Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

ELMORE LEONARD – TIMOTHY OLYPHANT – JUSTIFED – 2010- . . .

THE COMPLETE FifTH SEASON – 2013

This fifth season is tricky since all the local Harlan County families are dying like hell, so some props have to be brought into the Kentucky landscape. The first one is a whole family from Florida, the Crows, like the birds that are both parasites and scavengers, and they take over the Crowders with all kinds of conflicts going along with this coup d’état if not putsch. The second one through the friends in Detroit comes from Mexico with heroin. And that is the heart of the season with Raylan Givens more and more sidetracked by his chief Art to the point of this chief making a mistake in procedure and getting severely wounded. The worst part of the situation is that a ten year old boy is mixed up in this Crow family, and like with birds crows do not like smaller birds like sparrows and robins. So the boy has a lot of problems with his mother, when she is revealed to be his mother, and with his uncles when they are revealed to be his uncles.

The violence in this season is extremely serious but always the mark of some kind of paranoid or hysterical or even psychotic derangement of the various criminals who are like a bunch of spiders locked up in a glass pot. They are ready to eat one another if they cannot get even with the cops and kill them before getting back to eating one another alive if possible. They try the latter but they are so corrugated that they cannot shoot a weapon straight.

This criminal milieu reveals that family links, in other words blood relations, are an absolute dictatorship, a bond that cannot be cut loose or untied, a connection that is more than a rope, a real cable, and not made of some vegetal fiber but made with stainless steel. Blood means slavery. And on the other side within this blood entourage the stronger individuals consider they have all rights to do what they want and to be followed, obeyed by all other members. It is very bad luck to be a child in such an environment because then you are a pack mule at best and a body shield at worst. You can imagine if being a boy is not easy in that criminal family, what it would be to be a girl.

There is there a real lesson about human society. The lower you go into crime and hooliganism, the more disorganized and disjointed human relations become, in fact there is nothing human left, just the animal instinct not to survive but to kill. These people are not even animals who kill to feed or to defend themselves, but beasts who kill for the pleasure of killing and who torture as long as possible before killing to inflict pain, suffering and humiliation. Strangely enough these men only consider a menace to their manhood as having the chance of getting some kind of influence on their behavior, otherwise dying for them is nothing at all, whereas losing their masculinity is unbearable. You should see them then crawling and begging. They have no decency, no honor, no dignity.

That’s the main dimension of this series: it does not use any subtle intrigue or plot on the criminal side. It is only sheer force and mere violence.

On the cop side you have the ruffians, like Raylan, who manipulates the criminals into killing one another, maiming each other, mutilating themselves even, let’s say by accident, but these cops are always getting what they want: the death and elimination of the criminals if possible without going to a court of justice and saving on judicial costs. The second type is those who try to proceed by the rules and by the book, Miranda and all. They know X or Y is going to commit a crime but there is no need for them to make it come faster and thus blocking them, nor to do anything else but wait for the crime to have been committed. The last type, generally the bosses, is so frigid in front of these criminals that they prefer not seeing the crime that is coming rather than sending cops who might be a little bit rough.

So we are justified in thinking that such police forces are in fact by far ineffective, impotent in front of real crime, and this frustration largely explains that then some may become criminal in their turn by taking some ethnic categories of people, young, male and colored, meaning black or very dark, as prime targets for their harassment that can lead to some innocent casualties among these populations. That consequence of bad police work in the USA is not really hinted at in this series, but we know better.