"BEEN DOING COWBOY SH!T ALL DAY"

June 21, 2024 3:01 PM

"The Wild West looms large in the American psyche, so it’s no surprise it plays a prominent role in the stories we tell in film and television. But there’s one writer who’s been able to take the essence of the Old West and modernize it for today’s savvy audience:" 'How Taylor Sheridan is redefining the Western genre'. 'But the show’s (Yellowstone) focus on white-male resentment hardly distinguishes it from other prestige fare — sure, Yellowstone is about mad men, but so was Mad Men.' from: ' How the Cowboy was Colonized'
posted by clavdivs (25 comments total)

I really enjoyed Sheridan's work in Hell Or High Water and Wind River. I haven't been able to follow him into Yellowstone, as I guess "full western" just doesn't work for me. But his character studies have seriously impressed me and made me think about how I tell stories myself.
posted by jordantwodelta at 3:14 PM on June 21 [3 favorites]

Taylor Sheridan wants to make sure that everyone knows that real cowboys aren't historically marginalized people taking whatever work is available to them; they're white men in $800 hats doing tricks on $250,000 horses and if one of the characters ever isn't cowboy enough he can learn how to be a cowboy at "the place cowboying was invented" which is [checks notes] a ranch that Taylor Sheridan owns.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 3:22 PM on June 21 [19 favorites]

Montanan's loathe that show and everyone depicted in it. It's about as western as a pink cowboy hat on 5th Avenue.
posted by ITravelMontana at 3:24 PM on June 21 [7 favorites]

But his character studies have seriously impressed me

I agree. The character that Sheridan plays in Yellowstone reminds of the observent show horse, the way he counters Jimmy, preparing him. Kinda fuqing mean but. Yellowstone may be the audience gem but the characters in Mayor of Kingstown grabbed me esp.with the S2 end scene.

"Kingstown sits on the edge of lake Michigan surrounded by nearly a million acres of forest. trapped by resources it cannot extract, resembles an island more than anything. And like islands, any resource it can extract, is not worth price of exporting it.
so, like most islands, we must sell the only resource of value, the island itself. Hawaii has white sands, the allure of the tropics, so they sell that. Kingstown has no dreams so it must offer the nightmare and we must sell our failures. our allure is prison labor and the union wages to extract it. if failure of our society could be distilled into one city, this would be the city and the miseries are free."

Has Taylor Sheridan re-re invented the hard boiled western noir? Viseral. The periprostatic aforwarned shadow.
it's as if re-action is prologue three bureaucracies deep.

posted by clavdivs at 3:39 PM on June 21 [1 favorite]

I love how the first link says: "The struggles of a modern working-class family living in rural America had not been as eloquently portrayed on television before now".

This, when we are told the ranch is "the size of Rhode Island".

Talk about hitting the nail of the head of what is wrong with how we conceived of power and who counts as working class in America. I can't think of a better way to demonstrate that. What a crazy characterization.
posted by Carillon at 4:19 PM on June 21 [32 favorites]

When I saw the phrase "redefining the Western genre," I thought of a review I read recently of Meek's Cutoff, a Kelly Reichardt film I haven't seen yet but hope to see soon.

(Y'all, there's no Fanfare entry for Meek's Cutoff. Seems like the sort of thing MeFites would enjoy.)

The 2011 Guardian review of Meek's Cutoff says,

What's most striking about Meek's Cutoff is how radical it is on every level. Most obviously, it's a western that prioritises the female perspective. "Women are usually the objects. But I always wondered what, say, John Wayne in The Searchers must have looked like to the woman cooking his stew." Reichardt researched the journals of women who had travelled on the Oregon Trail in the 19th century with the real-life Meek. "When you read these accounts you see just how much the traditional male viewpoint diminishes our sense of history. I wanted to give a different view of the west from the usual series of masculine encounters and battles of strength, and to present this idea of going west as just a trance of walking."

It would be so interesting to see how our image of the West, and American history, would shift if we had as many widely-told stories about all the other kinds of people who lived there as we do about white men.
posted by kristi at 4:49 PM on June 21 [14 favorites]

I could have sworn there was a Fanfare for Meek's Cutoff, are there posts that are getting deleted??
posted by Carillon at 7:21 PM on June 21

Them's some pampered cow pokes. When I was growing up in the SouthEast cattle was a hard life. The cows are not too bright, needed constant work, and just when you thought your were clear, some motherfucker would poach your steer for 10 lbs of steak.

