Robert Altman's “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” enraptured generations of moviegoers. One of them is David Milch, creator, executive producer and head writer of HBO’s “Deadwood,” which is entering its third season. In conjuction with Robert Altman Blog-a-Thon Weekend, Milch gave an interview to The House Next Door to discuss "McCabe" and thank Robert Altman for directing it.
Milch’s Deadwood is spiritual kin to Presbyterian Church in “McCabe,” a dingy town full of mostly desperate people navigating society’s labyrinth, hoping to get a bit closer to their dreams. There are incidental echoes galore – the soupy streets and candlelit interiors, the teeming church services, saloons and whorehouses; the hubbub of hoofbeats and overlapping conversations; the portrayal of the bedroom as a sanctuary where lovers shut civilization out and improvise their own social contract; the acknowledgment that in life, intoxicants are sometimes necessary (opium for Mrs. Miller in “McCabe,” laudanum for the widow Garret in “Deadwood,” and alcohol for nearly every character in both works); 
the tension between the necessity of moral censure and the impulse to judge not, lest ye be judged; the admission that in all societies throughout history, violence, like shit, has invariably rolled downhill; and the frank acceptance (rare in American culture) that race, nationality, gender and money decide the outcome of most encounters before they’ve begun. (Milch once told Salon, “The idea of equality before the law is an operating fiction of democracy.”) Yet in both “McCabe” and “Deadwood,” these fascinations are wheel spokes fixed in one hub: community. 
To some degree, nearly all of Altman’s films are anatomies of community. Ditto “Deadwood,” which week to week showcases a panoramic concentration that recalls Altman at the top of his game. Like Altman, Milch is not content to fixate on the plight of one individual -- a fundamental creative choice that puts both men temperamentally at odds with much of American popular culture. Both Altman and Milch prefer to see the big picture, the pointillist mural that takes shape when an artist asks the audience to take a few steps back from the canvas. They study human constellations comprised of distinct human beings who embrace different religions, inhabit different social strata, imbibe different substances, muse on their own pet obsessions and pursue their own strange agendas, all the while remaining largely oblivious to their impact on everyone else. Both Altman and Milch are not just storytellers. They are dramatic anthropologists, devising a collective organism in order to scrutinize it.
Altman and Milch’s interests are reflected in their methods. Both tend to work with gigantic ensembles. Both nurture actors' individuality and push them to be generous to other actors, creating a communal spirit on the set that informs and strengthens the fictional community shown onscreen. Both have a fondness for lyrically meandering dialogue (with one key difference; every line Milch writes is hammered into a particular musical shape, while Altman prefers cacophonous improvisation). And Milch could be described in terms that Bill Roundtree, in an essay on “McCabe,” applied to Altman: “The filmmaking equivalent of Spinoza's God: the creator as noninterventionist.” 
He said that when he first saw “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “…I thought that it was a very ambitious and almost fully realized work... Certain materials are particularly congenial to certain sensibilities, and Mr. Altman’s disposition to improvisation, I think is very well-suited to the idea of a community making itself up as it went along.” Milch was also taken with “…the kind of improvised quality of McCabe’s identity, and his reach-out for a kind of authority, if for no other reason than to attain Mrs. Miller. It was a beautiful match between a storyteller’s instincts and the material.”
Milch, once a self-described “alcoholic, heroin addict and degenerate gambler,” was also taken with Altman’s depiction of intoxicants as social lubricant and emotional anaesthetic, his frank and unglamorous depiction of sex and violence and most of all, his interest in community. 
Central to this interest, Milch said, is Altman’s depiction of a collective human organism that derives its life force from the energy of all these distinct, eccentric, myopic individuals bustling about in pursuit of their goals, their imaginations locked in a vise-grip of illusion. When individual illusions come together around shared pleasures and beliefs, a community begins to take shape. “McCabe,” said Milch, depicts details how a society is built from “the piling of illusion upon illusion, and the agreement upon illusions.”
“Here’s McCabe pretending to be a man of vision. He’s someone who’s moved to be more than a pimp by the impulse to impress Mrs. Miller, who is herself moved to sort of organize her life upon the embrace of illusion. These characters pile one illusion upon another illusion and they end up building something bigger than themselves. ‘McCabe and Mrs. Miller’ presents the agreement upon illusion as the liberation of an energy that is greater than one person can generate.”
