The Televangelist: ‘Hell On Wheels,’ Season 1, Ep. 9
The idea that the 1860s were more progressive towards race relations than 2012 is a strange stance to take.
- AMC
- Putting your 2012 racism to shame
Last week, the writers of “Hell On Wheels” really honed in on racial equality and gender issues. This week we find out that was only a primer of things to come. Not only did Elam and Eva suddenly set up as the King and Queen of Racial Harmony, being bowed to by a former foe who made a pilgrimage to them in order to cleanse his soul of his formally wayward racist and misogynistic ways - by way of a medical miracle, no less! - but Elam later held court in the bar with Bohannon, shocking everyone who, despite their shock, remained silent. Elsewhere in the camp, Ruth waited up night after night, praying for Joseph to return and make love to her, apparently. Return he did, and she comforted him in a very Biblical way.
Perhaps historically or statistically these scenes are true; my knowledge is limited to far more corseted materials on the subject I suppose, but let me go out on a limb here and throw this out for comparison. In the year 2012, the ABC show “The Bachelor” has 25 women compete for a man’s affections. The show has been running for a very long time, and has spawned its offshoot of “The Bachelorette.” Not a single one of these Bachelors or Bachelorettes have ever been any color other than white. Their harems of eligible men and women are always - if not exclusively white, as in the current season - overwhelmingly white. If, by some mistake, a man or woman of color makes it on to the show, they are eliminated pretty swiftly. As I commented to a friend who brought this up last week, “well, a ‘woman of color’ on ‘The Bachelor’ is essentially someone of mixed Irish and Italian descent.” The point is, apparently networks believe that many Americans are not comfortable enough with interracial relationships to portray them on TV. So the idea that the 1860s were more progressive towards race relations than 2012 is a strange stance to take.
The thing is, just like most viewers, I was happy to see Elam declare his affections for Eva and later have the courage to enter the bar and have Bohannon pour him a drink and ask him to sit down, and for the seemingly repressed Ruth to unleash her inner vixen and seduce Joseph in his tent, but is it not also incredibly distracting? Much like the Lily storyline (she’s a surveyor now? She is the only person that Durant can find to do the survey for the Union Pacific railroad? Really?), the cheeky (or in Lily’s case, utterly ridiculous) modern look at historical times is confusing. It flies in the face of what we know of the time period, but maybe the writers of “Hell On Wheels” want to say, “look, you didn’t know about these things because these things weren’t talked about, written about, recorded, because they were so frowned upon.” But it also feels a great deal like revisionist history which, frankly, might have been an interesting way for the show to go - to show an alternate history where somewhere in the Wild West the most base of men were able to sustain some kind of racial harmony that the rest of the country, in the real timeline, would not even begin to touch for another century. But that’s not what “Hell On Wheels” claims to be, and it goes back to my point last week that I’m not sure “Hell On Wheels” knows what kind of show it is at all.