When discussing Herman Melville’s classic novel, Moby-Dick, David Milch opines that the book is hard to get through (“the impossibility of getting through the f— book”). Indeed, after the story builds at shore and the ship sets sail, the book takes long divergences to detail almost all facets of whaling in encyclopedic fashion. Meanwhile, Ahab’s “monomania,” his singular focus on hunting the whale who took his leg, pushes the story and the ship forward.
That task of finding and killing the great whale is fantastical in nature. Further, the commitment and relentless pursuit to the task requires a certain mad zeal. To Milch, Ahab’s great skill and “knowledge of whaling…is in the service to a monomania…an irrational fixation.” The rest of the crew, some worked into similar fervor and some reluctant, such as Starbuck, are along for the ride. The reader is too. Close to the end of the book, “all the rational approaches to the subject matter have exhausted themselves.” The reader, thus, has made it through the worldly, analytical description of whaling to the point of near boredom. “And just when you’ve gotten to that point, when no other element reinforces your continued engagement with the work…” the chase begins.
As Milch explains, “by exhausting certain other ways of relating to the experience of life, other than imagination, the text has brought you to stand in a felt relation with monomania…It is an engagement with the world on the basis of adherence to the dictates of one’s own nature…That’s the only way to understand experience.” This framing can help us understand the world of Deadwood.
David Milch—a former writing teacher who created the show Hill Street Blues and co-created NYPD Blue—first pitched a series set in the time of Nero’s Rome to HBO in the mid-2000s. The network, of course, was producing Rome at the time, and he instead devised a series in the Old West. As Milch explains in an interview with actor Keith Carradine, who plays the famous Wild Bill Hickok in Deadwood, both Nero’s Rome and stateless Dakota territory were “environment[s] where there was order and no law whatsoever.”
Ian McShane and Timothy Olyphant in Deadwood (Pinterest).
Deadwood, which ran for three seasons on HBO in 2004-06 and concluded with a film in 2019, depicts the fast transformation of the town of Deadwood as the Dakota territories entered statehood in the third quarter of the 19th century. Gold prospectors, laborers, and entrepreneurs grew the town’s population, likely not only for riches but also for adventure. Some may have been escaping arrest or checkered pasts in the states. In the show, the town is filled with a motley cast of characters, played by Ian McShane, Timothy Olyphant, Molly Parker, and others. Many are real historical figures, such as Seth Bullock, Al Swearengen, and the aforementioned Wild Bill Hickok.
The town has a ‘lawless order’ as the show begins. Community, language, and structure organically develop, further shaped by the legal and cultural pressures of the territory’s fate. Milch notes that “this was a society which specifically determined they would have no law, so that they could keep their claims…how would there be order in this environment?” This setup, for Milch, was a “laboratory experiment in which was reenacted the entire American experience in an…accelerated form.”
The viewer experiences the town’s slow development into something more formal and gets insight into how random and arbitrary history can be. “You realize that history isn’t true at all, because in real life things just don’t happen the way a history book tells them. You talk about a history as a machine…But history really happens because people are very human,” says actor Brad Dourif, who plays the town doctor. A great scene, Milch mentions to Carradine, is when the town begins to form a makeshift government around the table, arbitrarily but eagerly assigning roles to each other. Peaches, because they were served at this meeting, become a staple at future gatherings. For Milch, “we are at our best, I believe, as people when that benign impulse toward community expresses itself in the idea of order.”
A lawful order does not come with ease in Deadwood. “Reason is about 17th on the list of the attributes that define us as a species. I just like to see the way we behave,” says Milch, and when you mix riches, frontier sensibilities, strong personalities, and politics, you get plenty of drama. Deadwood’s brilliance is that vivid characters drive the narrative, and history simply plays out through the resulting cause and effect of their human complexity.
Much of this authenticity and organic spontaneity is due to David Milch’s creative writing process. Often, the team would start shooting episodes without a complete script. Based on performance and simple interactions on set, David Milch would add new elements into the story during the production. Ian McShane explains:
Aware of his own compulsions and the solitary stress of writing, Milch wrote by dictation in the presence of others. He would discuss character arcs and plot elements in the writer’s room by committee, and would often change course based on valuable feedback from collaborators, including actors. Lying on the floor in his office, he would dictate script action and dialogue to a typist, often spending hours on single phrases and sentences, retooling them.
This focus on language is one of Deadwood’s great strengths. David Milch explains to Keith Carradine that, because of the idiosyncratic nature of the Old West, language was brute and harsh, but often masked with a Victorian vocabulary due the literary education of some inhabitants. “There was the cohabitation of the primitively obscene with this…ornate presentation,” Milch adds. The unique setting dictated the way of communication between friends and foes, as the chance of violence for a wrong phrase shadowed every interaction. The “thickness” of the language, Carradine notes, intimidated viewers initially. Once you get used to the dialogue, as I too had to do, the language is flourishing and immerses you in the show.
Brian Cox in Deadwood (Pinterest).
Language was “one of the resources of society” in the frontier, as a “social form” with “tremendous energy.” The best speakers became the societal “leaders.” The oratory performances, especially of McShane, Brian, Cox, veteran Jeffrey Jones, and the late Powers Boothe, are a joy to experience. In an essay for Nautilus, author Cormac McCarthy (himself very much a writer influenced by Melville) wrote that “the rule is that languages have followed their own requirements. The rule is that they are charged with describing the world.” In Deadwood, language is a product of the environment that also creates, alters, and expands the same environment in real time. That Milch worked so hard to get that right elevates Deadwood from a great show to an artistic achievement.
What I love about Deadwood is that through these creative methods, the characters are fully-formed from the outset. When there is more than one character in a scene, and most of the show takes place as an ensemble, there is a multiplicative, almost infinite amount of dynamics, motivations, and subtext all happening at once. This tension not only makes for compelling drama, but also makes for a rich, engrossing viewing experience. Through the full humanity of the characters, the thematic elements of Deadwood rise to the surface with ease, because, as Milch grasps intuitively, every greater concern is rooted in human experience.
Milch parses his process: “as I’m working on the piece, I am trying to get the physical situation right. A moment later, from the same set of materials, I am trying to amplify or qualify a theme, which may be economic, or philosophical, or religious, or sexual.” He achieves this all in Deadwood to great effect. While the show had an abrupt end in season 3, together with the film in 2019, Deadwood is an intricate experience that rewards far beyond the confines of its form.
- GJF