ode to "deadwood"...

I’ve recently started watching the series, DEADWOOD for the second time. I had forgotten its brilliance. David Milch, the creator, takes us into a world of emotional complexity, a tapestry of rich variance and subtle colors.

DEADWOOD takes place in the late 1800s in a lawless township built around prospecting in the hills of South Dakota on Native American land. It’s against the law for whites to be on the land but no one has come to kick them off. We first meet Seth Bullock, a sheriff, on his way to Deadwood to start a new life but first he has to deal with a man he recently arrested. When a mob shows up outside to kill him, he takes the prisoner out, hangs him but then is forced to break his neck when the rope is too long. This sets the stage for a world of fear where being a man means you kill or you will be killed and for women? There isn’t much to do but be beholden to a man, probably one you never loved or are a whore and you are still beholden to a man, one you never loved. Women were bought and sold like slaves and doped up to keep them from “hysteria”.

Each scene unfolds with a palpable fear undulating from within each character. In one scene, Trixie, a whore, has shot a man in the head for beating her up. Al Swearengen, the saloon owner and Trixie’s boss runs up after hearing the gun shot, afraid of what it will do for business. As they stand there watching the man die, the Doctor arrives to help but also to witness death and learn from it. The shot man blubbers about nonsense while the rest make deals to save themselves from moral responsibility until the man falls silent. Then there is silence and it is peaceful as the man passes over to the other side. The actor’s timing is precise as if they intuitively know how long it takes for a man’s spirit to leave his body. As soon as it has the characters go back to their fear based bickering. It’s moments like this where divinity shines through and the “TV show” becomes art.

In Deadwood death is as common as life. In Swearengen’s world killing a man is just another item on his list of to-dos to either to keep his status by instilling fear or to keep the truth of his matters under lock. But even in the death and killing there is a richness of humanity unlike what we find today. And this is shown beautifully in the last episode of Season 1 when Swearengen kills the priest whose been slowly dying of a brain tumor. He does it out of love to ease the suffering of the priest and to those witnessing his slow and painful death.

I wouldn’t want to live in Deadwood but there is something that calls to my soul and stirs distant memories of living in a time when entertainment was dancing to the piano or sitting on a porch commenting about the day’s affairs. It was a much simpler time when intuition was a necessity to stay alive and trust was a matter of life and death.