Can Elmore Leonard’s TVs “Justified” reboot the American Cowboy? By Dr Matt Finch

Confession: I love me some escapist television. I grew up with Airwolf, The A-Team and Knight Rider. I’ve no problem with the easy thrills of a show where the two-fisted hero wraps up life’s complicated problems in 50 minutes and a couple of commercial breaks.

As I grew out of The A-Team, I discovered the novels of Elmore Leonard, the veteran crime writer who’s a smart literary stylist too. He writes the kind of novels that get featured in the New York Review of Books and sold in airport bookstores – cool tales of American lowlife on the make and the law enforcers who try to keep up with them.

From a Role/Reboot perspective, Leonard has some features to commend him. He writes strong, unusual female characters. One of the most notable is U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco, played by Jennifer Lopez in 1998’s Out of Sight. The movie celebrates the competence of its female lead without fuss, something all too rare in modern Hollywood. (There’s a standout scene where she calmly fends off a thug’s sexual harassment and strikes him with a telescopic baton. As he reels, she tells him: “You wanted to tussle. We tussled.”)

When FX announced its new series Justified three years ago, fans like me were excited to see where showrunner Graham Yost and his team would take Leonard’s adapted tales of U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens. Played with great charm by Timothy Olyphant, Raylan’s an unflappable ex-miner who works a Kentucky beat and holds to the code of an old-style gunfighter.

The show is a modern Western, and the cowboy is a great emblem of American masculinity. No character better fits what Charlie Glickman has called the "Act Like a Man Box"—that set of key attributes and associations that define what it means to be a man, from sexual prowess to violence and able-bodiedness. (Check out Charlie’s piece here for a refresher.)

Justified charms viewers by giving us sharpshooting thrills straight out of the Act Like a Man Box while putting a twist on the gunslinger stereotype. Despite being a Western, Justified can still offer us a fresh view of American masculinity. As Charlie reminded us, gender is not a zero-sum game:

You can have as many characteristics that are traditionally thought of as male as you like and you can have as many that are traditionally thought of as female as you want, without that coming into conflict.

If, as Charlie puts it, "gender is a buffet," a smattering of cowboy posturing doesn’t necessarily spoil the meal.

From the start, I’ve hoped that Justified could smuggle a critique of the cowboy figure into popular TV. Marshal Givens might be a prime-time good-guy, able to take down gangsters without breaking a sweat, but in this show, we see the toll taken by his trigger-happy ways.

First of all, there’s the endless paperwork, recriminations, and internal investigations as our hero racks up the body count. Then there’s the damage to his relationships with others. One example is the old friend who he dates after saving her from a murderous husband. Raylan abandons her for his remarried ex-wife, and she takes up instead with another criminal.

Though many women in the show are swayed by Raylan’s charms, one is unmoved. She’s my favorite character, Rachel: an African-American marshal who gets to call Raylan outright on his cowboy behavior.

Rachel is professional and deadly. She doesn’t get drawn into the macho games of male colleagues. She even sees through the apparently effortless charm of our hero. In a great episode of Justified’s first season, Rachel takes Raylan to task on ‘cutting to the front of the line’ in their department.

RAYLAN: Did you ever consider I happen to be good at the job?

RACHEL: And you being a tall, good-looking white man with a shitload of swagger, that has nothing to do with it? You could get away with just about anything.

Rachel directly identifies Raylan’s easy cool as studied "swagger," a performance rather than some kind of male birthright. His cowboy attire symbolizes his own choices from the "Act Like A Man Box," and she calls him on it.

“How do you think it would go over if I came into work one day wearing a cowboy hat?” she asks her partner. He has no response but a laugh. He offers his hat to her, but she refuses to try it on.

This promising scene, which flags up issues of gender and race without spoiling our prime-time fun, is followed by one which subtly undermines Rachel, when she and Raylan question an elderly African-American man.

The acerbic witness mocks the idea that he might have "a soft spot" for the Marshals because they protected James Meredith, the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi.

“Am I supposed to be impressed you got a colored partner? All this post-racist shit?” the man asks Raylan.

Rachel takes over the conversation and tries to charm her fellow African-American, making her accent approximate his own. She is "performing" blackness, just as a cowboy "performs" masculinity—and her performance fails.

“Am I hearing you dropping your R’s?” the man asks. “Are you trying to get down with me, soul sister?”

