I’ve watched the entire Deadwood series at least 5 times. I’ve also rewatched John from Cincinnati multiple times. And I’m still astounded by David Milch’s writing. Who else could put a chunk of dialogue like this in a character’s mouth:
“I may have fucked up my life flatter ’n hammered shit, but I stand here before you today beholden to no human cocksucker, and workin’ a payin’ fuckin’ gold claim, and not the U.S. government sayin’ I’m trespassin’, or the savage fuckin’ red man himself or any of these other limber-dick cocksuckers passin’ themselves off as prospectors had better try and stop me.”
In a recent New Yorker interview with Milch, Mark Singer calls out that quote from Deadwood as an example of how “Milch’s dialogue transformed the frontier demotic into something baroquely profane.”
I stopped in Deadwood last summer during a jaunt to Montana just to check it out. I was worried I was walking into a tourist trap, and to some degree, I definitely was, but it still was a worthwhile side trip. I couldn’t help but hear Milch’s versions of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane ricocheting around in my head as I visited their graves at the cemetery.
The New Yorker interview offers insights into his writing process and approach to storytelling, but what resonated most with my is his battle with Alzheimer’s. It’s heartbreaking to see this type of intellect slowly slipping away, but Milch isn’t surrendering without a fight:
While writing the screenplay for “Deadwood: The Movie,” I was in the last part of the privacy of my faculties, and that’s gone now. I was able to believe that— You know, we all make deals, I suppose, in terms of how we think about the process of our aging. It’s a series of givings away, a making peace with givings away. I had thought, as many or most people do, that I was in an earlier stage of givings away than it turns out I am. It’s kind of a relentless series of adjustments to what you can do, in particular the way you can’t think any longer. Your inability to sustain a continuity of focus. And those are accumulated deletions of ability. And you adjust—you’d better adjust, or you adjust whether you want to or not.
The interview reminded me of a marvelous New York Times story about a woman’s struggle with early onset Alzheimer’s. I used this story in a feature writing class I taught at Ohio University a few years ago, fearing the college-age students wouldn’t be able to relate to a tale about aging. That couldn’t have been further from the truth. They could relate. They have witnessed the devastation that dementia wreaks in their own families. Writer N.R. Kleinfield detailed emotions that the article subject was feeling as she realized she had dementia and things were only going to get worse. That period fascinates and terrifies me. That span where you know you’re slipping away, trying to hang on to a thread of who you were, grappling with a world that grows increasingly less familiar.
Meanwhile, the Deadwood movie launches May 31 on HBO. I’ll definitely be watching. Probably repeatedly. But as I watch, I’ll be thinking about Milch as we continues writing, working, resisting the inevitable march of Alzheimer’s.
