Its critics can only see race.
Its critics can only see race.
L ong after it has run its course on TV, the show Yellowstone will provide fodder for countless Ph.D. candidates in whiteness studies.
In certain precincts, the verdict about the smash hit that has spawned a cottage industry of spin-offs is in — the show is about whiteness, and particularly white grievance.
In a recent podcast about Yellowstone, Sam Sanders of New York magazine said, “Kevin Costner sets up the imagery of conservative white grievance without any of the negative baggage.”
His interviewee, New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom, agreed: “It is a white grievance that you can feel good about.” She added that the context is a “show in post-Trump America, the political backdrop of white grievance and white reclamation that we are undergoing, trying to claw back to a sort of mythical 40, 50 years ago, when our systems worked better for white Americans than they did for non-white Americans.”
Got that?
Another piece at New York a couple of years ago was titled, “Yellowstone Is the Most (White, Male) American Show on TV.” It observed that at the heart of the show “lies an ideology that separates it from the prestige-knockoff pack, a desperate and threatened appeal to American identity and white masculinity.”
The debate over Yellowstone isn’t new; the show is in its fifth season, and after a brief hiatus, the latest episode drops on January 8. But the debate matters. As the most popular scripted show on cable TV — the season premiere in November garnered 12 million viewers — and as the work of Taylor Sheridan, who is now one of our most important writers for television, it is a significant cultural artifact.
So is the hostile and racially reductive critique of the show accurate?
It is certainly true that the protagonist (and antihero of the show), John Dutton, is white. The family patriarch and owner of the Rhode Island–sized Yellowstone ranch in Montana, Dutton fights off hostile forces threatening his land-empire through political subterfuge and murder — you know, the way all white people do.
That you can’t help but sympathize with Dutton, despite his loathsome methods, is a count against the show, although too much shouldn’t be made of this.
Dutton has charisma on his side — he’s played by big-time star Kevin Costner, who looks like the Marlboro Man and sounds like Clint Eastwood. And the scenery at his ranch is shot so beautifully that Albert Bierstadt would be envious. Just looking at the show, you can’t help but occasionally wonder if preserving such magnificence isn’t worth stringing up a developer or two.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that the defense of an embattled or doomed way of life oftentimes has romantic appeal, and as Mafia movies and TV shows from The Godfather to The Sopranos long ago established, amoral familialism can make for excellent entertainment.
Taylor Sheridan, who’s so busy now that he makes Elon Musk look underemployed, has been at pains to deny that Yellowstone is a conservative show.
About this, he is correct. It has no sympathy for capitalists, corporations, or economic development. But it is decidedly populist — and right-leaning populist — in its disdain for these things. By skewering assorted coastal elites while taking an unsentimental view of Native Americans, it steadfastly refuses to bend to contemporary progressive pieties.
In its appreciation for land, place, family, and tradition, the show channels Wendell Berry via the ethos of the Wyatt Earp Vendetta Ride.
In the world of Yellowstone, property is king. A signature scene from season 1 has John Dutton happening upon a group of Asian tourists who’ve come dangerously close to a “friendly” grizzly bear lounging in a meadow on his property. He exits his truck, warns them to get back from the bear, and explains that they are trespassing because he owns this land as far as they can see.
When one of the tourists opines that it’s unfair for one person to own so much land and that it should be shared with others, Dutton fires a couple of shots in the air to hustle the group back to their tour bus, growling, “This is America — we don’t share land here.”
This scene is typical of the show. It is faintly ridiculous (really, the tourists think the grizzly bear is friendly?), unquestionably heavy-handed (no one is missing the point between the rifle blasts), and still and all, pungent, memorable, and entertaining, not to say laugh-out-loud funny.
You could squint a certain way and say this vignette is advancing a veiled critique of America, or subtly skewering Dutton for his blinkered chauvinism. Yet it’s obvious who gets the better of this exchange, and it isn’t the foreign tourists scurrying ridiculously back to their bus.
Is there anything characteristically “white” about this? Well, a controlled experiment testing the proposition would be for progressive critics of the show to go around trespassing on the property of various nonwhite people — whether a postage-stamp-sized lawn in a city or a considerable spread someplace else — and see if they get a warm and welcoming reaction.
I doubt this experiment would go well; protecting what’s yours is a universal American, nay, human, quality.
The race angle doesn’t work on another level: Important Dutton adversaries are also white. Dan Jenkins, a well-heeled developer and sworn enemy of the Yellowstone ranch, is as Caucasian as John Dutton. What divides them isn’t race or even class (Dutton doesn’t lack for financial resources), but their vision for the valley’s land.
