[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!]
[Also: serious
Season 6 SPOILERS in these final three posts!]
On a couple
final takeaways from the wonderful story of the multi-generational Longmire
family.
Perhaps the most
surprising twist in the Longmire series
finale (ONE MORE TIME—SERIOUS FINALE SPOILERS IN THIS POST!) was its resolution
of Cady
Longmire’s character arc and her uncertainties about her professional and
personal futures: running for Absaroka County Sheriff to succeed her retiring
father Walt. I’m not entirely sure that Cady is right for the job of sheriff,
not least because (as my Dad and fellow Longmire Posse member noted) the one
time she had to shoot
someone it left her significantly traumatized. Even if this narrative
choice existed solely to allow her final scene in the series finale to be a
wonderful echo and extension of the pilot’s closing scene, however, with a new
Longmire posting her own “Longmire
for Sheriff: Honesty and Integrity” signs, the moment would have been well
worth it to this viewer. But I would also say that the possibility of Cady
becoming a Sheriff Longmire 2.0 allows us to consider through a
multi-generational lens one of the show’s most central and enduring questions:
whether and how an old-school type, hero, and person like Walt Longmire can
have a role in a 21st century world.
The easy, and
not necessarily inaccurate, answer would be to say that he can’t, exactly—at least
not in a role like sheriff. It’s not just that Cady is of a different gender,
although that does itself speak to the transition between the Western cowboy
archetype and a different such figure and identity. She’s also different from
him in a number of other ways that suggest modernizing transformations: far more
versed in the nuances of contemporary law (as a former practicing lawyer), far
more connected to the Cheyenne and Native American communities (as a former
tribal lawyer and an adopted member of the tribe), and far more closely focused
on issues like domestic violence that have become more prominent law
enforcement priorities in recent years, among other distinctions. All of which is
to say, Cady’s unhappiness with having to shoot someone might be a feature,
rather than a bug, of her candidacy for sheriff, and a reflection of how such
roles themselves should adapt to meet the needs of 21st century
leadership and justice. Seen in that light, Walt’s final decision to retire and
ride off into the sunset (or at least the beautiful Wyoming mountains) makes
sense and provides a fitting coda to the story of a man perhaps born (as
he said in Season 5) in the wrong era.
Yet at the same
time (OKAY, ONE MORE TIME AGAIN—HERE BE SERIOUS FINALE SPOILERS), the final
final moment of that ride into the mountains was another surprising and
wonderful twist: a cell phone rings and Walt Longmire, the man who swore he
would never get such an infernal modern device, takes it out of his pocket,
smiles happily, and answers it. We don’t know who’s calling, but my money is on
either Cady or Vic,
Walt’s longtime deputy and very new (if a longtime coming) significant
other. Which is to say, while those are two women in law enforcement leadership
roles (partly reinforcing the prior paragraph’s points), they’re also ones to
whom Walt is intimately linked, and with whom he seems very likely to continue
talking on this newfangled technological device he’s now apparently embraced. Walt
has always been a character on the line between old and new, or at least
between respect for tradition and the past and a need and desire to move
forward into the future in meaningful and successful ways. That cell phone
moment, like Walt’s defining and clearly ongoing relationships to two members
of the next generation of Absaroka law enforcement, makes clear that whatever
his job title or status, Walt Longmire will continue to move into the future,
bringing with him much of the best of our past.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other texts you wish we’d all check out?
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