i can’t tell if this show is getting more or less ridiculous, but i am compelled to watch.
apparently the west was not the jolly barrel of laughs it was portrayed as being in films such as “paint your wagon” and “blazing saddles”. season 1 established that a lot of people swore then/there, and thanks to season 2 i know that doctors did not use much anaesthesia. but where exactly is all the laundry being done? the people on this show are done up better than on masterpiece theater. perhaps season 3 will clear this up.
It’s been getting more ridiculous for the last seven or eight episodes. I know Mike will pounce all over my post with his hard on for Swearengen, and, interestingly, Timothy Olyphant who, presumably, was very good in The Girl Next Door; BUT I think this show has moved from darkly vicious, genre-busting western to absurdly comic western to melodramatic soap opera that happens to be set in the wild west. Yawn.
I haven’t seen the last couple episodes, so maybe it’s turned all soapy. I doubt it. I thought it was a bleak absurdist comedy last year, and the first two episodes this year struck me in a similar vein. Jeff notoriously has no sense of humor, and Arnab notoriously prefers “BlackAdder” and Benny Hill to “The Office.” So we take their comments with some salt. (That said: Arnab, there’s lots of pissing and shitting shtick–doesn’t that seem like fun?)
Maybe the show’s gone to hell; “Six Feet Under” certainly did. I’ll have to catch up and let you know.
Ian fucking McShane. He was grand in “Sexy Beast,” too. Can you believe he was Lovejoy?
And did anyone read the New Yorker article on David Milch, “Deadwood” creator and ex-(still?)heroin and gambling addict and Robert Penn Warren protege? He’s almost as much fun to hear ramble on about the nature of television and narrative as David Chase…
i have to admit it has got a lot better–the last two episodes were really good. i did like swearengen better in the first half of season 1 before they decided to redeem him but regardless, mcshane is on his way to creating one of the most indelible characters in recent memory. unless the writers fuck it up and turn him into the camp’s philanthropist. i like that race is being foregrounded a little more (if barely) but do find it strange that a warts and all approach to the old west like “deadwood” is yet to really depict the effect all of what’s being shown here has on the native americans in the region. in some ways most of the “as it really was” revisionist accounts of the west seem to really be “as it really was for the white folks”.
speaking of realism, what do those of you who watch make of the language on the show? i don’t mean the swearing but the almost courtly nature of the speech. is this meant to be realistic or is it meant to be deliberately stylized to achieve a different kind of aesthetic effect (a la mamet)? i can’t tell–john wayne sure didn’t speak this way.
The claim that Deadwood is somehow realistic always struck me as a) laughable and b) dull. Every new Western that comes along gets to be revisionist-slash-realist, because it defies or disrupts conventions of the Westerns that came before. But I doubt the glorious architectures of profanity in Deadwood are any truer-to-life than the laconic desert spaces of Leone’s West.
That said, it’s always the language that’s astounded me in this show. There are other elements — see below — but listening to E. B. Farnum suck up, or Swearingen deride someone, or Calamity Jane strut her slurred aggression… pure pleasure. The language is as gloriously theatrical as Mamet can (used to) be; the dialogue’s rhythms and cadences and structure resist any easy collapse into recognizable conventions, and so maintain a constant pervasive detachment from “reality” that I find endlessly pleasurable.
I’m having a tough time talking about it, and I imagine Arnab doing his best Butthead snicker about my pleasures, but there is something akin to poetry in the sensuality of language in Deadwood.
My other pleasure in this text: like the best HBO shows, the location is mostly a vehicle to allow close, focused examination of social life. Whether mobsters, talk show hosts, Baltimore’s drug warriors–these are all shows about how community values get contested and defined, how ethics emerges ambiguously in practice, how social life shapes and alters the individual’s goals… In short, HBO keeps producing novels, in the guise of series television.
