A Man on Fire

I’m reading David Milch’s memoir, Life’s Work.  If the only thing we remember him for is Deadwood, I’d be okay with that, on my resume.  But he wrote 81 scripts for Hill Street Blues (there were a total of 144 episodes, over the run of the series); he wrote and exec produced, with Steven Bochco, NYPD Blue – which it’s fair to say changed the nature of broadcast television in the 90’s; and he was the eminence grise behind John from Cincinnati, a brilliant misfire that sank beneath the waves after airing ten episodes on HBO.  He was responsible for Beverly Hills Buntz, Brooklyn South, and Luck, as well, but I doubt if they’ll prove to have the shelf life on streaming media the other shows do.

He was Yale, summa, master’s from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and mentored by Robert Penn Warren.  He’s been diagnosed as bipolar, he was a heroin addict, and he’s got a gambling Jones.  Milch is up front about all this, the good and the bad, but the gambling - and in particular the mystique of the track – has a very specific hold on him.  He walks it back to his relationship with his dad, which is unresolved.  The senior Milch was, ah, difficult. 

It’s interesting how Milch engages with this.  Art, he seems to feel, is in part a negotiation with the past.  He believes you can transform your personal history, through writing, but not transcend.  I happen to agree.  You can incorporate stuff (how do you not?), but you can’t shed your own skin, that’s soap opera psychology: confront your demons, and defeat them.  No.  What you can do is repurpose memory, and perhaps undo its darker energies.

Now, for instance, it probably comes as surprise to learn that the impelling inspiration for Deadwood is the story of St. Paul, struck blind on the road to Damascus.  Not me, either, but that’s what Milch says.  He actually pitched it to HBO.  They said, Naah, we’ve already greenlighted a series in ancient Rome, and he shifted gears.  He realized that the guiding principle was a myth, agreed-upon; if it wasn’t to be the dominant symbol of the emerging Christian gospel, there are other compelling mass delusions.  He settles on, wait for it, gold.  Gold is a lie agreed upon.  Which is how he winds up taking us out into the Black Hills of South Dakota.  A transliteration, he suggests. 

There’s a lot more in the book about Deadwood, the writing, the casting, the design, the zeitgeist, and I admit that’s mostly what I was reading it for.  War stories about Ian McShane, and Robin Weigert, and Timothy Olyphant, and how certain choices were made, about characters, and storyline.  You won’t be disappointed.

But here’s the thing.  Spoiler alert.  Milch’s brain is crowding up with deposits of amyloid plaque.  He’s got Alzheimer’s.  The past couple of years, he’s been in an Assisted Living/Memory Care facility.  He describes it as a growing solitude, coming unmoored.

In that sense, Life’s Work is enormously brave.  How much will he get to tell?  “Nothing comes easily,” he says, “in terms of being loyal both to the past and the present,” but he believes that’s the proper place of storytelling.  I’m both deeply impressed and terribly saddened, but I don’t think Milch is looking to curry favor, or find redemption, he’s simply setting the record straight.  We all want to enter our house justified, naturally enough, and Milch gets to tell the story his way.  I wish there were more of it.