In his seminal 1991 collection The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, the literary critic Frederic Jameson diagnosed the sickness plaguing our small towns. “What happened,” he writes,
is that the autonomy of the small town (in the provincial period a source of claustrophobia and anxiety; in the fifties the ground for a certain comfort and even a certain reassurance) has vanished. What was once a separate point on a the map has become an imperceptible thickening in a continuum of identical products and standardized spaces from coast to coast.
According to Jameson, this “thickening continuum,” the kudzic spread of cable television, fast food franchises, big box stores, and overnight delivery, posed a radical threat to self-identity. The small town was once, but was no longer,
contented with itself, secure in the sense of its radical difference from other populations and cultures, insulated from their vicissitudes and from the flaws in human nature so palpably acted out in their violent and alien histories.
As far as I can tell, however, Jameson—born in Cleveland, and a lifelong resident of chic European cities and hyper-educated college towns—has never actually lived in a small town. If he had, he might have understood the complex nature of that kind of insularity.
By contrast, I spent my entire childhood in one neighborhood, in a small town in the northeast corner of Maryland, tucked up against the Pennsylvania and Delaware borders. Elkton, named for its location at the head of the Elk River, boasted a population of just over 9,000 residents when I left for college in 1990. It was by far the biggest town in Cecil County and, like many small towns in rural counties, it was predominately white and conservative. In 1990, the population was approximately 95% white with 90% of its residents living in neighborhoods that were, themselves, more than 90% white. In a different era, Elkton’s location and lax marriage laws made it America’s Gretna Green, the marriage capital of the United States. When Ben Walton ran off to marry seventeen-year-old Cindy Brunson on Season Seven of The Waltons, they came to Elkton. Long after that era had passed, wedding chapels continued to dot Main Street.
If the name sounds familiar today, that’s probably because you’ve driven past it on I-95 or pulled off for a bite to eat at the off-ramp McDonald’s where I worked for about six months at age 15. Or it could be that you stumbled across a news article, absurd and unflattering, that left an impression. The town’s Wal-Mart, in particular, is both a hotspot and flashpoint: from xBox riots, to customers superglued to toilet seats, to a dead body decomposing in the trunk of an abandoned Sebring.
Older folks might recognize Cecil County from occasional flare-ups of Klan activity. The county’s complicated relationship with white supremacy first made headlines in the Sixties and Seventies, when the Klan held rallies at local farms. Such gatherings still happen from time-to-time, albeit with less pomp and, more often, a half-hearted attempt at re-branding. As a matter of historical reality, they typically pack more bluster than bite, with gawkers and protestors outnumbering participants. Still, for our neighbors to the north and east and west, the area remains defiantly redneck, “Ceciltucky” for those looking to punch down. There’s some no shortage of truth underlying that neologism and, for many of those who live there, it’s embraced with a kind of hillbilly pride. Skeptical of our backwater bonafides? Back in 1981, our fifth grade public school curriculum included a hunter-safety class that culminated (to our enormous delight) in a trip to nearby Elk Neck State Park, where they gave bolt-action rifles and pointed us at paper targets.
Growing up in Cecil County in the 1970s and 80s meant live bluegrass music, square dances in barns. Blue crabs, Maryland’s self-identified specialty, which now run almost $300 a bushel, were plentiful enough that even families of modest means could, at least once a summer, pile them high on newspaper-covered picnic tables, typically alongside the ears of locally-grown, sweet and succulent silver queen they sold out of trucks beds alongside Rte. 213. In 1984, I saw my first parent-less PG movie at the .99 second-run movie theater downtown: Hard to Hold, starring Rick Springfield. If all of that seems idyllic, I didn’t view it that way then. Like many teenagers, I felt a strong but shapeless longing to get away. In the meantime, we longed for Jameson’s “thickening continuum”—for anything, really, that might close the sprawling abyss between the life we knew and the life we (vaguely) imagined existed for those living elsewhere. Stability and identity come at a price.
Jameson’s presumptions about small town life are, I think, the necessary, unavoidable product of ideology. The simultaneously over- and underdetermined nature of Marxist thought dictates that development and growth can only be pernicious. Those who rail against Amazon and celebrate independent book stores were once railing against Barnes & Noble and Borders and I would wager that precious few of them grew up in towns where the only bookstore was Christian. But that doesn’t mean Jameson was entirely off-base. Although nothing in Cultural Logic suggests he foresaw the full impact of the growing rural-urban divide on our politics and culture, the internet-accelerated continuation of the processes he identified have, it seems, become destabilizing on a grand scale.
