Deadwood Revisited

 The Beloved Spouse™ and I recently completed our more or less annual viewing of Deadwood. We now know the show well enough to recite the lines along with the actors and can spare the attention to look for more subtle things: set dressing, how the actors use their eyes, how they play off each other when they are not speaking. It’s all fascinating and no one has ever done it better than David Milch and the cast and crew he assembled.

 

I could write a series of posts about Deadwood but, looking through the blog’s history, I have no material changes to what I said in 2015. (About which, pardon my puffery, Jim Beaver (Whitney Ellsworth in the series) commented, “Great piece.”)

 

I do have additional thoughts.

 

In 2015 I wrote: Probably the greatest praise I can give Deadwood is that it has made me re-examine my creative process. (Such as it is.) Since then I have become much more intimate with not only Milch’s process, but his attitude. I have

·       Watched, taken notes on, and distilled his series of informal talks titled “The Idea of the Writer.” They’re fascinating, if rambling, and I can’t recommend them highly enough for anyone interested in the creative process. All are available on YouTube.

·       Read Milch’s books: True Blue (with Bill Clark, about the first two seasons of NYPD Blue); Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills (companion volume to the series); and Life’s Work, his memoir.

·       Read The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed On, by Matt Zoller Seitz, an exhaustive labor of love that details everything from Milch’s life and career to oral histories of the show’s production, cancelation, and resurrection as Deadwood: The Movie.

·       Seen the documentary Without a Net: Creating NYPD Blue, directed by Marc Ostend and executive produced by Milch’s wife, Rita. The film depicts and dissects the end of Milch’s tenure at NYPD Blue. Don’t let his wife’s involvement fool you. This is no puff piece.

 

Several changes resulted:

·       I interpreted the concept of resting transparently to suit my situation, using it daily when drafting and rewriting.

·       There are no problems, and nothing is ever “wrong.” There are things that need to be better.

·       The best time for research is not during the writing but before, and it is not too specific. The best research becomes part of you and is expressed more between the lines than in specific explanation. I always had some of that attitude; a future blog post will describe a renewed interest.

·       “Visions come to prepared spirits,” a quote from the German chemist August Kekulé after discovering the structure of the benzene molecule. (After 25 years’ work, the answer came to Kekulé in a dream.) Now I try never to rush an idea to fruition.

·       “The testifying to the going out in spirit by the act of imagination.” Milch believes nothing exists in a vacuum, and that we are all connected in some way. I’m not as sold as he is, but I have found the task of writing—and let’s face it, much as we love to write, doing it well is a task at times—much more palatable. The “going out in spirit” part has also made my life a better place, and probably better for those who interact with me.

·       “The artist’s job is to find imaginative associations in what is merely fanciful.” Our job as writers is to take personal experiences—things significant only to us—and find ways to give them meaning for our audience.

·       Milch never thinks about writing except when writing. My adjustment is that I never try to think about writing unless I’m writing. That doesn’t mean things never force themselves into my thoughts; those that do, are welcome. I rarely play music or listen to the radio in the car; in good weather I take walks. If something about the writing pops up uninvited, well, the least I can do is let it visit a bit.

·       Milch’s memoir is unsparing in its evaluation of his life. I have neither his demons nor his gifts. Maybe they go hand in glove, though I think those types of explanations are more excuses than reasons. I mention it here because it taught me to be honest with myself in all aspects of my life, and to understand that all I can do is the best I can. (See “going out in spirit” above.)

 

I set out to write about Deadwood and ended up writing about David Milch. (Again.) I don’t see any good way around that. Deadwood is Milch. To talk about the show without going into some detail about him is to miss the point of its creation.

 

We’ll watch Deadwood again.

Understanding Art

Benoit Lelieve is one of the people who keeps me from getting old. While he’s young enough to be my son—okay, my nephew, maybe—his blog Dead End Follies routinely provides fodder that keeps me looking at things in a fresh light and exposes me to others I might otherwise have missed. While his tastes and interest are not always my own (see the age difference comment above), his writing on more universal issues, filtered through our dissimilar backgrounds, is always thought-provoking. This isn’t the first time he’s stimulated a response that required more thought and space than could fit into a comment, and it will not be the last.

