Man Out of Time: Justified: Primeval City

A neo-Western that premiered on March 16, 2010, Justified is about a man outside of time: Deputy US Marshal Raylan Givens (a tall, lithe and supremely self-confident Timothy Olyphant), who metes out frontier justice (i.e. shoots folks at the drop of his very large hat) despite his temporal position in Obama’s America. Elmore Leonard made his bones writing (lots of) Westerns in the ’50s and, even after branching out into the super-cool super-bare crime novels he became famous for starting with The Big Bounce (1969), continued to dip into the genre; his 2001 long short story “Fire in the Hole,” first published as an e-book by Steven Brill’s short-lived Contentville Press, served as Justified‘s source code. The Western can be expressed via a myriad of well-known plots, but all circle around an Ur-narrative: the white man pushes his way West, outpacing various legal structures and the precious imaginary of civilization. On the frontier, violence is both found to be, and becomes, unconstrained, and therefore must be adopted and shaped by civilization’s (usually unlikely) avatars. The individual, the gun, the personal code of honor: all are fetishized but ultimately driven under by world-historical forces. Finally, often as postscript, a state monopoly on violence is imposed, and we all know how well that’s worked out.