Joss Whedon

The language of Deadwood, Mamet, Whedon: excerpt and elaboration.

I sent off an op-ed yesterday responding to what I take to be a general critical misapprehension of Deadwood, the gloriously foulmouthed HBO show about the Old West that resembles in certain respects Altman’s McCabe and Mrs Miller, and which just began its third (and final!) season. This is its third paragraph.

Whenever people talk about Deadwood they talk about the show’s dialogue, and no surprise: the baroque syntax, the casual juxtaposition of ’shocking’ profanity and a kind of Victorian eloquence, the emotional heft of even the most compact exchanges, all sum to arguably the most distinctive dialogue style in TV history, an art of speech uniquely American and weirdly untheatrical. Compare for instance David Mamet’s austere American theatrical language, in which profanity is deployed as punctuation like a snare-drum rimshot, musical but never wholly natural. His settings are equally violent, equally status-conscious and performatively masculine, but while Mamet’s men (and women) often sound like avatars of emotional states rather than people baring their souls - performers rather than communicators, as in House of Games, the language of which is as baroque and involuted as Deadwood’s but willfully inorganic, even in the mouth of the heroine - the residents of Milch’s Deadwood speak a heightened but lived-in English that exposes and even buttresses their endangered souls. Milch has also given a historical justification for the surprising well-spokenness of Deadwood’s rogues gallery: self-made high-achievers of the time, within or without the law, would necessarily have sought out the raised status that accompanies a certain quantity of book-learnin’. Swearengen the pimp speaks so grandly in part because a man in his position would have needed to ’punch above his weight’ verbally. In other words: in that regard as in others, nothing has changed since then. Feel better?

I pass it along partly because I’m a bit proud of the writing, and partly because in putting together the bit about Mamet I finally experienced a bit of clarity about my feelings toward that great and terrible figure in the modern theatre (and film, and now TV). Mamet is one of the singular talents in American letters; no one writes quite like him, though plenty of people try. David Ives, for instance, wrote a spoof of Mamet’s plays that was simultaneously funny and completely, pitifully unaware of any of the characteristics that make Mamet a great writer. Such spoofs are easy and numerous, consciously or not. (Then again Ives is an overrated, oversold joke writer, so perhaps I expected too much.) Mamet’s musicality is to my ear jazzlike (bear with me): the convolution and tumbling-to-a-point macrorhythms of his theatrical dialogue have at their root the tiny rhythms and overdetermined stoppages of working-class American speech, much the way extended works by Mingus, Ellington, Marsalis can adopt classical forms but always come back to the moaning cadences of the blues. (Milch’s dialogue in Deadwood just doesn’t really work this way: the ornateness is part of the bedrock structure of the characters’ speech patterns. It’s part of why they’re so gloriously alive. This is in no small part due to Milch’s own astonishing prolixity - which in retrospect makes the spot-on cop voices in NYPD Blue an even greater achievement.) Human beings simply don’t converse like characters in a David Mamet play or film - perhaps Mamet himself does, I don’t know - yet you can hear in his dialogue the seed of a pungent American masculine vernacular speech.

Mamet’s essays, it should be noted, walk a fascinating line: their language is gruff, his hardboiled declarative sentences twisting on themselves as usual but with an occasional delicacy of manner that leavens the experience, humanizes it a bit. (His soft spots, even for Awfully Manly Pursuits like hunting and poker, come through in his essays moreso than in his plays, I find. And Christ knows: more than in his films.)

I’m drawn to Mamet’s writing because of its musicality; Milch’s dialogue is as formally compelling, but ultimately I’m wooed by its humanity, its generosity, its empathy, which come (as Milch explains in his surprisingly good book True Blue) from an unwavering attention to craft, which he obviously defines as something much greter than sentence-construction or scene-arrangement or the enumeration of his chesspieces’ cross-conflicting desires. And since I’m a Josshole, this is the place to link these two dyspeptic masters to the work of Joss Whedon, who arrives at a comparable artistry and musicality through a very different set of attentions and emphases, notably Whedon’s marvelous willingness to credit his characters even the tiniest moments of found dignity and human richness. Whedon’s polemical aims are more apparent in his story- and character-structures than Milch’s, but both writers show a sympathy for communities off the mainstream path - the troubled fraternities of cops and criminals, or the invisible lives of young people on the margins of their peer group. If Milch’s is the more airtight dialogue, Whedon’s benefits by displaying its intuitive fluency - like Milch he actually talks a lot like the characters on his shows, but his improvisations are lightning-quick, a bit compulsive, musico-theatrical. (In interviews Mamet is prickly and brilliant and sounds mildly ill-tempered all the damn time, like he’s patiently explaining the way the world works. He is generous with his intelligence and his animus but not, one senses perhaps erroneously, with much else.)

Whedon’s craftsmanship is no less impressive than Milch’s - consider that most of their writing, as firm-handed showrunners and in Joss’s early work, has been rewriting - but it seems to serve a quite distinct set of needs from Milch’s labyrinthine self-analysis. Milch speaks very consciously about writing as a ’going out in spirit’ to another; one gets the sense that Joss needs no mannerism to do so intuitively. The boundless sympathy on display in Buffy (prior, in a limited way, to the curiously externalized seventh season, in which Buffy herself became to a degree an object of the show’s gaze rather than its shaping consciousness) is of a different order than that which animates Deadwood. And they manifest differently: only one of those shows ever indulged even the possibility of wish-fulfillment.

Enough going on about this for the moment. (I practically left Mamet behind a paragraph and a half ago, damn it!) I’m fortunate to be able to share with you, Reader(s), the process of trying to figure out how and why art works, and if you’ve made it this far into this post, I’m grateful for your indulgence. And if you’re not watching Deadwood, please do - it stakes a strong claim to being the finest work ever to run on American television - and have a wonderful day. Today I will endeavour to write better (betterly?) than yesterday, and better(ly) still tomorrow, words without end, amen.