Dirty Words in “Deadwood”: Literature and the Postwestern Edited by Melody Graulich and Nicolas S. Witschi (review)

Melody Graulich and Nicolas S. Witschi have collected eleven essays that examine Dead-wood, the genre-busting, foul-mouthed, shortlived hbo series created by David Milch. In her introduction, “Deadwood’s Barbaric Yawp: Sharing a Literary Heritage,” Graulich draws on primary and secondary sources—including her own interactions with Milch—and deftly situates the show within the landscape of American literature, particularly the works of Twain, Melville, Whitman, and George Washington Harris.

In “David Milch at Yale,” Nathaniel Lewis interviews the ever-quotable Milch. The pair discuss Milch’s experiences at Yale, collaborating with Lewis’s father R. W. B. Lewis, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren on an anthology of American literature. Their warm and revealing conversation reinforces Graulich’s claims about Deadwood’s literary heritage. It offers Milch’s perspectives on the American frontier, art, and addiction while also weaving in humorous anecdotes, such as Milch’s recollection of regularly climbing in through the window to use the Yale office he shared with R. W. B. Lewis.

The editors organize the remaining essays into three groups, with helpful headnotes preceding each essay. The first grouping offers three poststructuralist readings of Deadwood, ones that draw on the works of Jacques Derrida, Kenneth Burke, and Julia Kristeva, respectively. For example, in “Last Words in Deadwood,” Brian McCuskey uses Derrida to frame his argument that Deadwood’s “transition from camp to town” involves a “corresponding transition from orality to literacy, from oaths and handshakes to contracts and signatures” (21). The second group of essays explores Deadwood and genre, looking at the show’s violence, music, and gothic and film noir aspects. In his essay, Witschi argues that Milch, who wrote for Hill Street Blues and created nypd Blue, routinely evokes film noir in Deadwood, relying on “genre hybridity” to chronicle “the story about the American West perhaps most in need of telling: the rise of the city” (128). The remaining three essays analyze Deadwood from disparate contemporary lenses: queer theory, disability studies, and gender, which Linda Mizejewski employs in her convincing reading of Deadwood’s “butch, cross-dressing” Calamity Jane (186).

In conclusion, Dirty Words in “Deadwood” will be welcomed by Deadwood scholars and casual readers looking for fresh insights into Milch’s iconoclastic series.