The female marshal’s performance of blackness is found wanting—in comparison with Raylan’s apparently effortless ability to "perform masculinity" and charm those in his path.

Little wonder that, at the end of the episode, when Rachel does try on Raylan’s cowboy hat, it doesn’t fit.

Justified’s second season spent more time with two other women. One is Mags Bennett, a corner store owner who is also the head of a vicious criminal clan. The other is Raylan’s ex-wife, Winona, a cool and competent lawyer who rejected him for his unwillingness to give up dangerous duties.

Mags got off to a promising start as a new kind of crimelord. She brims with Southern hospitality, but in business she’s not above poisoning snitches or breaking an errant son’s hand with a hammer. Viewers feel glee, and a real sense of threat, as we watch her deceive, outmaneuver, and brutalize opponents and allies alike.

Only in the closing moments of the season is this amazing female character undermined. Mags takes her own life on discovering that her adoptive daughter has rejected her, and another of her sons has been killed. Defining herself by her motherhood, she surrenders in the most irrevocable way when she realizes that she has failed her family.

Raylan might outlive Mags, but the show’s writers give his ex-wife, Winona, moments where she genuinely challenges her former husband. Like Rachel, Winona sees that Raylan’s charm is a construct, a performance: when she tells him, “You’re the angriest man I know,” we see the flaws beneath the smooth surface of the gentleman gunslinger. (Olyphant’s nuanced performance helps here, hinting at something simmering under the marshal’s courtly good manners.)

However, Winona is ultimately de-clawed by the scriptwriters, just as Rachel was. In an uncharacteristic moment of weakness, she steals money from the Marshals. The theft forces Raylan into an illicit attempt to protect her from the consequences of her actions. The marshal looks more noble than ever as he risks his career to protect the "little lady" from her folly—and Winona, the one person who could seriously question the way Raylan lives his life, is reduced to a weeping wife from an old school Western.

Justified’s scripts dance on a line between the clich�s of the past and the challenges of the present, including modern attitudes to gender and ethnicity. When showrunner Graham Yost adapted Leonard’s work for the screen, he made Raylan a more ambivalent character—not an orphan but the son of a petty criminal—someone trying to be a better man than his father. These tweaks create the layers of ambivalence that give depth to this show about a cowboy cop.

Tension between the Western, which defined American masculinity, and modern TV storytelling, with its attention to character, gives Justified its appeal—yet at the same time, it also keeps the show from truly offering a "role reboot" in this all-American game of cops and robbers. (It’s still, sadly, hard to imagine a primetime show whose hero was a black female Marshal, like Rachel, trying to uphold the law in rural Kentucky).

Justified’s third season kicked off on Jan. 17, with our hero recovering from a gunshot wound. He discovered that his sharpshooting skills, the measure of his potency, have been affected by his injuries. This link between injury and emasculation is nothing new—think of Jack Nicholson getting his nose slit in Chinatown—but there’s hope on the horizon.

A new female Marshal is in town. She seems Raylan’s equal in every way. Like J-Lo’s character in Out of Sight, she’s called Karen, and armed with a telescopic baton. She’s even played by Carla Gugino, who headed an ill-fated Out of Sight spin-off series back in the 1990s.

In Justified, this new Marshal is going to give Raylan a run for his money. And with luck, she might just stretch the show’s notion of gender, too.

Dr. Matt Finch is a writer and international educational consultant. Find out more at www.matthewfinch.me/about.

Django Unchained

Following the debut of the teaser poster for Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, we now also have the full synopsis for the film, scheduled to hit theaters on December 25. Here's how The Weinstein Company describes the movie:

Release Date: December 25, 2012
Studio: The Weinstein Company
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Screenwriter: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Samuel L. Jackson, Sacha Baron Cohen, Gerald McRaney, Dennis Christopher, Kurt Russell, Laura Cayouette, M.C. Gainey, Don Johnson, Kerry Washington, Anthony LaPaglia, RZA, Tom Wopat, James Remar, James Russo, Todd Allen
Genre: Action, Western
MPAA Rating: Not Available
Official Website: Not Available
Review: Not Available
DVD Review: Not Available
DVD: Not Available

Plot Summary:
Set in the South two years before the Civil War, "Django Unchained" stars Academy Award®-winner Jamie Foxx as Django, a slave whose brutal history with his former owners lands him face-to-face with German-born bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Academy Award®-winner Christoph Waltz). Schultz is on the trail of the murderous Brittle brothers, and only Django can lead him to his bounty. The unorthodox Schultz acquires Django with a promise to free him upon the capture of the Brittles – dead or alive.

