I’ve already (sort of) reviewed 1883 here, but seeing as Yellowstone is a cultural phenomenon widely regarded by right-wing critics (who should know better) as an antidote to wokeness, and sheepish over my own relentless negativity, which inhibits my poor suffering wife from enjoying beloved shows like this, I resolved not only to watch Yellowstone, but to avoid critical interjection altogether. Yea, I would go one step further and pretend to like it so as not to ruin her experience.
Still, the psychological burden was such that I found it necessary, on the first night of this torment, to ingest a 50 milligram THC gummy. Mis-dosed to the upside, I guess, because one of my eyeballs began to spin around in my head like a slot machine reel. I fell sideways and drooled at the screen, thinking myself quite clever at first, the gummy having created so much visual static that I was figuratively unable to discern characters other than the familiar Kevin Costner. Figuratively!
Even so, I was wincing from insipid dialogue and began to sneer and mutter “soap opera” among other epithets. Some cows had crossed into Indian territory and 2 dozen people of various factions were inexplicably lined up at a fence pointing guns at each other, waiting for Kevin Costner to helicopter in and tell them “that’s enough”.
“Do you want to turn it off?” my wife asked, and I cursed myself silently, straightened a bit, and did my best Manchurian Candidate: “No, no, this show is really good! The best!” And she bought it! LOL. Back to quiet enjoyment just like the normies do. For her.
For me, bouts of THC-induced self-loathing at my overactive critical faculty. Do I enjoy anything any more? Is there any decent entertainment out there? Why am I not working on one of my own projects rather than engaging in another of these fatuous critical exercises? Is the weed making me think this is much worse than it is? It can’t be this ridiculous?
As a teenager, I sometimes made the mistake of watching movies while high on LSD. Every time, without fail, I’d be struck by how bad the acting was and how phony it all seemed. I wondered if the gummy had induced a flashback. Anyway, the acting didn’t seem as bad as the dialogue, so maybe not.
I sobered up to round out the season and the dialogue seemed to improve, though it often gets mired in soap opera tropes, whining about how daddy wasn’t there or emotional breakups over nothing at all. Taylor Sheridan, our auteur, does at times have a knack for memorable gritty aphorisms, even if I can’t remember any right now.
Sheridan probably knows how to ride a horse, has spent some time on a ranch, got punched in the face once or twice, etc., so he has a leg up on Hollywood writers. His experience gives Yellowstone a veneer of authenticity. But Taylor’s parents wanted better for him than to be a ranch hand, so they sent him off to college, where he was fully brainwashed with Marxist revisionist US history, earning a Bachelor of Dances With Wolves.
The Duttons of Yellowstone, led by patriarch Kevin Costner, are meant to represent America itself. Greedy, rapacious, murdering capitalists. “This is America, we don’t share land!” Costner sneers to a Chinaman moralizing about the glory of communism. The vast tract of land the Duttons inhabit doesn’t want them, we are told, hates them, probably owing to their whiteness, but they sure are a resilient blight on the environment. Meanwhile, their very presence has corrupted the noble red man, making him a gritty anti-hero too, even if his handed-down wisdom of the ages remains impeccably pure.
Costner’s TV daughter is a laughable trope of a businessman written from sheer ignorance. Her work is destroying companies and the people who run them. She’ll buy your company and fire everyone just to amuse herself. Before the firing, though, she will expertly insult your CEO’s manhood for weeks, shattering his ego, cuckolding him for good measure. She has no morality other than pleasure in making others suffer. Even Upton Sinclair, that pioneer of one-dimensional characters built from ideology, would balk at committing this character to the page.
But she likes to have sex with cowboys so I guess it’s not woke? Sheridan and Costner snicker at right-wingers’ blinding infatuation with testosterone.
Man in a cowboy hat riding a horse, getting in fistfights, at least he hasn’t cut his own dick off! This is not a victory in the culture war, friends, this is ceding ground.
To elaborate on the Dutton mythos: the men are psychotic murderers and possibly serial killers. Every problem is resolved with murder. Recruits are figuratively-no-literally branded into their cult and bouts of conscience / attempts to desert are met with, you guessed it, murder. It’s an evolution of the mafia movie, which has helped condition us to accept villains as heroes. Movie mafioso love to exclaim “We’re no different from businessmen or anyone, we’re just more honest about it, hey, fuggedaboutit. Who’s naive now, Kay?” Hollywood writers hate businessmen so much that they invent their own realities of business, imagining Monsanto hit squads rappelling into family farms for wet work as toothless bureaucrats cower in shame, wishing for the day they could enforce some damn accountability on these fat cats.
This sort of deception, disguised as art, is how leftists argue against capitalism - figuratively! Umm, literally?
But business is the antithesis of violence - the principle of voluntary trade in action. The rise of the businessmen is a result of societies’ recognition of property rights and the freedom of action that entails. Businessmen are the appliers of science at scale (science is useless without application, contra modern sophistries). Take any icon of American business: Cornelius Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, J.J. Hill, for example. These men made vast fortunes for themselves while lifting up all of humanity - quite fig-er-literally! They sank their entire lives, every waking minute, into their operations, creating more value in single decisions than armies of slaves could under Pharaoh’s stupid, inbred orders. American businessmen build, regardless of what your Marxist professors tell you. They do not destroy, Taylor Sheridan.
(Let’s not mince words over modern fascist “business” and how much or little it resembles the golden age of capitalism, or how in that golden age there were many crooks in league with the state now held as examples of businessmen by Taylor Sheridan’s teachers.)
History and truth must be saved from the likes of Yellowstone, before it’s erased. Watch it but do not let it seduce you.