Hey there! Another ESL from tumblr right here! <3 And please excuse me for being so forthright, but even though I barely know you all, I profoundly love you already! My background to quickly show how much I mean it: I watched the series about a year ago, but being a laser-focused kind of fan, I had to exhaust my interest in the other canon/fandom to allow a new infatuation of mine to truly blossom. This spring, I re-watched the series and have been overenthusiastically fangirling all over the place ever since and in the end even decided to create a thematic blog to be able to process all the things I can’t process simply by writing fics. So, thank you so much for organizing this re-watch and attempting to revive the fandom. Holiday season came very early this year! As to the pilot itself: there is so much ground to cover, and it’s really late where I am now, so, I guess I’ll have to go back to it all tomorrow or in the near future, but it would be rude not to comment on anything at all in the pilot and just vomit my rapture onto you all, lol, so, I’ll just share my thoughts on the very opening shot/first scene of the series because it’s so freaking smart and just coolly done. Also, media studies are kind of my specialty, and I tend to get wordy in my analyses because of it, haha!
“Raylan is being shot behind at a low angle, reiterating a convention prominent in spaghetti Westerns e.g. Sergio Leone‘s films, as well as revisionist works. In a heartbeat, we realize that our protagonist is the inscrutable enigma of a cowboy, a figure larger than life. And then, we process the music, which, curiously, turns out to be some Latino beat. And then, even more curiously and incongruously, we find Raylan in a contemporary setting of sunny and affluent Miami. He is standing at the end of a swimming pool, not of a dusty town road, which in itself constitutes a subtle intertextual reference to Dirty Harry and, naturally, Clint Eastwood. And the cultural codes continue to contradict each other: Raylan’s arrival is unnoticed by the people around him. No fear and no reverence, he is not recognized as a herald of anything. Everybody is half-naked, self-absorbed, and enjoying themselves and the sun, not paying attention to… a cop or cowboy? Cop cowboy? Another curious thing. Although we cannot know it yet, Raylan’s outfit promises us, first, a seamless or at least very balanced, stylish blend between gangster films and Westerns. And second, because our perception is already influenced by the discrepancies between the hero and the context, our intuition is telling us that we are looking at someone who is trying to balance out his lawman instincts and his actual duties. Raylan wears his heart not on his sleeve, but on his head. And it is the cattleman’s hat that we would describe first if we had to give a description of him, right? Just like that, we find out that Raylan suddenly is an out of place and out of time man, a walking anachronism, looking more lost than searching for somebody. Arguably, the postmodern reinvention of ‘the Western hero’ that is so typical of Justified has already started. “You are a character,” says Tommy Bucks maybe a minute after that, reinforcing the impression. Yeah, and the knowledge that that kind of character cannot be formed by the waves and the sea breeze of the hot Floridian coast has already started to seep into our brains. And aren’t we secretly glad to soon find out that our cowboy is coming home, where the legend began?”
So, yeah, I hope I'm not being too excited here, and in any case, thank you so very, very much for the re-watch and this discussion opportunity, dear gwyn!
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My background to quickly show how much I mean it: I watched the series about a year ago, but being a laser-focused kind of fan, I had to exhaust my interest in the other canon/fandom to allow a new infatuation of mine to truly blossom. This spring, I re-watched the series and have been overenthusiastically fangirling all over the place ever since and in the end even decided to create a thematic blog to be able to process all the things I can’t process simply by writing fics.
So, thank you so much for organizing this re-watch and attempting to revive the fandom. Holiday season came very early this year!
As to the pilot itself: there is so much ground to cover, and it’s really late where I am now, so, I guess I’ll have to go back to it all tomorrow or in the near future, but it would be rude not to comment on anything at all in the pilot and just vomit my rapture onto you all, lol, so, I’ll just share my thoughts on the very opening shot/first scene of the series because it’s so freaking smart and just coolly done. Also, media studies are kind of my specialty, and I tend to get wordy in my analyses because of it, haha!
“Raylan is being shot behind at a low angle, reiterating a convention prominent in spaghetti Westerns e.g. Sergio Leone‘s films, as well as revisionist works.
In a heartbeat, we realize that our protagonist is the inscrutable enigma of a cowboy, a figure larger than life. And then, we process the music, which, curiously, turns out to be some Latino beat. And then, even more curiously and incongruously, we find Raylan in a contemporary setting of sunny and affluent Miami. He is standing at the end of a swimming pool, not of a dusty town road, which in itself constitutes a subtle intertextual reference to Dirty Harry and, naturally, Clint Eastwood.
And the cultural codes continue to contradict each other: Raylan’s arrival is unnoticed by the people around him. No fear and no reverence, he is not recognized as a herald of anything. Everybody is half-naked, self-absorbed, and enjoying themselves and the sun, not paying attention to… a cop or cowboy? Cop cowboy? Another curious thing.
Although we cannot know it yet, Raylan’s outfit promises us, first, a seamless or at least very balanced, stylish blend between gangster films and Westerns. And second, because our perception is already influenced by the discrepancies between the hero and the context, our intuition is telling us that we are looking at someone who is trying to balance out his lawman instincts and his actual duties. Raylan wears his heart not on his sleeve, but on his head. And it is the cattleman’s hat that we would describe first if we had to give a description of him, right?
Just like that, we find out that Raylan suddenly is an out of place and out of time man, a walking anachronism, looking more lost than searching for somebody. Arguably, the postmodern reinvention of ‘the Western hero’ that is so typical of Justified has already started.
“You are a character,” says Tommy Bucks maybe a minute after that, reinforcing the impression.
Yeah, and the knowledge that that kind of character cannot be formed by the waves and the sea breeze of the hot Floridian coast has already started to seep into our brains.
And aren’t we secretly glad to soon find out that our cowboy is coming home, where the legend began?”
So, yeah, I hope I'm not being too excited here, and in any case, thank you so very, very much for the re-watch and this discussion opportunity, dear gwyn!