[Editor’s note: This piece contains spoilers for The Lowdown.]
Ever since Bogie popped the collar of his trench coat and hit the mean streets of San Francisco, America has been riveted by film noir and its style, swagger, sexiness, and dark-underbelly mysteries. And over the past seven weeks, Sterlin Harjo’s The Lowdown has delivered a lot of the elements above (and the catharsis of folks getting their just deserts), closing out its first season with a satisfying finale on November 4.
In the latest FX series from the Reservation Dogs co-creator, our gumshoe is Lee Raybon (Ethan Hawke), an eccentric citizen journalist hellbent on bringing down Tulsa’s white-supremacist elite. Lee wraps up his investigations in this week’s “The Sensitive Kind,” shining a light on femme fatale Betty Jo Washberg (Jeanne Tripplehorn), among others. He also helps mayoral candidate Donald Washberg (Kyle MacLachlan) face some hard truths. Newly enlightened, Washberg cuts ties with his crypto-Nazi campaign backers and restores his family’s land to the Osage people his ancestors stole it from. It’s a visceral pleasure to see racists brought low and Indigenous Oklahomans get the restorative justice they’ve been denied for so long. But sadly, in our current reality, it can all feel like a beautiful dream.
Yet Harjo, who lives in Tulsa himself, insists that it doesn’t have to. The writer-director spoke with The A.V. Club to give us the lowdown on inspirations for the series, dig into this season’s sendoff, and explain why he believes there’s still hope for the future of this country.
The A.V. Club: What is it about Tulsa that makes it a great setting for this very American story?
Sterlin Harjo: I think that everything is represented here that makes up America. It’s a diverse city where there is a collision of cultures, and there are unthinkable crimes that happened in the building of Tulsa. There’s a lot of history here that is both dark and beautiful. And now reconciliation and facing history is happening.
I also tend to mythologize things that I’m involved with. I grew up in Oklahoma; and culturally, I’m mixed. I’m Muscogee Creek, I’m Seminole, my grandfather was Italian. Both of my parents are half white, descending from various European countries. So I always felt like I was trying to make sense of myself. And once I found Tulsa as a home, I just needed to sort things out for my own dreams and my own myth-making capabilities.
It’s also about myself being a father and trying to figure out if I’m going to be able to make a living for my daughter, who’s a teenager, and all the challenges of trying to figure out how to have a stable home for her and myself while also making films and telling these stories. There’s been people telling me, like, “You know, it’s funny. It’s like Ethan’s playing you.” And I think it’s a mix of all of these influences, including Ethan’s own life. He’s also a father.
AVC: The Lowdown represents a wide variety of cultures and communities in Oklahoma, which is sadly rare in shows and movies about the American West.
SH: I think it’s more truthful than most writing out there. The worst thing is when people are trying to be diverse just for diversity’s sake. That does zero good for anyone. It’s not very hard to look out your window and see diversity, and it’s very lazy when you don’t try to understand that diversity around you. And it’s like, Well, are you a writer or not? That’s your job, you know? You’re supposed to try and accurately represent the world around you, and that’s what we tried to do in this show, whether it came from consultants and writers and myself or just a general interest in the people that make up this world. When Killer Mike [who plays Cyrus] first came onto the set and he was talking to me about how much he liked the script, he said, “I love that the story is diverse, but it’s not just tacked on. It’s not just for diversity’s sake.” I’m very proud of that.
AVC: You’ve said that Lee Raybon was inspired by your friend and former colleague Lee Roy Chapman. The character is so interesting and specific, especially because he occupies a very particular space as a white man who’s able to move between various communities in Tulsa.
SH: Yeah, I started [writing the script] after Lee Roy passed. But it was too soon, so I just kind of put it away, and then I pulled it back out when I felt like I was far enough away from it. I didn’t want to try to tell his story; he was a complex, fully realized human being that’s no longer with us.
But I love the spirit of Lee Roy and that he wasn’t afraid to stick his nose in places that others thought he shouldn’t. He wasn’t afraid to call out something that he felt was wrong. He did have relationships in every community in Tulsa. He could fluidly move throughout the city, and people trusted him. And I wanted to have that spirit in the character. The show is also inspired by the time period [the early 2010s] when I worked with Lee Roy at This Land Press. It was the last gasp of having a longform magazine in a town like Tulsa. We were trying to change the world, and we did change our world.
AVC: Let’s talk about the finale, which was so satisfying to watch. With all the horrible things being perpetrated by the people in power every day, it almost feels like a fantasy of an America we’re so far from right now.
SH: It feels like we entered a different timeline 10 years ago. You know, there was a time when you could be white and tough and strong and like the outdoors and like to shoot a gun now and again and still say that Nazis suck. And from both sides, people are scared to do that now. There’s this fear to speak out against things that you’re seeing and to feel like, Maybe I’ll just say nothing. That way I can hedge my bets. And I think that it shouldn’t be a fantasy, and that’s what the show is.
It’s why in this last episode, we opened with this racist preacher intercut with [a reenactment of] the Oklahoma Land Run with Donald Washberg, who isn’t a racist but he’s participating in things that were constructed by racism and therefore is still a part of it. But he’s not a bad person; he even knows the Native activists by name. These are all really tough things to parse and sort of express in nuance. But like, it’s all there; that’s real. There are cowboys that will turn to a Black man in Tulsa and say, “Hey, don’t go to that racist place. You could get hurt.” That’s actually more real than I think what mainstream media puts out there. We’re not as divided.
So hopefully it’s not a fantasy. Hopefully we can get back to that. [There’s this idea that] you’re either good or bad, but there is a lot in between. We can strive to be good or we can strive to be bad. We can strive to be together or we can strive to be separated. And hopefully, history has taught us that separating ourselves by race, by sexual orientation, by politics is a bad thing for everyone. There’s proof of that over and over and over again.
AVC: At the beginning of the finale, Chutto [Mato Wayuhi] tells Lee that his family doesn’t care about getting their land back from the Washbergs, and Lee struggles to understand why. Can you talk about that moment?
SH: Land becomes so much about individual ownership, and that’s not the point. Whenever Native people say, “We would like our land back,” it’s not because they want to individually own it. It’s because land is there for community. It’s there for food; it’s there for shelter; it’s a basic human need. And it’s caused so much pain in this country because people have this idea that they need to own it. It’s made people sick, it’s made people fight, and it’s making many people die.
And look, I exist in Oklahoma because I was displaced here. My ancestors were moved here because of land. So my existence has always been connected to land and displacement and who has land and who doesn’t. We were all moved to Oklahoma, and then the land wasn’t good here. And then there’s the Dust Bowl, and then all of a sudden, there’s oil, and the land is good. It’s all connected to capitalism and money.
Tulsa was founded by Muscogee Creek Indians. And the reason is because we were moved here from Alabama, our homeland, and we had to walk all the way to Oklahoma. The word “Tulsa” comes from the word “Tallahassee,” which is a Muscogee word that means “old town.” Our whole story is about the taking of land and hurting people to own it.
AVC: I love that the season ends with Betty Jo cry-singing a karaoke version of Waylon Jennings’ “Luckenbach, Texas (Back To The Basics Of Love)” at a bar. What made you decide to finish on that scene?
SH: I had written that moment for another part, and it ended up not working in that part. But we just loved the performance so much. Jeanne Tripplehorn is amazing. Betty Jo gets away, but internally, she doesn’t, and I needed to show that. She’s back in her spot, and she’s trying to be the rodeo queen still, but she can’t help but feel the undercurrent beneath the words she’s singing. It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s beautiful, it’s heartbreaking. And that’s the show, you know?