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The first season of Noah Hawley’s limited series Fargo takes place in Jameson’s ideal of a small town—untouched, it seems, by the corrupting forces of globalization. A riff on, rather than a sequel to, the Coen Brothers’ 1996 film of the same name, it tracks the intersecting lives of four characters in and around the very real town of Bemidji, Minnesota (pop. 13,000): an insurance salesman, a deputy police officer, a policeman from the nearby “city” of Duluth,” and the outsider who, passing through, throws everything into chaos. That outsider, Lorne Malvo—whose name nods to Shakespeare’s Malvolio and, in true Shakespearean fashion, betrays his malign intent—is, in many ways, the show’s existential hero. Hawley, who wrote each script himself but collaborated on the overall story with a group of writers, has expressed a fascinated, forgiving relationship to his killer, describing him as “really interesting” and “a very fun character.” “Fun” is, I suppose, one way of describing someone who slaughters dozens of people.
But people aren’t really Hawley’s focus, ideas are, which explains why he might deem “the violence [Malvo] does to the social contract” somehow more important than “the real violence that he does.” For Hawley, Malvo’s open malevolence gives rise to a kind of ethical absolution: “[w]hen you see a shark swimming in the ocean, you’re not judging the shark,” and so “[w]e don’t judge Malvo because he’s not pretending to be anything else.” We do, of course, judge the shark—no one mourns the great white strung up on a pier. Worse, it’s not even true about Malvo, who constantly pretends to be “something else,” his affect friendly and even intimate right up until it’s not. He veils his threats against women and children in small-talk and friendly advice. His masks are indispensable to his grift.
As a trope, Malvo’s shape-shifting omniscience places Fargo: The Series squarely within an American strain of the Faustian tradition, what Hawley has called the “stranger comes to town story.” This ancestral line includes Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, both of which tell the story of Mephistophelean outsiders who tempt the citizens of small towns with their ability to grant wishes. In Fargo, the series’ bloodshed is, likewise, the product of wish-fulfillment-gone-wrong—those who get what they want, the shows wants us to understand, inevitably get what they deserve. This includes the mild-mannered insurance salesman, Lester Nygaard, whose half-joking “wish” that someone would kill his hectoring wife is granted by Malvo.
Twain’s novella, published in at the tail-end of an unremitting run of personal loss, is Nietzschean in its nihilism—his Satanic “No. 44” leaves behind not just death and destruction but the shattering knowledge that “there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell,” only “a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream.” Bradbury is more optimistic; his Mr. Dark is eventually defeated by the small-town bonds of communal joy and familial love. Fargo, for its part, wants it both ways. Although it provides a “happy” conclusion for its small-town heroes (“decency trumps all,” as one critic put it), the body count alone makes it hard to locate any triumph. Moreover, the show takes an almost punitive approach to human frailty, quite literally torturing those stupid enough to let themselves dream and desire. Twain, at least, can be understood if not forgiven—his coruscating satire is, at once, the product of great personal loss and an attempt to liberate humankind from hypocrisy. But what’s the misanthropy in Fargo actually trying to tell us?
As his references to the “social contract” suggest, Hawley’s Bemidji is primarily a blank canvas, a place to let his thoughts on the nature of good and evil play out—an opportunity to see what happens when a “civilized man meets an uncivilized man,” or an “anarchic force enters polite society.” That blankness is helpfully literal: Bemidji’s ice and snow consumes everything, including, in the end, Nygaard, himself. But there’s a figurative blankness at work, too. Although Hawley squeezes thirty-four deaths into the ten episodes of Season One, the town remains fundamentally unchanged throughout—there’s no identifiable panic, fear, or paranoia, even as the bodies pile up. When Malvo sits across a diner counter from Molly’s father Lou (Keith Carradine), an ex-state trooper, Lou has no idea who he is, even though Malvo has been caught on camera, arrested, and interrogated by his daughter, now a Bemidji cop, herself. When Malvo leaves the diner and drives off, no one follows. Bemidji, it seems, is too naive to protect itself.
This is a departure from its source material. The end of the Coens’ Fargo finds Marge, our intrepid detective, in bed with her husband Norm—they are, she says, in an act of positive affirmation, “doing pretty good.” Alluding to this scene, Hawley rejects the idea that his characters embarked on a “dark journey,” favoring instead the “romantic idea that you go off and you face evil and you come back and your reward is to lead a simple life.” This is, I think, an incomplete—if not outright lazy—interpretation of the Coens’ film. And, regardless of Hawley’s intent, it’s an equally dispiriting take on the series. The four main characters have been shot, turned into killers, and/or killed. Those who survive are more culpable than heroic. If meek Duluth policeman Gus Grimly does his job in episode one—he pulls Malvo over but, intimidated, lets him drive away—thirty-one lives would have been spared. No one, save for Lorne Malvo himself, should be able to rinse that kind of thing away.
