First off, great show. I’m almost done with Season 1. Interestingly I watched the first season of Justified on FX with Timothy Olyphant, and he plays both Seth Bullock and Raylan Givens as the same persona…maybe they’re both Timothy Olyphant.
Anyway, the real question I have is, has anyone verified that the dialogue and amount of cursing used in the script is historically accurate? Seriously, if you played a drinking game where you had to take a shot everytime someone said, “cocksucker”, you would die of alcohol poisoning by the midway point of any episode. Just curious if this have been historically verified or if it is literary license.
Yup, they updated the language so that it would sound as “salty” to modern ears as the language they truly used in that time would have sounded to the people of the time. So, the characters are speaking in the same level of coarseness that the people of Deadwood did, but if they’d used the words that were actually used at the time, it would sounds pretty tame to modern audiences (“damn” packed a whole ton more wallop back then than it does now).
And though Olyphant plays similar characters on Deadwood and Justified, he’s got a pretty broad range. Check out his recent guest appearance on “The Office,” or his role in the movie “The Girl Next Door,” for example.
No doubt many characters of that time “cursed like muleskinners”. But you’d hear something that would sound disturbingly and far too humorously like Yosemite Sam. “God Damn it” was extremely salty, and even “gol durn it” was considered improper for use around ladies.
So if I understand you correctly. The actual language used in the late 1800’s in Deadwood, would be considered quite tame by today’s standards, but in that time it was considered very crude and brusque. So to make sound crude and brusque to an audience in 2005, it was amped up? Is that correct?
I read an interview with the creator of the show where he mentioned that most of the profanity of the time relied on being sacrilegious, and sounded much less shocking to modern ears then it would’ve back in less secular times so they “up-dated” to more modern curse-words.
Honestly, I’m not sure how they’d know though. Other then maybe transcripts of police interrogations, I can’t think of where you’d get a lot of written “as spoken” conversations preserved for posterity that weren’t cleaned up.
They also have letters and diaries, some written by the people doing the cursing and some telling stories of encounters with same. Plenty of people with education and money passed through or moved to these areas, and recorded their experiences there.
“quadrilateral, astronomical, incandescent son-of-a-bitch.”
"When it comes down to pure ornamental cursing, the native American is gifted above the sons of men."
I wonder what word began with “H”?
Ah. Hell. Twain censored “Hell” in a speech. Think about it.
It was the non-profanity that I hated. It wore me out the way they take 100 words to say what could have been said in 10. Maybe that’s an exaggeration but my recollection is of some very tedious dialogue.
Least you could say. I bought the first seasons cause I read all the good critics it had but, seriously, the amount of procastinating in this show is amazing. I hear the author comes from theatre, it shows, it’s the common theatre trope of having two people discuss for five hours of what they might do tomorrow, if the day is lovely. The whole story pretext of the lady drug addict blabbering for X episodes about her mine, and how she should visit it, and so on and on. Lots of story time wasted, there are more things happening, both in story and character development in a single episode of The Wire or Oz.
I couldn’t disagree more. The dialogue was what made the show. The show WAS the dialogue. It was Shakespeare with swears. There’s been nothing else like it.
