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Milch on hater-ism

I splurged last week and bought all three seasons of DEADWOOD on DVD (they’re pretty cheap on Amazon right now). I won’t bother telling you how brilliant the show is. If you’ve seen it, and “got” it, you already know.

One of the special features in the first season set is a 45-minute interview with David Milch, conducted by Keith Carradine, who played Wild Bill Hickok in the first few episodes. It’s an amazing interview, and Milch proves to be one of the flat-out smartest writers I’ve ever seen interviewed. His understanding of human behavior and social dynamics — and, by extension, character development — is absolutely mind-blowing at times.

At one point, the conversation turns to the nature of celebrity, and the way people feel toward famous people — that fine line between adoration and contempt. It’s a subject I’ve been really fascinated by lately (which will someday manifest itself as a story) and I was anxious to hear Milch’s thoughts on it.

In particular, they were discussing a scene in which Wild Bill, busy doing carpentry work with his new friend Bullock and enjoying a rare moment of peace, is interrupted by an annoying fan. Hickok is exasperated. He suffers the idiot for a minute, then he just can’t take it anymore and tells him to go away. Immediately the man, who had up to this point been heaping praise on Wild Bill, turns on him and screams “I hope you fucking die! And I hope it happens in this camp!” (Very similar to that scene in THE KING OF COMEDY, where the sweet little old lady wishes cancer on Jerry Lewis’s character after he apologetically denies her an autograph.)

Milch’s comment:

“Nathaniel West wrote, I thought, beautifully about that syndrome, and W.H. Auden, the poet, wrote an essay about West’s analysis of that syndrome, which he called ‘West’s Disease.’ It’s about people who, for whatever reason, are unable to turn wishes into passions in their life, and lacking that capacity, sit passively in mute outrage, anticipating disasters. They go to fires. Any sort of natural disaster attracts them. And in the absence of a natural disaster, they sometimes try and create disasters. And they hate the people whose lives, whether successful or not, are pursued with passion. At first they idolize them, then they want to destroy them. They want to appropriate the vitality of those people.”

Pretty damned astute, no?