Perhaps that’s the point. Although Hawley has frequently noted the “stoicism” of Midwesterners, the desires and motives of the citizens of his Bemidji are never far from the surface. Rather than paragons of “Minnesota nice,” the town’s citizens are, save for a couple of exceptions, driven by vanity and venal self-interest. This is especially true of the women. That two of the most obnoxious—an ex-dancer more interested in an insurance pay-out than her husband’s murder, and Nygaard’s sister-in-law, a vain ex-beauty queen—are guilty of trading on their appearance is, I think telling. But even Nygaard’s sweetly boring second wife Linda (Susan Park), admits she longed for him while he was still married, fantasizing about his wife being “out of the picture.” To be fair, the male characters aren’t much better; the show is full of asshole fathers and daft, cruel sons.
The nihilism of Fargo: The Series is not foreign to the Coen Brothers’ films, of course—and it is easy to see Malvo as a nod to No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh. But, for all Hawley’s philosophizing, Fargo: The Series lacks the kind of arid, existential scale of No Country. It resembles—to the point of homage or mimicry—the comic condescension of the Coens’ Burn After Reading, in which the Coens give into misanthropy, mining human stupidity for amusement. Where BAR gives us Chad Feldheimer, the dipshit fitness instructor and would-be extortionist, FTS introduces us to Don Chumph, also a fitness instructor and would-be extortionist, whose idiocy is matched only by the modesty of his ambitions: he seeks only enough money to open a Turkish Bath (and not a penny more). We are expected to laugh at Chumph and Malvo is our avatar: he insults him, steals his money, and arranges his death at the hands of the police. Filmed in slow-mo, scored by Benedictine nuns singing an Easter litany, and culminating in a Peckinpah-esque barrage of bullets, Chumph’s operatically grandiose death is the the ultimate joke at his expense, a mockery of his grubby, small-time life.
This is a far cry from the inscrutable “niceness” of the Coens’ Fargo. According to Hawley, his “job was not to portray Minnesota as it is in real life,” but rather “to portray the Minnesota that Joel and Ethan portrayed in the movie.” In a clever touch, Hawley links his show with the Coens in the first scene, when ill-fated businessman Milos Stavros finds the bag of ransom cash left behind by the film’s equally ill-fated Carl Showalter. Indeed, there is little of the real to be found in Hawley’s series. The real Bemidji, for instance, is a hub of Native American culture though there’s not a single Native American character in the show.
Hawley’s attempt to “honor” ‘the Coens’ vision is frustrated by his failure to understand it. In interviews, Hawley has pointed out the famously enigmatic scene in the movie where Marge, briefly in Minneapolis as part of her investigation, reconnects with a former high school classmate. The class-mate, Mike Yaganita, meets with Marge under false pretenses—his awkward pass rebuffed, he breaks down, explaining that the death of his wife has left him lonely. Later, Marge discovers that Yaganita’s confession was a lie: he never married and, instead, suffers from an unspecified mental illness. Hawley describes this scene as important and irrelevant—more specifically, it is important because of its seeming irrelevance:
“Why is this in the movie?” But it’s in the movie, in my opinion, because it’s one of those details where you’re like, “Well, they wouldn’t put it in the movie unless it really happened. It has nothing to do with anything.”
Not so fast, Noah. Viewed in the broader context of Marge’s journey, the scene is pivotal, not irrelevant. She is nice, and her niceness is so deep-seated that, at first, she struggles to see the selfishness in others. In discovering the lies underneath Yanagita’s cheerfulness, however, she is reminded of the fundamental inscrutability of human behavior and, as a result, she stops trying to “understand” the crimes she’s investigating and starts solving them. And, indeed, the scene where wraps things up is at once a send-up of the nearly-omniscient fictional detectives, a study in comic understatement, and a implicit critique of empathic detectives.
So that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there. And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper. And those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a little bit of money. There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’tcha know that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day. Well. I just don’t understand it.
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By embracing venality, Fargo: The Series abandons the Coens’ Fargo. But it honors David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, where the small towns is, quite literally, a demonic hellscape. There are hints that this is intentional. There’s Malvo’s discourse on pie in the the FTS’ penultimate episode. The Bemidji deputy who throws-up at the sight of a dead body nods to Twin Peaks’ own deputy, who weeps at crime scenes. More broadly, Lynch’s Twin Peaks is equally uninterested in the reality of its setting and it foreshadows that disconnect in the opening credit, where a Welcome-To sign on the outskirts of town informs us that Twin Peaks’ population as 51,201—roughly the size of Wilmington, Delaware—not claustrophobically small. These parallels are easy to miss given the tonal differences Fargo: The Series adopts the Coens’ naturalistic approach; Lynch’s series, by contrast, subverts its lush northwestern setting with de-naturalized, melodramatic performances. And Lynch, in true Lynch-ian fashion, inverts the mysterious stranger trope: its “outsider,” Agent Cooper, is an agent of hokey “wholesomeness” in a town full of dark secrets.
