Family Matters in Harlan County
GERALD BROWNING
Raylan Givens’s estranged relationship with his father, Boyd Crowder trying to preserve the much-sullied Crowder name following his father’s death, and Mags Bennett attempting to sustain a criminal business under the guise of strengthening the bonds of family—all the most complicated and compelling relationships in Justified are those forged by blood and kin.
A major storyline is Raylan’s relationship with his father, Arlo Givens. In the beginning of the series, whenever there is a reference to Arlo, Raylan seems to roll his eyes and is quick with a negative quip to display his animosity towards his father.
Sigmund Freud’s theory of the Oedipus Complex says that sons see their fathers as rivals for the mother’s affections. The very first time we see Raylan and Arlo on camera together, Raylan is bailing his father out of jail. He is quick to admit that the only reason that he is doing it is because his step-mother, Helen Givens, asked him to do so.
Helen and Raylan seem to have a more amicable relationship than Raylan and his father. Raylan credits Helen with raising him after his mother passed away. Helen is one of the few amicable characters in the story who doesn’t have much of a negative side. Other than turning a “blind” eye to Arlo’s dealings (and aiding him at times with his criminal activity), Helen is viewed through a mostly sympathetic lens. There seems to be nothing but warmth and love for the Givens men on her part. On many occasions, she is pitted between the warring Givens men and tries to placate both of them.
When Helen is killed by Dickie, both Raylan and Arlo set their sights on Dickie. Whereas Arlo means to kill him in retribution, Raylan forces himself to stop short of doing so. He points a gun at the back of Dickie’s skull in the middle of the wilderness in the dead of night. With Dickie shivering and crying for his life, Raylan arrests him. There seems to be a theme throughout many of the relationships that blood is very important, but there are some times which bind deeper than blood (or at the very least are cherished more than just blood relationship).
As the story unfolds we see that Arlo is still involved with organized crime in Harlan County. He is actually collecting protection money for Bo Crowder, who comes looking for Arlo when he gets out of prison. Arlo, being unapologetic about his criminal behavior, finds himself in protective custody under the watchful eye of his son, who is investigating the Crowder family. Throughout the first season (and it has become a theme for each of the seasons), we observe a metaphorical chess game played between father and son to see which can manipulate the other to get what they want.
Boyd and Bo
We can easily see the same relationship (but on a much more vicious level) between Boyd and his father, Bo. When Boyd and Bo meet in prison, it’s plain to see that Bo is part of the reason why Boyd has been able to survive in prison. With his recent “conversion” to religion, he has not made many friends in the underworld of Harlan County. So, when some thugs attempt to exact revenge on Boyd, his father steps in to protect his son. Later Boyd is released on a technicality and moves out into the wilderness of Harlan with ex-cons and creates a church (which turns into a front for vigilante justice enforced by Crowder).
When Bo gets out of prison, he finds that due to Boyd’s actions against local drug dealers and meth cookers, a lot of the competition has been destroyed or driven out of the county. In a tense scene where Bo attempts to bribe Boyd into controlling who he attacked, Boyd confronts his father and tells him that his “services” are not for sale. Yet, as we watch this unfold, we can’t help wondering whether Boyd has a motive other than the “righteous” cause that he communicates to his congregation. The tenuous relationship between the Crowder men indirectly leads to Boyd attempting to kill his father.
The Crowder-Givens relationship seems to be murkier throughout the series. In the third season, we see Boyd and Arlo bonding. Arlo goes to work for Boyd’s criminal enterprise. Ava and Boyd take care of Arlo as his memory seems to deteriorate. He’s having visions of Helen, who acts as his conscience (something she did many times when she was alive). Throughout the third season, Arlo seems to be succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease. It is Ava and Boyd who see to it that he takes his medication. The closer Arlo is to the Crowder gang, the farther he is drifting from his biological son.
This seems to become an even bigger issue towards the end, when Quarles, a mobster from Detroit, moves to Harlan (or rather is exiled to Harlan) to influence the underworld (due to Mags Bennett’s passing and the gap in the drug trade that has occurred). Quarles is at odds with Boyd (who also wants to dominate the Harlan underworld) and revels in revealing to Raylan that it was Arlo who killed a friend of Raylan’s, Trooper Tom Bergen.
