Dialogue in Deadwood: The Mechanics of Delay
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 19 มิ.ย. 2024
- A deep dive into the dialogue of HBO's Deadwood (2004-2006) with a focus on how David Milch and his co-writers use the techniques of delayed meaning to engage the audience at the level of the sentence, the paragraph, even across an entire scene.
#deadwood #dialogue
Chapters
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0:00 Intro - The Mechanics of Delay
3:56 Suspensive / Periodic Syntax
11:02 Suspensive / Periodic Paragraphs
14:47 Suspensive / Periodic Scenes
17:50 Outro
Once you've watched Deadwood, you're standards for dialogue rises at least a hundred points.
Especially for your own writing! Everything suddenly sounds like a bad school play.
@@Scene-a-maticStorytelling yes
I worked for David Milch for 6 years, and during his time working on the tv film for Deadwood. Nice analysis of his style.
Wow, thank you! That’s a huge compliment. That must have been quite an experience. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall during one of those writing sessions.
Could you share some interesting stories about him? I have heard that he was a genius. Was it true?
@@jayaprakash387watch the show, or read his memoir, or listen to his interviews. Yeah. It’s true. Dude is a genius.
The production of Deadwood was always so unique to me.
How fresh pages could be thought up and written hours before being shot, how new character traits and ideas could thought up just based on what an actor might do or suggest. It sounded less like a normal HBO show and more like a fantastic workshop.
David Milch and Co. did some brilliant work on this fabulous series. I remember during Season One - a newspaper columnist, whose name slips my mind - did a glowing review on Deadwood, aptly entitled 'Shakespeare in the Muck'
That captures it pretty succinctly! Haha. Thanks for watching!
Loved this! Recently binged Deadwood for the first time and I couldn't get over how great the dialogue is.
It’s seriously on another level! Can’t believe I slept on the show for so many years. Thanks for watching!
@@Scene-a-maticStorytelling "Can’t believe I slept on the show for so many years."
That's what you call a mistake of youth.
Live and learn!
Not enough Deadwood content on here. This is a fantastic video on the most elusive distinguishing element of Deadwood: It’s just riveting to hear people talk. Thanks for the watch man. Keep putting videos together
Thanks so much! New video in the works!
"I can't say if they're in rut. I didn't linger for the song of the bedstead."
This was really excellent. I wrote my master’s thesis on this effect in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. I called it “Immersion by Deferral.”
Nice! Whenever people find their way to the same conclusion starting from different points on the map, it suggests our compasses must be working. Hope your thesis was well-received!
@@Scene-a-maticStorytellingI see what you did there!
David Milch, as an expert writer and all around intellectual individual, probably studied the original rhetorical progenitor of the periodic sentence, Isocrates.
This was absolutely fantastic. I hope your channel picks up and you get the attention you clearly deserve
You are too kind! Thanks for watching.
Glad to hear something I said helped you rethink/clarify your own approach to storytelling. That’s the whole goal of the channel, so that’s extremely high praise. Hope you dig the next videos coming soon!
Loved that you compared the dialogue to being almost Shakespearean, As that's exactly how I felt
Great analysis of my favorite show. I never though of the dialogue in this manner. Looking forward to other videos. May I suggest one in the Wire ...
Thank you! The Wire is fantastic. So much to talk about with the writing on that show. I’ll definitely be doing a video in the future. Next up is Succession.
"I imagine the pool that spawns you Richardson. I am filling it with rocks. I am holding shut your gills!"
Great video, I always thought about why Deadwood feels so particularly great, even compared to The Wire and The Sopranos socio-economic/psychological underpinnings. Beyond the syntax itself, the dialogue's meaning is much deeper, touching on aspects of the human condition, the historical setting implying their universality.
For example when William Bullock is hurt and Seth tells Martha it would be of comfort to the boy to speak to him, and she replies (after a futile interlude) "What does the doctor tell us to say?" - Medicine may treat the physiological, but is silent on psychic and spiritual matters. They then go on to speak to William, with references to the resurrection and revelations.
Fantastic comment! You’ve touched on something that goes beyond the scope of this video: WHAT do you write about once you nail all this tricky syntax business? Beyond great character voices, what is the writer actually saying about life? I’m convinced Milch (perhaps before his diagnosis) is capable of taking a simple scene of two people sitting in a coffee shop to the most interesting and bizarre places, and the conversation would have little to do with coffee.
That’s one of my favorite E.B.-isms, too! It’s a perfect example of how visually evocative a character’s language can be, even when the camera is just looking squarely at two characters we’ve seen before moving around a room we’ve become intimately acquainted with over the seasons.
