<i>Deadwood:</i> Unalterable Vibrations
2010; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/thr.0.0176
ISSN1939-9774
Autores Tópico(s)American Sports and Literature
ResumoDeadwood:Unalterable Vibrations Joan Richardson (bio) . . . let us live in America, too thankful for our want of feudal institutions. Our houses and towns are like mosses and lichens, so slight and new; but youth is a fault of which we shall daily mend. This land, too, is as old as the Flood, and wants no ornament or privilege which nature could bestow. Here stars, here woods, here hills, here animals, here men abound, and the vast tendencies concur of a new order. If only men are employed in conspiring with the designs of the Spirit who led us hither, and is leading us still, we shall quickly enough advance out of all hearing of other's censures, out of all regrets of our own, into a new and more excellent social state than history has recorded. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Young American" Language is the essence of who we are. Emerson is not the first name that would come to mind for even the most academically informed viewers watching the opening episodes of the HBO series Deadwood, and yet his spirit is as fully alive in the muddy thoroughfare of Deadwood camp as those of Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant), Trixie (Paula Malcomson), Doc Cochran (Brad Dourif) or any of the other characters whose individualities, "conspiring with the designs of the Spirit," "pent in . . . between the whole body of funded truths squeezed from the past and the coercions of the world of sense about them," attempt to form a more perfect union: "the vast tendencies . . . of a new order." It took me some time to recognize Emerson's voice as one of those being channeled by David Milch, executive producer, creator, head writer (and writer of three and co-writer of another two [End Page 376] episodes), as well as supervising director of the entire series. But once I did, I witnessed Milch, throughout the series, wrestling Emerson as powerfully as Bullock did Swearengen, or Jacob his necessary angel, as the one-time Yale student of R. W. B. Lewis and Robert Penn Warren wrestled with language itself, periodically channeling the Sage of Concord's "irresistible dictation" above and behind his own as he lay on his back, "going out into the spirits" and speaking the parts of the characters he was creating, inhabitants of the rawest of all "frontier instances," Deadwood, a place with no law, learning order. "Frontier instances" is a term Charles Darwin borrowed from Francis Bacon to describe "cases in which we are enabled to trace that general law which seems to pervade all nature—the law, as it is termed, of continuity." While it would be impossible for viewers watching the early episodes of Deadwood to detect—stunned as they find themselves as much by the violence of words as of guns, fists, and pigs eating human bodies—, the general law that Milch was intent on exploring in the series was the actuality of spiritual experience and redemption as fundamental and necessary to human society. Like a later-day Emerson, Milch illustrated in his series that the "original relation to the universe" promised by "this new yet unapproachable America we have found in the West" can offer, in fact, only continuing work toward a more perfect union among its inhabitants, a newer model of Christian charity for a post-Darwinian world. "A Modell of Christian Charity" was first delivered to an "American" audience in mid-June 1630 by John Winthrop as a secular sermon to the passengers constituting the Great Migration still aboard the Arbella as it was tossed about furiously during a storm that threatened its making landfall at Salem in Massachusetts Bay. The sermon enjoined these founders of what was to be thought of as "a city upon a hill," as their part in keeping the bargain with God if He would bring them to safe harbor on their errand, to accept their roles, however menial, in the life of the community they were to establish and [End Page 377] to work as one. The "modell" Winthrop offered was that of the body of Christ, where even the lowliest member of the community would understand himself to have a necessary...
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