But while Altman sees that social mechanism and must feel a certain affection for it (otherwise why spend a career on it?), he doesn’t let himself or the audience fall too in love with it, to the point of sentimentalizing either individuals or their community. There is persistent melancholy undertow. It originates in our being reminded that everything is impermanent: nations, cultures, customs, beliefs and of course, specific lives.
Milch said “McCabe” treats illusion itself as yet another type of intoxicant – as a substance with which to numb pain, forget mistakes, obscure one’s awareness of social constraints, or give oneself permisson act ambitiously, recklessly, selfishly or idealistically. Like every intoxicant, illusion gives people permission to do things they know could lead to trouble. 
“I remember the first time I shot up,” Milch said. “Just before I shot up [my supplier] said, ‘Dope’s gonna give you everything, but you’re gonna have to give everything to dope.’ There is that sort of sensual surrender when you are frankly embracing an intoxicant, something that you know is poisonous, as the organizing element in your life.”
“McCabe” takes that notion even further, Milch said, by depicting a community’s collective agreement on certain principles as yet another kind of intoxicant -- perhaps the most powerful one of all.
“An agreement that creates a community is an agreement upon an illusion, an agreement upon an intoxicant,” Milch said. “Our founding document jumps off from, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident,’ which to me seems a frank agreement upon illusion -- not that these are self-evident truths, but that we agree on an illusion that these are fucking truths.”
Altman has covered this philosphical terrain so thoroughly that all successors must walk in his snowy footprints. Milch said he likes to think of “Deadwood” as a way of speaking to “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” across time, answering one work of art with another. 
“I think that everything you write is part of a conversation with everything you’ve read and seen,” Milch said. “I answer Mr. Altman’s work because I have an affinity for it. St. Paul is my guy, in terms of saying that idea of community is central to understanding, and that we mistake our deepest nature if we fail to realize that we are part of some larger organism. The illusion of individuality is probably more pernicious than any other…The failure of certain individuals to explore that fact is the source of their tragedy.”
Sunday, March 05, 2006
McCabe and Mr. Milch
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16 comments:
Wow. I've let most of the negative criticism of DEADWOOD dissuade me from watching it. I love Milch's idea of one art work speaking across time to another. I'll make an effort to catch up with DEADWOOD on DVD.
Great post. I was wondering when we'd see your contribution and what a great idea to connect "Deadwood" and "McCabe." I'd never put the two together before, but it's so fucking obvious I must be the most ignorant cocksucker in these parts not to have noticed it before. (Note: For those who haven't see "Deadwood," the language in this comment won't be truly appreciated)
Damn, he beat me to the first use of the word "cocksucker." Nice score. I'm not yet 100% sold on Deadwood (though I am a full season behind), but Milch's work on NYPD Blue was a high water mark for the medium (as Alan Sepinwall would no doubt agree). Interesting to see how deep the Altman influence runs, and how far Milch sees beyond the usual focus on Altman's tics and technical flourishes.
The other titanic influence on Milch, of course, is Mamet. Speaking of which, Matt, when do we get to see what you think of THE UNIT? I keep hoping something will turn up on the Star-Ledger site, but either it's not there or I don't know how to find it.
Great post, Matt. No surprise that Deadwood (the best show on TV) was inspired by McCabe (the best film ever). But it's nonetheless great to hear Milch openly discuss his affinity for Altman's masterpiece.
Hey, Sam: I was too busy to review THE UNIT, so barring a last minute change of plans, it'll probably be covered by my Ledger colleague Alan Sepinwall. I might write about it here, though.
Edward Copeland: After Ian McShane won an award from the TV Critics Association, a group of which I am a member, he began routinely sending out lovely little seasonal cards that said, "Merry Christmas! Ian McShane." Of course the running gag among critics was that he missed his shot: he should have sent out cards that said, "Merry Christmas, cocksucker!"
TLR-HB: I don't know what specific negative criticism of DEADWOOD you've been hearing -- I know from getting reader mail at the Star-Ledger that most people find it too violent, too sexually explicit, too profane and too narratively complex, and way too convoluted at the level of dialogue. But whatever you've heard or read, disregard it. DEADWOOD is the most demanding series on TV, but it rewards close scrutiny and continues to reward it. it is the only show I can think of that simultaneously operates on six to ten levels at once, in every scene.