Thanks for watching!
@@Scene-a-maticStorytelling I've never seen My Dinner with Andre but I imagine Milch's version would be amazing! He is a genuine genius and polymath
I love that E.B.-ism because it is so abstract and specific, intelligent but profane. A characters words can transport us in our minds beyond whats on the screen. With this one we are literally with the primordial ooze...and why? so E.B. can insult Richardson xD
Yes! Reminds me of another exchange they share, along the same ‘evolutionary’ lines.
“Could you have been born, Richardson? And not egg-hatched, as I’ve always assumed.”
The quiet intelligence within E.B. was so well drawn. He’s the type of character to trip over his own feet, or wilt whenever Al slams his fist on the table, but alone in his own castle, he is king, and he’ll abuse those beneath him to compensate for the anxiety he feels for his place in the pecking order outside the hotel. Very similar to the dynamic of Tom and Greg in Succession!
The characters talked using prepositional phrase filled sentences and indirect meaning on NYPD Blue's early seasons. It was very unique. Sipowicz could say something like "Past me standing here wanting to beat your balls, and me likin you for that killin, there's you thinkin like an uptown prick who can get over on the unwashed cop that I am"
Greatest show ever.
This was an incredible analysis! Thanks a bunch for posting!
This is a great analysis - I love this sort of breakdown of language, structure and story.
YOOO THIS VIDEO WAS SO WELL-DONE!
This channel is criminally undervalued. Thank you so much!
Thank you! Happy to hear you’re digging the content 😎
This is fantastic! We'll done bro!
It seems to me that Trixie was asking Dan to burn down the Gem rather than the entire camp. That aside I enjoyed and appreciated your dissertation.
I held the same interpretation. Deadwood- as a whole - was too chaotic to be taken over by any one individual. So characters struggled to maintain their grasp on any small piece they could control in the chaos. For Trixie and Dan, that was the Gem. (That’s my take, anyway …)
This was really great!! Great advice for writing! Good on ya!
That you found something in here valuable to writing means a lot to me! Thanks for watching!
Reminds me of Norm MacDonald telling a 15 second joke in 5 minutes.
This video was great help to me as I’m also writing my first screenplay. Thank you for sharing!!
Glad it helped, Chris! I have a new video in the works that I hope will be as relevant. Best of luck with your screenplay!
@@Scene-a-maticStorytelling Thank you so much!! I am truly blessed to have found you!
Thanks for this 🙏
Like Shakespeare with cursing and set in the Old West. Best TV show ever made, nothing has ever come close before or after!
Perfect video. It explains exactly why the dialog in Deadwood is so good. I could never really put my finger on it.
Thanks for commenting! Happy to hear it resonated with you.
One of HBOs greatest “what if” tragedies was the untimely canceling of this show, along with Rome.
Awesome video! I remember when I started watching Deadwood and thought "Damn, this is Shakespeare". But I never could have put it as precisely as you.
Appreciate that! Insane to think that Milch never put pen to paper and came up with that dialogue out loud for others in the room to transcribe.
Most underrated show of all time. Btw, it technically wasn’t cancelled, but was stopped due to a writer’s strike.
Interesting! I didn’t know that, but it makes sense.The final season came out in the middle of the big WGA strike. Makes me wonder how a fourth season of Deadwood would have handled the end of all the different storylines.
no, it was canceled due to budget.
Canceled due to extreme production costs. Writers strike didn't affect this.
Deadwood is the best TV show ever made, the only TV show I've watched more than once, up there with Unforgiven and RDR2.
Fantastic and spot on. It must have been serendipity because I was just thinking about revisiting syntax in writing a few days ago and then bam! the Algorithm delivers me this today. Great job!
That’s awesome! Serendipity, synchronicity, or algorithmic telepathy… I’m glad you found the video and enjoyed it. Thanks, Mac!
You were too young to watch it when it came out. We were there from the beginning.
Great video. New subscriber!
Appreciate the kind words! I’m working hard to put out a new video soon. Please excuse the inconsistent upload schedule these first few months.
nice!
Thank you for a magnificent breakdown. I'd be interested in hearing your view on whether the meandering language of Deadwood actually owes more to Victorian literature, especially that of Henry James, than Shakespeare.
Excellent observation! I remember hearing Milch in a couple interviews mention that literacy in the area during the 1880s was limited, and most houses - if they did own any books - would have the Bible first and a copy of Shakespeare's works second. Seems he started with a first principle that a lot of his characters' worldviews were shaped by these two works being nearest at hand for them when trying to articulate their thoughts to make sense of the world.
