This post contains spoilers through the February 7 episode of Justified.

It may just be that my personal taste in baroque redneck feuds is low, but since Justified introduced Limehouse (and, as Matt Zoller Seitz astutely points out, took a huge step towards remedying the odd exclusion of African-American characters from its particular Kentucky cartography), I find myself much more interested in what’s going on in Noble’s Holler than in whatever antics the Crowder gang is up to this particular week: the drama there is drawn from a deep and particular wellspring rather than manufactured for maximum baroqueness and squick. I’d much rather plumb race relations in Harlan than an organ-smuggling ring.

We learn about Noble’s Holler and Raylan in the same breath, every time he speaks of it. “Noble’s Holler. Nice community,” he tells Brooks as they drive out to meet with Limehouse. “Carved out for emancipated slaves after the Civil War. Good white folks of the county trying to dig them out going on 150 years now.” Brooks is amused, but she’s also intrigued, telling him “You’re all up on your race relations.” But she’s only willing to give Raylan so much credit. When he tells her “I pay attention during Black History Month,” she wants to know “So you’re bringing me along on a mission to African America to smooth your path?” But I like that he’s done the same for her: maybe the whiteness of the Harlan that we’ve seen is a testament to the depth and persistence of segregation. There are places each of them can’t walk comfortably, or at all, if they go alone.

And we find out later, that used to be literally true. As Raylan explains to Boyd, Noble’s Holler, and Limehouse himself, served that role in Raylan’s life. When he was a child and his father, both drunk and sober, got violent with his mother, she fled a familiar route, a kind of reverse underground railroad. “Oh, I’d heard the stories,” Raylan muses. “White women seeking shelter there, white men not daring to follow them in. Not Arlo, though. He wasn’t scared of black folks.” It’s a fascinating reversal of the white supremacist stereotypes of black men ravaging white women, and a piece of information I’d imagine has repercussions throughout Harlan, whether they’re acknowledged—or seen—or tacitly ignored. I’d have to imagine that acting as a sanctuary is one reason white men in particular would want to uproot Noble’s Holler: if white women have an interest in acting in at least some solidarity with black communities, that’s a risky proposition for the men at the top.* But all of this fascinating speculation is, and I fear will remain, largely for naught as long as white men are, for once, trying to get in Limehouse’s stronghold in pursuit of Mags’ money.

I quite like the revelation that what’s left of that mythical pile is “$46,313, and receipts for everything your mama spent buying every piece of land for that mine deal.” There’s something nice about announcing in that the bloodbath to follow will be over a deeply diminished share of ill-gotten gains, that Harlan’s crooks are tearing themselves to pieces over small cash. Everything, it seems, is like Mags’ rotten and bug-infested marijuana, not even good enough to send up in a glorious burst of smoke. But that means we’re going to have to care something about these criminals. And I’m not sure I’m much invested in an organ-snatching orderly, or even much in Boyd’s effort to become a small-time white-supremacist-tinged Stringer Bell, especially since he doesn’t seem good enough at it to be worth the effort.

And while Quarles is nutty enough to watch, his race-tinged sermon to Devil that “Chasing money through a black holler? Cozying up with people you’d just as soon see swinging?…Can I get an amen?…I have the resources to turn your shitty little project or whatever you call it into a money-making machine,” feels weirdly false, especially given that Quarles comes from a heavily black industrial city and it’s hard to imagine the syndicate he represents is all-white. When the concept of Noble’s Holler touches on something weird, and specific, and emotionally true, Quarles’ rant feels like a put-on to me. We haven’t seen enough below the surface for me to see him as a truly worthy opponent yet, in organizational or metaphorical terms.

*With this proposition out there, I was a big disappointed that Brooks, as it turns out, seems to be the daughter or granddaughter of one of the women in The Help, and that Raylan’s conversation with her about her heritage extends about as far as noting that Ole Miss girls are pretty.

There are some good defenses of Jonathan Franzen, particularly from an archival perspective, in our thread in his comments on E-Readers (I’m glad no one’s defending the idea that the president is too busy to read fiction, though). I absolutely agree with everyone who says we need to think carefully about and allocate appropriate resources to digital archiving. But I think Simon Pits raises the most convincing argument in defense of Franzen’s worries about e-readers making literature impermanent. He says:

Franzen’s point is that with a e-books, an author never need “finish” writing a book. The ability to constantly revise, improve or worsen and censor remains. While authors, publishers and distributors today aren’t taking full advantage of this, certainly it cannot be far. Think of the controversies surrounding the teaching of Huck Finn. In an e-book world, Nigger Jim gets renamed to Jim or Black Jim or Slave Jim or something that may offend fewer, but tells us less about the culture and society in which the book was written.

A couple of thoughts. First, I think even though it’s theoretically possible to keep editing a digital manuscript in a way it’s not possible to change a print copy, there are still some structural factors mitigating against it being a major problem. Most writers I know tend to feel that they have to walk away from a project at some point, if only for their own sanity. I know writing a novel is different from blogging, of course, but even then, folks feel like they have to be done sometime. And even if they don’t, I think there’s probably a limit to the extent to which digitial publishers are going to be willing to push fixes, something that requires a lot of file maintenance, checking to make sure changes haven’t introduced new errors, and then either updating or getting readers to update their texts, something that might seem particularly annoying for new tweaks rather than minor functionality.

