Deadwood: The Movie

Even the film poster celebrates the F-word

(Spoiler alert: if you're a Deadwood fan, you won’t like what follows.)

I watched Deadwood: The Movie last evening. A little late to the game, but it's difficult to watch this western with teenage girls in the house. Actually, the three thirteen-year-olds have only lived with us a week and the HBO Film has been available for over six weeks. In truth, I wasn’t keen to see it. After three separate attempts, I never finished the series … and I write Westerns for a living. What’s wrong with me?

I loved the television show until Wild Bill Hickok died, then I no longer cared about any of the characters. Deadwood didn’t draw me back because the story wasn’t compelling. Same for the HBO Film. The movie tied up every loose end, and every actor got to invoke their character’s iconic pose, but the main storyline could easily have been captured within a single episode. The rest felt like fill and forced nostalgia.

The problem with Deadwood is the overuse of visual and dialogue gimmicks to project an artful image. The ploys get old after a few episodes. The harsh profanity mixed with stylized formal speech reminded me of Betty White using the F-word; funny at first, tiresome with repetition. The cardinal rule of storytelling is to never take the reader/viewer out of the story, and the odd dialogue did just that.

Many believe the stilted speech—punctuated with swearwords—made the show unique and artsy. Executive Producer David Milch insists that the vulgar, Elizabethan-like dialogue is based on historical research. To steal a word from the era: poppycock. No characters talked this way in any of the stories by Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, or Owen Wister, who were all there. In that age of propriety, they would have omitted profanity, but I doubt Wild West speech would make rap singers sound virginal. In case you think I'm a prude, I occasionally use harsh profanity in my novels, but sparingly, so the impact is not diluted by repetition.

The Deadwood dialogue reminds me of James Fenimore Cooper’s attempt to invoke an earlier age with excessively formal language. Cooper wrote historical novels that occurred about a hundred years in the past. Mark Twain, my favorite Western author, didn’t like Cooper’s writing. Wait, that was far too mild of a sentence. In his article “Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses,” Twain ridicules, lacerates, and skewers Cooper.

I may be mistaken, but it does seem to me that "Deerslayer" is not a work of art in any sense; it does seem to me that it is destitute of every detail that goes to the making of a work of art; in truth, it seems to me that "Deerslayer" is just simply a literary delirium tremens. A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are -- oh! Indescribable;  its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.

Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.

Twain wrote about dialogue in another section:

When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the "Deerslayer" tale to the end of it.

Even the style of this article is meant to mock formalistic writing.

In summary, the starchy speech demanded attention but didn’t enhance the storytelling. I found the volume and volume of profanity off-putting and wearisome. The nostalgic scenes didn’t work for me because I hadn’t missed the characters. Excluding that, what is left is pretty good. I think we all must admit that.

You might also like: Mark Twain Tells Us How to Write

Yesteryear

In a bygone era, milk was delivered fresh to the door in reusable bottles, ice cream trucks plied neighborhoods, Helms brought bakery goods to the curbside, and whether you wanted anything or not, you got a visit from an annoying Fuller Brush man. Another door-to-door phenomenon was a photographer with a pony in tow. Now, my mother would never pay for my picture sitting astride a guzzied up pony, but I followed this dude around the neighborhood to see which of my friends' parents were worthy of children.

Yours truly

These were highly professional photographers. You can tell from these artfully framed portraits. The hat and chaps came with, but it was supply your own cap pistol. I had one of those, but a stingy mom. She tried to make up for her miserly ways by snapping my picture on the stoop with her Brownie. I loved her anyway.

Neighborhoods seemed a lot more important back then. I knew every kid within a couple years of my age. If mom wasn't home, I knew she was sipping coffee over gossip with one of her neighbors. We played in the street with no fear of a reckless driver, and went to the park unafraid of being bothered by strangers. All the parents walked together to the PTA meetings at our school, and to my knowledge, they never discovered we played marbles for keeps.

I thought those were the best of times until I learned to surf as a freshman in high school. Then my neighborhood became a street end in Hermosa Beach. Now those were the days, my friend.

There is no life east of Pacific Coast Highway

A few posts ago, I described meeting an old high school friend at his mountain retreat in the Sierras.

Mountain Sanctuary

When we were freshmen and sophomores, we rode bikes to the beach towing our surfboards behind us using jerry-rigged trailers we had cobbled together out of two-by-fours, carpet pieces, and old wagon wheels. It was a great time of life. The good news is that we knew it. We had lots of fun and many friends. We really did believe that no life existed east of Pacific Coast Highway (PCH).

Best of the batch of yours truly

On rare occasions, my friend would bring a twin-reflex camera to the beach and try to capture moments of surfing prowess. He had a darkroom in his garage and I can remember spending hours trying to finesse a recognizable image. No such luck. Without a telephoto, we only got  grainy pictures of neophyte surfers riding tiny waves. In other words, nothing we could pass around the school cafeteria to secure a date or a couple moments of fame.

On my visit last month, my friend gave me an envelope of black and white negatives. His idea was that in the big city, I might find a lab that could still process two-inch, fifty year old negatives. With a few phone calls, I succeeded. However, modern technology still can’t out-perform an enlarger in a garage. In fact, back in those days, we may have had the edge in technology for this ancient medium. Despite not finding Surfer Magazine-worthy material, we did have fun seeing these photographs once again. They brought back pleasant memories of long-ago summers. Unfortunately, they also reminded us how much time had gone by. Darn. Nostalgia just isn't what it used to be.

My Pinterest board on surfing

Me and an impolite friend

Mountain Sanctuary

Yesterday, I visited a high school friend I had not seen for at least thirty years. Before diverting north, the trip started through the Carson Pass in the Sierras. It was a beautiful drive and I thought anyone should feel privileged to view these magnificent mountains. Then I remembered Genoa, a way station for 49ers. I was cruising at 60 MPH in climate controlled comfort, while the early pioneers were lucky to eke out 10 miles in a long, determined day. The view probably wasn't uppermost on their minds.

My friend owns an isolated forty acres next to national forest. Getting there required him to come down the mountain to lead me through trails that would challenge a city-bred sedan. Although he had owned the land since the early seventies, he didn't move there until semi-retirement in the nineties.  Now his wife descends the mountain every day to work, while he struggles to make his home self-sufficient. He may want to be independent, but he’s a distant cousin from the long-gone, mountain men who lived off the land. PG&E provides electricity to supplement his solar panels, propane is delivered to his door, a tractor can carve out roads and plow snow, and cell phones keep civilization a touch screen away. Technology is a wonderful way to make a rustic existence comfortable. I even noticed a Verizon Hot Spot winking away on a book shelf to bring the entire World Wide Web directly to his mountain top. The pioneers could only wish they were so lucky.

We had a great afternoon wallowing in nostalgia for our younger days. We have lived very different lives since high school, but reconnected easily. We had been neighbors in high school and had peddled bikes towing surfboards to the beach nearly every day. We learned to surf with a couple of other friends and spent untold hours lazing about the beach; sunning, talking, playing volleyball, and flirting with girls. Growing up at the beach in the sixties was a singular experience and a great way to meander our way to adulthood.