Deadhead on Deadwood: commentary track for Episode 1, Season 1.

[uvula_fr_b4]

Finally watched the first two episodes of Deadwood (first series) on DVD, and listened to creator/executive producer/writer David Milch's commentary track for the first episode ("Deadwood"). Some stuff in Milch's rather pedestrian commentary that stuck out:

1. Milch cited Marvel Comics as being one of his influences, but didn't elaborate; worse, he brushed it off, as though he was embarrassed. Be nice if Terry Gross or somebody drew him out on that: which Marvel Comic went into the hopper to help him shape Deadwood? Hopefully not the half-assed, one-joke Marvel MAX limited series written by Ron Zimmerman that brought the Kid out of the closet....
   
   
2. During the scene where Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and his partner Sol Star (John Hawkes) sell hardware in the Deadwood, South Dakota mining camp for the first time, Milch remarks (this is a paraphrase but fairly close to what he said), "Jews have a natural sense of how to sell." I'd like to give Milch the benefit of the doubt that he's not a racist (especially given his last name) -- but this sounds to me a hell of a lot like he said, "Them Latin fellas sure know how to dance, but they're not much for work." Or words to that effect. WTF?? A "positive" racial stereotype is still a racial stereotype....
   
   
3. Milch said that, fourteen months after the Deadwood settlement was established, it had telephones; better still, Deadwood had phones before San Francisco did. Take that, Paladin!
   
   
4. During the first scene of Alma Garret (Molly Parker) geezing up with laudanum, Milch remarked, rather unnecessarily, that Alma was a junkie; he then said, "I've always liked that in a person." Since I watched it after a long day at work, my irony detector was a little fuzzy: was Milch trying to sound a Tom Waitsish, bad-boy note? Or was he serious? If the latter, he's an ass, even if he's not a racist (or anti-Semite).
   
   
5. Milch seems to have a grudge against the news media, judging by his comments when A.W. Merrick (Jeffrey Jones) was spieling off his theory of what Uncle Sam was going to do to get its mitts on the money coursing through Deadwood's mud-and-shit-strewn streets; considering that Merrick's speech sounded plausible when I first watched it, I was a bit puzzled as to the disdain that Milch expressed when he said, "The newspapers always get it wrong." Also, given that Milch described Merrick -- who was a real person -- as a "hypochondriac" and pointed to the scene where Merrick asked to ride out to the site of a massacre with Seth Bullock and Wild Bill Hickock (Keith Carradine) as being "proof" of his hypochondria, I'm not sure if Milch was entirely awake (or sober) when he recorded this track, or if he's confused as to just what a "hypochondriac" is. Did he mean to say that Merrick was a hypocrite? Because that makes more sense in the context of the episode....
   
   
6. During the scene of the con that Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), E.B. Farnum (William Sanderson), and Tim Driscoll (actor unknown) run on Brom Garret (Timothy Omundson), Milch notes that everybody thinks they're a genius when they're committing a robbery, which is when crooks trip themselves up; Milch then notes that this is why he was never able to be a good crook. Man, I have got to get my irony detector looked at; or is he really another Edward Bunker? (HBO's site doesn't give one that impression....)
   
   
7. Milch remarks, "I could watch people being fed to animals all day -- there ought to be a channel devoted to that 24/7." Okay, now that was irony; or dark sarcasm. Or something.
   

While I'll probably rent the other DVDs in Season One, I may not feel compelled to listen to Milch's commentary tracks, if he has any more. It's probably not fair to judge Milch's prowess as a commentator on his own series based on listening to just one track, but at this point, David Chase's (and Steve Buscemi's) commentary tracks on various episodes of The Sopranos have it all over Milch's. And while the profane language of Deadwood didn't bother me, Milch's language on the commentary track ultimately did. It wasn't as though he had a failure of imagination, the way I'll monotonously cuss out fellow motorists when I'm tired; it was more like he was trying to impress the rubes with his street cred.

Yeah, boy; we're all of us a bunch a' big swingin' dicks here.

Can we just go on to the next episode and take the fact that we can crack walnuts with our assholes as a given? Sheeeeesh....