Like the relationship between FTS and Coens’ film, Twin Peaks serves as an oblique continuation of Lynch’s Blue Velvet, part of a genetic through-line that’s both apparent on the surface (the re-casting of Kyle McLachlan) and, more subtly, structurally and symbolically embedded. When the opening credits of Twin Peaks move from an image of a bird (the regional Varied Thrush) to the town’s churning mill machinery, for instance, it offers a off-hand deconstruction of Blue Velvet’s last scene, in which a mechanical robin sits on a windowsill, a beetle in its mouth. Given Lynch’s repudiation of patriotic wholesomeness, one might assume that Frederic Jameson was a fan. That he’s not is, I think, emblematic of the Marxist struggle with post-structuralism (and thus the “postmodern”). Lynch’s depthless pastiche is a clear a rejection of the deep history that drives dialectical materialism; worse, the film, neatly packed into a two-hour runtime, treats walls itself off from socio-historical currents, reducing time to one more commodity. Blue Velvet‘s rejection of progressive ideology should not be confused with capitulation to America’s worst impulses, however.
Placing Lynch’s film in historical context, it eviscerates the fantasy and fetishism that marked Reagan’s America. Just two years before, MGM/UA had released John Milius’s Red Dawn, in which the gun-toting teenagers of a small town were—quite literally—the last line of defense against communist takeover. The problem for Jameson, in the end, is that endless conflation can ask question but provides no foundation for positive critique; even right and wrong are thrown into uncertainty. As Blue Velvet opens, the camera pushes through lush grass to reveal an army of chittering beetles underneath; it closes with an image of a songbird. The movie in-between asks us, obliquely, why we see the beetles differently from the birds that devour them. Is it simply because they sing?
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Stories about mysterious outsiders spinning webs of intro-level philosophy had a moment in 2014. Early in the first season of Nick Pizzolatto’s True Detective, which joins mismatched detectives as they try to solve a series of ritualistic murders, the camera tracks Detectives Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rust Cohle (Matthew McConnaughy) from high above their Chevy Caprice as they glide across the Louisiana countryside while, inside the car, Cohle opines about the people he’s sworn to protect and serve: “People around here,” he says, “it’s like they don’t even know the outside world exists. Might as well be living on the fucking moon.” Down on Louisiana’s southernmost edge, in Pelican Bay, the grandfather of a murder victim reframes this sentiment as ethical critique, blaming her (not unlike Hawley) for seeking something, anything more: “Everybody think they gonna be something they not. Everybody, they got this big plan.”
Like Fargo: The Series, True Detective is enamored with place, though only as an idea. From our birds-eye vantage point, we track vast swaths of swampy open land broken up by the jigsaw of pipelines and the refineries they serve, a landscape at once agrarian and alien. Culturally, the series traffics in clichés of Bayou exoticism. The Cajun and the Creole, corruption and conservative politics, Mardi Gras and evangelism—these stereotypes are all “mashed together,” to quote the show, in a kind of Esperanto apocalypticism. The thread tying everything together is one of physical and mental degradation, the peripheral characters forming a kind of Flannery O’Connor-like grotesquerie. One witness complains of chronic headaches while the camera lingers over her corroded hands; there’s a palsied ex- baseball player, a castrated and developmentally-disabled member of local church, and, finally, the in-bred killer.
Occasionally we get glimpses of something deeper, novel. When the detectives’ visit a dilapidated bunny ranch nestled on a back road near Spanish Lake, we witness, fleetingly, how regional decay might open up new forms of social organization. The ranch is, paradoxically, the only example of female autonomy in the show’s first season, though the price of freedom—sexual commodification—proves steep. Everywhere else, however, the show’s decomp fetish proves strikingly conservative —change, we are told, is the breeding ground for cosmic terror. In the show’s unsatisfying conclusion, the symbolic and the literal collapse: the detectives confront the murderer at the ruined estate of his once-wealthy family.
Although True Detective’s efforts at conjuring existential terror disappoint, other parts remain delightful. In some ways, it was always interested in the chemistry between McConnaughy and Harrelson and the rom-com-ish dynamic between the flinty, philosophical Cohle and Hart, whose lack of ambition and curiosity are inextricably intertwined with his “aw shucks” take on the world. The subtle character work done in the show’s quieter moments is almost—but not quite—ruined by pun-ish foreshadowing of the characters’ names, which not-so subtly pair “cold” and “hot” or, depending on your tastes, “coal” and “heart.” Fortunately, those paradoxes are also internalized in interesting ways. Cohle, the would-be misanthrope, shuns family and community while secretly craving communion; Hart idealizes family and community only to betray his own again and again. In its best scenes, this conflict becomes something like a comedy of manners. When Hart invites Cohle to dinner, he doesn’t want him to show, let alone stick around; Cohle, who claims he didn’t want the invite, proves endlessly chatty, lingering long past welcome. In the able hands of McConnaughy and Harrelson, this odd-couple pairing is far more successful than the supernatural thriller grafted onto it.