And I agree with adipex about God.
mike, on behalf of the dull let me say the following: the pleasures of language do not entirely trump other considerations. the location may be a vehicle as you suggest but it is also interesting to see who gets to ride in it (ooh check out my extension of your metaphor). realism or historical accuracy may be mcguffins in the world of “deadwood” but the show nonetheless does some interesting things in the representational terrain of the western–specifically in the representation of the life of women from different classes on the frontier, and also the representation of commerce and political chicanery. it strips the western of its usual heroic landscape–they’re still vacillating on bullock but bullock himself has always vacillated in a way no western icon ever has. i’ll grant it all these things in addition to the pleasures of language.
but even if we say, as you do, that like other hbo shows “deadwood” shows “how community values get contested and defined, how ethics emerges ambiguously in practice, how social life shapes and alters the individual’s goals” etc. etc. we still have to ask why the question of race gets short-shrifted again. the indians are completely absent–even their absence doesn’t work critically; the chinese are so far either props (the new whores in camp) or comic relief (wu); and the brief episode with the “nigger general” and the black stableman a few episodes ago works largely to underline the race-blind nobility of bullock, utter and jane. we aren’t to the end of the second season yet but i hope the show will get better in this regard.
Yeah, all of your points are well-taken, although my point rejecting dull realism had more to do with the question of whether the language was realistic, which is a dull question, but you are particularly right about the show’s lousy or lazy approach to race. In fact, most of the HBO shows I named, with the notable exception of “The Wire,” do a crap job of moving outside the whites-only country club. Most seem to offer the occasional sidekick or “very special episode” approach to non-white racial identity.
I’m finally starting to catch up–I think I’m only two episodes behind now. I won’t tediously reiterate all the raves I’ve made before, but I wanted to call attention to episode 18? 19? Michael Almereyda directed it; in addition to being the finest this season–with the conflation of Wolcott’s pathological desires and corporate destructiveness made most explicit here–it was just fucking gorgeous to look at. There’s an opening shot, a big framing exterior shot of the town, with a miasma of orangish glow hanging over, a thick line of black mud below, and the muddle of townsfolk in the middle, that highlights the show’s fond homage to Bosch. This isn’t a Western; it’s a medieval morality play.
Medieval morality plays lacked ambiguity and functioned more as allegorical propaganda for the ruling and religious elites to keep the working man (who didn’t understand a jot of Latin) down and in his place. Deadwood is good but it ain’t no medieval morality play. I do, however, think the show to be medieval in its fascination with evil (and to a lesser degree good) and Bosch is a reference that works for me. Episode 21 had a stunner of an ending and I will be watching my HBO On Demand tonight to see how that little tragedy plays itself out (I knew it was coming since the character walked into the muddy street–I just didn’t know how).
OK, so I was hard on Deadwood at the beginning of the second season, but I thought the final six episodes were very good and the season finale (no spoilers) was truly grand (even if Milch and co. owe Francis Ford Coppola a royalty payment). I think my favorite character of the series is Wu, but the final moments were owned by “Swirgin” as he cast his lofty eye upon the denizens of a city he helped build and which, against all odds, he still seems to rule. Damn good television!
i thought the season finale was somewhat anti-climactic myself, but maybe that was the point. but i thought there was some inconsistency between the offscreen hirst/hearst of mid-season, the very mention of whose names brought strong men to their knees, and the man who eventually showed up.
is there going to be a season 3? other than the question of whether tolliver will live there don’t really seem to be any cliffhangers. and i think season 1 had ended with a season 2 trailer. the only other loose end is the question of the “nigger general” and hofstetler(?) . weren’t they planning on returning to camp?
why is wu your favorite character? if i had to pick one i’d probably pick farnum, who i think may have surpassed swearengen as this show’s most unique creation.
