The most important television series of our time -the one that best raises the critical tension between the world that has not finished dying and the one that has not just been born- is hardly known in Spain. In the United States, for years it has been breaking audiences, motivating sociology essays and fueling political controversies. We are talking about Yellowstone, the creation of Taylor Sheridan starring Kevin Costner, which is broadcast here by SkyShowtime. Pay another platform? I say that enjoying the five seasons of Yellowstone already justifies that subscription, and even the loss of any other platform in exchange.
John Dutton’s (Costner) titanic struggle to preserve the legacy of his ancestors – the largest ranch in Montana – underpins the plot. The Dutton family will defend itself with the law and without it against those who plan to take their land from them, whether they are greedy developers, investors from New York and California, or the Indian reservation claiming their original property. But the Yellowstone ranch is nothing more than the synecdoche of a traditional way of life threatened not by predatory capitalism, but by a woke ideology that goes with it much better than the new identitarian left would like to admit.
Like Clint Eastwood before him, Sheridan turns the stereotype of the Marlboro man on its head by transcending the mere tantrum of politically incorrect, just as stomach-churning as correct. The edge of the script penetrates so deeply and respectfully into the psychology of that canceled masculinity that it comes out the other end: Monica, John’s native daughter-in-law, tells him when he sees him cornered by her enemies: “Now you are the Indian.” Thus, a natural alliance is established between cowboys and Indians, both species in danger of extinction under the advance of the post-industrial economic paradigm.
But it is a series of characters, not a thesis. And maybe Beth Dutton is the real protagonist. Raised among men—she’s tougher, more ruthless, loyal, and smarter than they are—she deals with harrowing teenage trauma. She is only consoled by her reciprocated love for her by the ranch foreman, Rip. “You wouldn’t fill a thimble with my faith in humanity,” Beth confesses to Rip before giving in to the tenderness.
In Yellowstone, there is a quiet demand for marriage and motherhood -a source of permanent conflict between what is projected and what is real, but at the same time a safe refuge for affection, as Monica’s character teaches- not as outdated institutions that oppress women , but rather as real needs that rather protect her from a hypocritical world that is only lip service. Family against the elements.
Yellowstone’s happy paradoxes throw off the commonplaces of our public debate. They show that a rancher can love nature better than any activist (John ends up rescuing an environmentalist from jail and welcomes her to the ranch, in an eloquent exercise of moral miscegenation, of ideological levelling). That the family is paradise until it becomes hell, because cattle raising is the art of Cain and the ranch of this Cainite family figures the evolution of man from barbarism to civilization… until civilization becomes barbaric and conservatism appears as an alternative to an undesirable progressivism. That cattle exploitation can be a dam against financial speculation. That violence is only instructive when it begins with oneself, like an arduous asceticism through which an orphaned stable boy must go through the same as the heir to the family saga. And that women can play far more dominant social roles than any testosterone cowboy.
In fact, Beth’s everyday attributes – Kelly Reilly’s performance is prodigious: I can’t remember anything like it – are big cars, alcohol, uninhibited sexuality and a fearsome position among financial elites; Next to her, any cowboy represents an Edenic figure who does not know the origin of evil. Beth’s irreconcilable enemy is her older brother, Jamie, weak-willed, tormented by scruples and ambition, whose role raises a plausible monument to moral ambiguity. Thus, the series intones, by affirmation or denial, the moving apology of an outdated strength that men and women show equally, these are very capable of punching their faces shut in scenes that oscillate between John Ford and Sam Peckinpah.
Beyond the accusations of impropriety or the melodramatic concessions, Sheridan composes a majestic contemporary western that evokes both the parental hatreds of Succession and the ritualized violence of The Sopranos -John Dutton is a mounted godfather- and the Hobbesian premise of Deadwood. There is no right or wrong, Nietzsche insists through the mouths of various characters: there is a morality for slaves and another for masters. Only the cowboy’s code of honor is inflexible, and he stamps himself on the skin with a red-hot iron.
It is easy to attribute the success of Yellowstone in the US to the collective imagination of a country that entrusted the construction of its national epic to the western genre. But the validity of the cultural wars invites us to think that this milestone of American television will be exportable. “I am the wall against which progress is beaten,” Costner-Dutton proudly proclaims, lamenting the survival of cowards while refusing to show up when a fictional president easily identifiable with Trump’s populist opportunism visits Montana. “A fake cowboy” in the eyes of the real ones.
For the rest, you have to be blind, deaf or have a taste ruined by ideology not to celebrate the vision of a rider fused with his mount, leading cattle through wild mountains, silhouetted against the sunset. Or not to be moved by the strumming of a melancholic guitar in the hands of a gruff-voiced cowboy who laments or resigns, since country is nothing more than the flamenco of the old West.
Yellowstone is much more than a powerful manifesto of conservative environmentalism. It narrates the eternal drama of the man attached to his peace who, to defend it, has no choice but to prepare the war.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project