Rejecting Big Plot: Deadwood and the Thematic Resonance of Unfocused Storytelling

This week I'm wrong about the fundamental value of narrative, plus I rant about the Ghibli-AI image trend and American fantasies of violence in Reacher

These men will drop approximately 1,000 F-bombs in an episode of TV where nothing happens and every minute of it is compelling

I have been, for many years, an anti-plot evangelist. As a teacher, as a lover of books and movies and TV, as someone who loves to argue about something when everyone disagrees with me, I have developed many, many arguments about why plot is a wildly over-rated aspect of storytelling. Historically, plot as the primary driver of stories is a new phenomenon—ancient classics like The Odyssey, early drama like Oedipus Rex, even entire genres of art like opera operated under the assumption that the events in their stories were known by the audience beforehand. It was the way a story was told that made the art great, not the narrative itself. Plot, at least plot as a source of surprise and suspense, only became the prominent feature of storytelling with the development of the novel in the 18th Century.

The past 50 years have seen the gradual encroachment of plot over art accelerate massively. We are in the midst of a decades-long era of Plot, capital P, as the defining characteristic of film and television. TV seasons have become shorter as “fluff” and “filler episodes” have gone out of style. Movies, even when they’re long, are stuffed to the brim with events. We rush from incident to incident rather than linger in their aftermath.

OK, so I don’t actually hate plot. A well constructed murder mystery, or procedural episode of TV, or thriller, or Christopher Nolan-style sci-fi adventure can absolutely entertain me. But I do hate that plot has become a stand-in for substance, when it is in fact the least substantial part of a story. The big P in Plot also stands for an obvious Point. A complicated Plot, or making a plot seem complicated by jumbling up the narrative order, creates an illusion of depth (see most Christopher Nolan movies) while still rendering subtext mostly moot. Plot is not a bad thing in itself. But it’s not the apex of what art is capable of, and it reduces the interrogative capabilities of narrative when it becomes the primary point of acclaim and appreciation. Plot engages, but it is character development and thematic meditation and the synergy of sound and image and performance and dialogue that makes a work meaningful and memorable. Plot can absolutely service theme and establish character, but it isn’t the plot that matters in those moments. It’s the character or the theme.

Recently, as I’ve found myself once again arguing against Plot supremacy, I repeatedly have returned to the same example of how a rejection of Plot can lead to revelatory, insightful art. I have made my way through all 3 seasons of the 2000’s HBO show Deadwood over the past 6 months, and it’s a show that consistently, effectively, gloriously rejects Plot. The three seasons of the HBO show, a dialogue driven western, depict three different 12-day periods in the development of an illegal settlement on Indian territory in what would eventually become the Dakota territory. It’s story is loosely based on real history, with real historical figures appearing throughout. While it was acclaimed in its era, it was also overshadowed by other HBO content like The Sopranos and much of the cultural discussion of Deadwood centered on how often the characters say “fuck” (which, to be fair, they say a lot—about 1.5 fucks-per-minute).

The historical foundation of the show is partly why major events rarely happen in Deadwood, and they rarely happen in a manner where one event clearly leads to another. Season 1 features the murder of a famous gunfighter, the opening of a new saloon, and a plague. Season 2 includes a public fistfight between prominent citizens, the arrival of a telegraph machine, a serial killer, the accidental death of a child, and the promise of Deadwood’s imminent annexation by the Dakota territory. Season 3, by far the most Plot heavy season, still only really features a series of political murders, the opening of a theater and a school, and the run-up to the town’s first official elections. Spread out over 12 episodes each, these major events feel few and far between, and mostly disconnected.

So what makes Deadwood compelling if there’s little overarching narrative to tie one episode to the next? Why does it work?

Because eliminating Plot allows for plot, little p, to drive storytelling. The show is freed from the need to focus exclusively on the choices of a few Plot driving characters, and can instead immerse itself in how the few major events ripple through a dense, inter-reliant community. We see how the plague infects characters from all walks of life, how leaders step up to create sick tents and fund communal vaccines, how others volunteer as caretakers. When a child dies, we don’t just see the grief of the parents—we see how a local business owner is wracked with guilt, how two Black characters who anticipate being blamed flee the camp but slowly decide to return and face whatever consequences come to them, how the women in the brothels demand to be allowed to attend the child’s funeral. The show takes enormous care to recognize how every character is at the center of their own story, with their own grudges and hopes and histories, and by mostly eliminating a central narrative, allows that multitude of stories to each get focused development and narrative weight. Episodes are dedicated to contract disputes between minor characters clinging to their perceived dignity, to the anger a Chinese leader in the community feels about the grotesque treatment of Chinese women in the camp that he is mostly unable to communicate in English, to the strangely reinvigorated sexual appetites of an aging minor lieutenant to a secondary character, to the budding friendship between a Black cook mourning her son and the frequently abused, stupid, deeply good-natured employee of the hotel where she works.