A few weeks ago he wrote about the difficulty of understanding art. (Pause inserted while you read his piece, which would be worth reading even if it weren’t helpful for understanding what I wrote below.) As with all such discussions, the crux of the matter is defining what art is, as it’s impossible to understand anything if one can’t define it. Therein lies the rub. Art is like beauty (and, not coincidentally, often has “beauty” somewhere in many of its definitions) in that it is in the eye of the beholder. What is art to me may not be art to you, and the guy down street agrees with neither of us, though he’s a cretin, so fuck him.

Does intent matter? Maybe. Probably not. J.S. Bach didn’t intend for his cantatas to become timeless works of art. He just needed music for Sunday’s service. On the flip side are countless writers, singers, songwriters, actors, sculptors, painters, on and on with pretentions of creating art. Their definition of art is sometimes whatever they create and, oh my god, is this a “my shit doesn’t stink” crew to have to deal with. So, no, intent doesn’t matter a whole lot.

Another question that comes up—often raised by snobs—is whether art is more “noble” than entertainment. Even if that’s true—a point on which I am not sure—there’s also no bright line there. Doesn’t art need to entertain its audience on some level? Since its medium (listening, viewing, reading) is not required for life—and by “required” I mean like food and water and air—can’t we say there must be some reason for people other than the creator to partake, and that reason is to be entertained? Devotees of Gabriel Garcia Marquez are likely not entertained by his writing in the same way as Bruce Springsteen’s fans are by the Boss’s work, but each has qualities in their creations that engage others, and we can think of that engagement as entertainment as easily as anything else.

Now, there is entertainment and there is entertainment. “Mere” entertainment doesn’t challenge the audience. (See Benoit’s comments about the TV show Numb3rs. See? I told you to read his piece.) If one engages with a book or movie or piece of music but is not compelled to think about it afterward as more than a good time, it succeeds as entertainment, but it is not art. Art is when the experience gets one to thinking about more than what was on the surface. I enjoy Ray Donovan, but when each episode is over any discussion focuses on what happened, what went well, and what they might have done better. Compare that to The Wire or Deadwood or NYPD Blue, where The Beloved Spouse and I talk about all of the above and how it affected us. What it made us think about we hadn’t thought of before, and what it made us re-evaluate.

I argue that no one can fully “understand” art. It’s too dependent on one’s previous experience and background. I have friends whose opinions I trust and respect, whose work I enjoy and value, who get moist about the virtues of X-Men or Batman, or any of a number of members of the DC or Marvel universes; I think they’re fucking comic books. That doesn’t make me wrong, nor them. It doesn’t even mean either of us is mistaken. It just shows there’s more each of us may still have to learn, and having more to learn—and a desire to continue to learn it—is always a good thing.

Maybe that’s all we need to understand about art. It’s what makes us want to keep growing.

Abbreviated Thoughts

Tom Pitts raised an interesting point on his blog the other day. (Go ahead. Read it now. What I have to say will make more sense if you have, and it’s probably better than whatever I’ll come up with.) The gist of Tom’s piece is that writing an alternate history may not be as daunting as he’d thought. Just take actual history and tell it however you want.

(A brief digression. I read Tom's novella Knuckleball over the weekend. I'll have more to say about it when i have some time, but, if you haven't read it, you really ought to.)

This grabbed my attention, as I’m playing with the idea of a Western that will, in essence, be an alternative history. Deadwood is the obvious inspiration, as I plan to set the story where the stagecoaches used to change horses on the run from Cheyenne. There’s a town there—Lusk—named after the rancher who donated the land and laid out the streets.

That was to have been the point of this blog, to show how Tom got me thinking about blending reality and fiction into a Western that would capture some of the spirit of Deadwood without either becoming ensnared by its scope, or ripping it off. (Unsuccessfully, of course. Deadwood will always stand as a unique artistic accomplishment.) I’ve been pushing these ideas around in my mind for weeks now as The Beloved Spouse and I watch all three seasons back-to-back, twice through. I thought a blog post would be a good way to work some things out, and Tom had me inspired.

