You don't have to have a weakness for westerns to appreciate the HBO series, Deadwood, but it helps to have a weakness for the strange and wonderful things the dialogue does with the English language, not to mention the incomparable cinematography and acting.
Deadwood has been widely acclaimed, and by now, with the first two seasons available on DVD at local video stores and the Princeton Public Library, it should reach the large audience it deserves, but there are still viewers out there who, for one reason or another, are reluctant to enter the world David Milch and his crew have created. Some people may have been put off by the show's violence, profanity, and political incorrectness. Cussing is as central to Deadwood as the muddy thoroughfare that runs between the Gem and Bella Union saloons. It's part of the earthy element, the currency of expression, and once you get used to that, you may even find the unprintability funny and flavorful, particularly as it's contrasted to and blended in with the various ornate forms of Victorian rhetoric that have become one of the pleasures of the series. This is not profanity for profanity's sake, nor violence for violence's sake. To question the historical authenticity of the volume and inventiveness of the swearing, as some have done, would be like quibbling about the liberties Shakespeare has taken in creating the language for a Danish prince or a Roman general. You may be a poet on the page or a poet at heart, or simply a believer in character and style as the essence of art; you may have a taste for speech that evokes Dickens and Shakespeare, Twain and Melville; or you may be responsive to the brilliantly balanced ensemble acting that makes moving and believable the vision of a real community rising out of the blood and filth of an 1876 Dakota Territory mining town. Regardless of what direction you're approaching Deadwood from, you should not miss this show.
It's best not to plunge in mid-stream, however. You might as well walk into the middle of a movie or a novel. Check out the DVD and begin at the beginning when Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine) and lawman-turned-hardware-merchant Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) come to town. Besides giving you a sense of the activity that goes into producing the show, the DVD's special features and actor commentaries are, as usual, illuminating; you will see David Milch at work, characteristically recumbent, dictating the dialogue as he tweaks and finesses a single seemingly casual line to be spoken by Ian McShane, who plays the powerful central figure, the Gem saloon's owner, Al Swearengen (pronounced, fittingly enough, swear engine). While numerous people deserve praise for writing and directing the different episodes, it's Milch who has the vision, Milch who enriches and refines the language and breathes life into the characters.
Another Level
If you've enjoyed two other stellar HBO series, The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, chances are you'd agree that the reason you came back to them week after week is because you looked forward to spending time with the characters.
The people in Deadwood are on another level. They have the depth and resonance of characters in literature. Reverend Smith (Ray McKinnon) could have stepped out of a story by Hawthorne or Stephen Crane. Doc Cochrane (Brad Dourif) might have been the ship's doctor on the Pequod. Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert) could have turned up in the pages of Huckleberry Finn. E.B. Farnum (William Sanderson) and his delightfully grotesque sidekick Richardson (Ralph Richeson) are a team of Dickensian caricatures who could as easily take their place in Shakespeare's rogue's gallery of wise and unwise fools. Towering over them all on the front balcony of the Gem saloon (his personal stage) and brooding over the town is McShane's Al Swearengen, who cuts throats and abuses prostitutes while turning phrases with the wit and rapier-sharp eloquence of a Hamlet or Mercutio.
The sheer intensity Ian McShane brings to his role has to be seen to be believed. Look into those basilisk eyes and you can also see Richard the Third and Iago or one of those monarchs who can doom a man with a frown or a nod or the mere raising of an eyebrow. In the last episode of Season One, when one such killing is accomplished, he becomes a sort of chorus narrating the scene he's engineering. It goes without saying that he's a stand-in for the author, the full fury of the creative ego unleashed. The arrival in Season Three of an acting troupe headed by an old friend helps explain where Al's theatrical style may have originated.
Milch's own theatrical agenda surfaces most obviously during the fifth episode of the first season when the delightfully loathsome hotelier, Mr. Farnum, begins talking to himself while scrubbing blood off the floor (what else in Deadwood?), which is what Al is doing at the end of last Sunday's Season Three finale. While E.B.'s monologue may not qualify as a full-fledged soliloquy, it's heading in that direction. Now and then in Season Two the density of the language actually threatens to strangle meaning. Perhaps one reason Milch is moving on to another series is because either he or HBO worried that the show risked disappearing into a maze of oblique, elegant, convoluted rhetoric the way Henry James did in his late period when, like Milch, he was dictating to an amanuensis.