And that anti-Plot storytelling actively deepens the shows exploration of its major themes: power, independence and interdependence, capitalism, and solidarity. These less flashy stories don’t feel like distractions from a larger epic, or more important characters—they make the audience deeply, fundamentally aware of how the “major” characters and their seemingly more prominent decisions are reliant on a vast tapestry of humanity that exists alongside them, full of people worthy of the same essential dignity, and who struggle against similar problems and personal failings. Everyone is chafing against an oppressive force of some kind—from universal forces like addiction, anger, desperation, greed, and hunger, to targeted injustices like racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, classism, and anti-semitism. The show’s one uniting principle is the foundational anger everyone feels resisting their own unique blend of conflicts.

That allows Deadwood to develop its central critique of its subjects, and also America, and our world generally—how true solidarity and fighting for the dignity of others is the only way to achieve true dignity for yourself, and how that radical possibility is poisoned and made impossible by a social system that rewards domination over compassion.

Deadwood refuses to let anyone be purely a hero or a villain. In fact, the show goes to great lengths to show how the protagonists and their enemies are fundamentally more alike than different from one another. The primary antagonist of the first season also goes out of his way to employ and support a disabled woman (while also regularly verbally abusing her). One of the most frightening, powerful characters empowers a Black woman well beyond the comfort of the rest of the camp and refuses to adjust to their discomfort (although the show brilliantly shows how she recognizes she is being used, and justifiably hates the man who empowers her).

The 3rd season of the show centers on the major characters organizing resistance to the violent, encroaching influence of an obscenely rich man (George Hurst) murdering dissidents and bending the town to his will. The audience is compelled to support their fight against a man we have been shown is cruel, indifferent, and greedy.

But their resistance is twisted into something evil in itself. The final episode hinges on their efforts to protect one woman, a former sex worker, after she attempts to assassinate Hurst. To do so, they murder another innocent sex worker and present her body in disguise. The effort is aided by the Sheriff, the Mayor, and the most influential saloon owner in the town. These are the characters we’ve come to see as the “good guys.” It’s just one of many ways the show reflects how good intentions can lead to profound injustice when systems of domination are allowed to remain; how everyone is aware of their own subjugation but can’t truly escape it because they refuse to acknowledge their own culpability in equivalent systems.

In that way, the show is a profound metaphor for America, both of the past and of our present day. Deadwood was settled illegally on Indian land protected by treaty. There are no purely heroic or morally righteous figures because everyone there, from the richest business owner to the lowliest worker, has chosen to ignore the existence and humanity of Native people to maintain a sense of normality about their lives. All the other injustices and damaging power dynamics flow from there. Deadwood is a town built on the promise of individual wealth—a place where American ideals of independence and self-reliance and social mobility are centered by the town’s own mythology and self-definition—and the show repeatedly demonstrates how inter-reliant and interconnected everyone is. Efforts by characters to leverage power over others, or to assert separation from certain parts of the town they find unsavory, consistently undermine their own autonomy and safety and that of everyone else. And their failures steadily, inexorably, lead to the total dominion of the ultra-wealthy.

In a more Plot focused show, the depth and breadth of the show’s fundamental critique would be diminished. Narrative inherently lends itself to a singular hero or group of heroes. It creates simplicity and binaries, and Deadwood refuses to engage in either.

Both that thoughtful, detailed examination of American mythology and a resistance to over-stated plot are features of the genre. It’s no surprise that the Western fell out of favor as Big Plot started to dominate the media landscape. Westerns resist Plot. They wriggle free from the constraints of a tight, focused story because slowness, an appreciation of landscapes and space, of ritual, are baked into the form. The action of a gunfight takes seconds, but the slow preparation and anticipation of the same fight might be drawn out for ten minutes.

Westerns also resist the easy morals and lessons of Plot, the straightforward takeaways or binary choices that event-based storytelling provides. Stagecoach, the film that launched the career of John Wayne, has a basic narrative about a wagon getting from one place to another, but uses that story to question class boundaries, the sexual purity demanded of women, and the opportunities for redefinition provided by America’s frontier. Once Upon a Time in the West, perhaps the best Western ever made, opens with ten minutes of men waiting to kill someone in a train station, swatting away flies and drinking water dripping slowly from the ceiling, and ends with a former prostitute gaining control of a critical stop on the cross-continental railroad. More recent westerns, from Django Unchained to True Grit, still feature longer scenes, more patient pacing, and more intentional social critique than most major modern movies.

But the failures of the Western as a genre also flow from the little Plot they do have. The presence of a singular hero in most of these films requires a reduction of complex circumstances to a single person who represents a larger evil that can be overcome. Problems are almost universally solved by swift, deadly violence, an inherently simplistic storytelling device. Stagecoach carefully critiques gender dynamics and class conflict but depicts Mexicans and Native people as essentially sub-human; Once Upon a Time in the West examines the fundamental failures of American concepts of masculinity but isn’t able to fully connect those failures to larger forces of racism and the genocide of Native people; the best modern Westerns make similarly valiant efforts to find nuance but are at least somewhat overwhelmed by the demands of a clean resolution ending in a gunfight.

