Spurs and Slurs
The immediacy Hill brings to Deadwood results in a pertinent allegory. It looks like the 19th century, but it feels like America today. The characters Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine), former sheriff Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and Deadwood entrepreneur Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) stay alive in the cutthroat town only through a series of moral choices. Westerns typically mythologize America's past, but Hill, a modernist interpreter of genre, uses the form to vividly address the choices we live with today. His Deadwood episode is striking for its uncanny depiction of people trying to see through spiritual darkness. Hill's light is different from Deadwood's other episodes; using filtered patterns and deep-focus lenses (including an iris-like effect in which many shots are encircled by shadow), Hill imposes the effort of viewing. Rather than being a distancing device, Hill's photographic style draws a viewer in, demanding more than spectatorship, but speculation. As a modernist work, the western genre is exposed and reconsidered. Hill doesn't mean to simply show us a fable but to implicate us in its issues, reconnect us to our national history?and illuminate current circumstances.
It's a short film about the great problem of cultural miasma. In Hill's Deadwood, each character is aware of having put aside ethical code; capitalism and survival motivate these citizens as the only meaningful principles in life. This is not far from the hiphop agenda currently mythologized in Never Die Alone, but Hill, who has often expressed his social view through pop archetypes (The Warriors, Streets of Fire and the unfortunately ignored Undisputed) now goes back to our complicated past to create a credibly baroque vision of America's corporate ethos. The allegory works better for Hill?and for HBO?than the completely irrelevant (but constantly name-dropping) The Sopranos, which merely seeks to revive the diabolical, vicarious pleasure of gangster movies and sitcoms. In Deadwood, a corrupted genre and the corrupted world are not merely judged; they are viewed more clearly?but viewed through a compassionate artist's squint.
Using a legendary town as the metaphor for a corrupt society isn't limited to westerns. Probably the greatest film to take this approach is Henri-Georges Clouzot's long-unavailable 1942 film Le Corbeau (recently restored by Criterion). This is the movie made in France during the German Occupation that nearly cost Clouzot his career when Liberationist zealots accused him of sedition. The awesome vision and courage of Le Corbeau (based on an actual 1930s event when the town Tulle was scandalized by a poison pen campaign) can be seen in Clouzot divulging the ugliest aspects of French society?ugliness the French were well acquainted with before the occupation yet wanted to deny. Clouzot's vision is dark (he is sometimes facilely called the French Hitchcock) but not nihilistic. The small town inundated by provocative letters signed Le Corbeau (The Raven) reveals as much as Deadwood about the selfishness and hypocrisies underlying what seems a typically functioning community.
Francois Truffaut defended Le Corbeau: "Since the plot revolved around an epidemic of anonymous letters denouncing abortion, adultery and various other forms of corruption, the film seemed to me to be a fairly accurate picture of what I had seen around me during the war and the postwar period?collaboration, denunciation, the black market, hustling, cynicism." Deadwood deserves a similar defense and recommendation. Perfidiousness happens all around us if we know how to look at it. Movies such as Mystic River, Lost in Translation and American Beauty protect Americans from seeing themselves; in Deadwood, Hill holds up western villainy as a mirror of today. The town is rampant with a shameful, familiar cynicism and distrust. This treacherous behavior might be intended (in Sopranos fashion) to be commercially sensational, but the Hill episode is impossible to look at without actually feeling shock.
Deadwood opens with a visual poem that is not to be missed. A more evocative 10 minutes than the built-in blood-splattering trailer that starts Dawn of the Dead, it describes the all-around guilt of capital punishment; it shames Lars Von Trier's fanciful treatment in Dancer in the Dark. Showing Bullock's conversation with a condemned man hunted by a lynch mob, the dialogue?combining sharp aphorisms and vulgar expressions?is so good that minus cable's surfeit profanity, it could have been written by Hill himself.
As attempted in the limbo setting of Last Man Standing, Hill captures a contemporary hellishness. Saloon and whorehouse owner Swearengen stalks his establishment like a depraved version of Altman's McCabe (Ian McShane's heavy-lidden stare peers over a sensually lined, moustached face that is the most feral image of corruption since Michael Corleone in The Godfather II). Swearengen is balanced with Hickok and Bullock?triangulating white-male desperation. (Indians and blacks don't appear, but their political presence is implied, completing the idea of a whole society that is connected yet askew.) The scene in which Hickok rises from a gambling table and asks for Bullock's help against an anticipated assault is classical?straight out of John Ford's My Darling Clementine?but Carradine's measured paranoia makes it seem immediate. It compares to the astounding moment in Le Corbeau when Dr. Germain (Pierre Fresnay) and the psychiatrist Vorzet (Pierre Larquey) investigate the source of good and evil by swinging a light bulb over a globe, evoking the nature of the universe.
Clouzot's tale seems misanthropic, but he is not indifferent to morality even though he shows characters who reject religion or who practice it hypocritically. In Le Corbeau his suspicion goes to the bad faith of religion's opposite?psychiatry (which is used as absolution in The Sopranos). Clouzot critiques the idea that behavior is uncorrectable, inevitable. In Deadwood, Hill shows men negotiating between their impulses and their ideals. This difficulty affects women, too, as in a memorable scene where Robin Weigert's Calamity Jane ("I don't drink in a bar where I'm the only one with balls") loses confidence when Swearengen's mere appearance recalls a horror from her past. She gets unnerved. Complex human nature?and a nation's history?are enough to make anyone shake.
Movies rarely confront national character. Director Jean-Paul Rappeneau's new film Bon Voyage makes peace with that most troubled moment of France's film industry, the German occupation. It avoids the controversy attached to Clouzot's Le Corbeau by paying tribute to old-time movie romance. Still, that past haunts this beautiful, conscientious fluff. The apparently ageless Isabelle Adjani plays a conniving, kittenish movie star, Gerard Depardieu a pol in the Vichy government and Gregori Derangere a romantic novelist who rises to heroism. They escape the worst of times, always dreaming of better circumstances. Bon Voyage is astute entertainment, if not deep. Hill's Deadwood and Le Corbeau are tough art; let the dilettantes have the stupid allegories of Von Trier's Dogville.
Deadwood's producer David Milch is known for the 80s police series Hill Street Blues, one of those glibly ambivalent tv shows about law and order. Milch has said, "Deadwood was a place created by a series of accidents. A kind of original sin?the appropriation of what belonged to one people by another people?was enacted with no pretense at all." This accurate summary of American history is frequently attached to a kind of nihilism that Hill in fact sees through. If Deadwood is nihilistic toward anything, it's the limits that contemporary film culture have placed on the subject matter and vision of serious filmmakers like Hill and even Peter Bogdanovich (who recently directed some fine human observation in The Mystery of Natalie Wood for ABC). It was only on cable tv that Hill was able to make a film that compares with the daunting social vision of Le Corbeau. Hill demonstrates that Deadwood is also a metaphor for Hollywood.