Pixelated History: Hell on Wheels - "Pilot"

Though I may haunt the fringes of the internet as an amateur television critic, my first and foremost concern is with my grad school work. (Trust me, I wish that it was the other way around too.) As such, I present to you Pixelated History, my attempt to write reviews/posts that seek to discuss historical practice and television in equal measure, mostly in preparation for my master’s thesis, but also just because I think it will be fun. Pixelated History isn’t about nitpicking the details of historical dramas; it’s about analyzing how television depicts and influences our understanding of our past.

This is not a straightforward review of the show; for that I can send you to any number of reviews, all of which say more or less the same thing about Hell on Wheels. That it feels like a rip-off of Deadwood. That it’s lazy. That it’s just not that interesting. All of these things are true, and if it’s wasn't for a more compelling reason, I would probably stop watching that show right now.

That reason? My interest in history. As a grad student in the subject, I have been subjected to a whole lot of courses, both about historical events, and the practice of history itself, and as I come closer and closer to obtaining my master’s (read: writing my thesis), I’ve begun to home on my topic, and I now seek to combine two things I love the most: history and television.

“You’ve got to let go of the past.”

You’re probably scoffing at the idea right now, and you are right to do so. Nobody takes television seriously as a form of education, and attempting to point out every historical inaccuracy is a futile, uphill challenge. I know this, and that’s why I’m not concerned with the historical facts that television forwards; I’m interested in interpretations, those larger ideas about the past that are far more easily planted into the brains of viewer.

So look at this post, and all the future ones to come, as a metaphorical toe-in-the-water, as I seek to figure out just how I’m going to write 80+ pages on this subject, and just what format it's going to take. While there is a lot that can be unpacked in this episode, this specific post will look at only two strains of thought, and I’ll leave the other ideas for future episode, where I will hopefully have more evidence to analyze.

“The Noble South” Myth

“We opened a door, and the devil stepped in.”

Whenever I discuss The American Civil War with anybody, my mind invariably goes to the scene from The Simpsons episode “Much Apu About Nothing”, wherein Apu goes through a citizenship test in order to avoid deportation. “What cause the Civil War?” the test proctor asks him. “Well,” Apu starts, “there were many factors that contributed…” “Just say slavery”, the proctor cuts in. “Slavery”, Apu agrees.

We laughs (okay, you would laugh if you saw/knew the scene), but there’s a real truth behind that joke. Throughout school, we are often told that the Civil War was fought over slavery, only to quickly be reminded that it was the main, but not the only factor, that played a part in the start of the Civil war.

It’s in the “not the only” part that things get tricky. Southern scholars, in their attempts to recoup the South’s image, have used those other factors to downplay the slavery angle, and in doing so, have created their own, highly incorrect, interpretation of the Civil War. Akin to the “the war wasn’t about slavery” argument, Southern scholars have also tried to claim that not all southerners were slave owners (true), that the North was aggressive with its tactics (debatable), and that Reconstruction had a negative impact on the South (debatable, based on state). All of these interpretations used the smaller, more specific examples to bypass the larger trends that existed during the time.

Knowing all of this, it’s hard to miss the bias that’s rampant throughout Hell on Wheels. The pilot opens with an ex-Union soldier professing his sins, in which he says the above quote. We, the audience are supposed to accept the quote at face value, especially considering that the next things to happen is our protagonist, Cullen Bohannan, shoots the man dead. It’s supposed to be a vengeful moment for the character, but one can’t be sure that it’s not also one for the show’s sense of history, a symbolic interpretation of the South besting the North, with the South’s actions being righteous.

In fact, Cullen is on a mission of vengeance, where he seeks to get revenge on those evil Union soldiers who killed his wife (who, it must be admitted, is also from the North). In order to endear the character as much as possible to the audience, Cullen is an ex-slave owner, though he released his a year before the war, at the behest of his wife, who “taught him the evils of slavery”. Yet he still fought in the war. Why? For honor.

