Welcome to Deadwood: Tell Your God to Ready for Blood

Victor in an epic duke out, knife-wielding saloon owner and mining camp Machiavelli, Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), is about to slit the throat of an adversary, when he’s stopped in his tracks by the sight of a just-arrived stagecoach containing a startled young mother and her little boy, whose eyes she’s shielding from the gruesomeness before them in the thoroughfare. 

The foul-mouthed greeting is more than a deadpan observation or an amusing play on ‘welcome’ signs posted on the borders of towns greeting newcomers. It’s tantamount to a mission statement by series creator David Milch. His vision of the titular town nestled in the Black Hills of Dakota is radically different from all that came before. Thanks to 19^th century theatre roadshows, dime-store novels and the subsequent development of the western on the big and small screen, Deadwood – a name to rival Tombstone, Dodge City and Fort Sumner in the annals of western lore – became mythologised, romanticised and sanitised by Hollywood censorship, finally rendered unrecognisable from its bloody, truthful origins.

Deadwood aired on HBO between 2004 and 2006, running for 36 episodes across 3 seasons before its abrupt cancellation. Milch, who cut his teeth on Hill Street Blues (1981-1987), before co-creating NYPD Blue (1993-2005), fashioned a show focused on a group of disparate people striving to establish order from chaos, setting it in the furtive and famously volatile Wild West. It was the blood-soaked era of manifest destiny and the last great American gold rush in the lower-48s, kicked off by General Custer’s reports of creeks and streams in the Black Hills, bursting with what Deadwood’s arch-bastard George Hearst (Gerald McRaney), poetically calls ‘the colour.’ “Gold you can scoop from the streams with your bare hands,” as one character puts it. 

Deadwood, the mining camp founded illegally on land intended for the displaced Lakota tribes, is the place where ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok was slain at a poker table by Jack McCall (an event which forms part of the first season’s plot) and became well known for its lawless ways. In 1876, a year or so after the founding of the camp in what became dubbed ‘Deadwood Gulch,’ there was a murder every day. Claim disputes and other shady business tended to be settled with a six-shooter or blade. “No law at all, in Deadwood?” as one man puts it.

Milch and his writing staff combined the humanism of John Ford, the profane poetry of Sam Peckinpah’s western riffs and New Hollywood critiques of America’s past. Robert Altman’s 1971 classic, McCabe & Mrs. Miller proved a key referential text; from the muddy aesthetic and crafty subversions of archetype (Timothy Olyphant’s volcano-tempered lawman), to the town’s expansive physical transformation over the course of three seasons, as big business interests begin moseying in to crush individual enterprise.

Deadwood notedly shares a narrative arc – and political backdrop of a territory on the road to statehood – with John Ford’s masterworks, My Darling Clementine (1946) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). The latter film is famous for its parting dialogue: “This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” and Milch isn’t above following the American tradition of embellishing the truth, even when Deadwood rebukes old westerns (and Hollywood) for their lack of honesty. Al’s observation – “He wants me to tell him something pretty” – is Milch’s own take on the Liberty Valance line, attaching historical commentary and post-modernist self-awareness to this penchant for masking facts with yarn-spinning. 

Like the western itself in the early 2000s, when we first meet Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine), his glory days are well and truly behind him. The pilot episode directed by Walter Hill (who tackled the character’s life and times in his 1995 biopic starring Jeff Bridges) deals with celebrity and the burden of notoriety, said notions (unearned or not) being the foundations of western mythology. Milch, who along with Hill won several awards for his pilot, does much to lay the foundations of the Deadwood experience, especially its ornate use of language and sexualised swearing (there are over 40 instances of the word ‘fuck’ in the opening episode alone). While violence on the screen changed forever with the likes of Bonnie and Clyde (1968) and The Wild Bunch (1969), Milch brought his skills as a dialogue writer to the table. The western had never sounded like this before, pitched somewhere between Shakespeare and Scorsese. The proliferation of fucks and cocksuckers isn’t just for stylistic effect, it helped in developing characterisation. Characters often struggle to express themselves and resort to coarseness.

Nowhere is this more gleefully and strikingly applied than to Calamity Jane Cannery (Robin Weigert). If your experience of the character is the late Doris Day singing ‘Whip-crack-away’ and ‘Take me back to the Black Hills,’ Milch’s comic-tragic iteration is a hurricane whirling through the entire show. “Why don’t you take a fist punch up the ass?” she spits at one person, who has earned her blowhard wrath over some minor matter. Doris Day never spoke like that. As in countless other films such as The Plainsman (1936) and Calamity Jane (1953), Wild Bill and his cohort are presented as good friends, even though in life they weren’t so close. The pairing offered Milch the opportunity to forge his own gritty take on western icons (Wyatt Earp turns up for a two-episode stint in season three), showing up how often they lacked any kind of heroism at all. Deadwood is a spirited and fascinating exercise in killing your Wild West darlings. From destruction, comes fresh creation. 

In Deadwood, the birth of community is a definite struggle, as the American ideal of an individual standing alone clashes with the need for alliances to get things done. It’s a long, slow road towards social progress and the establishment of order from lawlessness. In that way, it is Fordian to a T. David Milch’s masterful retelling of old western tales refuses to tell us something pretty as it repudiates the legends of old, point blank.

With the show set to wrap up its tale this weekend with a feature-length finale 13 years in the planning, we can but echo HBO’s own promotional material: “Welcome the fuck back.”