Waking the Deadwood of history: Listening, language, and the 'aural visceral'

The role of sound in filmic and televisual historical representations has been underexamined, yet sound can function in powerful ways to produce specific forms of knowledge about the past. In particular, a film or show can use dialogue and other human sounds to move viewers between spectatorial identification and alienation. In other words, sound can be deployed to maintain a sense of distance and difference as a structuring principle even as viewers are invited to have an investment in the past. Viewers can come to feel connected to the past without losing a sense of their inevitably fixed position in the present. This essay examines the case of the HBO dramatic series Deadwood to illustrate the particular ways in which sound and dialogue structure the conditions of audience engagement and thereby make possible the acquisition of particular kinds of knowledge about the past.