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Fargo and True Detective fit perfectly within the modest constraints of their limited-series form: small towns provide—and limited series require—just enough life to flesh out a narrative without the risk of overabundance, randomness, and arbitrariness. Both shows reject Jameson’s “thickening continuum” for an all-encompassing sense of isolation and dislocation that’s reinforced by their mutual rejection of pop cultural signifiers and modern technology. Fargo’s disgraced FBI agents Pepper and Budge work in an old-school, analog file room; the paper “files” that True Detective’s Hart and Cohle seek were lost in hurricane flooding. Fargo’s Gus Grimly communicates with his daughter on a walkie-talkie. The “murder board” at the Bemidji police station is a cat’s cradle of red yarn and local vernacular (one out-of-town hitman is listed as the “deaf fella”). And on and on.
This sense of small-town timelessness is hardly new to television. Indeed, one could argue that it’s inscribed in television’s DNA. Twenty-five years before Frederic Jameson wrote about the flattening effect of our nostalgia for small towns, the Andy Griffith Show provided its audience with a weekly window onto a wholesome “time gone by”— Mayberry, North Carolina, patterned after Griffith’s actual hometown of Mt. Airy (pop. 7,000 in 1960). Though it was technically contemporary in its setting, Griffith was always frank about the show’s conscious attempt to re-create the “feeling of the 1930s.” It is the testament to the power of nostalgia that The Andy Griffith Show has been on the air in one form or another pretty much continuously since it debuted on CBS in 1961. Audiences today are drawn to the comforts of the “simpler time” of the early-1960s run; its audience in the 1960s sought the illusory comforts of the 1930s. It’s nostalgia as Matryoshka doll.
It did not take long for networks to realize that television was uniquely suited to this brand of escapism. By 1971, CBS was airing seven rural-themed shows and network television was so full of rural stereotypes that Gil Scott Heron sought to burn it all down in his seminal spoken-word piece “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (“Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction will no longer be so Goddamn relevant”). But 1971 proved to be a saturation point rather than a high-water mark. In an attempt to appeal to a younger, more contemporary demographic, CBS initiated what later became known as “the rural purge,” cancelling its entire line-up of rural shows, including Mayberry RFC (what was left of the Andy Griffith Show once Griffith left), Green Acres, and (the year before) Petticoat Junction. As one actor put it, 1971 “was the year CBS killed everything with a tree in it.”
Not for long, however. In response to a popular uproar, CBS premiered The Waltons a year later, a wholesome recounting of a wholesome family’s travails in hardscrabble 1930s rural Virginia. Although expectations were low, The Waltons found a large audience, running for nine seasons and peaking at Number 2 in the Nielsen ratings in 1973-74. Not long after, NBC would attempt to capture a similar tone with Little House on the Prairie. The Waltons ended in 1981 and Little House on the Prairie in 1982, victims of shifting cultural currents. The early 1980s brought an emphatic backlash against 1970s culture that manifested itself in myriad ways: the rise of New Wave aesthetics, MTV, and a love-hate relationship with the interrelated preppy and Yuppie cultures. Ever adaptable, television soon incorporated these changes, replacing overt nostalgia with culture-clash comedy. The often-underrated Newhart debuted in 1982, updating Green Acres’ fish-out-of-water humor to contemporary cultural and generational divides embodied by its relocated Boomer city-dwellers, materialistic Yuppies, and seemingly clueless country bumpkins.
The Newhart template would prove both durable and malleable. Two months after CBS brought Newhart to a close (in classic fashion) in 1990, it debuted Northern Exposure, which followed a young Jewish physician’s nonconsensual relocation from NYC to the small Alaskan town of Cicely. Although it was created by the team behind the much-admired St. Elsewhere, Northern Exposure premiered to little fanfare—especially compared to Twin Peaks, which debuted just two months before and almost immediately became a cultural flashpoint. There are broad thematic parallels between the two shows—in each, an outsider arrives in a remote northwestern town with an eccentric population; surreality ensues—but even sharper divides. If Twin Peaks is best read as a deconstruction and corruption of small town nostalgia, Northern Exposure is clearly on the side of the town, practically begging its would-be hero to loosen up and let his freak flag fly.
