This is the title of seven-part series on Netflix. Scott Tobias covers this show on Rolling Stone under the title, Godless; Why Netflix's brutal timely western is a must-see. Tobias delivers a good deal of insider information about the writer and directors and producers, their previous works, what specific elements compare to other Hollywood productions, the actors and their previous work, such as, I did not know one of the main characters, the personality that gathers a private army of thirty scoundrels and raises them from boys and trains them as a Boy Scout troop leader/preacher/outlaw, the most menacing character is actually Jeff Daniels.
Two young boys are are on their own and the oldest abandons his brother. The abandonment is psychologically devastating. The character development here and throughout is outstanding. Because there are none of the usual social structures that shape our behavior, our thoughts, our deeds, our outlooks, the characters all do strange and outrageous things. The boys hear a rustling in the bushes at night at their camp, they jolt alert and swear at the person creeping up on them. They let loose swear phrases strung together far beyond what's heard from boy their ages. Turns out it's a female preacher. She doesn't judge the boys, rather, she takes them in. They finally have something resembling a family. The woman is odd as the boys.
The boys are separated. The youngest steals a horse in the clumsiest way imaginable. He get on and rides the horse at a gentle walk right past its owner sleeping on a porch. The man sitting next to him barely awake himself, "Hey, isn't that your horse?" The man, Jeff Daniels, but we do not know that, wakens slowly and sees the boy riding the horse through the gates far beyond. Too far to chase. He lifts his fingers to his mouth and whistles sharply. The horse stops short. The boy falls to the ground and breaks his arm. The two men approach the boy on the ground and softly interrogate him with no sense of animosity but with tremendous menace. The boy whips out his pistol too large to handle. The man says, "You ain't gonna kill me. I seen my own death. I lived it. And this ain't it." He takes away the gun from the boy. The boy spits in his eye like a snake. The theft, the whistle, the fall, the gun, the spit, all occur in two minutes and it is honestly the best western writing that I've ever seen. Each scene is like this, scene upon scene, with outstanding dialogue and utterly unique writing and its depictions of life in societies just forming, where people make their reality as they go and where law does not help them, are the reasons this show is a must see.
Another element. Another fine touch. A beautiful young German woman escaped her marriage in Mexico. Her husband sent a detective to find her. Pinkerton agency, I think. He's determined to find her. Another woman who I took for standard lesbian character, turns out to be the wife of the mayor who died. She's wearing his clothing. It's all much clearer now that I know this, but I rather liked thinking of her as western lesbian. And I think she still might be. She sleeps with an ex-prostitute. She's level-headed, non-emotional, clear thinking, straight talking, rational, and she handles the crisis situations. The other women rely on her judgement and on her organizational skill. She lies to the Pinkerton detective, then visits the German woman to warn her to keep out of sight. There she sees the German woman is painting scenes of western women. And they are all beautiful. The mayor's wife who looks lesbian is struck by the paintings. The German woman painted one for her. The mayor's wife is too humble, too humiliated, too unselfconscious to accept it. She doesn't even know when her own birthday is. The detective bursts open the door and stands in the doorway threateningly. The German woman shoots him in the leg, drags him inside, and ties his hands together. While bound and near to the German woman and having her hand on him, the detective confesses his love for her. He fell in love with her picture. The detective wanted to find her for himself. She keeps him. That twist in this side story is just wonderful to watch. Three fantastic characters pulled together tightly into one scene. The mayor's wife is an odd character. The German woman is an odd anachronistic character. The Pinkerton detective is an odd character. It's a very convincing depiction of what early western life really must have been like.
The Jeff Daniels character is convinced he's seen his own death so he remains calm in chaotic scenes, on his horse in the open as his posse shoots up the town. He is an odd combination of tenderness and malevolence. He thinks God is removed from the west yet prays and they mention Christianity, Jesus and God throughout the series. The town is shown building a church, and you realize, wow, so that really is how all those churches got built. The entire town built them like Habitat for Humanity.
The basic plot is a mining town having experienced devastation and nearly all the men died so the town is run by their survivors. The dynamics is women taking the roles of men. The story follows the youngest of two brothers and the people who take him up, adopt him, the preacher woman, the Jeff Daniels character, a female ranch woman who is outcast from the other town women.