When Raylan confronts his father, he admits to shooting the trooper because he was aiming at Boyd. However, upon reflection Raylan realizes that a confused and disoriented Arlo shot a lawman wearing a Stetson hat, which causes Givens to wonder (due in no small part to his own trademark Stetson) exactly who Arlo was trying to shoot. Could it have been that Arlo Givens was trying to kill his son? This reflection ends Season Three, leaving Raylan with a sense of unease.
Boyd and Raylan aside, the most pronounced source to show the Achilles Heel of family would have to be the exploits of Mags Bennett. Mags is one of the biggest underworld masterminds within Harlan County. Mags has owned the marijuana business in Harlan County for a long time. Her family has a rich history which goes back to Prohibition. Her main focus for all that she does is her family. Her attitude towards the “family business” is not unlike that of mafia crime families as dramatized in movies.
Much like Don Corleone in The Godfather, family is the most important thing to Mags Bennett. She has three sons Dickie, Coover, and Doyle Bennett (much like Vito Corleone’s sons Michael, Fredo, and Sonny). She also “adopted” a child, Loretta McCready. Vito Corleone adopted Tom Hagen. Whereas Tom was an orphan on the streets whom Vito took in, Loretta’s father crossed Mags one too many times and she had him killed. While he died, she took it upon herself to inform him that she would take care of Loretta as her own kin.
It seems rather ironic that even though Mags Bennett is quick to talk about the importance of family, she notices that each of her sons acted incompetently and directs her affections and love onto Loretta McCready, much to the envy and chagrin of Coover (the simpleton of the sons), who is ridiculed and debased on a regular basis by Mags.
Coover is brutalized by Mags when she takes a hammer to his hand to teach him a lesson. The Oedipus Complex seems to apply strongly to the relationship that Coover has with Mags. Coover is the most submissive of the three sons in his relationship with Mags. “Yes, Mamma” seems to be his most often used line in his stint on the show. In the scene where Mags destroys his hand with a hammer, he cries while being cradled in the arms of Mags. “I’m sorry, Mamma,” he whimpers over and again. With Coover’s strong and constant need for Mags’s approval, coupled with his ability to ruin plans and reveal secrets, we can surmise the reason for Mags’s disdain for him. Coover’s one strength seems to be his ability to grow and cultivate marijuana. “He had a gift” Mags sighed over hearing of Coover’s death. It seemed to be the one positive thing she could say about him.
If Coover is the oafish member of the Bennett family, Dickie is obviously the hothead of the clan. Dickie and Raylan have a lot of history together. During a baseball game in high school, Raylan gave Dickie the limp that he has throughout his tenure on the show. Much like Coover, Dickie is very intent on making “Mama” happy. However, his motives are much more subversive. Dickie, highly involved in the distribution and selling of the illicit marijuana that they have cultivated, wants to inherit the family business after Mags passes away. As such, he does whatever he can to strengthen the family business.
Dickie’s impetuousness that gets him into trouble on many occasions. Dickie tries to strike out to make a name for himself. This motive is purely self-aggrandizing. It’s easy to see that he wants money, fame, and power. However, in most cases this results in him meeting with Raylan and regretting his choices. In an altercation with Helen Givens, Dickie is the one who kills her, prompting Raylan to seek revenge.
The third member of the Bennett clan is Doyle Bennett. Doyle, who happens to be a sheriff in a small town in Harlan County, seems to be the smartest of Mags’s offspring (which isn’t saying much). Being a sheriff, Doyle has perfect (and multiple) opportunities to cover up for his mother’s misdeeds, which he does time and again. However, he spends most of the series covering up for what his brothers have done to endanger their family business.
Life Is Suffering
Yet the most telling family relationship in Justified seems to be between Raylan and Winona Hawkins, the mother of Raylan’s daughter. In the second season, we find out that Winona is pregnant with Raylan’s child. During the pregnancy, Winona and Raylan discuss the idea of raising a child in such a violent environment as Harlan County. This evokes Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimistic view of life. The nineteenth-century German philosopher expounded a quasi-Buddhist philosophy in which life is suffering.
This pessimistic outlook forces Winona to leave Harlan County to move to Louisville to live with her sister, Gayle. Winona turning her back on her life in Lexington demonstrates her pessimism. With an ex-husband who was involved in organized crime, which led to his demise, plus being involved with missing money, it is easy to see her opinion of life as suffering in Kentucky. Schopenhauer’s belief that life is suffering is merely a premise to his notion that because life is suffering, to bring a child into this type of world would be a negative action.