Cullen might just be the noblest ex-Confederate to have ever lived, and while such a person is historically possible, he’s also a very rare occurrence. The problem with this is that the show, by placing him front and center, is obviously using him as some sort of stand-in for the South as a whole, an exemplar of many noble Southerners. The show tries to play at being objective by having other characters being highly skeptical of Cullen’s beliefs, but considering one of those characters dies before the pilot in finished, it’s clear that we’re supposed to look to him as a source of honesty.

Why is this problematic? Because it instills in the viewer the idea of a historical type that didn’t exist. (Cullen himself is a fictional character.) Viewers may be on the lookout for the facts that aren’t right, but they rarely look out for interpretations that don’t jive with historical fact, and Hell on Wheels, and any other show that operates under this historically inaccurate means, runs the (quite possibly calculated) possibility of shifting the lay person’s beliefs of what the Civil War was about, and the kind of people who made the decision to go to war.

And that’s what Pixelated History (and, by proxy, my thesis) is about: Identifying those myths and interpretations that are unjustly propagated by television, be it fictional works or non-fiction productions (I’m looking at you, History Chanel).  For a further example, let’s look at how the pilot treats Turner’s Thesis of the West.

The Turnerian Thesis

“We can only be binded together by the joining of east and west.”

“It’s all horsecrap.”

In 1893, Fredrick Jackson Turner presented his paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”, in which he argued that it was American expansion into the West that really redefined and solidified the quintessential American experience. It’s a thesis that has been refuted many times over since its inception, and at this point, most historians accept it as bunk. But there are those few passionate followers who still believe in its virtues, and it’s possible that the show’s creators are among those numbers.

(It should be noted that the creators seem to be basing this show off of a documentary with which I am not familiar.)

I say possible, because as the above pair of quotes, taken from two sides of a jump cut featuring the same character, Thomas Durant (who is based on a real person), revealing that he believes the first idea to be a sham. But does the show? A few scenes later, Robert Bell looks at the land he is surveying, and proclaims “It hasn’t changed since Louis and Clark saw it 60 years ago.” Bell (another fictional character) believes in the purity of the West, just like Turner did, and it’s clear that the show wants us to as well, even as it dismisses the idea of the West holding a significant.

Except that the show once again reverses on itself, as it closes the pilot with a scene depicting Durant speaking to an unknown the listener (the audience at home, perhaps), where in a long monologue about the both the fallibility of history (“History is written by the zebra for the zebra”) while also proclaiming himself to be “a lion” and that his works on the railroad will, at least in the mystery listener’s eyes, unite and complete the nation, making it what it is today. (In this instance “today” seem most likely to signify the 21^st century, which gives large credence to the metatextual interpretation of this scene.)

Part of this confusion is no doubt due to the show’s lack of focus, the fact that it doesn’t quite know what it wants to say just yet. And while that’s problematic on a narrative level, it also creates its own set of historical problems. While viewing the pilot, I couldn’t determine what side the show was coming down on, though given that last scene, I would be inclined to say that the creators believe in the Turnerian thesis, and audiences very well might follow them down that rabbit hole, further mucking up in the mind of the public an issue that was settled many decades ago.

 Hell on Wheels isn’t a historical drama; it’s drama that’s seeking to destroy history. And with its belligerent interpretation of the Civil War, and its confusing (and quite possibly backwards) myths about the role of the West in American history, it very well may do that for those not trained in the historical arts.

Outside Sources:

Levine, Bruce. “In Search of a Useable Past: Neo-Confederates and Black Confederates.” In Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory, edited by James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, 187-211. New York: The New Press, 2006.

Gallagher, Gary W. “Shaping Public Memory of the Civil War: Robert E. Lee, Jubal A. Early, and Douglas Southern Freeman”. In The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture, edited by Alice Fachs and Joan Waugh, 39-63. North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

McPherson, James M. “Long-Legged Yankee Lies: The Southern Textbook Crusade.” In The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture, edited by Alice Fachs and Joan Waugh, 64-78. North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.