Success leads Schultz to free Django, though the two men choose not to go their separate ways. Instead, Schultz seeks out the South’s most wanted criminals with Django by his side. Honing vital hunting skills, Django remains focused on one goal: finding and rescuing Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), the wife he lost to the slave trade long ago.

Django and Schultz’s search ultimately leads them to Calvin Candie (Academy Award®-nominee Leonardo DiCaprio), the proprietor of “Candyland,” an infamous plantation where slaves are groomed by trainer Ace Woody (Kurt Russell) to battle each other for sport. Exploring the compound under false pretenses, Django and Schultz arouse the suspicion of Stephen (Academy Award®-nominee Samuel L. Jackson), Candie's trusted house slave. Their moves are marked, and a treacherous organization closes in on them. If Django and Schultz are to escape with Broomhilda, they must choose between independence and solidarity, between sacrifice and survival...

Dick Clark Dead at 82

Dick Clark, the revered TV producer whose "American Bandstand," "American Top 40" and  "New Year's Rockin' Eve" helped shape modern pop music for decades, died of a "massive heart attack" at a Los Angeles hospital on Wednesday, his agent confirmed to Billboard. He was 82.

 Dick Clark, the ever-youthful television host and tireless entrepreneur who helped bring rock 'n' roll into the mainstream on "American Bandstand," and later produced and hosted a vast range of programming from game shows to the year-end countdown from Times Square on "New Year's Rockin' Eve," has died. He was 82.

 Spokesman Paul Shefrin said Clark had a heart attack Wednesday morning at Saint John's hospital in Santa Monica, a day after he was admitted for an outpatient procedure.

 Clark had continued performing even after he suffered a stroke in 2004 that affected his ability to speak and walk.

 Long dubbed "the world's oldest teenager" because of his boyish appearance, Clark bridged the rebellious new music scene and traditional show business, and equally comfortable whether chatting about music with Sam Cooke or bantering with Ed McMahon about TV bloopers. He thrived as the founder of Dick Clark Productions, supplying movies, game and music shows, beauty contests and more to TV. Among his credits: "The $25,000 Pyramid," "TV's Bloopers and Practical Jokes" and the American Music Awards.

 For a time in the 1980s, he had shows on all three networks and was listed among the Forbes 400 of wealthiest Americans. Clark also was part of radio as partner in the United Stations Radio Network, which provided programs - including Clark's - to thousands of stations.

 "There's hardly any segment of the population that doesn't see what I do," Clark told The Associated Press in a 1985 interview. "It can be embarrassing. People come up to me and say, 'I love your show,' and I have no idea which one they're talking about."

 The original "American Bandstand" was one of network TV's longest-running series as part of ABC's daytime lineup from 1957 to 1987. It later aired for a year in syndication and briefly on the USA Network. Over the years, it introduced stars ranging from Buddy Holly to Madonna. The show's status as an American cultural institution was solidified when Clark donated Bandstand's original podium and backdrop to the Smithsonian Institution.

 Clark joined "Bandstand" in 1956 after Bob Horn, who'd been the host since its 1952 debut, was fired. Under Clark's guidance, it went from a local Philadelphia show to a national phenomenon.

 "I played records, the kids danced, and America watched," was how Clark once described the series' simplicity. In his 1958 hit "Sweet Little Sixteen," Chuck Berry sang that "they'll be rocking on Bandstand, Philadelphia, P-A."

 As a host, he had the smooth delivery of a seasoned radio announcer. As a producer, he had an ear for a hit record. He also knew how to make wary adults welcome this odd new breed of music in their homes.

 Clark endured accusations that he was in with the squares, with critic Lester Bangs defining Bandstand as "a leggily acceptable euphemism of the teenage experience." In a 1985 interview, Clark acknowledged the complaints. "But I knew at the time that if we didn't make the presentation to the older generation palatable, it could kill it."

 "So along with Little Richard and Chuck Berry and the Platters and the Crows and the Jayhawks ... the boys wore coats and ties and the girls combed their hair and they all looked like sweet little kids into a high school dance," he said.