But it makes sense a great deal of the spoken dialogue would reflect a late-19th century syntax and rhythm, since that's the water in which these characters would have swum. We can see Shakespeare's influence in the dialogue through the liberal reordering of clauses (to the point of sometimes straining a sentence's clarity), but we wouldn't expect Milch to go ultra-literal and have Bullock and Swearengen arguing back and forth in iambic pentameter.
(Actually, maybe some would be interested in seeing that, haha.)
I think you're right on the money with James, specifically, as being an uncredited influence on the style. It's been a while since I read anything like 'Daisy Miller' or 'The Real Thing,' but I still remember many of his sentences twisting and turning and growing into dense blocks of text - partly why he's a bit hard to 'get into' for most readers.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment!
When's the next one coming out?!? :)
This might have value as a technique, but it is also a double-edged sword-do it 'wrong' and it can scuttle the writing, the story, and the audience. What do I mean by 'wrong'? I'll 'delay' that until it will make sense.
It's similar to one of the techniques I employ as often as possible, something often referred to as 'withholding information'. Briefly, what this entails is giving the reader just enough info to get their minds engaged actively in trying to put 2 and 2 together to see if they can figure out the part of the info they don't yet have. This can work at the clause, sentence, paragraph, scene, sequence, chapter, act, story arc, and trilogy arc levels.
The human mind is hard-wired to attempt to fill in the blanks automatically. It's a survival technique-figuring out what's going on, even with only partial info, increases the odds of survival bc it allows better preparation for what may come. Present the reader with a puzzle, even a tiny one in a 8-word sentence, they automatically try to solve it. Now, they're actively a part of the storytelling. And that's what makes reading fun. Humans naturally attempt to make order out of chaos, 24/7/365. They can't help themselves. This plays directly into that.
The trick is to withhold 'part 2' of the info for the exact right amount of time, then give them the rest of the info. What's difficult is figuring out how long the delay should be. The more important that info is to the story, usually the longer the delay will be. But you want to give it to them either just before or just after they figure it out on their own, or you want to give it to them just before they give up in frustration. A bit of a guessing game for the writer.
If you delay part 2 of the information too heavy-handedly, or too long, then it is no longer an effective technique, because it can backfire, and spectacularly. It does not promote story flow. It presents stutters to the flow. Readers hopefully fall into the fictive dream. Writers should avoid anything that pulls them out of it. Having to stop and think or to go back and reread something to make better sense of it works against both keeping the reader mesmerized with the fictive dream and also works against steady forward story motion and flow.
You also need to be sure to give them enough info in 'part 1' to get them to that stage of wanting to figure things out and trying to. Simply puzzling them just does not work. So, writers, do this at your peril. They have to have enough bait to want to buy in. Like corner drug dealers used to say, 'First one (part 1) is free'.
That cautionary aspect is the same cautionary aspect to be mindful of in using delay as a technique. The most important 'mechanic' of delay is the same as rhe most important thing in comedy-timing. It's knowing how much info to withhold and how long to wait before handing part 2 over to the reader, which must also be done. Do it properly, and they will fall in love with your story. Do it improperly and they will hurtle your novel off their balcony like a discus.
Keep going. You will get more viewers.
Amazing video!! Thank you!
Please consider a video or video series dissecting and analyzing Shakespearian Dialogue!!!
Thanks, Wyatt! Funny you should ask. I’ve actually got an announcement coming soon that I think will make you happy! It’s not going to be exclusively focused on Shakespearean grammar, but there will be no shortage of iconic lines from the Bard put under the microscope. Hope you get a kick out of it!
Have you watched Fargo? Its writing is terrific!
Oh, yeah, you betcha!
Ok then!
Too young to watch the series when it aired originally? It makes no sense, of course, but I confess I was taken aback by this. The mathematics works out, but, still, speaking for myself, twenty years ago was not that long ago. Twenty years ago seems perhaps like- ten years ago, maybe eight. When you get to be my age and many people around you seem like kids, you will understand. For now, though, I imagine my remarks will seem rude and arrogant, though these things are merely incidental to the point I am attempting to make. Anyhow, thanks for the vid.
1:47 who is that actor
The only thing I disagree with so far is that the paragraph spoken by Dan is not a major thing. I dare anyone to find a more fundamental explanation of who Dan is. A major character's raison d'etre is kinda sorta major.
I'm sure this is all fine & good...but I just like to watch the show! 😂
Nothing wrong with that!
This show has ruined me. I would pay thousands for a fourth season.
Delay the proposition. Fancy screenwriter talk for communicating in a circular way.