Five years later, NBC inverted the Northern Exposure formula with Ed, the story of a former New York corporate lawyer who returns in disgrace to his hometown of Stuckeyville, Ohio. Unlike Fleischman, Ed’s gratingly-enthusiastic titular protagonist throws himself into the town’s affairs, buying the local bowling alley and opening up a new law practice inside (Ohio bar admission be damned). Ed falls back in with his high school friends and aggressively pursues his high school crush, season-after-season—in spite of her resistance, the show never hints that Ed’s behavior might be inappropriate. If anything, it posits that Carol’s resistance to his charms as a violation of television’s narrative contract and, as punishment, burdens her with a series of terrible boyfriends. One (John Slattery) was so despised by the show’s audience that fans devoted a website to ways they might kill him off.
Ed frames its hero’s return as redemptive and the audience is expected to follow suit. In an about-face from his Big Law past, he recasts himself as an advocate for community values, throwing himself into low-stakes, high-principle, long-shot cases. Through his clients—aging pastors, doddering party magicians, good Samaritans, an army of sad sacks—and his causes, like turning his bowling alley into a historical landmark, Ed puts a wholesome spin on Gen X stereotypes while simultaneously (or seemingly) rejecting neoliberal materialism. Happily, Ed, the show, is—at least sometimes—in on the joke. When Stuckeyville High creates a student-run television, station, the pitch of one of the students, a Stuckey Bowl regular, is laughably familiar: “Americans these days are looking to television for something comforting, something warm, gentle and reassuring.” That air of nostalgia nonetheless finds room for self-consciousness. The show name-drops Northern Exposure, nods to David E. Kelley’s Picket Fences, and references a variety of classic 1970s television shows like Archie Bunker, Happy Days, M.A.S.H., One Day at a Time, and The Rockford Files.
Jameson would, no doubt, identify this as an unfortunate surrender to “identical products and standardized spaces.” But Ed suggests something different. These references are treated like a common language, a shared cultural heritage among the latch-key kids of the 1980s that links the characters to each other and the audience. But Ed, the show, also subverts the nostalgia of Ed, the character, by questioning whether he seeks to preserve Stuckeyville as it is or bully it into becoming the television-like idyll it never was. It is true that a large crowd shows up to see the cast of Happy Days at a promotion aimed at saving Stuckey Bowl, but those who attend are far more interested in getting a glimpse of faded television stars than they are in saving the bowling alley.
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That I can weave all of these shows together as strands in a single, interlocking thread, is strong evidence that Hollywood’s treatment of small towns has always played to comfortable (and comforting) tropes. It makes one appreciate all the more those shows that try to capture the underlying complexities and ambiguities that mark contemporary life, wherever it takes root. On one level, FX’s Justified—which follows trigger-happy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens after he’s banished from Miami to his backwater birthplace in Harlan County, Kentucky—is a prototypical genre exercise, updating the ethos of paperback Western to modern Appalachia. On another, however, it is deeply fascinated with both its setting and those who live there, taking a methodical approach in establishing the complex socioeconomic and regional hierarchies, sub-strata, and micro-habitats that have formed over generations. Its six seasons play out against a backdrop of failed farms and a dying mining industry that’s only become more dangerous and destructive as its influence has waned. The citizens of Harlan County view outsiders—whether they be individuals, corporations, or the federal government—with understandable wariness.
It helps to have a solid foundation to work from. In this case, it’s clear that the show’s creators and writers learned something fundamental from Elmore Leonard, who wrote the novels and short-stories on which Justified is based. Family loyalties and feuds, collective memory, communal self-construction through myth and lore—there is a local logic at the core of the Justified universe. If it’s easy to hear Darrell Scott’s now-famous “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive” as a dead-end lament for those born to die in Kentucky’s backwoods—which, to be clear, it is—a closer look at its lyrics reveals that the same fate awaits to those who go into Harlan, seeking their fortune at local expense.
This is clearest in Seasons 2 and 4—not coincidentally, the show’s strongest seasons—in which Big Coal and organized crime both find Harlan County frustratingly inhospitable. Throughout the series, outsiders continuously underestimate both the intelligence of Harlan County’s residents and the importance of localized knowledge. In Season 2, this provides an avenue for criminal matriarch Mags Bennett (and, to her dismay, the Bennett’s enemy, Boyd Crowder) to extort an exorbitant price from a Columbia-educated executive of Black Pike Mining Company, which seeks to strip off the tops of nearby mountains in search of coal. In Season 4, similar knowledge is the key to secreting a fugitive out of town on a coal train, beyond the reach of the army of Detroit mob heavies who’ve descended on the county. As Raylan tells one Detroit button man, shocked that the unassuming and unimposing Constable Bob killed one of his men, “people underestimate Bob at their peril.” The same can be said of Harlan.
