DEADWOOD: Why It's So Good

(The western series on HBO, that is.)

In short: David Milch and his writers have solved a problem I’ve been struggling with for years in direct defiance of Larry McMurtry, who claims (and who would know better?) that it’s impossible to write a realistic Western.

Although the rest of us think Lonesome Dove is McMurtry's masterpiece—would be anybody’s masterpiece—and apparently the Pulitzer Committee agreed—he always brushes us off because, according to him, he failed: he wanted Lonesome Dove to be realistic, but he couldn’t pull it off. He has repeatedly asserted that once you start writing a Western, the Myth rises up and consumes your story: you end up with bad guys in black hats, Indians who are unequivocally worse than the black hats, good guys in white hats (often sporting sheriffs’ or marshals’ stars on their waistcoats), frontier doctors who are also philosophers, and helpless whores with hearts of gold. Ho-HUM:  you keep writing Gunsmoke, no matter what. The Western I’ve been trying to write for oh, the last ten years, keeps turning into Gunsmoke, which is why I keep giving it up. But my gritty, nasty, weird little story keeps eating at me, begging me to tell it right.

Maybe I never will, but Milch & Co. have broken up my little logjam and are making me think just maybe I could. . . .

When Pica was here about a month ago, we rented Episodes 3 & 4 by accident, thinking we were getting in on the beginning of the series.  She’s no sissy when it comes to Westerns and has been sweating mine with me since its inception (in the unlikely setting of the Schlesinger Library).

Though the two of us liked the funky, sepia look of Deadwood, we were annoyed, distracted and grossed out by language we’d never heard or thought possible in Western context, so we assumed it was gratuitous: "f*ck," "f*cked," "f*cking" (I’m not being coy here, just trying to dodge spammers), "motherf*cker," "c*cks*cker," "c*nt" plus all their adumbrations and every other imaginable expletive plus a few we’d never imagined—Deadwood was a barrage. "Oh, that’s too bad," one of us said to the other (I can’t remember which), "they really f*cked up their chances, there!"

Before Pica left, though, she encouraged me to rent the rest—specifically, to go back and see the first installments and then see what followed the assassination of Wild Bill Hickok at the end of the fourth episode--history I know only too well. Last weekend, I got around to it.

And I am mesmerized! because I know (as does anyone who consults the OED) that English hasn’t changed that much in the last 150 (or 500) years. Folks who crawl around on the bottom of the tank still talk that way, so why wouldn’t they have done so in Deadwood? It wasn’t a cow town; it was a gold town. There was no law. How many of us ever have been in environments where there is no law? I have, so I see the truth in Deadwood: when there is no law, the only law that operates is that of fundamental human decency, which is either born in you, or it isn’t. Either you have a conscience, or you don’t. And that having or not having determines your behavior, as to whether you’ll murder someone for their shoes, use "f*ck" as an all-purpose intensifier, think creatively about "justice," or tip your hat to a lady. Those behaviors go hand in hand today, so why wouldn’t they have done so in 1876?

Language is action; action reveals character.  I can be as much of a pottymouth as anybody, but I can also choose my moment. I can express myself without "profanity," but when nothing else will do, I can peel the paint off the wall. So I recognize my kind when I hear them; and I recognize the other kind, who have no other way of expressing themselves, too—in 1876 just as well as now.  That's why Deadwood does what nothing else ever has:  it gives us some realistic sense of how the Wild West might have been.

Comments

[chorusgirl]

This daughter of a real cowboy who tipped his hat is on her way to the video store now. Hmmmm.

[Doc Rock]

Remember: THEY'RE NOT COWBOYS. Different code operating here! Or different subcategory of Code of the West.

[Steven Rubio]

Can't tell from the above if you've caught up, so I'll just stick a quote here, and eventually you'll get it:

"As much as you can, please minimize your obscenities."

[dale]

(Tangent) Have you read All My Friends are Going to be Strangers? I love that book.