The Reverend's Fate
Deadwood is so rich with characters, I could write a paragraph or two about almost any of them. The most haunting of the lot is Reverend Smith. Ray McKinnon's performance is nothing less than uncanny. Usually you are able to see at least the semblance of an actor acting, all the more when the major actor on the scene sinks his teeth into the meat of his role as hungrily as McShane does. At first glance the minister seems true to the stereotypical smoothly pious, mellifluous man of God, but soon you begin to notice that his face has a fragile, unguarded aspect and that when he tilts his head toward the heavens, he seems as helpless and exposed as a blind man sinking in the mire of an evil world. In fact, there's a lesion in his brain, "something's amiss," as he gently and unselfpityingly puts it. One of the great scenes in the series is when he comes at night to Seth Bullock and his partner Sol Starr to ask them if they still are the friendly personages he once met or if they're the demons his brain is telling him they have become. Or there's the scene where we see Robin Weigert's swaggering, pugnacious, fabulously foulmouthed Calamity Jane staring at the afflicted man in a stupor of awe. Jane literally hurts for people; compassion takes her by the throat. For all her bluff and drunken bluster, she has a gift for sympathy; in fact, her sympathies are so intense they disable her and drive her to drink. When she comprehends the harrowing extent of the minister's affliction, she seems to be seeing the naked essence of his mortally wounded spirit.
The most unforgettable of the minister's scenes, however, is his death at the hands of that admirable cut-throat, Al Swearengen, who can't bear it when the reverend seeks solace in his saloon, sitting among the prostitutes, smiling, tapping his foot, and nodding his head as lively music is being played on the new piano. Though he finds the brain-damaged minister a violation of the integrity of his saloon, he is the one who knows what to do when the man suffers a seizure because (as Al casually remarks) his own brother had fits. After delivering the by then-dying man to Al's "care," Doc Cochrane begs God to put him out of his misery, and God's most unlikely servant performs the task. What makes Ian McShane's Al even more of a wonder than Weigert's Calamity Jane is the way he simply, murderously, efficiently does the job. On one level, he has to dispatch the minister because. as he explains to the reverend himself, the spectacle of "a man of cloth" kicking up his heels among strumpets is "bad for business." Once he knows what has to be done, Al beckons the more humane of his two henchmen to come into the whore's room where the minister is raving and writhing, racked with convulsions. After telling his man to close the door and watch, Al hugs the minister in his arms, holding him close as he covers his face with the cloth a whore was using to bathe the dying man's forehead. As he suffocates the victim of his compassion, Al makes a lesson of it: "You want to learn how to deal out death when called upon? Make a proper seal, stop up the mouth, apply pressure evenly, like packing a snowball." At the moment of death, he whispers gently, urgently, in the minister's ear: "Go now, brother."
Of all the great things in Deadwood, that scene, for me, is the most memorable.
Season Three Ends
I'm glad I wrote most of this celebration of Deadwood before I saw Sunday's concluding episode of Season Three, which was a letdown. Having had only a day to absorb what happened — or didn't happen — I don't want to make any hasty guesses as to why the denouement was flawed and tentative in a show that has moved along so confidently and forcefully. The villain of the season, George Hearst (an outstanding performance by Gerald McRaney), the epitome of ruthless capitalism, seemingly singlehandedly truncated the final hour of the show. The stage was set for a battle for the very life of the community; the stage was also set for Hearst to be somehow compromised, wounded, or defeated. Instead he has his way. The unjust justice he demands is inflicted on an innocent (once again at the hands of cut-throat Al, thus the blood on the floor) and the ultimate villain rides off with a gold mine in his pocket. Possibly this flawed ending resulted from confusion about the program's future, which may have been up in the air at the time the episode was filmed. According to reports, the set was to be dismantled; there would be no Season Four. Now it seems that there's to be a compromise in the form of a pair of two-hour specials to be released next year.
When you think of it, though, it may be the most honest ending, especially given the present state of the nation. What could be more fitting than that the brutal capitalist would prevail? As the avatar of money and power mounts the stagecoach to ride mightily on to the next great motherlode, the election he rigged installs an ineffectual sheriff and a well-paid behind-the-scenes schemer in place of the steadfast choice of the people.