Then, there’s the notion that the land is somehow “white” because the white man stole it from the Indians. The show doesn’t have any problem acknowledging Native American claims. The chairman of the local tribe, Thomas Rainwater, has a vision of buying back all the land with the profits from a casino project and returning it to pristine pasture.
In the first episode, Dutton and Rainwater have a dispute when Dutton’s cattle stray onto reservation land and Rainwater refuses to give them back. Dutton says that if Rainwater acts like a thief, he’ll treat him like one. Rainwater asks how Dutton can sit on his massive haul of property and accuse anyone else of being a thief.
Kathryn VanArendonk of New York magazine writes, “Dutton has no answer, and Yellowstone doesn’t either. Instead, Rainwater gets classified as another of Dutton’s many adversaries — as an opposition to the things that make John Dutton who he is, an otherness to Dutton’s whiteness.”
Rainwater is not an “other” so much as someone who wants the same thing Dutton does — namely, the land — and is willing to scheme and maneuver to try to get it. The spirit of their relationship is captured in the quip from Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, about his geopolitical rival Francis I, king of France: “My cousin Francis and I are in perfect accord. He wants Milan, and so do I.”
As for there being “no answer” to Rainwater’s gibe — yeah, we aren’t going to readily undo century-old injustices, when, even if this were a simple proposition, the direct perpetrators and victims are long dead.
Cottom of the New York Times complains that the show “acknowledges white land theft and Native American grievance, but it does not make a case for reparations.”
There’s your elevator pitch, right there — a soapy neo-Western TV show devoted to agreement among all major players on the necessity of Native American reparations. Cormac McCarthy, Louis L’Amour, and Elmore Leonard could collaborate on that one and it’d still be a clunker.
(By the way, Cottom’s use of the phrase “Native American grievance” is interesting. Whereas Dutton is embattled, Rainwater is actually aggrieved. There isn’t a raft of commentary about how Yellowstone has a compelling subplot in Native American grievance, though, because it is “white grievance” that is the fashionable phrase and concept.)
Race aside, Taylor Sheridan says that one of the basic questions that he wanted to examine with the show was, “When you have a kingdom, and you are the king, is there such a thing as morality?”
This seems right to me. John Dutton, like any good medieval king, has his poisonously rivalrous brood of children; his thane in the person of the ranch’s enforcer Rip Wheeler; and various knights, the ranch-hand loyalists who are branded with the Yellowstone “Y.”
The same way you might admire, say, King Æthelstan’s proficiency in uniting Anglo-Saxon England in the tenth century but not endorse his methods, you might have a soft spot for Dutton’s shrewdness and staying power while realizing the answer to Sheridan’s question — whether such a king can produce a morality worthy of the name — is emphatically “no.”
“Do what’s best for the ranch” is a fine rule of thumb if it involves, say, implementing the business plan; it’s an exercise in moral bankruptcy if it is used to determine whether to murder an inconvenient ranch hand.
The true hero of Yellowstone is traditional masculinity as reflected in the ideal of the American cowboy. (New York magazine naturally calls it “masculine fragility.”)
Of course, there’s an exaggerated emphasis on fisticuffs and violence. But in a show where most people are unhappy, the grace notes tend to come via the bunkhouse where the ranch hands socialize among themselves, and in honeyed moments of appreciation for the outdoors and horses.
It is to Sheridan’s credit that these moments don’t come across as hokum and are quite affecting. If Yellowstone recognizes that there are some things that only guys can do — sheer physical strength matters — it has a broader appreciation for toughness.
The second-most compelling character in the show after John Dutton is his viperish daughter, Beth. There’s nothing wrong with her that a lifetime of therapy, AA meetings, and a religious conversion wouldn’t fix. But she’s tough as nails, which is why she can have a corporate career and still fully partake of the Dutton family ethic (for better or worse).
In a culture that relentlessly boosts college degrees and other credentials, Yellowstone at its best is an oasis of a different way of looking at accomplishment and value. If we don’t need a show about reparations for Native Americans, we could use more shows doing for HVAC repairmen, plumbers, and electricians what Yellowstone does for cowboys. Since none of these professions provides occasion for gorgeous scenery, or has the romantic resonance of the American West, or lends itself to storytelling and especially meditations on the nature of justice and law and order, that’s obviously not going to happen (although Mike Rowe has done more than his part).
This aspect of Yellowstone must account for a large part of its appeal. The progressive critics who see the show through the prism of “white grievance” are only proving that they, not Taylor Sheridan, are the ones obsessed with race.