What happened was less serendipitous. The blog post rambled, taking in more unsettled ground with each paragraph. I’ve had a long couple of weeks and a trying weekend lies ahead. So it goes. In life you have to do a lot of things you don’t fucking want to do. Many times, that’s what the fuck life is: one vile fucking task after another. So this is all I got. Read Tom’s post. It’s better than anything I have in me right now. I’ll be ready to go after scratching a couple of things off my list. Pain or damage don’t end the world, you know. Or despair, or fuckin’ beatings. The world ends when you’re dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man — and give some back.

I’ll do better next week.

Deadwood

God, I love Deadwood. I love the characters, the stories, the sets, the photography, the acting. I can relate more closely to The Wire, and no series ever strung stories together to a more fitting climax than did The Shield. The sense of place established by the characters and dialog in Justified is unsurpassed. What Deadwood  did—and still does, after repeated viewings—is create a hyper-reality where disbelief need not be suspended; it’s torn away as brutally as James Ellroy describing a Los Angeles that existed, but never quite the way his does.

How does Deadwood do it? This may seem ironic when discussing a visual medium, but the whole things is about language. For a person who loves words—their uses meanings, the sounds as they fall upon the ear—Deadwood is the ultimate experience.

The Beloved Spouse and I recently finished what was our fourth (or fifth) trip through the 36 episodes. Not ready to give it up, we worked out way through the bonus features disks. They were a revelation, and highly recommended for fans, especially for insights into the creative process of David Milch.

Let’s talk about Milch for a minute. For years I spoke of him as if his given name were “That Cocksucker.” (“Don’t forget how That Cocksucker Milch fucked us on Deadwood.”) Jim Beaver recently placed the lion’s share of the blame on HBO on his Facebook page. He was there, I wasn’t, and a re-reading of the relevant portions of Brett Martin’s wonderful book Difficult Men shows I had been largely unfair. I still wish Milch hadn’t been quite so sensitive to HBO’s snub and found a way to get the two two-hour movies made to wrap things up, but that’s small potatoes compared to his overarching achievements in Deadwood.

The bonus features were another eye opener. True, they’re edited, and I’m sure Milch had final approval, but the respect, admiration—awe, even—the actors had for Milch was evident, even in candid shots. Watching him speak showed a bit of the charisma they must have felt. Something special was happening there, and while I can’t say everything they did worked—the George Hearst character might have been a little more believable had he not become evil incarnate—the flaws are negligible when compared to the accomplishments. (Some Season Three subplots don’t go anywhere, but I’ll give the benefit of the doubt that Season Four would done something with them.)

                                             

Probably the greatest praise I can give Deadwood is that it has made me re-examine my

creative process. (Such as it is.) I’ve toyed with the idea of a Western for several years; now I have a file full of notes for it, and plot ideas are springing up unbidden in the car and after showers. I’m paying special attention to the language I’ll use. Not just the style and voice, but the language, both narrative and spoken. I’m not fool enough to try to copy Deadwood’s unique speech, but some things Milch said in the bonus features stuck with me: the task is to create a language. It will sound like English, and it will have elements of the vernacular of the times, but the point will be to develop something unique.

Development. That’s the key. The story develops. The characters. Even the language. Milch spent over a year “developing” Deadwood before bringing in the crews and getting to work. The universe must be set in the creator’s mind before “work” begins. The story and characters and language and setting can develop in whatever form and direction, and the whole will not be ill-affected if the vision of the world is true. That’s where the real effort must take place for this book, and even for the Penns River books I have on the back burner, though that world is known to me well enough now that deliberation is less important than interpretation.

Gustav Mahler said after revising his Fifth Symphony, “I cannot understand how I could have written so much like a beginner. . . . Clearly the routine I had acquired in the first four symphonies had deserted me altogether, as though a totally new message demanded a new technique.”  I’m no Mahler, but I understand what he meant. I’ve been dissatisfied with writing in general and my writing in particular for some time. Now I think I know why. I’d said as much as I could say with the tools and approach I had developed. So it’s time for me to develop, too. Even if the end result is not dissimilar, the approach will differ.

I might have come to these conclusions even had I not seen Deadwood as this precise moment in time. Maybe. I defy any limber-dicked cocksucker to gainsay it had nothing to do with it.

Westerns as Noir

Beth Kelly hit the ground running with her first OBAAT post, and got me to thinking why I enjoy some Westerns so much, others only a little and (unfortunately) the rest, not at all. It was The Beloved Spouse who reminded me: the best Westerns are very much noir stories, set fifty to seventy-five years before film noir became a thing.

