Jim Beckerman: The Language of the Day? Says Who?

Sunday, March 21, 2004
By JIM BECKERMAN
STAFF WRITER
The Bergen County (N.J.) Record

Smile when you say what, pardner?

It's the gol-darned language that has everyone talking about "Deadwood," a new 12-part HBO western that debuts at 10 tonight.

Salty isn't the word for the language these folks use. Peppery, Tabasco-y, jalapeño-y is more like it.

"I'll [expletive] knock you into the middle of [expletive] next week."

"Get the [expletive] out of here for a moment, sir."

"Excuse my ill humor, but certain people wear on my [expletive] nerves."

Clearly "Deadwood" is not your grandmother's western - which may be part of the point for HBO. In a month of promotional buildup, the cable network has been marketing the series to "The Sopranos" and "Sex and the City" audiences.

"Deadwood" is set in an outlaw shantytown in 1876 South Dakota and features such historical characters as ex-marshal Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant), Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine), and Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert), but in language, at least, most of them sound more like Tony Soprano on the range.

Graphic? Yes. Contemporary-sounding? Bet your [expletive]. But did folks really talk like that back then?

Series creator David Milch ("NYPD Blue," "Hill Street Blues") has two comments: (1) Why does it matter? and (2) Yes.

"It's a question that gets asked a good deal, and I find it a little surprising," he says.
"Deadwood," he says, is art, not a research paper.

"I'm a storyteller. To say that one has to have evidence to prove [the language] is really to misunderstand the nature of storytelling." The point, he adds, is whether "viewers experience the piece as real."

That, of course, has always been the crux of Hollywood historical movies.

Most are, bluntly, inaccurate - including, as Milch points out, almost all previous westerns. The question is whether the movie succeeds in drawing you into its world and making you believe it.
"When I'm watching 'My Darling Clementine' [the 1946 John Ford western], I believe the people spoke that way even though I know they didn't," Milch says.

Almost always, historical movies don't reflect the period, says Simon Bronner, who teaches Americana Studies and Folklore at Penn State, Harrisburg.

Language, hairstyles, clothing styles might offer a nod to the intended period, but most historical films will tell you more about the time in which they were made than the time in which they were set.

"I'm not expecting these movies to be accurate," Bronner says. "I see them as statements about today, expressions of contemporary attitudes toward the past."

The trick is to make it seem accurate. It's when movies and TV shows cross that fine line into blatant anachronism that viewers revolt - though, of course, each viewer has a different threshold.

You might, for instance, have to be a historian to know that bicycles didn't exist in 1862, the year in which Jodie Foster's character sings "Bicycle Built for Two" to the King of Siam in the 1999 historical epic "Anna and the King.

And it might not occur to you to wonder where "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" (1991) learned about comparative religion in 12th century England when Kevin Costner breezily says to the Sheriff of Nottingham: "Did I do something to you in a previous life?"

Other than director James Cameron, most would think it out-of-period for Leonardo DiCaprio to tell Kate Winslet aboard the deck of the "Titanic" (1997), set in 1912, that she needs to relax and "go with it."

A line like that, says author and historian Marcia Landy ("Cinematic Uses of the Past"), is enough to bring back any disbelief she might have suspended.

"It's sort of like being on a smooth surface, and suddenly you hit a bump that's not supposed to be there," she says.

Which brings us to "Deadwood's" liberal - nay, prodigal - use of modern-sounding swear words.
The key four-letter words in the show, Milch says, are documented as far back as Chaucer's 14th century "Canterbury Tales." There is no reason to think that people in an outlaw 19th century mining community wouldn't have used them. And Milch, who spent a year researching the project, has no doubt they did.

"We are speaking now of mining communities, not farming communities," Milch says. "The language of miners universally is sort of recognized for its profanity and obscenity. And this is an illegal camp, sort of the most extreme of the extreme."

But it's not merely that swearwords are used - and used constantly, in "Deadwood." It's how they're used.

"[Expletive]," yes. But "What the [expletive]," and other phrases used constantly in the show have a much more contemporary flavor.

"To me, that sounds more like urban street language," Bronner says. "Did they use those words? Yes. But to the best that we know, not with that rhythm or those combinations."

E-mail: beckerman@northjersey.com