I Enjoy the Way You Lie

We've now watched two seasons of Deadwood. Oh, but I am a sucker for serialized drama. I'm also a sucker for the blurring of history and story, or truth and fiction, which Deadwood does in intriguing and complicated ways. For most of our viewing of the first season, I thought only Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane were based on real people, and it wasn't until watching the DVD featurettes that we learned that almost all of Deadwood's characters are adaptations of actual historical human entities.

In reading the biographies of the "real" Deadwood folks, you'll find some important differences between the "true" -- you just can't use certain terms without "problematizing" them with quotation marks -- and the fictional. For example, from Wikipedia:

(Contrary to the story in the TV series, Martha was not Bullock's brother's widow, but in fact had been Bullock's childhood sweetheart; the two had been married in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1874). They had one daughter, Margaret, at the time of Martha's arrival in Deadwood, and subsequently had another daughter, Florence, and a son, Stanley.

E. B. Farnum [of Massachusetts] was the owner of a general store. He is portrayed in the HBO television series Deadwood; however, his character is a Southern-accented hotel owner, which Farnum never was in real life.

Of course, the point of a TV show -- or this one, anyway -- is drama, which is always served better by lies than by the historical record. Of course, Deadwood does not present itself as non-fiction -- the way, say, Truman Capote or James Frey presented themselves as absolute truthtellers. But I don't know if we want Capote or Frey to be "truthful"; what we really want them to be is interesting, and (perhaps unfortunately) most of us feel "truth" makes something more interesting. As Ellsworth said in the first season: "Goddammit, Swearengen, I don't trust you as far as I could th'ow you, but I enjoy the way you lie."

Both the movies Fargo and I Love You To Death begin with a proclamation that they are "Based on a True Story." Fargo actually isn't, but I Love You To Death is. Fargo is a fantastic movie, the other -- despite a capable cast -- is not. (I shake my meaty fist at you, Lawrence Kasdan!)

During the first season, I was tuned into the Seth Bullock character, but in season two he's become a bit flat. Admittedly, Timothy Olyphant has achieved blackbelt acting mastery in "shy remorse" and "moralistic contempt," but only the height of his eyebrows marks the difference between the two. In fact, both looks are essentially D.Zoolander's Magnum.

Who combines seediness, depravity, and eloquence better than Larry?

E.B. Farnum: Some ancient Italian maxim fits our situation, whose particulars escape me.
Woolcot: Is the gist that I'm shit out of luck?
Farnum: Did they speak that way then?

Back during season one, or at its start, I had Ian MacShane's Al Swearengen pegged as an unremittant, inhuman jackhole. The kind of man who beats his horses and the dancers who work in his bar (as Camper sang of Jack Ruby). Meanwhile, I had initially pegged Powers Boothe's Cy Tolliver as a crafty but essentially decent businessman. By the end of the second season, it's clear that Swearengen has the humanity, and Tolliver the jackholiness. Similarly, it's interesting that while both are conniving, Swearengen is crafty where Tolliver is cagey. These words only seem like synonyms until you parse them out (preferably through human interaction), the way you might understand the difference between a snake and a rat by watching the first season of Survivor. Swearengen will lay out a trap for you to walk into, which is the way of the grifter and the con man. Tolliver -- who may be smart, but is neither farsighted nor a deep thinker -- will take advantage of whatever angles present themselves, which is the way of... well, our current Republican overlords, for one.

And Robin Weigert deserves some kind of gigantic acting award for her Calamity Jane. She pert' near makes up for Bullock's lack of facial expression.

Big props to my wife, who recognized a dessicated and puffy Major Simon Dad in the Season Two finale.

I now anticipate Season Three in June, although I suppose I will well have been distracted by that point by The Sopranos, Survivor: Exile Island, Lost, and the probably-not-with-a-bang ending of the West Wing.