The audience, having seen Bob withstand a savage beating before turning the tables on his would-be killer, knows that the key to his survival was, more than anything, a tolerance for pain. That toughness, born of place, proves to be a tie that binds even enemies. Justified is full of unlikely alliances, formed to defend Harlan against would-be interlopers, transforming local enemies into counter-insurgent allies. Such kinship is hard-won, but powerful. The series finale closes with Givens, now stationed in Miami, visiting his nemesis Crowder in jail, to inform him of the (apparent) death of Boyd’s’ wife and Raylan’s ex-girlfriend, Ava. When Boyd asks Raylan why he chose to deliver the message in person when he just as easily could have passed it along through the warden, his question answers itself: “we dug coal together.”
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Unlike Fargo, True Detective, and Justified, most (though certainly not all) of the physical violence in Ray McKinnon’s slow-burning—but ultimately soaring—wrongful conviction drama Rectify remains in the distant past or an uncertain future. Season One follows the first free week in the adult life of Daniel Holden, once convicted of killing his high school girlfriend and now released back into his hometown of Paulie, Georgia after twenty years on death row. In its first season, the show doubles its narrative, frequently flashing back to Daniel’s last year(s) on death row to chronicle his affectionate relationship with his fellow death row prisoner Kerwin, who occupies the cell next door. The sympathy we feel for Kerwin, in spite of his guilt, is representative of the show’s carefully constructed ambivalence.
Daniel is, like True Detective’s Cohle, an autodidact with a philosophical bent. He relies on intellectual structure to measure and mediate a seemingly cruel and arbitrary world—a way of understanding, of course, but also a means of keeping the world at arm’s length. Unlike Cohle, however, Daniel refuses to give into nihilism; a “world view” devoid of optimism, he explains, is a “kind of fantasy itself.” The first half of Rectify’s first season follows Daniel’s attempt to escape a compulsive hopelessness that, although psychologically necessary on death row, threatens to become destructive once outside. Neither Daniel nor the show are able to shake this pessimism easily. Malice and violence threaten to break through the town’s deceptively placid façade at any moment, hinting at the possibility that—as Daniel’s former defense attorney, Rutherford Gaines (Hal Holbrook) laments from his deathbed—we’re nothing more than “monkeys going to nowhere.” Lorne Malvo would no doubt agree.
Rectify is also concerned with the superficiality of small town pleasantness—though it is unique in allowing the town and its citizens a voice as they struggle to balance simmering anger, “gentility”-based norms, and Christian forgiveness. Ultimately, Rectify complicates—but does not reject—the Peyton Place cliché that small towns are prisons. This tension is interrogated from the very first scene, where the camera watches, through a dark room and a small square window, the processing of a newly-arrived prisoner, complete with cavity search. In the background, watching through another window and a closed door, is Daniel, waiting to be released, suddenly on the other side of the prison panopticon. When Daniel’s guard turns his back to allow Daniel to change into civilian clothes, we get our first sense of the seemingly insuperable distance between prisoner and civilian. Typical of Rectify’s approach throughout: the camera lingers on the interaction, unhurried.
This reversal does not last long. Because Daniel has been released based on DNA evidence that calls his conviction into question but falls short of exonerating him, he cannot shake suspicion. This means there is nowhere he (or his family) can go that is not noted, watched, catalogued, and commented upon. (“Remember,” his attorney tells the family, before they’ve even been reunited with him, “everything we do is being watched and judged.”). If freedom seems, to the death row prisoner, like “a world full of windows,” those windows can quickly become oppressive—a point driven home by a tense scene in the parking lot of a big box store, when Daniel is trapped behind the driver’s-side window of his mother’s car, caught in the fixed gaze of the television cameras that crowd around him.
As claustrophobic and menacing as Paulie seems, it is far from one-dimensional. The gossipy waitress who spreads rumors about Daniel and his family also sends Daniel home with fried chicken, without charge. The local evangelical church—an easy, frequent subject of liberal critique—is treated with expansive even-handedness; it bears scant resemblance to the mocking depiction in True Detective, with its freak-show ambience. (“Safe to say no one [t]here is gonna be splitting the atom,” Cohle jokes.). Which is not the same thing as saying that Rectify finds solutions or resolution in religion. Daniel, desperate to wash the past away, rushes into a baptism that offers fleeting catharsis but not transcendence, leaving him confused and raw. If the church’s followers want to believe that “miracles” are possible “in this town, right now,” Rectify does not begrudge them their optimism.
