AMC’s Hell on Wheels: Dark but Balanced View of U.S. History

The AMC-TV drama series Hell on Wheels (Sundays, 10 p.m. EST) takes a rather cynical view of the building of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States, but it would be a mistake to dismiss it because of that. The points the show makes about the gigantic infrastructure project are quite defensible, and the picture Hell on Wheels draws of American society in the post-Civil War era, though exaggerated for dramatic purposes, has useful parallels to contemporary issues.

To be sure, in some ways the show pays obeisance to modern political and cultural clichés about the nation’s past. Predictably, the United States in 1865 is shown as dirty and corrupt, and life for many is depicted as short, brutal, ugly, dirty, and meaningless. The railroad encampment is a cesspool rife with drunkenness, violence, and sexual license. Although no longer slaves, all the blacks we see are impoverished manual laborers.

Similarly, the businessman leading the building of the railroad is no Gary Cooper. Expertly played by Colm Meaney, Thomas “Doc” Durant is physically unattractive, corrupt, greedy, cynical, and selfish, with no nuances in the early episodes and few enough as the series progresses.

The Christian church is largely portrayed as sinister and weird: a pastor in a debate with a prostitute (which he loses, of course) is shown from a strange, disorienting camera angle. A murder in a confessional opens the first episode. A baptism in a river is shown in an intensely disturbing way, as the individual being baptized is held under water for what seems an inordinately long and in fact life-threatening amount of time. This all too obviously emphasizes the power of the preacher who is holding him under water while the dirty, ragtag congregation sings in ugly disharmony. These film tricks all tend to make the Christian church highly unattractive.

The baptism scene in particular seems more than a little insensitive, portraying one of the Christian sacraments as if it were a brutal assertion of power — one cannot imagine the producers doing the same with Muslim or Hindu rituals. All of the aforementioned fits with a view of America’s history as a long string of perfidy, fanaticism, greed, and injustice.

Fortunately, Hell on Wheels producers Joe and Tony Gayton don’t leave it at that. Instead, they convey numerous story elements that contradict the cynical contemporary view of the nation’s history in very interesting and important ways. In the very first episode, for example, common views of the history of American race relations and the origins of the War Between the States are subverted. A northerner is cruel to the former slaves who are working on the railroad, whereas the protagonist, a southerner and former slaveholder, is sympathetic to them and treats them fairly. Later we find out that even though he fought for the Confederacy, the Southerner had already freed his own slaves and suffered privation in order to pay them wages for their services.

Similarly, Sherman’s March and the Union’s conduct of the war in general are depicted as vicious and unconscionable, whereas the Southern cause is characterized as a matter of honor, which the characters — who would know, of course — clearly accept as true. This, in fact, drives protagonist Cullen Bohannon’s story and hence is further emphasized in the narrative: his wife was murdered by marauding Union soldiers while he was off at war. A further irony is that she was a transplanted Northerner who had, as mentioned, persuaded him to free his slaves and take them on as hired laborers.