Deadwood

[poliphilo]

The Western has been pronounced dead a whole heap of times. The nineties were a lean period, but they produced Eastwood's Unforgiven- one of the greatest Westerns of any decade.

Now there's Deadwood. Book by David Milch, direction by Walter Hill. No, the western ain't dead yet.

The western has always provided a mythical space in which America can examine its dark, dark heart. Mythical enough for feathers not to be unduly ruffled at the political implications.

I'm trying to decode Deadwood. I'm thinking that the stone-eyed brothel-keeper played by (wonderful, wonderful Britisher) Ian McShane has to be Dick Cheyney. So does that make Wild Bill Hickcok and Calamity Jane the Kerrys?

Hill made a film about Bill and Jane once before. It wasn't very good. Now he's back for another try because he loves them so much. I love them too. I'm not sure about Keith Carradine's Bill- he could be too chiselled for the role- but Robin Swigert's Calamity is a delight. She's ugly, she's drunk, she's filthy and smelly and she strides out of bars saying "I don't drink in places where I'm the only one with balls." But also she cares. There's a woman's heart beating under all that encrusted muck.

Was the old west really this hellish? Did they really call one another cunts and cocksuckers? I dunno. I supect that the "realism" of Deadwood is as ahistorical as Roy Rogers and Trigger. The first director to give us a really filthy-dirty-disgusting Wild West was Sam Peckinpah- and his heretical version has since become the established orthodoxy.

When I was a little kid there was Hopalong Cassidy. Then things got a little more sophisticated and there was Eastwood playing a cow-punching Jimmy Dean in Rawhide. Later I caught up with the classics- meaning mainly John Ford. Then came Leone and Peckinpah and Eastwood again. The 80s produced the odd but adorable Silverado. I've loved them all. And now I really, really want Deadwood to succeed.

Comments

[archyena.livejournal.com]

I have to admit that I like Westerns, even though I'm supposed to hate them. Unfortunately, like most things, I'm in love with the Western that exists in my head which I think must be a composite of the film and commentary I've consumed. For the life of me, I can never quite match my idea of "The West" with any example that comes to mind. My concept is all dust and guns and anxiety. Not normal anxiety, a sedated, paranoid unease like a man under anesthesia during a surgery with a fifty percent chance of success.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Why are you "supposed" to hate them?

One of my favourite westerns is Delmer Daves' 3.10 to Yuma with Glenn Ford and Van Heflin. There's LOADS of anxiety in that!

[archyena.livejournal.com]

Oh! Because it's not "high art," Oklahoma is a step behind the rest of the world (sometimes several) and the awakening to contemporary art just hasn't happened yet. "Real" Western art still means a Remington sculpture here.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see.

I'm not keen on Remington, but he inspired John Ford so there must be something to him.

I don't know about "high" art, but I'm sure that some westerns qualify as "great" art. Ford is great art. So is the best of Peckinpah (the Wild Bunch and Pat Garret and Billy the Kid.) Clint Eastwood usually falls just short but I think Unforgiven qualifies.

[beentothemoon.livejournal.com]

I love Westerns just as I love Greek, Roman and Hindu mythology. They're all the same stories anyway (well, the western didn't have as much sex as the Greeks and Romans, and not as many arms as the Hindu)

Above my desk the watchful eyes of John Wayne and Clayton Moore (and J. Edgar Hoover, but that's another story) stand guard over my stapler and my favorite desk calculator.

Might I suggest a few westerns, with apologies if you've seen them?

1. The Searchers
2. The Hired Hand (beautiful cinematography)
3. Red River

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen the Hired Hand, but the other two would make it onto my list of best evers.

I love John Wayne. His performances in Red River and The Searchers are among the greatest in cinema history. What he didn't know about screen acting isn't worth knowing.

[beentothemoon.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad you liked the Searchers, so many people I've met think it's the most pointless Western ever. I think it's one of the finest.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Pointless? Pointless!

It's the American Odyssey. It's the American King Lear. It's arguably the greatest American film of all time!

[balirus.livejournal.com]

Deadwood is a fantastic show. Time-Warner cable in NYC has a video on demand feature and a couple of months ago I dialed up the first episode out of curiosity. I ended up watching most of season one in one sitting.

