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 Five
Class, Taste, and Tribal Bonds
The show retells the conservative story of class. It is one in which class is replaced by taste and style. Purveyors of organic ice cream and yoga studios are the outsider enemies. In contrast, the superrich and the ranch hand prols alike are decked out in Carhartt and Filson (never Patagonia), drink Budweiser and Coors (never craft), and thereby establish a fundamental kinship as confirmed by their unspoken but unwavering adherence to red-state aesthetics. When pasturing the cattle in the summer, they sleep together in heavy World-War-Two-style canvas tents (never REI nylon).
Yellowstone’s conspicuous display of cowpoke couture has not gone unnoticed by the arbiters of suburban fashion. As much as the show reviles hobby ranchers and weekend wrangler wannabes, in the world outside the televisual fantasy, there appears to be no shame in being “all hat and no cattle.” Stetson cannot keep up with the demand for hats like those worn by the characters. Expanding its product line, the Western hat company has hired Luke Grimes, the actor who plays the youngest Dutton son, Kayce, as the spokesmodel for its new cologne. It is hard to imagine what such a fragrance might comprise. Perhaps it will evoke the captivating musk of manure blended with acrid notes of gun smoke and complemented by subtle hints of l’ordeur de horse sweat. Stetson seems to assume the aspiring rodeo queens of red-state malls will find it alluring enough to justify the company’s investment.
Of course, ranch hand cosplay would not be complete without the proper footwear. Tecovas cowboy boots are now all the rage among the show’s fan base. It's unclear if they come pre-scuffed or if there is an additional fee to have the soles encrusted in authentic range cow dung. Perhaps you're a man anxious to shore up your masculinity without the hazards of jumping into a Yellowstone-style bar brawl. In that case, the company promises that their product with give you “confidence no matter where you’re headed.” Moreover, if you don their boots, “You won’t just look taller, you’ll feel taller.”
I may be presumptuous here, but there in one logo the fanbase is unlikely to adopt. That is the literal brand they wear – the one conferred by a red-hot branding iron. The Yellowstone “Y” ranch symbol is permanently burned into workers’ chests, which renders concrete their identification with and loyalty to their land baron masters. Initiates into the tribe of the ranch are not only promised lifetime membership in the “family,” they are forbidden to leave on pain of death. Lethal punishment is often inflicted on those who seek an independent identity – euphemistically described as being “taken to the train station.” The physical and psychic branding is another way the series betrays its deep conservative ethos – a code in which in-group loyalty is among the most prized moral values.
The other defining conservative touchstone that establishes the show’s right-wing bona fides is its hatred of outsiders. "Transplants, they're all transplants," Kayce tells his son as he casts his contemptuous gaze on the new cosmopolitan residents of Bozeman. A transplant "is a person who moves to a place, and then they try to make that place just like the place they left,” the dad explains. It is a statement that treats the centuries of cowboy colonizers as if they were the true indigenous residents. We can readily see Kayce's comment for the projection that it is. After all, it was the explicit intention of the Dutton colonial precursors to force the Natives who managed to survive extermination into white European identities. In other words, it was the settlers' aim to make the area just like the place they left.
Sheridan does have Native voices telling a different and more historically accurate story. The disparate narratives could be read as the show simply providing multiple perspectives, a classic liberal move. But given the extreme popularity of the program among conservatives, it seems that the Rorschach nature of the script is more readily interpreted along right-wing lines. That reading is made easier since it is the worldview of the show’s protagonists, one that the white rural and suburban audience is most likely to identify with.
In many respects, Yellowstone aims to create narrative coherence from the incoherent fairy tale of right-wing libertarian "populism." The Duttons are the beleaguered and oppressed "individualists" who just want to be left alone – free of do-gooders, government regulators, cultural outsiders, and corporate wolves. In some respects, they oppose predatory capitalism as a force that, in Marx's phrase, tends to "melt all that is solid into air." It annihilates whatever value it seeks to exploit, like a parasite that ultimately destroys the host on which it feeds. However, in the show, predation and "progress" are indistinguishable, which positions the protagonists as militant anti-modernists.
To be clear, it is not a myth that corporate, hedge-fund-driven vampiric gentrification extracts wealth from and denatures the culture of local communities like Bozeman. Those forces do drive-up home prices and send immiserated working-class residents into economic exile. Developers market their real estate ventures by branding them with the same wild environments that their McMansions displace. The problem with the story told in Yellowstone and other right-wing populist narratives is that the genuinely destructive impact of global finance capital predation is folded into the xenophobic fantasies used to legitimate fascist movements across the world, from Russia to the US.
In Yellowstone, as with the conservative fables in the non-televisual world, class is a concept disarticulated from its real-world political/economic context and is thus rendered meaningless. The enemy in the show is presented as a disparate amalgam of rapacious investors, big-city real estate speculators, Indians who aren't resigned to being history's losers, an always-corrupt federal government whose self-serving bureaucrats don't understand the things they want to regulate, and assorted criminals and reprobates.
“California” shows up repeatedly as a source of all that is evil and vile – developers seeking to spread the cancers of resorts and planned communities, gourmet coffee emporiums, biker gangs, and scooter-riding hipsters. One particularly repellant "Californian" transplant owns a "hobby ranch." He is a walking right-wing caricature of liberal villainy – a smug, entitled vegan whose only animals are llamas, which he keeps only to exploit the livestock property tax deduction. The new resident comes to the attention of disgusted locals because he refused to allow a neighbor, a real rancher, to use an easement path to a grazing area. This prissy, snooty California second-home owner installed cattle grates on the path because he couldn't tolerate the smell of cow poo and was horrified by the idea of raising animals for food. We can only wonder what it was like for the cast, many of which are California residents, to reinforce the show’s right-wing geographic demonology.
Beth encounters another annoying outsider/transplant in a clothing store. She’s there to buy clothes for a quasi-feral fourteen-year-old boy recently taken in by the ranch. When he acts bratty and defiant, Beth gets a bit physically aggressive with him. "That's child abuse!" shouts a meddling liberal Karen, filming with her cell phone. The soft-headed intruder is a foil for one of many lessons about the perils of permissiveness in child-rearing and the importance of harsh discipline. The show often conflates nurturance and tenderness with the failure to set limits and presents cruel punishment as "character building." This is parenting pedagogy many conservative viewers may likely find validating.
In that scene and others, the Duttons frequently confront the multi-headed hydra of decadent modernity, which must be fought off if the cowboy way of life is to survive. And, of course, you can't have too many guns, especially assault weapons, to fight off those threats. While visiting her father in the hospital after a near-lethal shooting that brings John to death’s door, Beth is asked by another visitor what is killing her dad. She answers, “The Twenty-First Century.” “Progress” is again depicted as the overarching enemy that subsumes all the others. Together, they are about to roll over her and other ranching families. Beth believes the Duttons may ultimately succumb, like the Indians before them.
In the show’s opening credits, images of oil rigs, open pit mines, and construction cranes serve as the iconography of the malignant progress that threatens the environment and way of life enjoyed by Montana ranchers like John Dutton. Shots of bison, cattle, and the rugged natural landscape represent that way of life. The juxtaposition suggests the latter is being displaced by the former. What the show renders opaque is that the malignant version of “progress” the Duttons fight against constitutes the current GOP’s real values and political aims. Unlike the conservatism of Teddy Roosevelt, its present iteration has no interest in conserving anything beyond the economic elite's power, privileges, and wealth.