Dirty Words in Deadwood: Literature and the Postwestern
Edited by Melody Graulich & Nicholas S. WitschiUniversity of Nebraska Press, 2013For three seasons on HBO, from 2004 to 2006, the dramatic series Deadwood chronicled the sordid, violent goings-on in the eponymous small 19th-century frontier town made famous as the place where "Wild Bill" Hickok was shot dead. The show's loathsome creator, David Milch, infused nearly every scene of nearly every episode with a bizarre, poetic, and utterly convincing patois of his own creation. The result was a weird rhetorical jungle that sprang from a deep bed of profanity; HBO, perhaps sensing they had something of a tough sell on their hands, initially offered the show's first three episodes free - and were promptly buried under thousands of viewer complaints about the veritable torrent of cuss-words uttered by almost every character in almost every scene. "Gratuitous" was a term that popped up in quite a few of those complaints.Eventually, the show's brilliance became intertwined with its profanity. Characters had never spoken like this on television before - they were given razor-sharp insights into each other and themselves; they were given aggrieved spur-of-the-moment arias on every subject under the sun; some of them were even given extended Shakespearean monologues, a remarkable dare of hubris redeemed only by the fact that Milch's writing somehow made it work.The show boiled along for three seasons, reaching a strained high point in the third season when Deadwood's various residents - previously at each other's throats most of the time - faced a unifying outside threat in the person of gold-baron George Hearst (played with seething, tamped-down menace by Gerald McRaney). Just as this plot was coming to its climax - a crowd of hired gunmen converging on Deadwood to destroy it, the town girding to fight for its very existence - Milch summarily abandoned the whole project. But the mark on viewers' imaginations had already been made. Here had been television that soared to some very unexpected heights. Here had been salty, obscene language gorgeous enough to teach in English literature classes.Naturally (unfortunately?), you can’t teach something in English literature classes without English literature professors, and the calling doesn’t typically produce mesmerizers. For every warm and captivating speaker, there are two or three hundred who have long since allowed their meager portion of power to corrupt them absolutely; they brook no shadow of criticism from a slavishly note-taking class full of students whose future careers depend in part on their teachers’ approval, and the feedback they receive at conferences from academic colleagues tends to be poisoned right through with self-serving bile. The result is singularly unfortunate: an entire class of intellectual that has lost the ability to write for a smart, common-reader audience. Drone and pontificate, they can do. But entertain? Might as well ask them to fly to the moon.So those smart common readers will feel a bit of leaden trepidation when approaching a new volume from the University of Nebraska Press, despite its welcoming title of Dirty Words in Deadwood. Those readers will have fond, perhaps profound, memories of the show, and they won’t relish having those memories defaced by anything so trivializing as academic discourse. There’s a certain element of mourning involved in any contemplation of Deadwood; nobody who’s ever watched it hasn’t wished it had lasted longer. Ham-handed scholarly writing on the subject can only make the show feel even more cancelled.So the heart quails when Brian McCuskey wastes no time in bring up Derrida. The spirits flag when Tim Steckline can watch a harrowing episode like “Requiem for a Gleet” and opine: “An auditor without ears and a speaker without English become the interlocutory correlates of the mute Swearengen's blockage.” The mind boggles when a writer is able to confuse Blazanov and O’Shaughnessy, or when Ellsworth’s dead body is described as “disfigured,” or when John Dudley, in his essay “Land of Oblivion,” starts to talk about the “usurpation of female generative power in the service of patriarchal authority” (Dudley also tells us that when Trixie flashes her breast at Hearst in order to distract him before she shoots him, she’s also evoking “the dangerous power of the bare-breasted Amazon as an emblem of warfare,” when actually she’s only flashing her breast at Hearst in order to distract him before she shoots him). You start to imagine the air-scorching comments Al Swearengen would have made about these tropes and gambits. Despair begins to settle into place.Not all hope is lost, however. It’s true that Jennilyn Merten, in her essay “Right or Wrong, You Side with Your Feelings,” can uncork a positively stultifying paragraph like this one:
Swearengen explains to Johnny (and the audience): “A fair fight, something Dan and I have always struggled to avoid, is different. You see the light go out of their eyes … it's just you left, and death.” While it seems that a fair fight ought to absolve the combatants of such strong emotions, these two scenes suggest that it is precisely the fairness, its empathy and intimacy with another individual, that accentuate [sic] one's own vulnerability and proximity to death. By contrast murder has a way of producing a feeling of immortality, of reenacting one's own survival in the termination of another.
But she also comes up with the best insight of the entire book, when she casually observes that Deadwood’s vivid language becomes “another form of violence.”Yes, Nicole Tonkovitch writes, in “Who Put the Gun into the Whore’s Hand?” – “An enterprise that depends heavily on visual prosthesis, Deadwood both labors to approximate historical realism and warns its viewers against simple credulity. Two sets of contrasting tropes signal the oscillation …” until you want to wander into the Black Hills to die, but Michael K. Johnson can defy the odds (odds he himself has lengthened considerably giving his contribution the ghastly title “Queer Spaces and Emotional Couplings in Deadwood”) and produce a quite excellent and wide-ranging piece, full of good thought-provoking stuff like this:
At the end of season 3, Trixie, who has left prostitution behind to learn bookkeeping from Sol and who has earned a position at the bank established by Mrs. Garret, once more takes to the street – the only actor in a town full of Hamlets, each in his own way hesitating to act against Hearst – in the role of self-appointed assassin, her real identity and purpose concealed by taking on her former social role as whore, as she distracts Hearst with bared breasts and lifted skirt long enough to shoot him (unfortunately, not fatally).
“A town full of Hamlets” is very nearly enough all by itself to redeem the many lapses of Dirty Words in Deadwood. That redemption doesn’t happen – no single phrase or essay could do it – mainly because although our various contributors are billed as “film experts,” they’re all academics first, mostly hailing from institutions of higher learning established deep in the territories … places like Utah and Montana, where perhaps the movie and TV writings of Anthony Lane or Locke Peterseim have yet to penetrate. They’re accustomed to classes and conferences, the ruling irony here being that such individuals inevitably fare poorly in the hurly-burly of Deadwood’s main thoroughfare, where how you say something is at least as important as what that something is. All very smart individuals, no doubt, but the collection of them left me shaking my head, missing my show, and thinking something very much along the lines of what Doc Cochran thinks of God: “I doubt he's omnipotent; I know he's myopic.”
