(no subject)
I have some Thoughts on the recent outcomes of Justified, that I thought I'd write up just to work them out in my head. I haven't seen all of last night's episode, but I've seen everything else.
I was thinking about Mags Bennett as one kind of character, until she made the deal with the mining company, and revealed herself to be a very different kind of character. Both pot-growing and shady land-lease deals are maneuvers for power as well as profit, so that wasn't the shift; but I would not have thought till she did it that she had any interest in turning "legit." Everyone sort of tolerates the pot despite its illegality, but the land-lease deal is legal (more or less) but unpopular. Mags has seemed till now like a character more interested in popularity than legitimacy; or rather, she seemed like the sort who would rather come across as first-among-equals, a status she definitively sheds by throwing her fellow county people under the bus.
It's possible to see her dropping the pot as a straightforward side-effect of Coover's death; it's only afterward that she divides her sons into Saved and Damned. Dickie will be the crook (and the increasingly violent one, as she can't be so naive as to think he wouldn't challenge Boyd), while Doyle and his sons will inherit investment wealth, and firm up their grasp on the middle class. But the land-lease deal was before that, and the county folk were going to find out about it. That nasty confrontation in the diner was going to happen, which makes me think that Mags had been intending all along to move up the social ladder with all her children, and leave the poor folk behind. I don't think that would have worked, though, and she had to see that not only weren't Dickie and Coover interested in changing social classes, they were both active threats to her new social position. (I don't think Coover would have rolled on her to the cops, for example -- though Dickie might --, but either or both of them could easily have got her embroiled in a Njal's Saga type of situation, where the whole family takes the punishment meant for only a few.) I think she would have shed both Dickie and Coover, but would have had to wait for it to happen, for them to do something so bad she could shun (or execute) them herself. I don't think she expected to have to wait long.
So in some ways, painful as it is, Raylan did her a favor. He allowed her to accelerate her plans, and gave her an excuse to cut Dickie out immediately. That the whole thing revolved around Dickie's telling Raylan where to find Coover was just an elegant convenience: it's much easier to be disloyal to someone on grounds of his own disloyalty. Even if that "disloyalty" is admitting under impromptu torture where your murdersome brother can be found and stopped.
(Poor Dickie, though. It's obvious Mags doesn't take him seriously as an appendage of her empire all along, and late in the day she says explicitly that it's because of his physical disability. How he must seethe, smart enough to know he's being shunted aside, unlike Coover. If he were just a touch more underhanded, I would fear for Mags -- he is not quite close-to-the-vest enough or ambitious enough to be her rival -- but as it is, he's the useless extra son, struggling desperately to be useful.)
I make Mags sound like a cruel person above, but I don't think that's how she really is, or feels herself to be. She does what's necessary for her family, and sometimes that requires cruelty, but usually it doesn't. That general high regard she has in the town, that sense of being a big fish in a small pond, would seem to be an asset she'd want to keep. But she sits down with Helen in the diner, and severs that tie while handing over an envelope full of cash.
The holding and breaking of loyalty bonds seems to be the theme of this season. Helen and Mags kept peace between the families for 20 years before Coover's death broke that relationship. That's no mean feat, and it's a feat nobody seems clear on: the men glare at each other across parking lots and picnic tables, but don't appear to understand why the fight they all want doesn't ever break out. They've always just subsided uneasily, a-scolded by their women, without understanding the meaning of that scold. Similarly, Mags does all the things you think of as loyalty for Loretta -- treats her like a favored daughter, teaches her the ropes of the family business -- but did she think the child would never find out about her father's murder? I guess Mags did, or just put her head down and refused to think about that. But she cottoned to the girl because she reminded Mags of herself. Surely she knew that Loretta would feel loyalty towards her father, as useless as he was, over any loyalty to the people who killed him.
(If Mags had just made him feel small, and taken in the girl as a de-facto foster, it would in the end have worked out better, don't you think? But I guess Mags felt she had to punish the father for calling in the state cops, though it was also partly her mistake. If she did not police the boundaries of county/crime loyalty so keenly, she would not have lost Loretta so thoroughly in the end.)
Where will Mags go now? She and Doyle and his family can move away from Harlan County, if they so choose: they've got the money now, and have lost the town. (Presumably Doyle was elected sheriff, and will be unelected in short order.) They might have to move, considering Dickie's violent forays into rivalry with Boyd. I don't know that anyone will be able to trace Boyd's resurgent criminality to Mags's deal, but it must feel to the bystanders like all the luck going sour at once, like the life gone out of a town after all these years of resilience. And Mags, if she moves away, what will she be?
A smaller fish, in a larger pond. We've never met Doyle's wife that I know of, but I can't imagine that Mags will be content in a suburban mother-in-law suite, kibbitzing the household's daily function. She is diminished by this step up in respectability, and maybe she can bear that, for the sake of her grandsons and their future. Maybe not, though. Maybe she'll take the small slights and awkwardnesses of her new middle-class peers, and copy their behaviors in grocery stores, and be secretly fulminating about the empire, and the girl-child, that used to be hers.
Blah blah law-dudes and their law-dudery blah. As you can see above, I don't think Raylan Givens is or should be the main character of the show, just the narrator or facilitator for all the other characters.