And second, there’s been real resistance to authors going back and fiddling with what are considered foundational texts, whether George Lucas is making Greedo shoot first or an edition of Huckleberry Finn that replaces the word “nigger” with “slave.” These alterations tend to be treated as a kind of cowardice, whether it’s Lucas lacking the courage to make Han Solo kind of a jerk or the political correctness that avoids exposing people to uncomfortable ideas and words even if those things might move their thinking forward. I don’t normally trust the market with a lot of things. But I’m actually reasonably confident that outcries against endless tinkering, customer demands for the portability of content from device to device and from format to format, and the desire to retain customers will make it easier to preserve digital content in its original form. That doesn’t mean we don’t need to back up those forces with an independent dedication to digital archiving. But unless things change, I think this might be a case where customers’ demands and the imperative to preserve texts are relatively closely aligned.

This post contains spoilers through the February 5 episode of House of Lies.

At the end of last night’s episode of House of Lies, Jeannie may just have been talking about Marty when she told him “I might possibly be the only person on the planet who has known you longer than five minutes and actually likes you. And all you do is shit on me. So fuck you.” But to a certain extent, she could have been talking about the show’s attitude towards women. Like Marty, House of Lies may not be aware that what it’s doing to its female characters is bad. But it is, to the point that I’m considering walking away from what I once saw as a promising show.

First, let’s talk about Marty’s “Medusa black-hole ex.” From day one, it’s been a huge problem for the show that Monica is supposed to be both a pill-popping, irresponsible sex maniac who also happens to be completely fantastic at her job and together when it comes to her professional life. There’s a bridge to be drawn here about how the skills that you need to be an excellent management consultant could make you a toxic person in personal relationships. But there’s a difference between treating people instrumentally and getting yourself so blotto you can’t be roused, a state that doesn’t tend to discriminate between days when you have to be at work early and days you don’t. And the show has never really explained that fundamental contradiction, or explained who Monica is as a person at all (much less what drew Marty to her in the first place).

She’s nothing but a vile shrew, telling Jeremiah that he hates her not because, as he puts it “you’re toying with my son, you ignore yours, and you are the perfect poster girl for narcissism, but “because you want to fuck me.” She shows up to care for Roscoe not because she actually cares but because her married lover reneged on a promise to take her to Fiji. And are we supposed to believe for a minute that Jeremiah would leave Roscoe with her when push came to shove given what comes next doesn’t seem totally out of left field? “I arranged an internship for his fat as fuck daughter. I even let him…do you know what a golden shower is?” Monica rants, before dragging Roscoe along with her to burgal her lover’s house for what she thinks she’s owed: “We are talking about roughly $16,000, and that is a conservative monetization.” They bond briefly over how great she looks in a couture dress (I do wish the show hadn’t fallen back on the gay/gender-questioning kid=fashion maven trope), and then Monica decides to steal a painting. “It’s kind of creepy,” Roscoe tells her of the Egon Schiele. And of course it’s all about Monica, again: “There’s still some beauty in there, isn’t there?” she needs to know. Ultimately, Roscoe gets himself to school and out of her way, but it’s frightening to think what a less-resourceful kid might have been dragged into.

All of this is not to say that female characters can’t be loathesome. But if we’re supposed to believe that she and Marty are deeply entangled, and by something other than just sex, that she’s very good at her job, there has to be something else going on here, and we need to be made to see and understand it. We got at least some of that last week, with Jeannie’s on-the-road affair, though again, it would have been nice if we knew more about her engagement before we saw her reacting badly to it. And I barely even want to get into Clyde and his corn-eating Mormon, a nakedly gross-out tactic that continues to confine Clyde to a distasteful combination of infantile and frat boy.

The one thing I thought worked well about this episode was the way it handled race and ethnicity. As soon as it became clear, as Marty put it that “Brant Butterfield: racist? He’s not going to want to hear a word out of my mouth except for the best way to shine a shoe or the optimal way to load luggage into a Pullman car,” the show could have done something corny about race and reconciliation. Instead, Marty went into killer mode, taking advantage of the situation to set up a test for Jeannie while getting himself out of responsibility for a situation that was doomed to awkwardness. And he first bonded with the secretly-Jewish CFO, then warning him in Jeannie’s presentation that he’d be only too happy to sell him out, saying “You should check and make sure that number is…kosher.” Sometimes, it’s satisfying to see bigots learn. And sometimes, it’s satisfying to see Marty say “I’m sorry for interrupting, Mr. Butterfield. Sometimes I just don’t know my place,” all while putting Butterfield in his.

This post contains spoilers through the January 31 episode of Justified.