McShane is a sparkling villain, and I love the verbal gamesmanship between the characters.

The best line of the series so far has to be from the Honorable Mayor E.B. Farnum, "August commencement to my administration, standing stymied outside a saloon next to a degenerate tit-licker."

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

We Brits have just seen the first episode.

McShane is a local lad. He was born in Blackburn, about twenty miles up the road from here.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

My dad, who was born on the Texas plains in Comanche County in 1915, loved Zane Grey's westerns. He'd take Mother and us children downtown, and while we were out shopping in Penneys and Sears and Woolworths, Dad would pull out the latest Zane Grey he'd bought at the drugstore and happily read in the car. Luckily for Dad, Zane Grey was a prolific writer.

I haven't seen (or heard about) Deadwood, but I'll look for it.

When we were children, we'd go to the Royal Theater and watch Saturday matinees, either bad horror movies or bad westerns--we loved them all. (My brother, the chicken, actually crawled under the seat next to me during a horror movie about a giant tarantula.)

I liked the dusty trails, the sounds of horses running fast, and the fancy riding--leaping from treebranches onto horses, shooting backwards in the saddle. Mike and I would sit in the back and eat Smith Brothers cough drops (5 cents a box) or sunflower seeds. (What WERE we thinking?)

At home with our new Zenith television set, though, it was Davy Crockett that we loved. We had racoon hats.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I loved Davy Crockett and all those guys. Britain imported a lot of western TV series in the 50s and 60s. I never had a coon-skin hat (though I'd have liked one) but I did have a full cowboy outfit with fringed pants and (mock)leather waistcoat. I owned various cap-guns, the pride of my arsenal being a scaled down Winchester rifle with a mechanism for loading and ejecting shells.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I owned various cap-guns, the pride of my arsenal being a scaled down Winchester rifle with a mechanism for loading and ejecting shells.

So did my brother--and all the boys in our neighborhood. I had a cowgirl outfit, and my brother had a full cowboy outfit just as you did. I have a photo of him taking aim at my walking doll with his capgun.

Didn't gunpowder smell great? I loved those little red rolls of caps.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes, I still love the smell of gunpowder.

I guess most of my generation of little Brits spent several key years desperately wanting to be American.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Was the old west really this hellish? Did they really call one another cunts and cocksuckers? I dunno. I supect that the "realism" of Deadwood is as ahistorical as Roy Rogers and Trigger. The first director to give us a really filthy-dirty-disgusting Wild West was Sam Peckinpah- and his heretical version has since become the established orthodoxy.


I suspect it was pretty grim out there on the prairies. I've been in west Texas dust storms, and the sky turns brick red, and tumbleweeds roll toward you down the street, and sand gets in your hair and your teeth and your eyes--after the dust storm, tumbleweeds will be piled up in the corners of houses clear to the roofs.

And the blizzards, the heat (the ground cracked and dead), the storms--and the loneliness and poverty--I remember the weather, but we were city folk. In the early days, I've read, women would go crazy with loneliness and wind and dirt. If you built a sod house too near the creek for water, snakes would come in after rainstorms. People had no doctors.

I think--I could be wrong--that Victorian England still influenced morality in the early days of the West--people may have cursed on the prairies to their horses, but I'm guessing that the townspeople were conservative. Of course, I may be influenced by all those Westerns I've seen over the years!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Deadwood is/was a real mining camp in the Black Hills. According to the publicity for the show the real Deadwood had a murder rate of one a day. It was a pretty rough place, but I rather doubt whether it was quite the never-ending orgy of drink, drugs, sex and violence we see in the show.

I trust Ford. I think his picture of Tombstone in My Darling Clementine- the rough and the refined living side by side, with someone like Doc Holliday having a foot in both the salons and the saloons- is probably as accurate as it gets.

Like you I suspect that the Victorians, even Victorians in mining camps, were less freely spoken than we are today. And I'm not at all sure about the sexual swearing. I think that's modern. My gut feeling is that people in the late Victorian era would have gone in a whole lot more for blasphemy.

But where would one look to find out about that kind of thing?