Calamity Jane had only five seconds of screen time in last season's "Deadwood" premiere, but that was all she needed to make her presence felt. As the stagecoach carrying Martha and William Bullock and several new whores barreled its way toward town, we saw it pass a horse with its rider passed out in the saddle. Sure enough, it was our resident cross-dressing lush, who emerged from her stupor just long enough to scream out "Cocksuckers!" before returning to the sleep of the righteously blitzed.
With Keith Carradine's Wild Bill Hickok long gone, Robin Weigert has the unenviable task of playing the most famous character on "Deadwood," a figure of fascination through the history of Western literature. In movies, she's typically been portrayed as a sassy tomboy (Doris Day in "Calamity Jane") or a sharp-shooting sexpot (Jane Russell in "The Paleface"). In one of the more awkward page-to-screen adaptations, Larry McMurtry's "Buffalo Girls," which depicted Jane as a lonely hermaphrodite forever writing letters to an imaginary daughter, was turned into a miniseries with Anjelica Huston playing her as a regal plainswoman whose daughter was quite real.
Whatever her internal plumbing, most accounts of the real Martha Jane Canary paint her as profane and socially-maladjusted. Sound a little like the Jane we know? She dresses and shoots like a man, but that's a denim-and-wool suit of armor to hide her complete self-loathing. Early in the first season, Jane vows to protect little Sofia from Swearengen and his men at any cost. But when Swearengen marches into Doc Cochran's office, Jane's so paralyzed that she can't even get her gun off her hip, much less shoot the cocksucker. She wants to be as tough and heroic as Wild Bill, but she's too scared, too lacking in confidence to live up to her own legend.
Jane's complete lack of faith in herself leads her to drink herself into stupors daily, to curse longer and louder than any man in the camp (even Dan Dority seems taken aback by her language), to pine after a dead gunfighter who was never going to love her no matter how blatant she made her intentions.
But as Todd VanDerWerff points out in his essay on the women of "Deadwood," Jane is also the most open character on the show, willing to talk to anyone on their level. Because she has such a low self-opinion, she can't hold herself above anyone.
Because David Milch is himself a recovering addict of many stripes, he always seems to have a special affection for the drug or booze-addicted characters on his shows: J.D. LaRue on "Hill Street Blues," Sipowicz on "NYPD Blue," Jane here. As representative of the myth of the West that the show killed along with Wild Bill, Jane shouldn't really have a place in "Deadwood," but Milch clearly likes her too much to send her away.
(As an aside, I am continually amazed by how well Milch writes women on this show. On his cop dramas, the female characters were there only as potential conquests for the guys, and on the job were consigned to dealing with rapes or cases involving kids -- "women's work." You can tell how much this setting fired Milch's imagination by the way he writes multiple layers for the whores, the society lady, the schoolmarm and, of course, our Jane.)
In an upcoming third season episode, Martha Bullock asks Jane if she might like to give a speech to her elementary school class about her time as a scout for General Custer. Thinking about the idea later, Jane flashes a dopey smile and says, "Custer was a cunt. The end." She then notices that she's been sitting in a puddle of her own piss and quickly begins cursing herself out. I don't want to spoil what happens when Jane (clean-scrubbed for the first time in a long time) addresses the kids, but it's one of highlights of the first five episodes.
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Alan Sepinwall is a television critic for The Star-Ledger and the proprietor of the TV blog What's Alan Watching? For more writing on "Deadwood," see "The Deadwood Columns" in the sidebar at right.
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7 comments:
She is a plumbing puzzle, indeed. Between her sailor's tongue and her motherly bosom - I had no idea how she'd react to Swearengen when they confronted each other. Who would think that such a incorrigible character would be capable of backing down like that? After that scene, I felt so bad for her that I wanted to take up the bottle.
I thought the key to that scene was the way something in Swearengen's implacable will and boundless cruelty triggered Jane's memories of terrible abuse in her childhood. The words tumbled out of her when she talked to Cochran afterwards:
Jane: I fell apart. I couldn’t look out for the little one. Fucker looked at me and I fell apart in front of him.
Doc: Alright. You’re not the first.
Jane: No, I’m not the first. Who said I was the first? You think he’s the fuckin’ first? I’ve been fucked plenty! And tougher fucks than he was and little than her by plenty! They fucked me plenty! So you can go fuck yourself! (Sobbing)
Thus, Jane's brave, despairing wail at her most terrible moment with Swearengen:
"Leave her alone you cocksucker! Do it to me if you have to."