Has there been a better image of the contempt with which addicts are so often regarded as Glen Fogel’s sick game of Harlan roulette with one of his employees on Justified last night? I think it’s very easy for shows about drugs and crime to focus on criminals, who have more wherewithal to plot and execute, and who are more thrilling, and perhaps more comfortable, to sympathize with than the people who purchase and use their project. There are notable exceptions, of course, like Bubbles on The Wire. But I think there’s something powerful about watching criminals directly exploit the people who produce their profits or in other ways facilitate their crimes. These transactions aren’t just made in money: they’re paid in emotion and blood as well.

“You win, you get a pill. You lose, I’ll put a pill in your casket for you,” Glen says, his contempt only becoming clearer the more he speaks. “With all the oxy you do, you’ll live just a few more years anyway…you thought I was going to let you kill yourself in my office? Maybe it’s just your lucky day. Or maybe not.” Addicts don’t even seem to be people to him, he’s amused by, rather than appalled by or sympathetic to, the level of the dead man’s need. It’s clear why those assumptions about addiction are useful to him, but that contempt can also be a weakness. Fogel clearly relies on Raylan agreeing that an addict’s word isn’t worth much of anything, and he’s surprised when Raylan’s willing to rely on the man who “hung me up in a tree,” though perhaps the fact that “he didn’t hit me with a bat” counts for a little extra.

If that operation is coming to a messy end, Boyd Crowder is hoping for a new beginning to a well-run empire. “My father, he considered himself a Harlan criminal. But he became more than a middle-man,” Boyd monologues. “His association cost him his life. We will not make that mistake. We will work within Harlan. We will control every aspect of crime within its boundaries…We will be meticulous, and we will be clean. No more smash-and-grabs…we’re all sitting together at this table in service of the almighty dollar.” It’s not clear, however, that he has what it takes to be Stringer Bell—or Quarles, for that matter. While the latter man has awfully nice-runnig tracks on his wicked little gun, Boyd’s style is still to bust into establishments with guns and to spell his name out for the title transfer. Boyd’s approach may be right at home in the holler, but Quarles seems more likely to be a transformational figure.

Especially if race comes into play. Travis Bickle may not precisely be a model of racial reconciliation, though it remains to be seen what of his views Quarles absorbed when he was at an age to be watching the children’s programming his father denied him. But at least Quarles doesn’t have tattoos and a racist upbringing, the kinds of things that prompt Limehouse to inquire of Boyd “There are those who wish my people harm, and there are those who wish for the restoration of white supremacy in the land. Do you believe that?” Harlan’s a long way from being any sort of peaceable kingdom. But the players have revealed themselves if the lines have yet to be firmly drawn. Gunfights seem likely. And Raylan might want to swap for some boot that are made for running.

One of the most depressing trends for me at Sundance was something that’s been building for a while: the fact that the talented actors who made The Wire so great can’t seem to get out of Baltimore.

First, there’s Isaiah Whitlock, Jr., who will be forever defined by state Sen. Clay Davis’ favorite obscenity:

He’s already had to imitate Omar in Cedar Rapids (one of the better, and more overlooked, small comedies of the last year):

And in Red Hook Summer, Whitlock gets forced to pretend to be Davis again in the movie’s most forced, artificial moment, one that interrupts a tremendously powerful plot line. It’s unfortunate that people want so much to be associated with The Wire or to make in-jokes about the show that they’re willing to sacrifice their own world-building and dramatic continuity to do it.

It’s less irritating, but still depressing, to see the actors who so thoroughly inhabited roles on The Wire getting stuck in those kinds of roles again. That kind of repetition is the hallmark of LUV, the depressing-on-many-levels movie about Vincent (Common), a man trying to start a small business after his release from prison, who gets pulled back into his old life as a killer for drug dealers, and pulls his nephew in along with him. The movie’s riddled with implausibilities and disturbing ideas, including the idea that an elementary-school kid would easily and automatically be comfortable wielding a gun, negotiating with high-level drug dealers, and running away to North Carolina. But it’s perhaps most disturbing for a movie that wants to transcend our stereotypes about black men using black actors in the same old roles over and over again.

First, there’s Michael K. Williams, who, after Omar’s death, has apparently been reincarnated in the person of a Baltimore homicide detective. Unfortunately, karma hasn’t seen fit to give him Jimmy McNulty’s panache or faculty with language. He spends a lot of time saying things like, “You’re young. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. You can still do something with your life.” Then, there’s Anwan Glover, who’s been downgraded from the glories of Slim Charles to playing a drug kingpin named Enoch who appears mostly to hang out menacingly in an abandoned warehouse, to be duped into believing that Vincent didn’t actually kill one of his relatives when of course he did, and to buy a large cache of drugs off of Vincent’s nephew, who is acting as the front for the deal. It’s a totally stereotypical, flimsy role, though Glover does a nice job with it.

It’s one thing to be defined in public memory by the best role you’ve ever played. It’s quite another to be forced by your industry to inhabit it over and over again. Killing a tough, transcendent role ought to be proof that you should be allowed to do a wide range of other things, not that the public will only buy black men as aggrieved or menacing.