Horses were the only fun thing about westerns, film critic Pauline Kael once wrote. For the rest, the genre could be stolen from her. The TV audience too, it seemed in recent years. After the golden fifties – with Bonanza, rawhide and many others – the western had all but disappeared from TV.
But the horses are back, and the rest follow at a gallop. In YellowstoneKevin Costner’s TV hit. The series, which is entering its fifth season in America, is so popular that there are already two metastases, 1883 and (still coming) 1923, with Harrison Ford. After the lukewarm reception of the first seasons (a ,,soapy mess”, thus The Guardian) have now also neatly impressed reviewers, even the initial skeptics.
The fact is classic. Costner, a reliably dull actor, plays surly rancher John Dutton. A man who talks with a throat full of pebbles and fights tooth and nail against progress in modern-day Montana. He competes with investors who want to turn his pristine valley, where only real guys are allowed to graze, into an amusement park for the wealthy wimps. In that rearguard fight against big money, fought with routine sadism, he is assisted by his dysfunctional family: a biting-hungry boozer as daughter, an errant son with PTSD from Iraq, and a loyal right-hand man. None of the main characters is sympathetic, they compete with each other in venom and brutality.
Also read: Declared dead yet very much alive: westerns are an underestimated film genre
Brutal message
So what explains the success? Yellowstone counts as a red state show with an undisguised conservative and brutal message, but one that has struck a chord with a mass audience in today’s rudderless America. According to Costner himself, the series appeals to a love for “an old-fashioned way of life that is still vital in America.” A way of life that – and that is the crux – is under heavy pressure. It is the myth of the autonomous individualist, who sets his own laws and is only accountable to God and family.
That myth is packaged in a contemporary formula. With a superficial respect for Native Americans (for Dutton old, ‘equal’ enemies but now allies in the fight against modern times) and love for the healing nature. Moreover, the makers not only borrowed from the illustrious western soap Dallasthe American TV hit of the early eighties, but also with the mafia epic The Sopranos. Besides a cowboy series, this is a mob show on the prairie. No duels in the main street this time, but nocturnal liquidations. Dutton has sniffs “taken to the train station” (shooting through the head and dumping into a ravine). The series also has mafia glorification of honor codes and omerta. Dutton brands his confidants, literally. Pa Bonanza never did such things!
There are also the same toxic family quarrels and bouts of despair with the clan’s leader, the alpha male. Only Pa Dutton lacks the chilling charm of Tony Soprano. He’s not a complex anti-hero, noted The New York Times after the first season, but “a corrupt piece of chagrin on horseback.” Fortunately, Kevin Costner (67) is like a fish in water with that role. The role of the setting sun suits him a lot better than that of the rising sun. With a beer belly and a grooved head that has forgotten how to laugh. In the end, despite his bluntness, you even start to empathize with him – a little.
Maniacal glorification
However, those elements are minor. Most important to the success of the series is undoubtedly the maniacal glorification of cowboy life as an oasis of honor and vigilance in a corrupted world. The series is obsessed with all things ‘cowboy’; the word falls every one and a half sentences, even more often than kill.
It has nothing to do with historical facts. Cowboys (or cowpunchers, as they called themselves) were poor farmhands, at the bottom of the social ladder, until the late nineteenth century. In Yellowstone the cowboys often bear little resemblance to those tawny boys who once really ate dust behind the cows. The closest is clumsy Jimmy – the schlemiel of the testosterone company. To raise him, he is sent to a Texas ranch where he endlessly patrols the grassland – the most realistic scenes of the series.
The portrait of Dutton as a nature-loving rancher who tries to fend off shrewd entrepreneurs is equally bizarre. In the nineteenth-century ‘Wilde West’, large ranchers were pre-eminently shrewd businessmen themselves, with one eye on stock prices. They had to, because they often depended on European investors who smoked fortunes in the beef bonanza across. The Legendary cattle king Granville Stuart (1834-1918), for example, whom Dutton is modeled on, was not only a rancher, but also a prospector, shopkeeper and amateur meteorologist. In his heyday he hunted horse thieves (usually petty thieves and outcasts), whom he had shot or hanged. In his later years, Stuart found employment as a school administrator, librarian and diplomat.
But what do historical facts matter? Yellowstone is not about the past, but about the threatening future, in which an allegedly pure, masculine American culture will be crushed by the forces of commerce and money. Only that ominous vision is so false that it hurts your eyes. Costner, who hits $1.3 million per episode, belongs to the super-rich class who enjoys a billionaire wilderness are making, complete with eco play spaces, luxury retreats and the cowboy fetish. Costner built a mansion in Colorado, invested in a bison education center, and operated a casino. He himself is the danger he tries to fight as Dutton.
Yellowstone is a triumph of myth-makers and cultural entrepreneurs. A new chapter in the exploitation of the American West, which has been used for centuries as a trampoline for shattered dreams or threatened masculinity. This time with some eco-consciousness, a good pinch of mafia morality, and the sentiment of heroic cultural demise to keep up with the times.