I doubt you will be impressed by your own achievement, nevertheless, it is the case that you have stolen my blog cherry.

Looking forward to the Socialist Realism extravaganza in August. Then - Ben.

Ben--Describing me as stealing your blog cherry makes me sound too much the capitalist. I prefer to think I nationalized it.

Nationalized it? Silly me up here in Canada, I thought this conversation was international. Meanwhile, I can't blame you for giving away my blog cherry. Sounds like something covered with hair and soap scum at the bottom of a tub drain.

Or a band name.

Actually, it's the newest Haagen-Dazs flavour.