Friday, July 07, 2006

Boomtown

I did a lot of TiVo catching up from some travel a few weeks ago and I can't get this fucking theme song from HBO's cocksucking Deadwood out of my head.

If you want to know what I'm talking about, this rhythmic fiddle and banjo and some other tension-provoking instrument theme is here. Click on (stick with me now) "Theme From Deadwood".

For the uninitiated or who know about the show but haven't dipped in, the show is a revisionist Western, the bad old days, created and run by David Milch, of NYPD Blue fame. He's the guy who channeled Sipowicz.

The show is based on some history of the actual frontier town of Deadwood in South Dakota, and creates kind of a John Ford meets Thomas Hobbes state of olde time panic. The real Deadwood never quite made past the boomtown phase, although now a couple thousand citizens and tourists roam the town with that name, on that spot.

Season One focused on the town as "camp", with few permanent structures and a state of capitalist anarchy. The main characters were established through their coming to grips with each other for the first time. Men were killed over gold, families slaughtered for what they carried, Wild Bill Hickok (an iconographic Keith Carradine -- not only for McCabe & Mrs. Miller, but his dad was in John Ford's Stagecoach) shot at a gambling table. Starts in 1876.

Season Two became, more interestingly in my mind, a building critique of capitalism, as operatives for legendary monopoly miner and later industrialist George Hearst began to infiltrate the camp and buy up gold claims -- by hook or by crook. Hearst himself (Gerald McRainey, in a great performance) showed up in that season's final episode.

Season Three is underway, and I'm not sure you can't just start watching this week and get what's going on, but basically it's the town's last stand again Hearst and the big money that always drives out the small. There's a real town now, with wooden buildings where tents once stood and property being sold at a profit. We're deep into 1877 now.

Without getting into the details of the serpentine character interrelationships or praising all of the fine actors that make up the sprawling cast, I do want to single out three faves.

The magnetic center of the show is Al Swearengen, played by Brit thespian Ian McShane, who's worked forever over there and only occasionally over here, until he broke through at age 58 as the steely, brilliant, vicious mob leader Teddy in Sexy Beast.

Based on a real saloon/brothel owner from Deadwood history (he was a real asshole and ended badly), Al spent the first season as the cutthroat villain but after passing a kidney stone the first half of Season 2 emerged as the main rival to Hearst, maybe the only balwark and now he's motivated by revenge.

Indeed, Al is the silent political leader behind the town's rise to legitimacy, manipulating competing states and kingmaking all the town officers. And, every season, he has long soliloqies where we learn about his troubles and his past while he has one of his prostitutes servicing him.

You can see how Swearengen's most famous epithet works kinda metaphoric-like.

McShane rules with a performance simultaneously dark as night and astonishly vibrant. Think of those frontier times, those risks, the type of people it took to pioneer. The big question is whether Al survives after the frontier is domesticated. Or is he just roadkill for George Hearst is his search for "the color?"

The most underrated female actor on television must be Paula Malcomson, born in Belfast with a thick Irish accent off the show, who plays the endlessly profane prostitute, Trixie, who has steadily become the moral conscience of the show. Malcomson bites into her lines and spits them out like arrows, piercing all in their path.

Trixie has gone from Al's consort to unmarried shadow wife of a Jewish businessman now running for Mayor. She's left the brothel for the hardware store and now bank, been schooled in accounts from her non-judgmental man.

I predict great things for Malcomson. She has the ring of truth and fiery good looks.

To my mind the third revelation of the cast is William Sanderson (Blade Runner, Newhart) as weasely innkeeper and current Mayor E Farnum, who gets to spout perhaps the most Shakespearean of the much lauded period dialogue.

Farnum is a nosy little bastard, and best of all his entire re-election campaign speech was a blatant anti-Semitic smear, replete with references to large noses and circumcision. A wholesome platform.

Maybe the theme song gets me with it's rollicking nature of the tension, like there's a good time somewhere in this mess, something hopeful and transcendent just by nature of the community building steadily from scratch, another John Ford theme echoing throughout the show. Maybe it's just the excitement, the anticipation it brings to mind, of another cocksuckingly good episode.

Most of all, the super-objective of the series, way past concerns of Alma losing her fortune to Hearst or Bullock making his obligatory marriage work or Al ending up face down on his barroom floor with Hearst's hired bullet in his back, is whether the town itself survives.

This fortune-making hellhole, this experimental incubator of unbridled capitalism, it may not make it out of the series let alone the 19th Century. HBO and Milch recently announced agreement to do two more 2-hour "movies" after this 13-episode season and tie up all the loose ends.

After that, no more new Deadwood.

Cocksuckers.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

My favorite revelation regarding this new season is that the building tension that we expect to culminate in violence, instead peaks in climaxes of moral victory, such as the Sheriff's mastering of his anger in the last episode. And then there's still the chance that his peacemaking machinations will still go to shit.

Killer stuff.

Mark Netter said...

Oh yeah, the livery deal could end in bloodshed!