Double Denim

Understanding Raylan's Walk.

I turned 47 last month, a horror, but there was one consolation, I finally found my tribe. It’s an online community devoted to deciphering the pigeon-toed allure of Timothy Olyphant’s walk as Raylan Givens in the Elmore Leonard inspired TV show Justified. Southern/hillbilly gothic is my genre, and I like men who are swimmers, which Olyphant was, a champion at USC. And the question of his character’s walk is solved by his torso not his legs. A long perfect V. He could sell genes with Sydney Sweeney, except he’s the WASP version of Americana. A Vanderbilt and Anderson Cooper’s distant cousin. I should hate him! But I’ve chosen to objectify him instead. Perhaps this makes me a fascist, or even worse, the banal evil of being fascist adjacent?

Earlier in the year Olyphant did sell jeans in a Levis ad with that great subversive Marxist warrior Beyoncé, who was blonder than Sweeney and with more back. The advertisement is set in a pool dive because poor white places are transgressive cultural arenas now and Bey has been mining it for rhinestone kitsch. Recently Olyphant quipped to Nicole Byers that he had only agreed to the be in the ad because his cool singer/actress daughter Vivian convinced him that if he didn’t take the gig, she would disown him. Timothy Olyphant had been equivocating about going to his Saturday ceramics class instead, because he’s the Mr. California of the talk show circuit. An art form which is in its death throes, which is probably for the best. It could have died with dignity alongside Norm Macdonald. Now Stephen Colbert is going to be reduced to delivering a podcast.

Despite being superhuman, Beyoncé is not immune from criticism. She is currently in trouble for wearing a t shirt celebrating the Buffalo Soldiers, a Black army frontier force who were instructed to kill ‘Indians’ and ‘Mexican Revolutionaries’ amongst others. The fact that Beyoncé is Black with Indigenous ancestry does not double bounce the discourse back into positive integers. Instead, all of this business with t shirts and jeans is very, very important. It’s a great distraction watching the chat cannibalise itself.

I confessed on Bluesky that I admired his Aryan features because I have a social death wish and I watched my follower count plummet through its purity pool. No matter, my pool has Timothy Olyphant in it and the way his character Raylan Givens prefaces statements and questions with, “Might I…” And all the ways I found myself fixing to say yes.

I know that my critical reflections on Justified are important, because my favourite seasons are based on Raylan’s haircuts, I don’t like it when it gets too long, and the edges start to trouble his collar. This is my uncritical pornography. Is this how men used to watch television? Or is it because I have come off my antidepressants and I can um, feel things again. Albeit, only for an actor, on a screen. I also enjoy the quick draw violence and shootouts in Justified, which I can blame on perimenopause, suddenly I like to see people shoot other people in the face. For the first time in my life guns are sexy to me.

Justified is set in Harlan Kentucky, a coalmining town and the subject of an earnest 70s documentary Harlan County, USA which detailed the miners fight to unionise. Season 2 of Justified is also preoccupied by the avarice of a mining company and the ensuing tensions with the alternate economy of Harlan, drugs. The company sends a sends a ballsy lady rep to town to convince them to blow out the top of their hills and sell their land. The real star duo of Season 2 is Mags Bennet and Loretta, the former is a matriarchal menace obsessed with the pinch faced girl.

Season 1 deals clumsily with the issue of race as Walter Goggins hams through scenes as swastika-tattooed Boyd Crowder, with teeth so white and square and perfect they must be fake. Appalachians are not known for their teeth. Whereas the question of whether Raylan and Boyd are friends or foe remains unsolved over six seasons.

This is the part of the world that produced Kentucky Fried Chicken, Corbin, a place famous for the Harlan Sanders original restaurant is just 60 miles to the west. It is also notorious for being a sundown holler because in 1919 almost all of the Black population was driven out of town and put on freight trains like Jews without the ovens.

The 1991 documentary Trouble Behind covers this riot and opens with a jovial monologue from a long time elderly resident about the fact they replaced Black people with minstrel shows, where the town’s fire chief Shorty sported Blackface and was asked why he would be in a place that has no use for him. His reply was,

“The devil never would look for a n****r in Corbin”

This looping allegorical speech infused with dry humour is typical of Justified too, you can feel the cast relishing their lines, and behind this the writer’s joy in coming up with them, full of opera and shadows and the assumption that even one’s foe is in on the joke right up until the moment their brains drip down their shirt.

The sundowner history is echoed in season 3 with the introduction of Limehouse, a Black man who starts his own rural outpost because of racial tensions and gives refuge to white women like Ava, Boyd’s love and to Raylan’s dead mother when they were on the run from the bad men in their lives. He also dispenses with pesky criminals and gangsters in his BBQ slaughterhouse, to some comic effect. A lot of the humour in Justified is macabre.

Then there is the incredible cartoonish villainous mask work of Jere Burns as Dixie Mafia motorhome terrorist Duffy, surpassing even Steve Van Zandt as Silvio and Pauly in The Sopranos. And the visual and cultural joke of Raylan being the only person who seems to wear a cowboy hat in the horsy state of Kentucky.

Raylan is very angry, apparently. He does brood a little but manages to almost never say the wrong thing to women, even his ex-wife Winona, a character so annoying I can feel her compromising my feminism.

Somewhere during my binge watching of Justified and my simultaneous ventures into side tabs about Timothy Olyphant, I became confused, the lines between Timothy and Raylan became bent and blurred. This is because I did a fatal thing, I watched all of Olyphant’s appearances Conan O Brien, which went from cute to a mutual psychopathic regard after an hour of enduring their clips fudged together. Although wearing checkerboard slides on a talk show is quite frankly adorable and Olyphant, the Modesto native is so louche and laidback it looks like one sweet whisper would tip him over. But he’s not angry. I’ve tried to watch Olyphant in other things but it is just not the same. I’m saving myself for Deadwood. And pondering the mystery of why the only thing Raylan ever eats voluntarily on Justified is vanilla ice cream.