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 Six

Don’t Look Up

There is a visible but never-named sign of political and ecological truth in the background of nearly every episode – wildfire smoke. Summers in the mountain west, where the show is filmed, are haunted by a reality that conservatives do not want to acknowledge: rapid and increasingly lethal planetary heating. Human-caused climate change is the biggest threat to ranching, rodeo riding, hunting, fishing, and other red-state endeavors that folks like the Duttons so dearly want to preserve. It also imperils pursuits that people of all political persuasions are fond of, such as drinking, eating, and breathing. Notably, Montana forests are disproportionately suffering the catastrophic effects of global warming – drought, beetle infestations, apocalyptic wildfires, and devastating floods from rapid snow melt. The massive die-off of the state’s trees has turned the landscape from one of the largest carbon sinks into a major carbon emitter.

There is a point in the fifth season when a character notices and comments on smoke from a fire that had come so close it couldn’t be ignored. Unless it was a special effect, the fire occurred unbidden during filming and therefore had to be acknowledged in the script. One of the show’s clueless “environmentalist” characters expresses concern about the billows of thick smoke rising from nearby peaks. A younger but wiser ranch hand reassures her that lightning-caused fires are a seasonal occurrence and just part of the cycle of nature. The explanation is true as far as it goes. And it doesn’t go very far. By decontextualizing the natural cycles of nature from the larger picture of global warming, Yellowstone mirrors and reinforces the normalizing climate-denying narrative of Republicans.

Unfortunately, since that denial is an inviolable catechism on the Right, were any of the characters to frankly acknowledge it, the writer would risk estranging Yellowstone’s largely conservative audience. It’s better for ratings to keep the GOP base raging at “coastal elites” than talking about who is really going to steal ranch land and the rural way of life – fossil fuel interests and their allies. The nearly omnipresent smoke is an uncomfortable truth hiding in plain sight. Sheridan seems to have concluded that it is an audience-share imperative to shore up his viewers' hysterical blindness.

The Party that Need Not be Named

That brings us to the one feature of the Yellowstone narrative that makes it such a profound inversion of political reality – John Dutton’s Republican identity. That label is mostly implied and rarely overtly stated. It is, however, constantly manifested in his philosophy of life and folksy “common sense” advice to others.

Once he grudgingly agrees to run for governor and is ultimately elected, another reluctant hero move, he extends his “rugged individualist” mistrust of expertise from medicine to policy issues and environmental science. At the beginning of Dutton’s first meeting with policy advisors, he challenges one of the science geek panel members on the value of solar panels, insisting they do as much damage to sage grouse habitat as natural gas drilling. The environmental science advisor is depicted as ignorant of the risk that such a development might pose. There is no discussion of relocating the solar farm to an area that is not ecologically sensitive. There is no discussion at all. Instead, Dutton just nixes the project altogether. In an impulsive Trumpian moment, he fires all his advisors and declares, “I’ll advise myself.”

Environmentalists in the show come in for special abuse. In scenes that could have been scripted by fossil fuel lobbyists, liberal conservationists are treated mostly as threats rather than allies. Beth even equates them with greedy developers. Like those corporate predators, she exclaims, “They want the land!” Preserving open spaces and endangered species is just their excuse for driving ranchers, farmers, and the good people away, she insists. In the Yellowstone version of the “Great Replacement,” environmentalists are the head of the spear of coastal-elite-driven gentrification. As mentioned above, the majority of villains are from California, with the remainder hailing from New York, Portland, and Seattle. Many of these arrogant, moronic “liberal” characters seem created to lose arguments to the wiser, more authentic, salt-of-the-earth conservatives. Those progressive pinheads appear to be bred by Sheridan, a rancher as well as a writer, for the sole purpose of rhetorical slaughter.

Identification with the Aggressor

In the world outside the mythic one conjured by the show, right-wing lawmakers have long sought to give corporations and the super-rich veto power over the choices and freedom of ordinary Americans. It is the GOP that represents and fights for the interests of those seeking to steal, defile, and monetize the natural world so prized by Yellowstone’s ranchers. In contrast, it is the party of the show’s reviled coastal liberals, the Democrats (at least those who are not themselves beholden to corporate interests), who are most invested in conservation and environmental protection.

Just like its conservative viewers, the show is embedded in a mystifying narrative that locates the threat to their livelihoods and wellbeing in a reified and warped notion of progress, along with a wide variety of culture-war shibboleths. Predatory and minimally regulated corporations are the real-life peril that the show does acknowledge. Yet, they are a force the storyline dissociates from the GOP, the party that Yellowstone protagonists and the right-wing segment of its audience vote for and with which they identify. That dissociation makes it easier for the show's conservative viewers to continue supporting the very party whose policies sicken and kill its most loyal constituents.

Here is where Yellowstone is most troublingly conservative. Sheridan, a talented storyteller, has crafted more than an entertaining fictional world featuring compelling characters who are animated by "traditional" values and threatened by encroaching "progress." He has constructed a reinforcing mirror of the justifying and delusional fiction that leads those who comprise the Republican base to remain aligned with a party that too often hobbles and shortens their lives.