Sunday, May 23, 2004

I Hate Motherfuckin' Cocksuckin' "Deadwood''

Regis and I love "The Sopranos,'' where the profanity always rings true.
But after "The Sopranos'' is "Deadwood,'' which Regis likes for reasons he can never make entirely clear to me and I have grown to hate with a passion.
Nonetheless, since its on after "The Sopranos,'' and I don't feel like getting off the sofa, and we've already drunk our "Sopranos'' night bottle of red wine, and its too much of an effort to go the freezer and get a lime popsicle, which I like to eat as a substitute for the beer I really want, I end up watching "Deadwood''-- and bitterly complaining all the while.
What I hate the most are the portrayals of women. With the exception of Calamity Jane, who is a decently-written character, played by a good actress, all the female characters are whores who get beat up. Or whores who get killed.
If they were well-developed and believable whores getting beat up and killed, I'd feel a lot better about it. But they're not. They're one-dimensional and the point-of-view dwells so lovingly on their brutalization.
Another thing I hate is the veneer of historical accuracy. Initially, what was interesting about "Deadwood'' was that you got the feeling that it was trying to tell you the REAL story about the Wild West.
At first you think, yes, that's how people must have sounded back then. They must have sometimes said "cocksucker'' or "cunt.'' Everyone must have been kicking the shit out of prostitutes or getting typhoid or forming an addiction to opium. But until now, no one could portray that on TV! That's the beauty of HBO.''
But now it seems like HBO is just an excuse for the"Deadwood'' characters to utter things like "If ya don't tell me what ya did with that money, yer gonna get fucked up the ass.''
When I hear "Deadwood'' dialogue these days, I don't think 'this is how people must have sounded then,' or even, 'this is real people talking' I think, "oh, they're on HBO so they can say "motherfucker'' and now they're saying it every two minutes.''
In the last five minutes I was listening to the show, they must have said some variation of the word "fuck'' at least 20 times.
The only offshots of fuck they missed, as far as I could tell, were "babyfucker'' and "unclefucker'' but only because those terms probably hadn't been invented before the 20th century.

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