This entry was originally posted at http://vehemently.dreamwidth.org/22493.html. Comment wherever you like.
I was thinking about Mags Bennett as one kind of character, until she made the deal with the mining company, and revealed herself to be a very different kind of character. Both pot-growing and shady land-lease deals are maneuvers for power as well as profit, so that wasn't the shift; but I would not have thought till she did it that she had any interest in turning "legit." Everyone sort of tolerates the pot despite its illegality, but the land-lease deal is legal (more or less) but unpopular. Mags has seemed till now like a character more interested in popularity than legitimacy; or rather, she seemed like the sort who would rather come across as first-among-equals, a status she definitively sheds by throwing her fellow county people under the bus.
It's possible to see her dropping the pot as a straightforward side-effect of Coover's death; it's only afterward that she divides her sons into Saved and Damned. Dickie will be the crook (and the increasingly violent one, as she can't be so naive as to think he wouldn't challenge Boyd), while Doyle and his sons will inherit investment wealth, and firm up their grasp on the middle class. But the land-lease deal was before that, and the county folk were going to find out about it. That nasty confrontation in the diner was going to happen, which makes me think that Mags had been intending all along to move up the social ladder with all her children, and leave the poor folk behind. I don't think that would have worked, though, and she had to see that not only weren't Dickie and Coover interested in changing social classes, they were both active threats to her new social position. (I don't think Coover would have rolled on her to the cops, for example -- though Dickie might --, but either or both of them could easily have got her embroiled in a Njal's Saga type of situation, where the whole family takes the punishment meant for only a few.) I think she would have shed both Dickie and Coover, but would have had to wait for it to happen, for them to do something so bad she could shun (or execute) them herself. I don't think she expected to have to wait long.
So in some ways, painful as it is, Raylan did her a favor. He allowed her to accelerate her plans, and gave her an excuse to cut Dickie out immediately. That the whole thing revolved around Dickie's telling Raylan where to find Coover was just an elegant convenience: it's much easier to be disloyal to someone on grounds of his own disloyalty. Even if that "disloyalty" is admitting under impromptu torture where your murdersome brother can be found and stopped.
(Poor Dickie, though. It's obvious Mags doesn't take him seriously as an appendage of her empire all along, and late in the day she says explicitly that it's because of his physical disability. How he must seethe, smart enough to know he's being shunted aside, unlike Coover. If he were just a touch more underhanded, I would fear for Mags -- he is not quite close-to-the-vest enough or ambitious enough to be her rival -- but as it is, he's the useless extra son, struggling desperately to be useful.)
I make Mags sound like a cruel person above, but I don't think that's how she really is, or feels herself to be. She does what's necessary for her family, and sometimes that requires cruelty, but usually it doesn't. That general high regard she has in the town, that sense of being a big fish in a small pond, would seem to be an asset she'd want to keep. But she sits down with Helen in the diner, and severs that tie while handing over an envelope full of cash.
The holding and breaking of loyalty bonds seems to be the theme of this season. Helen and Mags kept peace between the families for 20 years before Coover's death broke that relationship. That's no mean feat, and it's a feat nobody seems clear on: the men glare at each other across parking lots and picnic tables, but don't appear to understand why the fight they all want doesn't ever break out. They've always just subsided uneasily, a-scolded by their women, without understanding the meaning of that scold. Similarly, Mags does all the things you think of as loyalty for Loretta -- treats her like a favored daughter, teaches her the ropes of the family business -- but did she think the child would never find out about her father's murder? I guess Mags did, or just put her head down and refused to think about that. But she cottoned to the girl because she reminded Mags of herself. Surely she knew that Loretta would feel loyalty towards her father, as useless as he was, over any loyalty to the people who killed him.
(If Mags had just made him feel small, and taken in the girl as a de-facto foster, it would in the end have worked out better, don't you think? But I guess Mags felt she had to punish the father for calling in the state cops, though it was also partly her mistake. If she did not police the boundaries of county/crime loyalty so keenly, she would not have lost Loretta so thoroughly in the end.)
Where will Mags go now? She and Doyle and his family can move away from Harlan County, if they so choose: they've got the money now, and have lost the town. (Presumably Doyle was elected sheriff, and will be unelected in short order.) They might have to move, considering Dickie's violent forays into rivalry with Boyd. I don't know that anyone will be able to trace Boyd's resurgent criminality to Mags's deal, but it must feel to the bystanders like all the luck going sour at once, like the life gone out of a town after all these years of resilience. And Mags, if she moves away, what will she be?
A smaller fish, in a larger pond. We've never met Doyle's wife that I know of, but I can't imagine that Mags will be content in a suburban mother-in-law suite, kibbitzing the household's daily function. She is diminished by this step up in respectability, and maybe she can bear that, for the sake of her grandsons and their future. Maybe not, though. Maybe she'll take the small slights and awkwardnesses of her new middle-class peers, and copy their behaviors in grocery stores, and be secretly fulminating about the empire, and the girl-child, that used to be hers.
Blah blah law-dudes and their law-dudery blah. As you can see above, I don't think Raylan Givens is or should be the main character of the show, just the narrator or facilitator for all the other characters.
This entry was originally posted at http://vehemently.dreamwidth.org/22493.html. Comment wherever you like.