Winona seems to be detached from Harlan County. She lived in Lexington and only seems connected to Harlan through Raylan. Raylan, however, grew up in Harlan and has roots there. Winona seems to wonder about the ethics of raising a child in such an environment (her musings might lead us to wonder if she is even contemplating not having the child); whereas Raylan has no doubt in his mind as to raising the child and taking care of her.
Try as he might (especially in the beginning of the series) Raylan seems to want to distance himself from Harlan County, traveling so far away from his home town of Harlan (all the way to Miami) to be a “big city . . . federal lawman”. This very action shows that Raylan Givens is just like the people of Harlan County, which would not come as a shock to anyone who sees Raylan interact with anyone within that county.
Schopenhauer’s perception of Harlan County would be one where procreation would not be moral. Who would want to raise a child in an environment like this? Schopenhauer would see irony in Mags Bennett’s rhetoric of parenting and looking out for the best interests of Harlan County, all the while establishing an empire based on drugs and murder. In On the Vanity of Existence, Schopenhauer writes that due to the fact that life is suffering there seems to be no real significance or value to life. As such, humans create value or purpose (vanity) by using religion. Inherent in this is a type of selfishness. If we bring a child into a world where there is suffering and chaos, then we must be doing it merely for selfish reasons rather than to make the world a better place.
Mags Bennett is using her sons for selfish motives. Her interactions with her children are mostly connected to her criminal empire. The only person with whom her motives are “pure” (if anything Mags does could be construed as pure), would be her relationship with Loretta McCready. However, Schopenhauer would most likely note that even though Loretta is treated with more love and devotion by Mags than her sons, the effect of Mags’s apparent benevolence toward Loretta is to expose her to violence and corruption.
Where the Greed and Selfishness Come From
What is it that parents stand to gain from having children in such an unpromising environment? Where is the greed coming from? Some would argue that a potential reason for the desire for procreation would be due to the fact that the parents could see this as a way to make their memory last (even after their death). This could be a way to become immortal, and this is the “vanity” that Schopenhauer writes about.
Mags’s constant mention of the importance of family reinforces this. Family is a major theme for all the characters in the show. In many cases, the family members create a sense of duty for the characters, which leads them into many of the situations that they find themselves in. Harlan County seems to have a long memory. Throughout the series, there have been many instances in which two or more members of a family mention how their family has helped (or hurt) another family, which created a feud. With the lineage of the family as being an important backdrop to the storylines, we can see that the concept of “immortality” can be a useful metaphor in understanding just how valuable family can be. On the other hand, it is also easy to see just how selfish a motive this is.
What motivates this selfishness? Schopenhauer writes that the strongest will that man has is the will to live. It seems to be a driving force in a lot that mankind does. If it is impossible to live forever, then the next best thing is to ensure that your family name survives. This would explain the importance of lineage and heredity in Harlan County. If you can’t be immortal in the purest sense of the word, you want to be immortal in that you’re not forgotten and your name will live on long after you have passed away.
The Will to Live
Ironically, one of the seemingly “purer” relationships in this sordid story is the one between Boyd, Ava, and Arlo Givens. When Arlo is wracked with dementia, it is Boyd and Ava who take care of him. Even though they’re trying to keep an eye on him and don’t trust him not to spill the secrets of their fledgling criminal enterprise, Boyd and Ava seem to care for him as if he were a blood relative. They make certain that Arlo takes his medication and they live in the same house (or hideout) together. Apparently there’s no need to preserve a family name or ensure a lineage. They’re just people who seem genuinely interested in taking care of him (even though, he is a member of their crew and a weak one at that).
The characters in Justified are driven by very complex agendas and motives. However, beneath the surface of their tough exteriors are souls who are very cognizant of their own mortality. Being in a kill-or-be-killed lifestyle may cause them to reflect on what will happen to their name once they have passed away, or been executed. This vulnerability forces the family members to emphasize their family history and the continuation of that history.
A lot of what these characters do is fueled by the fear of their own mortality. This is what makes them so authentic and what makes their stories so believable. There most powerful motivation is the will to live.