Deadwood stands apart because it’s a television show that has more time to develop its ideas, because it centers dialogue in a way the genre rarely does, because every level of its production was done with meticulous care. But all of those strengths are created or enhanced by its unwillingness to worry about a clear linear story and the demands that story would place on its more important pursuits.

Deadwood is the most compelling TV I’ve ever seen. It’s reflections on the ongoing failures and paradoxes of our nation and its identity have never been more relevant. You should watch it, no matter how much you love Plot.

If You Use the Studio-Ghibli AI Image Generator, You Are a Bad Person and I Hate You

If you’ve been on the internet for the past week, you’ve probably noticed an abundance of images from popular culture animated in a quasi-anime style. OpenAI, one of the many tech companies in the running to be the real-world version of the Tyrell Company from Blade Runner, released some sort of app that allows photographs to be converted into something vaguely resembling the style of Studio Ghibli and its creator Hayao Miyazaki.

Readers of this blog will know that I am a huge fan of Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. Last year I wrote about their superior style of fantasy storytelling in The Boy and the Heron, and last month I wrote about the charm and thoughtfulness of Kiki’s Delivery Service. On Saturday, I saw what I think might be Miyazaki’s best work, Princess Mononoke, in IMAX, an indescribable experience you can also have until this coming Thursday.

Readers of this blog also know I hate AI and its creativity-stealing, mind-rotting, environment-destroying nature and think there is no justifiable reason for a normal person to use it, ever.

So you can imagine how furious this recent internet trend has made me. I’d like to list a few of the most significant reasons here.

1. First of all, the “Ghiblified” images don’t actually look like Studio Ghibli animation. Every frame of every Ghibli film is painstakingly crafted. The care and thought and passion bursts off the screen. Characters all have impressively unique, beautifully detailed features. The AI images have a bland uniformity that reflects the empty automaticity of their creation. I’m not going to share any AI images here, but if you look at them and then at actual Miyazaki creations, you can’t help but see the difference.

2. Miyazaki himself has stated his opinions of AI, and he (entirely accurately) said it was “an insult to life itself.” Anyone who loves Miyazaki cannot in good conscience use AI for “art,” let alone an image created by stealing from his work.

3. One of the foundational themes of all of Miyazaki’s work is the ongoing destruction of the environment by human indifference and technology. AI is an absolute disaster for the environment, both in terms of carbon pollution and the waste of enormous amounts of water.

4. The images generated by the unthinking, unfeeling algorithm default to making everything a very particular, treacly style of “cute.” Look at these images and you’ll see everyone, without exception, has pretty much the same facial features. While Ghibli does animate some characters with more traditionally cute features, those characters still get their own unique faces. And more importantly, many characters are notably NOT cute. Old people in Miyazaki are consistently animated with almost grotesque, wrinkly features, and are each hideous in their own special way. It’s wonderfully charming (there is beauty in ugliness! something AI will never understand) and the AI machine doesn’t even attempt to recreate it.

Your takeaway here should be that this generator is a monstrosity born of hubris, thoughtlessness, and a hatred for true creativity, and you should shun it and its creators.

Reacher is a Better American Fantasy

Three seasons of TV hinge on the idea people want to fight this man who is woke

Last year I wrote a little bit about bell hooks and her argument that a lot of narrative exists to justify inherently counter-productive cathartic violence.

When it comes to stories that justify cathartic violence, nobody is doing it better than Reacher. The show, based on a series of novels by Lee Child, stars Alan Ritchson as an extremely large man who investigates stuff and punches the evil people he investigates in the face until they die. Season 3 ended last week, and it remains extremely fun, stupid TV.

The show goes to often outrageous lengths to show that the men Reacher and his (equally violent, impressively diverse, and usually smaller) buddies brutally kill deserve it, usually because they intimidate vulnerable women or torture puppies for fun and then brag about it to the impossibly large stranger they just met.

Reacher himself is the epitome of a certain white male American fantasy—a completely independent, buff, intelligent man who sleeps with beautiful women, protects the weak, and can punch better than anyone else.

But the genius of the program is showing that he is all those things, but also that he is made better by having friends and companions who are women, who are Black, who are probably queer, who in other words represent what the least intelligent people on the planet have derogatorily labeled “DEI,” and that Reacher trusts and respects these people more than the dumb misogynistic anti-woke bros he tears limb from limb on a weekly basis. The further genius of the program comes from the fact that Reacher essentially looks at the camera every season and says “I’m woke” before shooting the most obvious Andrew-Tate-adjacent character in the face. The star, Alan Ritchson, embodies that ethos in more than one way.

Anyway, if you’re going to fantasize about the fictional virtue of American violence, you could do worse than Reacher.