Figurin’ Out All Over Again How to Fuckin’ Live: Depictions of Mental Illness in Deadwood

Sometimes it feels like Deadwood never happened. With shows like Maniac and Bojack Horseman dominating conversations about mental illness in TV, it’s easy to forget that back in 2004 David Milch’s bloody, profane gold rush period piece broke trail on some of the most daring and empathetic portrayals of mentally ill characters in television history. It’s not my intent to look down my nose at people who enjoy Bojack Horseman’s therapy-session style of discussing depression and anxiety, but I’ve never found it particularly interesting. As my friend and fellow critic Sean T. Collins put it in a review of Netflix’s Maniac: “When I think of lines from films and television shows about mental illness and suffering that have really moved me, it’s not stuff I’ve heard before cutting a check to my psychiatrist for my co-pay, it’s stuff I’d never thought of before at all, but rang true the moment I heard it.”

Deadwood forgoes workmanlike discussions about symptoms in favor of showing us mentally ill people struggling to survive in a world that’s actively hostile to their wellbeing. We glimpse their inner lives not through earnest DSM-V extract dialogue, but through their affect and actions, their relationships to others and to themselves. Some are self-aware, others painfully not. Some function in daily life, others can’t. It’s a portrait of what it’s like to live a life you don’t understand and which hurts and confounds you for as long as it lasts. To quote a frustrated Jane Canary, “Every day takes figurin’ out all over again how to fuckin’ live.”

Languages of Sickness

Set in 1870s-era South Dakota, Deadwood takes place in a time and culture where the terminology available to discuss mental illness is minimal at best. None of its characters are going to be diagnosed with anything more specific than uterine hysteria or battle fatigue. Nobody has much of an understanding of the causes behind the depression, post-traumatic stress, addiction, and personality disorders with which many of the town’s inhabitants live. This frees the show to deal with mental illness in an individual context, and to explore its effects from the unique perspectives of the people living with it.

All this is not to say that things were holistically “better” or “worse” for the mentally ill in post-Civil War America than they are now, but that the circumstances of the show allow for a different understanding of mental illness. It’s a valuable narrative tool, one period pieces often overlook or opt not to engage with. Cy Tolliver’s (Powers Boothe) convalescence after his stabbing at the end of the show’s second season is a useful example of just how complex and moving this method of storytelling can be. Visited in his sickbed by the terse, difficult Dr. Cochrane (Brad Dourif), it soon becomes clear that Tolliver has been engaging in self-harm by picking at his stitches between visits. Pressed by the doctor, Tolliver lies, claiming angrily that he was inspecting his wound for signs of pus. It’s not a particularly difficult psychological problem to unravel his motivations, but by leaving it to the viewer the show gives us a chance to live in the skin of someone with a serious, life-deforming mental illness.

Tolliver, pathologically hostile, incapable of sustaining relationships, and viciously resentful of personal growth in those with whom he’s managed to maintain some degree of attachment, has found in his injury a scenario in which others care for him. His self-harm is an attempt to prolong it, the frustrated action of a man completely alone in the world and desperate not to lose the only thing binding him to other people. If he said as much out loud, it would deny us our chance to experience it with him. His lack of ability to express himself—of even the self-awareness to know what he’s trying to express—is a crushingly realistic depiction of what it’s like to live as an isolated adult with destructive behaviors almost certainly stemming from extreme childhood trauma.

Cochrane often functions as the show’s sole informed voice on the subject of psychic distress. While he has no better terminology than any other character with which to discuss his knowledge, thanks to his life in the medical field he’s adept at recognizing patterns of behavior like Tolliver’s self-harm, Jane’s binge drinking, and Dan Dority’s (W. Earl Brown) deep depression after barely surviving his street brawl with Captain Turner (Allan Graf). His quietly furious bedside manner is often the only thing resembling counseling the show’s mentally ill characters receive, but while it’s often show in a humorous light, it’s not hard to grasp that his deep frustration stems in part from his inability to treat his patients effectively. It’s a struggle familiar to anyone with a mentally ill loved one, even those of us who are mentally ill ourselves.

Fragmentary Trauma

The vast majority of Deadwood’s characters live with past or ongoing trauma. Many of them also reenact it unconsciously, like Al Swearengen—whose verbally and physically abusive relationship to the prostitutes who work for him reflects his experience being prostituted as a young boy by the woman who ran his orphanage. He never makes a conscious connection between the two situations, but shortly after musing on his experiences to Dolly while she fellates him he shows a flicker of empathy for her wants and needs as they bond over disliking the feeling of people controlling them by pulling their hair. “I guess I do that to you,” he says gently. How many of us exist like that, acting out our own worst experiences again and again, our whole lives shaped by trauma before we have a chance to decide otherwise?

On another show a story like Al’s might get its own episode. Flashbacks, conversations, confrontations with his abuser—these are the stock in trade of any number of TV dramas. On Deadwood we hear only a fragment of the event itself. The past is prologue, not part of the text. This is where so much art loses the thread in its depictions of mental illness and complex trauma, treating its subjects as fully comprehensible through the lens of their diseases and past trauma rather than as unique and difficult human beings. By integrating trauma unobtrusively into its storytelling, Deadwood gives its mentally ill characters the dignity of complete personhood.

We don’t need to know what happened to Jane to recognize she’s been through hell, that her alcoholism and social dysfunction stem from a place of deep pain. Her fear of Swearengen when they first meet reduces her to incoherent weeping, but Milch wisely avoids delving into backstory to explain present behavior. Instead, Jane’s personality and reactions function as a shadow play of her past experiences, a rough outline of what she’s survived. When the show does get explicit, it’s brutal. In one scene brothel madame Joanie Stubbs recounts to Jane numbly and with confused self-loathing being raped by her father and pimped out to his friends, as well as her incestuous reenactment of that abuse with her younger sisters.

It’s a bottomlessly miserable story, but it isn’t shared to explain Joanie’s intermittent suicidal depression, or her deeply ugly relationship with her former pimp and abuser Cy Tolliver. Instead, it signals the formation of a bond of trust between Joanie and Jane, who not long afterward begin a tentative lesbian relationship. Any survivor of trauma knows that understanding is one of the most powerful things a partner can offer, that baring your ugliest experiences to another person and receiving not revulsion but love can be a transformative experience. Deadwood’s depictions of mental illness comprise an essential guide for artists everywhere, an example not just of how to explore a mentally ill life, but of what it feels like to be inside one.