 But Clark defended pop artists and artistic freedom, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame said in an online biography of the 1993 inductee. He helped give black artists their due by playing original R&B recordings instead of cover versions by white performers, and he condemned censorship.

 His stroke in December 2004 forced him to miss his annual appearance on "Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve." He returned the following year and, although his speech at times was difficult to understand, many praised his bravery, including other stroke victims.

 Still speaking with difficulty, he continued taking part in his New Year's shows, though in a diminished role. Ryan Seacrest became the main host.

 "I'm just thankful I'm still able to enjoy this once-a-year treat," he told The Associated Press by e-mail in December 2008 as another New Year's Eve approached.

 He was honored at the Emmy Awards in 2006, telling the crowd: "I have accomplished my childhood dream, to be in show business. Everybody should be so lucky to have their dreams come true. I've been truly blessed."

 He was born Richard Wagstaff Clark in Mount Vernon, N.Y., in 1929. His father, Richard Augustus Clark, was a sales manager who worked in radio.

 Clark idolized his athletic older brother, Bradley, who was killed in World War II. In his 1976 autobiography, "Rock, Roll & Remember," Clark recalled how radio helped ease his loneliness and turned him into a fan of Steve Allen, Arthur Godfrey and other popular hosts.

 From Godfrey, he said, he learned that "a radio announcer does not talk to 'those of you out there in radio land'; a radio announcer talks to me as an individual."

 Clark began his career in the mailroom of a Utica, N.Y., radio station in 1945. By age 26, he was a broadcasting veteran, with nine years' experience on radio and TV stations in Syracuse and Utica, N.Y., and Philadelphia. He held a bachelor's degree from Syracuse University. While in Philadelphia, Clark befriended McMahon, who later credited Clark for introducing him to his future "Tonight Show" boss, Johnny Carson.

 In the 1960s, "American Bandstand" moved from black-and-white to color, from weekday broadcasts to once-a-week Saturday shows and from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. Although its influence started to ebb, it still featured some of the biggest stars of each decade, whether Janis Joplin, the Jackson 5, Talking Heads or Prince. But Clark never did book two of rock's iconic groups, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Elvis Presley also never performed, although Clark managed an on-air telephone interview while Presley was in the Army.

 When Michael Jackson died in June 2009, Clark recalled working with him since he was a child, adding, "of all the thousands of entertainers I have worked with, Michael was THE most outstanding. Many have tried and will try to copy him, but his talent will never be matched."

 Clark kept more than records spinning with his Dick Clark Productions. Its credits included the Academy of Country Music and Golden Globe awards; TV movies including the Emmy-winning "The Woman Who Willed a Miracle" (1984), the "$25,000 Pyramid" game show and the 1985 film "Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins." Clark himself made a cameo on "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" and a dramatic appearance as a witness on the original "Perry Mason." He was an involuntary part of Michael Moore's Academy Award-winning "Bowling for Columbine," in which Clark is seen brushing off Moore as the filmmaker confronts him about working conditions at a restaurant owned by Clark.

 In 1974, at ABC's request, Clark created the American Music Awards after the network lost the broadcast rights to the Grammy Awards.

 He was also an author, with "Dick Clark's American Bandstand" and such self-help books as "Dick Clark's Program for Success in Your Business and Personal Life" and "Looking Great, Staying Young." His unchanging looks inspired a joke in "Peggy Sue Gets Married," the 1986 comedy starring Kathleen Turner as an unhappy wife and mother transported back to 1960. Watching Clark on a black and white TV set, she shakes her head in amazement, "Look at that man, he never ages."

 Clark's clean-cut image survived a music industry scandal. In 1960, during a congressional investigation of "payola" or bribery in the record and radio industry, Clark was called on to testify.

 He was cleared of any suspicions but was required by ABC to divest himself of record-company interests to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest. The demand cost him $8 million, Clark once estimated. His holdings included partial ownership of Swan Records, which later released the first U.S. version of the Beatles' smash "She Loves You."

 In 2004, Clark announced plans for a revamped version of "American Bandstand." The show, produced with "American Idol" creator Simon Fuller, was to feature a host other than Clark.

 He was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 1994 and served as spokesman for the American Association of Diabetes Educators.

 Clark, twice divorced, had a son, Richard Augustus II, with first wife Barbara Mallery and two children, Duane and Cindy, with second wife Loretta Martin. He married Kari Wigton in 1977.

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