Yellowstone and the return of the western, 2020s style
The western is back – in the form of Kevin Costner and his immaculate Ram Laramie Crew Cab, Whitey Morgan on the radio, a $700 hat on his head and a sparkling Ruger Blackhawk revolver in the glovebox.
Since January, Neon customers in New Zealand have been able to watch all 29 episodes of the US hit series Yellowstone, a family drama starring Costner, a big ole Montana ranch, a high body count and a custom horse trailer of product placement.
Testosterone, horses, chicks, guns, land – heck, Yellowstone has it all, plus a few extras like a white supremacist militia and a Silicon Valley takeover.
As in all true westerns, the genders have been chiselled from Ponderosa pine – cowboys are stoic, jokey, sensitive and murderous; the women sexy mamas, sexy cowgirls, or sexy raving psychopaths.
Yellowstone is also pacey, addictive and thrilling (personal highlight – the bull in the bar scene); although it exploits a number of ‘red state’ paranoias.
Costner has always had a thing for westerns, even when nobody had a thing for Costner. There was Silverado (1985), Wyatt Earp (1994), Open Range (2003), and most famously, Dances With Wolves in 1990.
Although western films have been old hat now for years, from 1910 to the end of the fifties they accounted for a quarter of all Hollywood movies. In a 1997 London Review of Books piece about westerns (title: Steaming Torsos) Village Voice film critic J Hoberman singles out one actor who spent years trying to flog a dead horse.
‘‘It remained for Kevin Costner, who grew up during the heyday of TV westerns, to attempt to revive the form. The brief, post-Cold War western renaissance may be bracketed by Costner’s massively successful Dances with Wolves and the 1994 fiasco of his even more selfregarding and costly Wyatt Earp. Where the western once proposed an entire moral universe, it is now no more than a few chunks of narrative revolving around the solar majesty of the lead.’’
Now Costner, in the lead role as rancher John Dutton in Yellowstone, has his solar majesty back, although in a TV role instead of a movie. And although onscreen he has the intensity of a dead marmot, he is surrounded by more interesting actors – I’m including the horses here – and a Montana landscape shot with all the bigmovie reverence big money can buy.
For any New Zealander who has spent time on a farm, Yellowstone is a baffling show. So much is weird: the militias, the guns, the career cowboys, farming by helicopter, the clean trucks, the national anthem before a cattle sale, the feudal ranch hierarchies, the Native American reservation life, the price of hats.
And the healthcare system which, in its broadest sense, is required every few minutes (‘‘Call the vet!’’ screams a cowpoke as another one bites the dust). Although when the cowhands themselves get branded, like cattle, by the red-hot Big Y brand, their boss flicks them some white stuff in a tub which looks like shaving cream.
The only thing I recognised from my own farming background was a bovine condition called bloat – although Dad’s cattle weren’t poisoned by air-dropped hay bales, dastardly laced with clover.
The digestive troubles of cattle – truly, a universal language.
‘‘For a show about American exceptionalism’’, wrote Kathryn Van Arendonk in Vulture, ‘‘Yellowstone’s is a stunningly insular world. It feels like a contradiction for a show so obsessed with bigness, but in its heart, Yellowstone is a show about the inescapable smallness of feeling aggrieved and besieged.’’
When rancher Dutton (Costner) mutters: ‘‘it’s the one constant in life: you build something worth having, someone’s gonna try to take it’’, he sounds like Trump. ‘‘The central concept in modern conservatism,’’ wrote US journalist David Frum recently, ‘‘is victimhood.’’
Ironically, the lifestyle blocks threatening Dutton’s ranch – the largest in the States – sound rather like Costner’s 160-acre spread in Aspen. Dutton is also, of course, battling all those darned environmental regulations.
Westerns have always been required watching for conservatives, sanctifying white American history long before arch Republican John Wayne told Playboy magazine in 1971: ‘‘I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility . . . I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from the Indians.’’
Hoberman points to The Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, which asked who actually owns America ‘‘and how that possession is to be legitimised. That ownership, of course, is achieved by obliterating the indigenous inhabitants in the cause of historical inevitability.’’
Kevin Costner, when interviewed about his character, told the New York Times: ‘‘The urbanisation and environmental protection that are threatening his ranch are much different than [what faced] his predecessors, where they basically took the land and were stubborn enough, maybe vicious enough, to hold on to it.
‘‘Characters that took up legendary status in the West were very capable of making really hard decisions that were probably questioned by people – but not for very long.’’
The NYT did not ask him to get more specific.
Although Yellowstone is, in many ways, a normal, rambunctious western – one critic noted that no other Hollywood genre ‘‘has men bathe as often’’ – there is one subplot which brings it into the modern era.
Dutton’s beloved young grandson and heir is part-Indian. And one of rancher Dutton’s foes is Thomas Rainwater, the Gucci suitwearing chief of the nearby Native American reservation.
By building a casino, Rainwater dreams of funding a return of the Dutton lands to their pre-European condition. ‘‘I am the past, catching up with you.’’