Old West, new women

Women had two roles in the traditional western: The bad ones staffed the saloons, and the good ones spoiled the fun. The virtuous lady journalist who comes to town in the 1939 Errol Flynn classic “Dodge City” signifies the end of the hero’s rip-snortin’, trail-drivin’ days. Ladies require the protection of a civil society, and so Flynn is forced to pin on the sheriff’s star.

Few westerns ever considered that women might have had their own complicated reactions to the freedom promised by the frontier. Strange as it seems to say about a series in which one of the main characters, the ruthless saloonkeeper Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), makes a habit of soliloquizing while being serviced by his employees, HBO’s “Deadwood” is one of the only westerns to treat its women characters with real respect.

A classic feminist critique of Hollywood movies challenges the filmgoer to find scenes in which two women have a conversation about something other than a man. Playing this game with the first season of “Deadwood,” recently released on DVD, is revealing: Though there aren’t many women in the camp, they do talk surprisingly often, and seldom about men. In one rare exception, the rich widow Alma Garret (Molly Parker) tells Sophia (Bree Wall), the little Norwegian orphan she’s adopted, that back home in New York, the ladies retire after dinner, leaving the men to discuss important matters and, incidentally, decide their fate. “If we didn’t hate them too much to be curious about the world,” she adds, “we’d wonder what they had to say.”

“Deadwood” creator David Milch explains in a documentary included in the DVD set that he considers Alma the key invented character in the series. (Most of the other leads are based on historical figures.) He clearly sympathizes with her opium habit, an affliction that often results, he says, “when you are raised to suit someone else’s purposes.” Alma may be a lady and deferred to by the camp’s rough men, but she’s not so different from her counterpart, Trixie (the riveting Paula Malcomson), a saloon girl Al bought from an orphanage. Alma’s con man father married her to a wealthy fool to pay off his debts, so she’s been treated like a commodity too.

It’s Trixie, though, who has emerged as the camp’s secret moral center. She began season one utterly brutalized by Al and ended it by calmly defying him. In between, she taught Alma how to care for Sophia, to kick opium and to consider someone besides herself. Trixie also attempted suicide, contemplated leaving the camp and chose to return to Al, finally able to see that she had more power than she realized because he needs her more than he’ll ever let on. (They’ve since split up, and those fellatio-fueled monologues represent his pathetic effort to convince himself that he can replace her.)

Trixie and Alma have, in season two, embarked on the long, delicate and fraught process of forming a friendship. (It’s to the show’s credit that this feels like a privilege Alma has to earn.) Like many of the women in “Deadwood” -- even the profane, drunken, cross-dressing Calamity Jane -- what they mostly talk about is children.

In the first season, one of the few things the better specimens among the camp’s motley collection of misfits (men as well as women) could agree on was that Sophia had to be cared for. This season, Trixie is engineering the protection of Alma’s unborn child and of the son of Alma’s married lover. Milch has said he sees the impulse to take care of one another as the essence of civilization. Since Trixie is the character in “Deadwood” who sees the imperative to care more clearly than anyone else, it’s Trixie -- not the genteel, educated Alma -- who’s the great civilizer at work in the camp.

Trixie has spent most of season two in a rage. She suspects the sweet shopkeeper who’s been courting her won’t ever be able to forget her past, so she keeps throwing it in his face. As for Al, well, like us she now sees that wicked as he is, he’s got a kind side that can’t be dismissed. Furthermore, he knows exactly who she is. The radiant fury that seizes her whenever she contemplates choosing between them comes from her dawning understanding of her own worth. Responsibility, she’s discovering, can hurt almost as much as being helpless.

The women of “Deadwood,” unlike the men, haven’t come to the camp to find freedom. With the exception of Calamity Jane, they came because they weren’t free, because some man made them do it. While the men are learning that, despite their reservations, civic order has some value after all, the women are learning what a complicated proposition freedom can be.