[I know I wrote
a week’s
series of posts on Longmire a couple
months back. But having now seen the show’s last season, I can say definitively
that a central wish
for the AmericanStudies Elves this year is for everyone to experience this
wonderful American cultural work. So this week I’ll make a relatively
spoiler-free case for doing so by sharing a handful of lessons we can learn
from characters on whom I mostly didn’t focus in that prior series. Add your
thoughts in comments, Longmire
Posse and everyone else!]
[Addendum to the
above: serious Season 6 SPOILERS in these final three posts!]
On a mysterious
character who embodied first Western myths and then American realities.
One of the new
villains introduced in the last two seasons of Longmire was Eddie Harp, a murderous, psychopathic thug in the
employ of the Boston Irish mob. Played to perfection by Dan Donohue, Harp became a lot
more than that stereotypical character description, or even than that of a
charming psychopath (itself a pretty common
stereotype in recent pop culture). The son of a lifelong aficionado of the
Western genre, Harp was perhaps even more obsessed with the genre than his
father, and spent a good bit of his screentime and dialogue offering
meta-textual commentary on the show’s various uses and revisions of Western
tropes. As a result, while his character significantly contributed to the final
two seasons’ plotlines, Harp added even more to the show’s overall engagement
with the genre of the Western, and in particular with the kinds of iconic myths
and images that constitute that longstanding American cultural form.
Longmire likewise introduced its own
version of another such mythic figure in the final two seasons: Cowboy Bill, a
legendary and seemingly likable bank robber/outlaw weaving his chaotic way
across the West. Such outlaws have been a Western staple since at least the
Gilded Age stories and myths of Jesse and Frank James and Billy
the Kid and the like, and as was often the case with those stories (historical
facts and details be damned), Cowboy Bill is famously polite and charming,
frequently even leaving his victims offering praise for the man who had robbed
them. Yet as it did so frequently, Longmire
also added layers and revisions to the longstanding Western myth, such as the
central detail that Cowboy Bill did not use (or at least did not show) a gun
while performing his acts of outlaw banditry. Indeed, a key plot thread in the
first episode of Season 6 centered on the misuse of guns by those seeking to
thwart a Cowboy Bill robbery, a strikingly new iteration of the stories of
armed and dangerous outlaws (charming or otherwise) so prominent in Western and
Wild West mythologies.
Yet it was
toward the end of Season 6 that Longmire
truly complicated, and indeed entirely undermined, any and all mythic qualities
to Cowboy Bill. It did so by revealing Bill to be none other than Bob Barnes (John Bishop), a
lifelong friend of Walt’s who has since the show’s pilot episode also embodied
a kind of self-aware irresponsibility and blockheadedness. At times Bob has
been a harmless buffoon, but ever since the Season 2 storyline in which Bob and
his son Billy were revealed to be the drivers behind a drunken hit and run
accident that gravely injured Cady Longmire, there’s been a dark side to the
character as well. In the final seasons, that dark side was amplified by Billy’s
descent into drug addiction, one Bob blames on his own reckless and
irresponsible parenting and actions. And Bob’s criminal performance as Cowboy
Bill was a direct result of those histories, as he could no longer pay for
Billy’s rehab stint and resorted to bank robbery as his last-ditch effort to do
right by the son he had helped push toward such a tragic 21st
century situation. I don’t think too many Wild West outlaws had drug-addicted
sons for whom they felt responsible and in service of whom they were
desperately committing their robberies, and that reveal both changed the
meaning of Cowboy Bill and exemplifies Longmire’s
commitment to presenting 21st century revisions of Western myths.
Next lesson
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other texts you wish we’d all check out?
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