The Chris Moeller Archives

The Deadwood Pioneer- Early Edition

The best show on television this year is HBO's "Deadwood." Though David Milch's revisionist western is more faithful to historical reality than its Hollywood predecessors, and unendingly gratifying in its squalor and grittiness, its true genius lies in its incorporation of the American language.
No one in Milch's 1876 Deadwood speaks in simple sentences. It's jazz music-- ultra-stylized, purposely muddled, inverted and subverted, of its time and out of time, lyrical, and gloriously filthy. Take, as examples, these excerpts from last week's show: On the rumors that the camp's gold claims may be in jeopardy, "Panic's easier on the back than the short handled shovel." On the messenger of such rumors, "Nor the sort'd shrink from a lie, or more than one, to advance his purpose, or be ignorant how to circulate his falsehoods without others knowing the source." What should the messenger do next, "Would that argue for allowing word of my presence to circulate a bit before I present myself officially?" The response, "A man might use that time to put some stink on his Johnson." You get the idea.
Ian McShane and Timothy Olyphant are "Al Swearingen" and "Seth Bullock," respectively. An evil man and a good man who become more and more alike with each passing episode. As "progress" comes to the Deadwood camp, whether it be in the form of telegraph poles ("Messages from invisible sources,") deep-pocketed mining brokers, or Yankton politicians, Swearingen and Bullock fight each other, and these external elements of the Dakota Territory, for the soul of the camp-- Bullock, a slave to his code of ethics, and Searingen, to his established commercial interests along Deadwood's muddy and narrow "thoroughfare." Bullock, wearing the lawman's badge, provides for his dead brother's family while fighting an attraction to the camp widow, Alma Garrett, a recovering dope addict from back East. Swearingen, the backbone of the show, is a Main Street pimp who dispenses the mayor his title, wields power over the newspaper publisher, and throws the word "Sheriff" at Bullock like a dagger.
"Deadwood" writers keep an extraordinary number of plates spinning at one time-- richly-woven stories, accented by brilliant characterizations. Brad Dourif's world-weary "Doc Cochran" is a standout, dispensing primitive and agonizing remedies to the sick and dying. Milch, as he did on "NYPD Blue," shames the established medical shows on television with his realities of death and dying, conduct and compromise.
He's delivering a new, truer American history. Last year, Wild Bill Hickok, played by Keith Carradine, strode through town and met his maker as a celebrity gunslinger and man of traditional Western morality. He left in his wake, Calamity Jane, portrayed by Robin Wiegert, a man-ish, drunken, self-pitying hanger-on, destined to become a hero during the outbreak of yellow fever and be buried next to her idol, Wild Bill. Wiegert's performance is no less than the greatest re-imaging of an American historical figure on the page or screen since the founding of the Republic.
"Deadwood" should be viewed in schools as a supplement or stand-in for American history textbooks. It would be a breath of pungent, foul air to blow the antiseptic stink from the classrooms.

posted by CM @ 11:10 PM