The stereotypical Western has become a cultural cliché: white hats = good guys, black hates = bad guys. Anyone with a true understanding of “American Exceptionalism” can figure that can’t have been how things really were. Better and more honest histories have since been written, and we now know “good guy” and “bad guy” were often situational, as many Western legends walked on both sides of that road, sometimes simultaneously. (Wyatt Earp a prime example.)

The earliest Western I know of to embrace these noirish roots was Shane

(1953).  Alan Ladd plays a gunfighter who tries to give it up, only to learn his past is not so easily eluded, and good intentions cannot alter one’s destiny. There’s no secret how the film will play out once Jack Palance makes his screen debut, but earlier Westerns would have Shane clean up the town and ride off into the sunset as the adoring citizens wave. In the movie, he rides into the dark mountains with only a child to see him, presumably to die.

Ride the High Country (1962) takes things another step down the road. Randolph Scott, the stock Western good guy (In Blazing Saddles, Cleavon Little rallies the people of Rock Ridge to follow him by saying, “You’d do it for Randolph Scott”), betrays old friend Joel McCrae. Scott can’t go through with it and dies for his sins—classic Western stuff—the tone of the film is what matters. The mining camp and its residents place one in mind more of Deadwood than of Dodge City, and you’re really not sure how things will fall out with Scott and McCrae until the final scene.

Ride the High Country was directed by Sam Peckinpaugh, who’d break the mold with 1969’s The Wild Bunch. The film created a stir with its ground-breaking graphic violence, but holds up over time thanks to its portrayals of the Wild Bunch as not only ruthless outlaws, but men who care enough about a comrade—the one they’re least close to, no less—to sacrifice themselves for him. It’s the

alleged good guys—Robert Ryan and his posse—who are the low-lifes, stealing the clothes off dead men and fighting over who killed who for the bounty money. Let’s also not forget, Peckinpaugh’s violence is graphic, not gratuitous. Over forty years later, the Battle of the Bloody Porch is still a difficult scene to watch, not least because of how the viewer has come to identify with William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, and Ben Johnson. (Yeah, Sam had a decent cast to work with, too.)

Television got into the act in 1989 with Lonesome Dove. While many would not think of it as noir, the final scene establishes its credentials. Woodrow Call

(Tommy Lee Jones) has returned to Lonesome Dove, where a reporter recognizes him as the man who ramrodded a cattle drive from the Rio Grande to be the first man to graze cattle in Montana, and tells Call people say he is a man of vision. Call reflects on how his quest has resulted in the deaths of everyone he was close to, and mutters, “Yeah. Hell of a vision.” A key element of noir is that of someone who kicks off events that will spiral out of his control and end badly. If this doesn’t qualify, I don’t know what does.

Clint Eastwood (you knew he’d show up sooner or

later) takes Shane’s premise to its pinnacle with Unforgiven (1992). (Eastwood made several movies that deserved mention here: A Fistful of Dollars; For a Few Dollars More; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; and The Outlaw Josie Wales. I chose Unforgiven as his masterpiece.) All characters are multidimensional. That Eastwood’s character William Munny comes out on top at the end is recognition that the most dangerous man is one who has no boundaries.

All of which brings us to what may be the darkest—and most realistic—depiction of its chosen Western element: Deadwood (2004 – 2006). Intended by creator

David Milch to show how order will of necessity arise in any situation, HBO’s brilliant series played self-interest against moral compass (or lack thereof) against greed against a desire to do what’s best for the most people, a morality play defined by the acrimony and marriages of convenience between Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and Al Swearengen (Ian McShane, playing what may be the ultimate multidimensional villain). Extremely loosely based on real people and events, Deadwood shows how society inelegantly climbs from anarchy despite—and because of—the baser natures of all involved.

It’s no great surprise Elmore Leonard was able to transition so well from

Westerns to crime fiction, the core elements are so much the same. (The movie Hombre (1967) could also have made this list, and may well be Leonard’s masterpiece; a brilliant book.)  A casual disrespect for the letter of the law, the use of violence as an acceptable means to an end, and characters who, when done right, are not what they seem to be, link both genres.