The most distinctive aspect of Deadwood is its language. I know people who dislike the show entirely based on its dialogue, and while I disagree, I don't argue with them either. The language of Deadwoodis stylized, exceptionally so, and if you can't get on board with that stylization than chances are it'll be a deal breaker for you. But to me, it is the dialogue of Deadwood that is the main source of its genius.
There are three aspects to Deadwood's dialogue that make it so unique. The first is its abundant use of profanity, and particularly its use of modern-day profanity in a historical setting. The second is its use, right alongside all that swearing, of an elevated, Victorian/Elizabethan rhetoric, in which even some of the crudest characters can perform dazzling displays of wordsmithing. Third is the distinctive sentence structures employed in the dialogue.
Deadwood's profanity was perhaps the show's most attention-grabbing trait. There's a lot of it, for one thing, and its also deliberately anachronistic, completely contemporary rather than historically accurate. While there can be something jarring, especially at first, at hearing all these 19th Century cowboys utter every possible permutation of the word "fuck," I think modernizing the profanity was absolutely the right call. Profanity in Deadwood is practically an act of violence, in itself a way of establishing a person's place in the pecking order. Historically accurate profanity -- "goldarn," for example -- would have stripped all of the menace out of the swearing, leaving only camp in its place.
And the incessant swearing is hardly gratuitous. It is modulated based on character, for one thing -- some characters never swear, others seldom. Characters constantly adjust the vulgarity and the formality of their speech depending on whom they are speaking to and what their goals are in the interaction. And one of the overarching themes of the show, as I will discuss in my next post, is how human beings establish order, or even community, in the absence of law. Language is the primary tool by which this is done, and swearing in Deadwood often carries with it the suggestion that the person doing the swearing is willing to back up his words with force.
In addition to the Hobbesian nature of the profanity in terms of the interactions between the characters, it is also a reminder that the town of Deadwood, as a lawless and stateless mining camp, has a violent relationship with the earth itself. This is not a farming community, working in cooperation with nature, but rather a community which centers around mining, which is itself a violent activity. Coarseness is thus an essential part of its nature.
Mixed with that coarseness is the show's astonishing rhetoric. Again, objections as to the realism of this rhetoric are duly noted, presumably accurate, and entirely beside the point. This is the primary source of the show's being described as Shakespearean: not only are many of the character word-drunk, but they also utilize a version of the English language which is, ornate, prolix, and certainly Victorian, if not Elizabethan, in tone.
The rhetoric of the characters is again a way of showing how language itself is one of the primary sources of law in the camp. While characters who are hostile to one another engage in a litany of vulgarity, affection in Deadwood is often expressed through excessive politesse. I don't believe, for example, that Charlie Utter ever referred to Joanie Stubbs as anything other than "Ms. Stubbs." And negotiations in Deadwood -- and negotiating is precisely what occupies much of the show -- also often involve a excess of formality, which is used as a way of masking intention. Here's one of my favorite such scenes:
Integrally related to all that free-flowing rhetoric are the unorthodox sentence structures employed in Deadwood's dialogue. Sentences of the straightforward declarative sort we were all taught in elementary school certainly occur in the dialogue of Deadwood, but they are overshadowed by sentences that are long, complex, and sprawling. The subject noun is often in hiding, waiting to pop out at the end of a sentence, rather than the beginning, where we are used to finding it. Unlike other prominent masters of dialogue, like David Mamet and Richard Price, whose attentiveness to sentence structure is grounded in rhythm, the beat of the words, Deadwood's sentence structures are grounded in meaning. By hiding the ball as they do, they force us to pay special attention, to follow the arc of the thought without the usual guideposts. David Milch's re-ordering of words in this regard is more like that undertaken by the poet John Berryman in the Dream Songs, than it is Mamet's staccato jazz.
Milch actually used some of these devices, albeit in more conventional guises, in NYPD Blue, of which he was the main creative force for the first half a dozen or so seasons. While that show was certainly not operating at the same level of sophistication, and obeyed some of the constrains of network TV (while charging right through plenty of others), the dialogue was blunter and bawdier than any previously heard on network television. While the language was nowhere near as ornate, it was certainly stylized (and more Mametesque), but again words often did not appear in their normal order, particularly with regards to Andy Sipowicz's dialogue. Andy Sipowicz -- now there's a guy who would've felt right at home in Deadwood.
To be continued.
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