When I got to the end of the seventh installment, I turned right back to the first. I missed some important portions, and now that I know all the characters, and they're all sympathetic, it's good enough to see all over again. I just finished the scene where the main character, the boy now grown up, trains a wild horse in the manner of horse whisperer. The first viewing I saw only one horse. The second viewing I notice the horse's faces have different markings, it's not just one horse shown laying down from different angles, it's all the horses in the corral laying down.The camera pulls back and all the horses in the corral are laying in the dirt. He whispered them all to sleep. Their way of showing he tamed them all. That ability came from the menacing posse leader, knowledgeable about various natures of men and of horses. He told the boy that horses are prey animals so it's not a matter of beating into them you are the boss, rather, it's a matter of allaying their prey-animal instincts. He exhausts them and gets them to the ground, a position they resist because they cannot bolt, and then comforts them. Strokes them. Talks to them softy. Assures them that he will not harm them, he will protect them, feed them, water them, and never abandon them. While the horse is down, he straddles the horse and vocally clicks him up, and now he riding him. This resonates with the boy, and now at the woman's ranch he copies that technique and makes himself useful for selling her wild horses. But he got all that from the worst character. There is no conflation about good and bad while both traits are shown in all characters. It is a beautiful blending. It is authentic writing. It is liberal in its acceptance. I like this show a lot. I thought it would have more episodes and I'm disappointed it won't have any more seasons. I understand Colorado history more meaningfully by having watched this. No western I've seen is more convincing about reality of life in those circumstances.
13 comments:
Chip, GREAT post. I'm glad you liked/loved Godless. I plan on writing to the producers urging another season. As I said when I wrote about this series a week or so ago, that outcast woman w/ the Indian mother-in-law and son is from Downton Abbey. My bride picked that out. I liked the old Indian lady always calling Roy Goode "Stray Dog" in Navajo. And didn't the writer show just what weasels newspaper men are, going back centuries.
I just finished watching it last night. At first I figured that the Frank Griffin character was just a rerun of "The Swede" from Hell on Wheels, so I stopped watching. But I started up again as I was invested enough in some of the other characters to see how things turned out.
Turns out I could not have been more wrong about Frank Griffin - he was much more complex than The Swede, and I was also impressed that Jeff Daniels was willing to have his left arm amputated just to play that role. Talk about dedication to one's craft, just sayin'.
Spoiler - if you have not seen it and plan on watching it, do not read any further.
Okay? Are you good?
That mook from Law & Order got blasted. Totally excellent! Long overdue.
Things I noted: Michelle Dockery really photographs well. I noticed the same thing about Molly Parker in Deadwood - I don't know whether it is the lighting or just awesome facial bone structure, but it's hard to take a bad picture of either of them.
The scenery was great and well filmed, it was apparently filmed where it was set, which matters to me - for example, when the young idiot Truckee rides his horse through the aspen grove and his horse is injured, it really was an aspen forest. I sure hope that was a stunt horse.
I kept an eye on the sky, looking for a contrail, but never saw one - either luck in filming or good editing in post-production.
The horse breaking scene was impressive - as someone who works with and tries to understand dog behavior, the mind of a prey animal is foreign to me. But I agree that kindness and trust go a long way to create a bond with an animal.
This series was a bit more honest than most regarding epidemics.
The shoot-outs were hokey as hell. But they were entertaining, so I guess that matters.
It was set in an interesting era. The 1880s in New Mexico was fun to watch. Different.
I enjoyed it.
The horse breaking thing is Comanche.
George Catlin described it at length.
Ok thanks.
Mike Rosen, some years back, recommended the series "Deadwood" I watched about 20 minutes and gave up. Way too much swearing.
They always get the language wrong - the words used in Deadwood were among the worst anachronisms. Same is true with Hell on Wheels.
Cowboys swore, but not like in some of these things.
Be interesting to see which draws better numbers, something like this or Maverick, Cheyenne, etc.
Sixty, The bar scene w/ Sam was a joy to behold.
The scene w/ the Norwegian settlers was as sinister as it gets.
Yeah, those Norskies were in a tight spot. Not easy to watch.
Sixty, Educator, agreed.
The dialogue is oddly schizophrenic that way. There are a lot of phrasings that are charmingly old-fashioned, while the swearing is modern. This had an odd effect of distancing the characters and modernizing them.
Like A Knight's Tale, where Goeffrey Chauser is a gambler, the princess wears Givenchy fashion and they play rock music.
For me it had the effect of drawing me into the story. Making that disappeared time more real. These people are just like you and me, but they lived back then. But only by their swears. The rest of the language is charmingly antique.
I do kind of wish they had researched the curses. In the book War of the Roses, I think, the one written by the female lawyer obsessed with that period, she has one scene only where a character swears. But, boy, does he swear. He is low class. The lowest. Nobody else swears in the book. And he did only once.