Hard work from dawn to dusk. Nobody got to go to fancy schooling on a cowpokes dime.
posted by pdoege at 7:47 PM on June 21 [5 favorites]

I haven't ever watched Yellowstone (despite local media fawning about Taylor Sheridan) because it's not my vibe even as a Texan by birth, though I admit to being tempted by the prequel with Harrison Ford. But my understanding is that it's about cattle barons, aka ranchers, not about actual cowboys. Kind of like Dynasty or Dallas but with a different kind of luxury clothing and gear: a soap opera for the 2020s. Is this wrong?
posted by gentlyepigrams at 8:13 PM on June 21 [8 favorites]

struggles of a modern working-class family

... firing an assault rifle at native Americans from his private helicopter. In the very first episode.
posted by CynicalKnight at 8:27 PM on June 21 [13 favorites]

'David Oyelowo on playing justice seekers, peacekeepers and men on a mission'
posted by clavdivs at 8:28 PM on June 21 [2 favorites]

Yellowstone is about as far away from Mad Men as you can get while still being the same media format
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 8:31 PM on June 21

CTrl f Yellowstone, replace with "reservation dogs" , becomes a way more coherent article.

Btw reservation dogs is easily the best thing on tv in the past decade.
posted by Keith Talent at 9:46 PM on June 21 [6 favorites]

A few people around me love, love, love Yellowstone, but mostly because I think they love Beth. I can't with it, because it's another show that celebrates rich people and those adjacent to them being awful because they can be - because they're rich.

It's a weird power fantasy (as much as the CoD games from earlier are)
posted by drewbage1847 at 10:38 PM on June 21 [3 favorites]

I appreciated that Yellowstone resolved the matter of all the missing and murdered Indigenous women by doming a lone psychopath in a field. The healing just sort of poured out of the screen.
posted by mph at 10:53 PM on June 21 [9 favorites]

Yes to Reservation Dogs.

I have mixed feelings about Wind River. It was shot on location and funded in part by the tribes on the Wind River Reservation. It tried to raise an important issue of abuse, murder and disappearance of indigenous women. And yet… fuck that white male savior fantasy bullshit. In my personal head cannon the ending scene on Gannet peak is just the dying fantasy of Jeremy Renners character as he bleeds out from wounds in the climactic shootout.

Taylor Sheridan grew up on a ranch paid for by his rich cardiologist dad. He’s just the master’s boy now all grown up and with his trust fund managed to turn his pretend cowboy bullshit into a movie career.

The greatest western of all time was Unforgiven. And the best recent one was “The Harder they Fall”.
posted by interogative mood at 11:24 PM on June 21 [3 favorites]

When I was in rehab for a time a few years back my room mates were really in Yellowstone. I haven't thought it through but rehab and Yellowstone seem a perfect fit. I used to refer to it as Yellingstone because of all the powerful human drama, but it also gave me the squicks, the underlaying politics, the REAL MEN TAKE WHAT THEY WANTedness of the enterprise, and the branding. The fucking branding.
I was in an AA facility, a blue collar, street level facility, and perhaps it's that creepy element of self righteousness that so many people in AA have that made it so congruent.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 12:08 AM on June 22 [4 favorites]

The greatest Western of modern times is the Toy Story franchise, which has all the Western characteristics: the sense of a wide and hostile world, a deep ambivalence about identity and nostalgia, the discovery of each character’s virtues through action, a very high value on platonic male friendship, plots driven by movement through a dangerous environment, engagement with risk as a catalyst to character development, and as though to top it off, protagonists who are cowboys and cowgirls.

He’s the rootinest tootinest shootiest cowboy around!
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 1:35 AM on June 22 [16 favorites]

I always thought Yellowstone was the western version of HBO’s Succession.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:04 PM on June 22

Is this wrong?

No, and in fact I think it's the dominant business model of series television today. Make a show that's interesting enough up front to hook people (and reward binge watching) while slowly morphing into a soap opera where the setting of the show becomes a MacGuffin where the same relatable™ stuff as every other series plays out.
posted by rhizome at 2:50 PM on June 22 [3 favorites]

I always said Yellowstone was The Sopranos in Montana.
posted by The OTHER Brian at 5:43 PM on June 22 [2 favorites]

I always thought it was Succession with a whiff of farm manure.
posted by CynicalKnight at 7:37 PM on June 22

I don’t think that’s a new model. ER followed that exact model.
posted by interogative mood at 8:40 PM on June 22

Bonanza.
posted by clavdivs at 5:54 PM on June 23

If we are talking good Westerns, the Deadwood series needs to be mentioned

my god Ian McShane chewed up some scenery
posted by elkevelvet at 10:09 AM on June 24