Just now I’m traversing what somebody (I think it was Bunyan) termed “a plain called Ease.” I have a few weeks off from graduate school, so I’m doing a little more reading for pleasure, and also watching quite a lot of TV, both the broadcast kind and the kind you get from Netflix and Amazon Prime.
A couple weeks ago I got to thinking, as I sometimes do, about Wild Bill Hickok, to me one of the more interesting characters of the wild west. I decided, with some reluctance, to watch the series “Deadwood,” which is getting to be fairly old as cable series go, but I’d avoided it.
It proved to be what I’d heard – lively, gritty, and profane. I watched the first season, mainly to see how they treated Wild Bill. Taken in that regard, I was mostly pleased. I’ve waited a long time for a really good portrayal of Wild Bill, and Keith Carradine’s character here is pretty close to the reality, as I see it.
Nevertheless, I finished that first season with the same resolve I reached when I finished the first season of “Mad Men.” I couldn’t think of a reason to spend more time with these extremely unpleasant people. Wild Bill is dead. Seth Bullock and his partner are pretty good, but most everybody else is either a fool or a knave.
And the language. It is to be expected that a grizzled moralist like me will object to it. It’s oppressive. It repels me. And, from what I’ve read, it’s not even authentic. Not that the real westerners didn’t cuss all the time, but they didn’t use the kind of sexual profanity favored in the 21st Century. The vulgarity has been “updated” for viewer comprehension.
The formal language in which the characters speak, I believe, is also inauthentic (I’m pretty sure I read this somewhere too, so I don’t claim it as my own observation). The fashion in westerns for the last few decades has been to put dialogue into people’s mouths that matches the literary style of those times. I believe it began with Charles Portis’ True Grit – and not so much with the book itself as the movie dialogue, which transcribed Mattie’s written observations into spoken words. It established her character, and it was interesting and effective. But it would be as wrong to think that all 19th Century people spoke like Trollope characters as to think that all 20th Century people spoke like Hemingway characters.
It was nice to see the attempts at authenticity. I’ve visited the real Deadwood, and viewed photographs of the original mining camp. The setting of the series captures that look very well. But I got the impression that the writers’ intention was to establish authenticity early on, and then fantasize freely. I’m pretty sure that Rev. Smith did not die as portrayed in the show, but was killed by Indians (nobody is ever killed by Indians on modern westerns). And whose idea was it to cast Peter Coyote as Gen. George H. Crook? He doesn’t look a bit like Crook, and they didn’t even give him the right kind of whiskers.
From what I read in online research, the theme of the series is the corrupting encroachment of corporate interests. Apparently, Al Swearingen may be a murderer, a pimp, and a drug dealer, but at least he’s not a corporate officer.
I came to “Deadwood” for authenticity, and I have dropped it for the same reason. Plus the cussing.