I get the resistance to this show, and to an extent I understand why it's never been as big a hit as THE SOPRANOS and SIX FEET UNDER. You have to immerse yourself and enter a differerent mental space in order to get anything at all out of it. Milch \ writes in a quasi-Shakepearean cadence, with rhythms reminiscent of iambic pentameter, and he backloads his sentences 19th-century style and has clauses within clauses within clauses. Some of Ian McShane's monologues run two or three minutes, and if you transcribe them (which I have) they are one long sentence! Added to that, McShane is often asked to deliver these monologues under the damnedest circumstances -- while contemplating a severed head or getting blown by a prostitute or getting a rectal exam. THE SOPRANOS is TWO AND A HALF MEN compared to DEADWOOD. But it you can take the sheer animal ferocity of the show and acclimate yourself to its peculiar presentation, it is, as I have said over and over again in my Star-Ledger column, the greatest dramatic series in the history of American television. Seriously.
Nick: Milch is brilliant man, as much a Prospero figure as Altman in how he draws together disparate, talented people into a single enterprise. Yet somehow he remains very humble with regard to his influences. When I visited the set earlier this year i got to watch him write a scene -- he has horrible back trouble that makes it hard to sit down in a regular chair, so he usually sits lotus-style on the floor and literally dictates entire scenes for an assistant to type while he watches her progress on a monitor; then he verbally gives her instructions on how to change or correct his work. The dialogue and descriptions start out sprawling and get tighter and tighter and tighter the more Milch reworks. It's a pretty incredible sight, like watching a blacksmith fold and refold a hot piece of metal until it's dense as can be. But when he's done, he turns into a genial college professor and lays some knowledge on you. The day I was there, when he was done with the scene he proceeded to read a mammoth poem by Robert Penn Warren, his college professor at Yale and a huge influence on his own writing. I sat there and listened, as did the five or six DEADWOOD staffers in the room with us. You could tell by his concentration and seriousness as he read that the point was not merely to illustrate similarities between Warren's preoccupations and Milch's, but also to keep alive a writer whose contributions often seem at risk of being forgotten.
I can't wait to hear your take on Crash winning best picture
CRASH comments should be placed on the Crash thread. Wear your poncho and pith helmet. It's gonna be a shitstorm.
Wonderfully written and textured with insight. Thank you so much! Yours is an essay I want to read again and again.
Thanks. It's a great show. I've written about it quite a bit at the Star-Ledger -- to the point where I probably annoy coworkers -- but it deserves that level of enthusiasm. I plan to write about it on this blog every chance I get.
For some inexplicable reason, I watched the first episode of “Deadwood” and loved it, but didn’t follow on with the series. I do have Season One on DVD, so thanks to your brilliant essay/interview with Mr. Milch, I've decided to quickly play catch up over the next little while.
Thanks so much for inspiring the Altman blog-a-thon in the first place. This entry did not disappoint.
Thanks, MGM. My suggestion would be to turn your phone off, crack open a bottle of wine or the stimulant of your choice, and watch the first two episodes back to back, then try to watch the next two the following night. The fourth episode's final sequence is as brilliant a large-scale setpiece as Altman has ever directed, a vision of a community coming together in reaction to an outrage. After that, you will be hopelessly addicted. This show is an opium pipe, and you will be its Mrs. Miller.
You're going to have to add me to the list of people you've yet to succumb to the charms of DEADWOOD.
Like machinegunmccain, I once upon a time saw the first episode and strangely never came back to it. (Another HBOer I didn't get very far with was ROME.)
I even own the first season DVD box and have S2 on tape! In any case, Matt, your above viewing suggestion has been duly noted and this interview rocked.
But I did sit up late last night watching MCCABE which kinda explains why I've never seen DEADWOOD: 4 out of 5 times I'll chow down on comfort food rather than try something new.
Matt, this is a terrific piece of analysis. From the first moment I set my eyes on Deadwood, all's I could think about was McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Altman's brilliance is well-known. But let it also be said that Milch is a fucking genius. This IS the best show on TV, and may indeed be the best TV show to EVER appear on television. And you done it proud, you limberdick cocksucker, with this fine piece of writing.
Thanks, Dan. Welcome to another one of my crusades: to get the world to acknowledge that this is the greatest dramatic series in the history of American television.
More articles will follow in the coming year, doubtless inspiring even the most rabid DEAD-heads to implore me to shut the fuck up about Milch and company.
I'd be honoured to be a knight on this holy crusade. Where are the chicks?
Hey Matt, consider the Crusade joined.
To wit: http://djardine.blogspot.com/2006/04/where-conversation-turns-to-discussion.html
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