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poliphiloThe 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2004-09-22 12:29 pm (UTC)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!
no subject
Date: 2004-09-22 01:30 pm (UTC)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?