In Jane's mind, Swearengen's utter lack of pity immediately made him one with the abusers of her youth. Unfortunately, or fortunately, Swearengen's evil intent took another form entirely, rendering her desperate, last ditch attempt at self-sacrifice of no effect. Swearengen viciously quips on the way out "Why would I do it to you?"
In terms of the overall character, we can say that Jane's "eccentricities," her profane language and her masculine manners, are the tools she developed to survive unimaginable cruelties and anguish. Likewise her attachment to Wild Bill must have rested in part on his resembling the protector she must have wished for but never had as a child: gentlemanly, kind to the weak, and a savage killer in the face of any threat.
What's most impressive about Jane is the steel she's found within despite all this, if not always a great deal of skill to go with it. After the breakdown in front of Swearengen , she soon rallied to patrol the streets for his return, though oblivious to Dority. After the devastating and no doubt terrifying loss of Wild Bill, she continued to function, though at the cost of intensified alcoholism, and in the second season we find her backing Bullock's play to get his gun & badge back from her former tormentor Swearengen, as well as steadily though tardily advancing with a shotgun on Wolcott to protect Joanie.
But all of these acts of courage come with a heavy cost. She not oblivious, stoic or without fear. Thus she decides to sleep outside the Chez Amie because she's badly afraid of what she might find in the dark: "Scared that way since I was small" she explains. No doubt darkness brought considerable torments for her when she was little, and she feels its terrors still, even with numbing effects of liquor. But under the weight of that experience, what could be more brave than simply continuing to stand up, however unsteadily?
rd: I think you're right. Jane seems profoundly traumatized, more so than almost any other character on the show. And we've seen the other major characters go through some truly horrendous shit; with the exception of Wild Bill's murder and the interlude in the plague tent, most of Jane's trauma seems to have occurred offscreen, where we can only imagine it. A scary thought.
rd, Jane's abuse (indeed, the abuse of many of the characters) has been so subtly portrayed that many fans have completely missed it.
Perhaps what I love most about Deadwood is that it grows with you: As you get older and have more experiences, those experiences can be found in Deadwood. I can't think of another show that works that way (on so many levels).
Lost, for example, can be rewarding to rewatch if you, say, read the many, many novels they namedrop and you can then connect the plot to the novels in certain ways, but that's a superficial kind of reward -- roughly akin to "getting" one of the cutaway gags on Family Guy (and I love Lost, maddening as it is).
But Deadwood reveals new levels of emotion, intellect, knowledge, etc., etc., etc. as you watch it over and over again. It's the closest television has come to the idea of the series as novel.
Addendum: Jane's "Cocksuckers" in the second season premiere is one of my favorite Deadwood moments (along with Swearengen's "Welcome to fucking Deadwood" in the same episode).
Todd: A side note, perhaps, but for some reason I always buy Calamity Jane's profanity, yet Trixie's often seems awkward and unbelievable. I don't know if it's the fact that Trixie's "fucks" seem shoehorned into her dialogue or if Paula Malcolmson is not at ease saying them (even after two seasons of saying them over and over) or if this is one character Milch never quite got a handle on, and he's substituting a tic for an actual trait. I don't even think of Jane's profanity as profanity -- ditto some of the other characters. But Trixie's often takes me out of the moment. A pity, since Malcolmson is so convincing in every other way.
I had to stop the player for like 15 minutes when Jane said "Custer was a cunt. The End". I couldnt help but laugh and laugh and laugh... she's so funny.
Definitely one of my fav characters from Deadwood.
For the record, Im a spaniard who's been living in London for 6 years now (studied translation and a student of the english language for almost 20 years now), and I found the language used in Deadwood a tough challenge. Not only the pronunciation is hard to understand, but the length of the sentences, the vocabulary used, and the profoundness of what every character has to say. It's got something shakespearian to it. I found it almost impossible to grasp even with the captions on, when I usually, save the odd word, can understand all kinds of movies. I'm doing a master degree in english language with this. Every day, I print out the script of last night's episode and read them again, takin' my time to get the whole meaning of every single word and sentence. One can't understand a character like Farnum without getting the whole thing of his pompous language.
Im gonna give it a week or two and start watching the whole three seasons all over again, and it sure will be enlightening now that I've mastered the lingo.
-In case anyone is in my same situation and want to discuss this further, or point something out, please email me at: rcortes[at]gmail[dot]com
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