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- Here Was One
Here Was One
No. 25
Grant Hodges
May 20, 2024
Deadwood
Dear Reader,
I started this newsletter almost a year ago with the goal of publishing one a week. I’ve decided to end it at the year mark (June) after publishing a total of 26, or about one every two weeks. That means this will be the penultimate issue.
When going back through the prior issues, I realized that I hadn’t included any examples of screenwriting. As I mentioned in the first newsletter, movies and television shows lately have not included much in the way of great writing, but there are always exceptional ones that prove the general rule. And there’s no avoiding that film and TV are the successors to the play, just like the screenwriter is to the playwright.
One of my all-time favorite screenwriters is David Milch, whose show Deadwood remains probably the best-written show of this century.
Background
Deadwood ran for three seasons from 2004 to 2006. The series followed various characters—some entirely fictional and some based on historical figures—as they settled in 1870s Deadwood, a mining camp in the Dakota Territory. The show is best known for the extensive—and colorful—use of profanity by its characters. But its dialogue (some of which was drawn from primary sources like diaries and newspapers) also contains moments of power and beauty. Consider the following excerpt, spoken by Alma Garret, a 30-year-old widow who moved to Deadwood from New York, to an orphan girl named Sofia, whose family was murdered.
I've wished sometimes only to play checkers or to occupy myself some other way than having to see and feel so much sadness, or feel every moment how difficult things are, to understand or to live with. I've sometimes felt I couldn't live with them, but I find I can, Sofia. I've found I am, even when I think I'm not or that I can't. Can you look to me now, Sofia? Can you try? I will be so grateful if you will trust me with your sadness, and I will trust you with mine, so that even when we are sad we will be grateful for how much we love each other, and know that we are in the world as much in our pain as in our happiness.
Much of the show depicts the gritty, brutal reality of frontier life, and follows Al Swearengen, the proprietor of the Gem Saloon, as he navigates—through violence, pragmatism, and, in a few cases, principled moral judgment— the development of Deadwood. Portrayed by Ian McShane (who won a Golden Globe for the role), Swearengen is a complex character—murderous and thieving, but at times compassionate and generous. One of my favorite exchanges—this week’s piece—is between Swearengen and his chief henchman, Dan Dority, in which Swearengen laments the arrival of the telegraph in Deadwood.
From Deadwood
By David Milch
Al: Invisible messages from invisible sources, or what some people think of as progress.
Dan: Ain’t the heathens used smoke signals all through recorded history?
Al: How’s that a fucking recommendation?
Dan: Well, it seems to me like, you know, letters posted one person to another is just a slower version of the same idea.
Al: When’s the last time you got a fucking letter from a stranger?
Dan: Bad news about Pa.
Al: Bad news! Or tries against our interests is our sole communications from strangers, so by all means, let’s plant poles all across the country, festoon the cocksucker with wires to hurry the sorry word and blinker our judgments of motive, huh?
Dan: You’ve given it more thought than me.
Al: Ain’t the state of things cloudy enough? Don’t we face enough fucking imponderables?
Dan: Well, by God, you give the word, Al, and them poles will be kindling.
What It Offers
This exchange is Deadwood at its best. The blending of terse, coarse language with discursive, near-Shakespearean phrasing (“tries against our interest,” “hurry the sorry word”). The authoritative pronouncements that ring prophetic (“Invisible messages from invisible sources”). The moment of comic misapprehension (“give the word, Al, and them poles will be kindling”). This is a writer in complete control—a reality that isn’t quite real, but far truer than any work of nonfiction on 1870s Deadwood.
And isn’t that the goal of all art? Whether it appears on the page or the screen? As J.R.R. Tolkien remarked in his essay, “On Fairy-Stories,” about the value of “recovery” in fiction:
Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view. I do not say “seeing things as they are” and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them”—as things apart from ourselves. We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness.
Deadwood, with all of its profane and beautiful language, achieves that recovery. It draws us out of the world of cliché to somewhere else—somewhere fresh, somewhere new, somewhere unfamiliar—where we can recover a sense of what it means to be human.
*****
What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.