Like the shooting of the police captain in "The Godfather" or the blinding in "King Lear" or the psychologically intense sex scenes in "Last Tango in Paris," this western's graphic content aims to shock audiences out of their complacency. The series earns its freedom by putting the nastiness in context: It was a hard time and place, inhabited by hard people. There are no heroes in "Deadwood," but two characters dominate: saloon owner and powerbroker Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) and newly appointed sheriff Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant).
On first glance, Swearengen seems a 19th century mob boss -- a mustachioed godfather in a stinky suit, making a fortune dealing dope, liquor, gambling and sex in his saloon, The Gem. Bullock seems a terse, tightly wound man of action in the Gary Cooper-Clint Eastwood mode. (His ramrod posture and machine-like stride suggest he really does have steel in his spine.
) Yet both men are more complex, at times confounding, than this summary suggests. Swearengen is a vicious sociopath who lectures employees on the right way to clean up a bloodstain and delivers ornately profane monologues while being serviced by prostitutes. But he has a weird tender streak.
He claims to employ a handicapped cleaning woman, Jewel (Geri Jewell), to give penniless johns a hooker they can afford, but that seems a macho lie. Al dominates and abuses another of his prostitutes, Trixie (Paula Malcolmson), but seems incomplete and unsatisfied now that Trixie's taken up with Bullock's business partner, the Jewish frontiersman Sol Star (John Hawkes). In last season's finale, when the Reverend H.
W. Smith (Ray McKinnon) lay dying in dementia from a brain tumor, Al strangled him to end his suffering. If Swearengen is an evil man with good in him, Bullock is his opposite - a straight-laced, married businessman who intervenes in other peoples' troubles yet seems incapable of controlling his own volcanic rage.
These flaws combined, to devastating effect, in last season's finale, when Bullock's lover, widow Alma Garret (Molly Parker), received an unexpected visit from her ne'er-do-well father. When Garret's dad tried to blackmail Garret by threatening to spread rumors that she killed her husband and took over his gold claim, Bullock went berserk and beat the man to a pulp in the middle of a crowded casino, then asked a visiting Army colonel (Peter Coyote) to protect the man against various enemies, Bullock included. "We all have bloody thoughts," the colonel told Bullock, a half- statement that completes itself in the mind.
Bullock and Swearengen's psychological-poetic connection forms the core of "Deadwood." They're surrounded by characters every bit as psychologically tangled, from Swearengen's murderous right hand, Dan Dority (W. Earl Brown), who clings to Al the way a toddler clings to daddy, to Swearengen's chief competitor, saloon maven Cyrus Tolliver (Powers Boothe), who treats his onetime employee, prostitute-turned-madam Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens), like an ex-wife, a surrogate daughter and a business rival, all at once.
The show's complexities are embodied in Milch's dialogue, which weds profanity to poetry, encloses thoughts inside thoughts and back-loads its sentences in the manner of pre-20th century verse, unpacking its components in order of importance and withholding the most potent image or idea until the end. Tending a wounded Sol Star, Trixie says, "I pray to God your shoulder pains like some sharp-toothed creature's inside you and at it and gnawing." Swearengen chides smart-mouthed henchman Silas Adams (Titus Welliver), "Over time, your quickness with a cocky rejoinder must have gotten you many punches in the face," and heals a dispute with Dan by promising, "Whatever looks ahead of grievous abominations and disorder, you and me walk into it together like always.
" All Milch's characters are this rich and slippery. With her doe-eyed "respectability," flirting skill and secret drug habit, Garret is part sturdy frontier widow, part femme fatale. Swearengen's emissary and foil, the appointed mayor E.
B. Farnum (William Sanderson), is a scheming little weasel, but he's got an agile mind, a poetic tongue and grand ambitions. Doc Cochran (Brad Dourif) is a one-man board of health and an angry hermit drowning his Civil War nightmares in whiskey.
Trixie's gutter mouth and matter-of-fact carnality contrast with her devotion to Sol, Swearengen and an orphaned girl. "Deadwood" pairs up the characters private struggles with larger events. In the fourth episode of Season One, famous gunslinger and dying alcoholic Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine) was shot dead by Jack McCall (Garret Dilahunt).
McCall's flight, capture and subsequent trial were public events, the outcome of which affected every citizen. Milch presented the shooting not just as a random act of murder, but as a celebrity assassination and a signpost marking the end of the old West as both fact and legend. Last season's finale mirrored Bullock's accepting his destiny as sheriff with a cavalry garrison's arrival in town - complementary images of order confronting chaos.
This pattern continues, and deepens, in this season's first two episodes. Titled "A Lie Agreed Upon, Parts 1 2," they raise Swearengen and Bullock's conflict to a boil, then gradually turn the heat down to a fine simmer. The fight begins when Swearengen publicly calls out Bullock as an adulterous hypocrite.
Bullock loses his gun, badge and hat to Swearengen a loss that symbolically expresses Bullock's loss of sanity and legitimacy to rage. Bullock and Swearengen must come to an understanding because the town is becoming more domesticated a fact illustrated by a private and a public event. The first is the surprise arrival of Bullock's wife and adopted son, which reconnects Bullock to his past and forces him to rethink his relationship with Garret.
The second is the construction of telegraph poles, which connect the once-isolated mining camp to the larger world. This two-parter insists that real history and official history are different things and whether that history is epic or personal, the dynamic is similar. Bullock's fight with Swearengen isn't just a feud, it's a struggle to determine Deadwood's future.
When Bullock vows to recover his gun, badge and hat, he's trying to put a happy ending on his own personal narrative effectively becoming the fearless hero that his wife, son and fellow citizens want him to be - while correcting an error in judgment that could damage the town's progress. Milch directly connects Bullock's climb back to respectability with the myth of Deadwood, a wild place that became civilized. But did it really become civilized?
Does anyplace? We want and need to answer yes. But Milch hints that this, too, is an agreed-upon lie.
Chaos never succumbs to order, it just adapts. This idea is illustrated in the second episode, which contains a revealing conversation between Swearengen and newspaper editor A.W.
Swearengen wants Merrick to print a version of the Swearengen-Bullock showdown story that omits the most unpleasant details because it will be good for business. Merrick wants to recount the whole story, ". Like the shooting of the police captain in "The Godfather" or the blinding in "King Lear" or the psychologically intense sex scenes in "Last Tango in Paris," this western's graphic content aims to shock audiences out of their complacency.
News RSS