Heroes, Horses, and Real Estate at the End of the Heartland Dream
A Close Look at What Makes Yellowstone a Red-State Fable That This Blue-State Intellectual Can’t Stop Watching, Part Two
On and Off the Reservation
To Taylor Sheridan’s credit, he has created a tableau that includes complex Native American characters, ranchers who manifest a sincere appreciation of a natural landscape worth preserving, and depictions of the rapacious actions of wealthy corporate predators as repellant and destructive. He also shows the racial profiling of Monica, the Native wife of Kayce, the youngest Dutton sibling. That episode, which takes place in an upscale Bozeman boutique, illustrates real white privilege. In other words, it shows a humiliating experience that white people don’t have to confront, in this case a false accusation and police-ordered strip search. The irony of this scene is worth emphasizing: what Sheridan demonstrates inside his script, he denies outside of it in interviews.
Over time, Monica is hired as a history professor. In her first lecture on Columbus, she presents a disturbing and compelling description of colonial domination. However, that nod to the history of Native disenfranchisement functions essentially as a virtue-signaling counterpoint to the series' more prominent theme, the ubiquity and tragic inevitability of predatory conquest. This theme makes the show a recognizably conservative fable.
As with the de rigueur “land acknowledgments” progressive speakers sometimes offer at the start of various events, such recognitions are only commemorations of a tragic loss. There exists no realistic plan or proposal to recover stolen real estate or the indigenous way of life. Native people are depicted by some of the show’s characters as beautiful losers, noble victims of injustice whose wounds and humiliations can never be repaired. Others, like the Broken Rock Indian Reservation Chairman, are not so resigned. They hatch futile plots to not only reappropriate lost lands but seek to erase the Dutton family from historical memory by buying up their property and driving them away – an ironic mirror of the colonial ambitions of those who eradicated and displaced his own people.
After one of John Dutton’s many battles to defend his land and family, Monica compares his Sisyphean struggle to fight off those who covet his empire to her own Native ancestors who had been evicted from the same land centuries earlier. She says to him, “You’re the Indian now.” At first, viewers may wonder how the actress (who, contrary to her claim, is not Native) could keep from gagging on this absurd conceit Sheridan had placed in her mouth. But the writer went to great lengths to make the comparison seem apt. As the prior Indian inhabitants experienced, ruthless and vengeful predators sought to steal the Dutton land and erase their legacy from history by launching a campaign of murderous extermination. Another Native character observes, “What has been done to John Dutton hasn’t been done since they did it to us.” Of course, there was one significant difference: the murderous assault on the Native occupants was successful, and their land was taken. In contrast, the Duttons, so far, have managed to survive the attacks and retain their land.
The comparison is specious in other ways. The idea that indigenous people had the same relationship to the land as their expropriators or that Native genocide was equivalent to the Dutton's struggle to fend off developers is certainly preposterous. But they may reveal something about the grandiose nature of white grievance. It might account for what makes this show so compelling to its Republican audience, who see themselves being disempowered and “replaced” by the forces of modernity. And in the paranoid MAGA-verse beyond Yellowstone, those usurping forces bear the countenance of non-white immigrants and Americans of color.
Naturalizing Conquest
There is much about this show that critics and defenders alike seem to overlook. It is a central and repeating theme that reveals the show’s conservative DNA. The characters constantly remind us that relationships of domination between individuals and groups are an unavoidable, if ugly and regrettable, feature of the human condition. Nearly every relationship in Yellowstone, especially among the men, features some form of a battle for dominance. Dominance can be brutal and humiliating or kindly and avuncular. Submission, too, can take multiple forms. It is variously depicted as a shameful defeat (those who lose fights), resentful cowardice (the lawyer son, Jamie), or admirable loyalty (the devoted servitude of the branded ranch hands). Everyone is either a top or a bottom for all the varied iterations. It’s a zero-sum world. It is also one of the most defining psychological traits of conservatives.
In a conversation about the violent seizure of Indian land in the 19th Century, Carter, the foundling kid taken in by the Duttons, is appalled and tells John how unfair that was. John explains that "There is no such thing as fair." In other words, as ugly and disturbing as conquest and domination might be, they are inevitable features of human and non-human nature.
In this landscape of cutthroat competition, even allies are enemies who can't be trusted. In the second season, when one of John Dutton's sons cautions his father not to make a "deal with the devil," the elder Dutton disabuses the young man of the notion that there is any choice, insisting, “All the angels are gone, son. There are only devils left.”
Women with Balls
Some critics have construed the agency expressed by various female characters as a departure from the conservative ideal of passive femininity. There is Beth Dutton, the vicious sociopathic daughter of John, Avery, the stripper-turned-ranch-hand, and Teeter, the hard-but-lusty horsewoman who constantly makes lurid comments to the men. The latter two reside with the men in the bunkhouse. However, what enables those departures from gender norms is Sheridan’s decision to defeminize them.
Beth and Avery are described by admiring male characters as having "bigger balls" than any of the men. Beth, in particular, has figured out the best way to succeed in a world driven by phallic bluster – be the biggest and cruelest dick around. Withering, castrating ripostes are her weapons of choice. So, I would argue, as honorary males, she, Avery, and other female characters remain within the conservative universe of gender. As ranch hand, Jimmy says, "One of the wranglers is a lady, kinda."