Elsewhere, the show’s relationship to Christian cosmology is more oblique. In Drip, Drip, Daniel has his own run-in with a mysterious stranger. Wandering Paulie’s quiet, late-night streets with insomnia, Daniel is picked up by a grizzled stranger in a battered pick-up truck who asks for help with some errands. To go into too much detail would spoil a delightfully strange hour of television. At one point, however, as Daniel and his new acquaintance wrestle in a field in the dewy light of early morning, the violence and tension increase to the point where the possibility that someone will kill or be killed grows terribly, frighteningly real. As with Daniel’s baptism, however, these lofty stakes yield to the intimate and personal. For the first time, we get a real sense of the depths of Daniel’s loneliness: the intimacy of the violence is better than no intimacy at all. Watching the episode—one of the finest hours of television I’d experienced in a long time—I was reminded me, with its reality and dream, violence and spirituality, of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son
In the light of day, however, Paulie remains trapped in a very particular version of the past, one in which the murder of Daniel’s girlfriend was long ago solved and explained, Daniel tried and convicted, and judgment (and justice) fixed. If the town’s desire to leave the past in the past seems unfair to those of us on the outside (Daniel’s public interest lawyer, the audience) Rectify works hard to help us understand this is a universal, human failing. Other characters, driven by kindness or a religious call to forgiveness, offer hope that the town’s feelings will eventually fade. Still others, like a group of selfie-seeking teens, suggest that even generational anger has its limits—for them, Daniel is simply an object of morbid curiosity, a place for their restlessness to alight. Daniel, to his credit, seems to understand all of this even as he bristles at the intrusiveness. When his half-brother—not yet born when Daniel went away—expresses too much interest in his experiences, Daniel explains that the appeal of this kind of “taboo,” while natural, requires caution.
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In the late 1970s, the area in-and-around Cecil County was the stalking ground of the “Johnston Gang,” an infamous crime family (immortalized in the 1986 Sean Penn film, At Close Range) that made a small fortune by stealing farm equipment before being torn apart by its own ambitions. In a sense, the Johnstons embodied the age-old tradition of hillbilly rebels—in trouble with the law, as a famous theme song once put it, since the day they were born. Good money rarely follows bad, however, and, in a Justified-like turn, the family eventually turned to selling drugs and then, inexorably, to murder. In 1981, Bruce Sr. and his brothers Norman and David were all sentenced to life for the killing six people (including three teenagers), as well as the attempted murder of Bruce, Jr. The story was sensational enough that it was picked up by papers around the country.
The Johnston legend did not end with those convictions, however. In 1999, Norman escaped, breaking out of a maximum security prison in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania in a manner befitting a Hollywood script: he “stuffed a dummy trimmed with human hair into his cell bed, then bust[ing] through window bars and vanish[ing].” Although Huntingdon was nearly 200 miles away from southeastern Pennsylvania/northeastern Maryland, Johnston returned where he was from, where he was able to avoid custody for 19 days. During that time, he was a constant presence in and on the local news, which breathlessly reported would-be sightings—on a porch, in a park, at a fruit stand, along railroad tracks. Some speculated that he’d returned to Cecil County “for revenge or to get money.” City papers found an opportunity to reinforce clichés of small town life:
None of this is comforting to residents of Cecil County, many of whom are used to leaving doors unlocked. Now, many of them report staying home, with their windows locked and front door bolted. Streets that last week were filled with the noise of children on bicycles have fallen silent.
This was more folklore than news. Evidence suggests that, like the curious teens of Rectify, those living along the Mason-Dixon line enjoyed their brief flirtation with lawlessness and legend. How else would one explain why copies of At Close Range flew off the shelves of local video stores during Johnston’s time on the run? Buried under the abundant nonsense of those 1999 newspaper articles is a palpable sense of local pride, a shared belief among locals that Johnston’s redneck resilience and knowledge of the land would be enough to evade even a massive manhunt:
“He knows the area. … The man was a hunter. The man was a farmer,” said Tim Bickling, who has been following reports about the manhunt. “If he wants to hide, he can hide,” said Bickling, standing outside his white clapboard home in nearby Cherry Hill.
The combination of memory, fear, morbid fascination, and regional pride is a potent one, and the area buzzed with it for the duration of Johnston’s flight. But it was misdirected. Johnston’s capture was both anticlimactic and comic:
But for days on end, he was on the run from state troopers, crouching in the cornfields, his heart pounding with each pass of the state police chopper. He was frustrated by his inability to steal new cars with tricky alarms and to operate self-serve gas pumps. After 20 years in prison, even his old Chester County stomping grounds didn’t seem the same. “He was dazed by all the change,” said his brother, Joe Rivera, who spoke to Johnston once during his time on the run.
Whatever Johnston once knew, it wasn’t enough to make up for all the changes that took place in his decades in prison. New housing developments and factories occupied what were once open fields. Old networks had shriveled up and disappeared. And so, after all of that work to get free, Johnston escaped into a world that was foreign to him. Places change, for better or worse, and we must change with them.