I love Westerns. Old Westerns (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), new Westerns (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), Sci-fi Westerns (Outland), Australian Westerns (The Proposition written by Nick Cave?!), Czech Westerns (Lemonade Joe) and even Russian Westerns (The Elusive Avengers), which are called Easterns because they’re all about Siberia. I love Clint Eastwood, John Ford, Sergio Leone, Yul Brenner, and Cleavon Little. I pretty much love everything about Westerns with one major exception: Marion Mitchell Morrison. But at least Bruce Dern shoots him in The Cowboys.
I guess what I find to be most appealing about the genre is really something that isn’t expressly revolutionary or exciting. In my mind, Westerns are all about our desire for justice and going beyond the reasonable and moral limits to enact it. If nothing else, Westerns show us that deep down inside even good people are murderers, and we fully support even the most despicable acts if they are “on the side of the law.” In Westerns, democracy, the law, and morality are all proven to be nothing more than a facade and humans are just atavistic beasts who haven’t evolved. Or, as Ike Clanton puts it in Tombstone, “Having that badge don’t make you right.” Just like Timothy Olyphant’s character in Justified.
Everything about Olyphant’s character conjures up the vigilante of old (yes he wears a cowboy hat and everyone talks about it, yes he wears a hip holster and is a quickdraw artist), but at work in a world that has no use for such barbarism. Of course the plot is cliched, but Elmore Leonard is just the writer to turn the cliched into the interesting and entertaining show that Justified is. Did I mention the show take place in Kentucky and makes Kentucky seem like an interesting place?
Ignoring the hat and boots, Olyphant has all the necessary traits to be a great Western sheriff. He’s a roguish gentleman, he believes in traditions, he’s honest and a natural leader. Allow me to translate. He’s a chauvinist, conservative technophobe who doesn’t mind sacrificing anything and everything to get an arrest. Oh, and as far as honest goes, in a recent episode he states that he’d rather, “stick [his] dick in a blender,” than go to a gallery of paintings by Adolf Hitler. All in all, I think Justified is going to be a solid show because, unlike Westerns where vigilante justice tries to right the lawless society, Justified is all about the vigilante in a hyper-legal society. There is no better expression of this change in tone than the way everyone talks about the way Olyphant gunned down the hitman in the first episode. In Justified, shock has replaced awe, but it’s still all about terror.
2 comments:
So...I like Justified. (Especially the cool true-blood-ish opening credits.)
But I'm somehow not exactly convinced it's a western. I should admit right now that I have seen about half a dozen westerns in my life so I'm really not the person to define the limits of the category.
But I know that sometimes I watch a movie and feel like "Just because you put a fedora on that guy, and turned down the lights, and there's a hot lady, that doesn't make this Noir." Watching Justified, I get this vague sense that I would feel the same way if I were a fan of westerns: like, just because he wears a cowboy hat, and people are constantly pointing out that he wears a cowboy hat, and yes I get it, cowboy hat, that's not enough.
My vague and formless theory is that Justified is a disgraced-cop-goes-home movie, with broad brush-strokes of Western painted on top.
I feel more that way about Firefly, which flashes some cows and some cowboy-ish slang, and some dusty planet-scapes, and then I feel like I'm supposed to be like "OMG I GET IT! IT'S like a WESTERN! LEATHER PANTS!!"
This is my question:
What makes Justified really a Western in the way that (if you agree with me) Firefly is just dressed up as a Western?
After reading your review, I think one answer is that Justified is maybe not a Western, but at least it is responding to some of the central issues of The Western. Is that right?
p.s. I'm not sure that the genre question matters that much. I will keep watching the show, and I suspect I will continue to like it, especially the one-off episodes that don't get hung up on the on-going drama of T Olyphant's character.
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