Right. But what happens in Deadwood is that people come to a new world (hur hur) - the ways in which they were shaped are to varying degrees actually pretty useless to them now. (Bullock's buttoned-up moralism, Alma's East Coast Lady act, Mr Wu's everything.) They have to excercise their agency. (This is where opinion diverges on the second season - the characters' are robbed of their agency a little, and some think this weakens the show.)
I think we're getting back to where we were - you suspect that these characters aren't sufficiently shaped by their world. They don't feel to you like products of it. It's like, to use the genetics metaphor, they've been seeded by some alien race. My point, simply, is that if the characters behave like this, the world has produced them like it. You think you know what that world produces. You don't - Deadwood does.
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Date: 2006-06-08 08:27 pm (UTC)I think we're getting back to where we were - you suspect that these characters aren't sufficiently shaped by their world. They don't feel to you like products of it. It's like, to use the genetics metaphor, they've been seeded by some alien race. My point, simply, is that if the characters behave like this, the world has produced them like it. You think you know what that world produces. You don't - Deadwood does.