A knight comes barreling down a road on his horse and kicks an old peasant off the road, who then gets up, turns around and swears for a full paragraph. And that's it with the swearing for the rest of the 600 pages.
I realized while reading it that the author researched how people swore back then, the swears involved plagues on houses and poxes on family members, and kept a computer file of them. When she wrote the book she created that scene for that one character who is introduced, described, gets abused, swears swears, swears, swears, swears, swears, and that's all that character does, and is never heard of again. She created him just to dump her research file and get that out of the way so it's not wasted, and she doesn't have to think of it anymore. She doesn't have to have any other character swear consistently throughout the rest of the book.
In another historical novel, The Raven, I think, about the Ostrogoths, the young character hooks up with an older traveler who had traversed several cultures. He consistently swore throughout each of his scenes by blaspheming the chief characters in every ancient culture and religion that exists. Completely unique curses. The Godless characters swore a lot by Jesus Christ, but this character swore by the Greek gods, the Roman gods, the Mithraic daughters of their principal, the Jainists, the Egyptian gods, Buddhists, Bahá'ísts , Islamist, Sikhist, Judaists. I sat there reading it amazed that anyone could even think of such swears. He didn't research them, he made them up. "By the seven tits of Mithais' daughter," for example. He'd sexualize real or contrived religious characters as the basis of his universal blasphemies, and it is hilarious. I could see the author on an airplane and thinking up another ancient swear and typing it out and saving in his swear file just for this one single character.
I wish the authors did this with Godless. I wish they had nailed the swears as well they nailed the rest of the dialogue.
The scene of them teaching the hunting, Roy and the son and indian grandmother going out hunting is outstanding. The woman finds the buck, her grandson blows the shot. "Maybe we ought to try fishing." The woman leads the way, the grandson falls, most un-native American-like. A clumsy indian half breed. Roy sees an overturned carriage in the water, (shot from above so excellently) steps out on the stones to peer into the carriage. A ghostly dead face inside the carriage. He reaches in and removes a mail bag protected from soaking inside a metal box. The woman in the background catches a large trout by hand and smashes its head while she sings. "Your grandmother is an unusual woman."
Roy wakes up to a stream of blood in front of his face. The woman is gutting a deer. She killed a deer while Roy slept.
Next scene Roy and the young woman read the mail! So innocently as if that isn't a crime. Because it isn't a crime yet. There is no sense of intrusion, of invading anyone's privacy. "He's talking about his dinner!" With some disgust that someone would waste the effort. Then a letter from a woman writing to her separated husband telling him how she misses him sexually, telling him what she'd do with him when he returns, writing about her longing for his body, getting all hot and extremely intimate but expressed in an antique stilted language that both conceals and states explicitly, and still pornographic, while the two reading it, faces side by side, in an intimate scene, giving both of them ideas for each other. "She writes straight."
"She does."
Then later the lesbian lady, awesome acting as a man, just spectacular acting, says, "fuck y'all" to the other ladies on the street after arguing with the prostitute school teacher.
In real life they didn't swear like that. "Your mother's a whore" is more like it. They have to sexualize the mothers and daughters, describe their male relatives as homosexuals, and beast loving, sexually perverted, shit eaters, and such. The swears would be longer and sillier, nothing so abrupt and sharp as "fuck you" existed. The swears would be a lot more quaint and imaginative."
I bet I can find a dozen to a hundred antique western American swears in just a few minutes if I looked through the internet to find them. Create a file for them, and put them into the mouths of characters. I wonder why the writers of Godless didn't do that. It's the one flaw in their dialogue that both bugged me and drew me into their time. They must have done that on purpose.
"Son of a whore" was a good one. No female dogs involved.
"Fuck you" was not even common until after World War II.
Likewise, "motherfucker" was unknown outside of the ghetto until after WWII. Vonnegut mentions that in Slaughterhouse Five - he had never heard such talk until he was around black soldiers.
Mark Twain wrote about the swearing on the Mississippi and out west - he leaves blanks where the words would offend the delicate sensibilities of the 19th century, but makes it clear that one's parentage and mating habits were fair game for abuse.
But then you characters like Drill Instructor Gunnery Sargent Hartman in FMJ - now there was a creative man - he swore for hours and never repeated himself. A true master.
Ol' W.C. Fields made up the best swear of all -- Godfrey Daniel, Mother of Pearl!
The legendary West that Godless and countless other dramas have celebrated lasted for about two decades, the 1870's and 1880's, was miserable for just about everybody involved, and was brought to an end much more celebrated by those who participated in it, by the civilizing influence of women.
Post a Comment