Well, I simply enjoyed the Swearengen/Wu scenes (there was humor but also a growing mutual respect as well as Swearengen building his alliance to maintain his power). And I admired how hard Wu worked to build alliances to consolidate his own power (his efforts to learn English in order to better communicate with the powers that be). Plus, I just love the way he pronouces Swearengen’s name. And unlike Farnum (who recalls one of the least favorite characters from my youth–Barney Fife) Wu provided humor but was never reduced to pure comic relief. Farnum’s paranoia and heightened levels of insecurity grew tiring for me, and, unlike Wu, he had no ethics whatsover. I thought Wu’s final few episodes, starting with his disgust concerning the San Francisco cocksucker’s burning of the dead whores and leading to his cutting off of his hair to declare himself an American . . . well, it was sentimental and ideologically problematic, but I fell for it. Still, I don’t want to make too much of that offhand comment. When Wu and Swearengen make a pact to back each other up in the final seconds of the finale, I thought it made for a engaging dramatic moment. I liked that Hearst didn’t come across as one more asshole baddie. His character was surprising and his pragmatic approach to handling his men (and there demons) set up a number of the big curtain closing moments. Season three? I don’t know. I have no idea where this show is going and to be real honest, I have no idea how Swearengen has managed to survive unscathed for so long. He’s a likable character . . . audiences want him around . . . but I find his ability to maintain his authority hard to believe (given the world this creative team has asked us to buy into). If any of that makes sense.
I want to comment, and will, but won’t now–I’m still a couple episodes shy of the full deck, so now that I know too much, I’ll stop reading these. Curses!
jeff, it is hard for me to see wu as played for anything but comic relief. and i’m not sure what to think either about the fact that the english speaking, tall chinese man who has sex with white women is the “bad chinaman”, while wu’s more conventionally locatable immigrant is celebrated.
there is an interesting gun vs. knife/fist dynamic in “deadwood”–the “good” characters seem to mix it up more “close in” (as swearengen puts it).
Yeah, I missed a few episodes in the middle so I can’t comment on the tall, English speaking, Chinese man and how he might resist cultural stereotypes (while Yu plays into the dominant culture’s ideological assumptions). In fact, I know I’m on shaky ground here. I thought Wu had agency (as much as a Chinese man can in the wild, wild west). His distaste for the way the whores were treated by his rival was more audience friendly I suspect (but it also played into his own capitalist designs). I did find him amusing (was I laughing at him or laughing at the absurdity of the situation, I don’t know), but I also found Wu to be smarter than first impressions might suggest. He knew where he stood in the social and civic hierarchy but he continually worked it to his advantage. The smooth, opium-smoking, whore-burning Chinese fellow certainly didn’t buy into the American capitalist ethos (he was, by and large, a kept man and did not have to play by the rules), while Wu can be read as an immigrant poster boy for American industry and its attendant work ethics (reifying institutional practices). Am I making any sense?
You know I was watching this final episode again last night at 1:30 in the morning and I find it to be so mesmerizing (ok I was a little altered, but still it is so well constructed and the narrative action compelling, sublte, sophisiticated). I enjoyed watching Gerald McRaney work as Hearst–that scene between him and Swearengen is a beauty (as is the scene between him and Toliver). and the look on Wolcott’s face when his demons are forced to the surface. That character became so human for me (it was a very strong performance). Anyway, there is something very feminized about the “San Francisco cocksucker.” One thing you can’t say about Wu is that he is not masculine. I really enjoyed watching the way he appropriated Swearengen’s men and, for an hour or so, they were taking orders from him.
Just read that Brian Cox will be playing a theatrical producer for six episodes during the third season of Deadwood. Mmmm . . . wild west theatre.
season 3 starts soon. i don’t see powers boothe listed among the returning stars on hbo’s site, but tolliver does pop up in the previews. i wonder if this means he won’t be among the living very long. the extended teaser hbo has been playing (the one with characters reading the beatitudes) is wonderful–perhaps the best i’ve seen for any of their shows. mcshane’s delivery of “blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see god” is just so delicious.
so this will be the last season of deadwood, with two two-hour specials to follow. i guess it hasn’t been doing so well for hbo. perhaps the third season will cause me to rue this more but i can’t say i’m terribly disappointed. i do hope hbo will have something that at least approaches the sopranos in quality soon. neither deadwood nor rome does, and from what sunhee tells me nor does big love. can’t say i’m excited by the thought of milch’s “surf noir” (in development as per the link above).