warnings for guns and violence (a lot a lot a lot)
subtitles available
show: #justified #waltongoggins
character: #boydcrowder
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Additional Notes
I’ve never been able to articulate all my thoughts about this character so I won't try it now – not in a coherent way, anyway. But! I feel like I have to say something, if only for my own benefit. Just to look back on it, whenever.
So, what's Boyd Crowder all about? Boyd is about class conflict, Boyd is about struggle, physical and metaphysical. Boyd is about self-fashioning - his style changing over the course of the show, his clothes, his speech patterns, his identity as well. Boyd is about having no fixed identity – ultimately: metaphorically shedding his skin like the snake, continually morphing himself into something new. He's about rebirth (and sin).
Miner, soldier, preacher, bank robber, drug-lord, and back again. All of these are him - and aren't. Because every role he plays is just another facade, another means to an end, blurring the lines between truth and lies, between belief and skepticism; another way to rise above his station, to shake off the yoke of his circumstances, of his family, of his birth place. He strives for freedom every time and every time he ends up in chains.
He’s the outlaw of Western iconography, self-mythologizing and self-aggrandizing - but thrown in the real world, within a very tangible social context, a hopelessly grim and violent one too. Violence is bred in his family line, rooted in the very history of the land, steeped in the blood of the people who died working and fighting in Harlan County.
But then again Boyd refuses to play victim, refuses to be victimized, refuses to cede anything. Refuses to be exploited, refuses to be uneducated. He can run circles around people, he’s the smartest person in the room, he’s one step ahead. As much as he uses guns, he uses words. He knows how to convince, and seduce. He’s a Satan-like figure, all smooth rhetoric and sharp edges: the rebel and the insurgent, the leader, the poet. He builds cathedrals out of thin air, enticing desperate people with something to believe in. He gets his army of worshippers, sacrifices them at the altar of his cause and then burns it all to the ground. And round and round in circles.
What a character.
Thank you Walton Goggins for such a magnificent, dazzling performance.
