Hollywood Still Doesn't Get Montana
Dear Friends,
By the time you read this, I’ll be catching a flight to Missoula with my kids. I’m sure I’ll have more to share from this year’s Montana adventures, but for now here’s an updated piece from the archive. It first appeared in lengthier form in December, 2022, so it will be new to more than half of you. If you saw it the first time around, you’ll appreciate that I’ve trimmed it considerably.
I don’t have time to develop this question today, but I wonder if what’s happened to Montana — in real life and in pop culture representations — might be happening to lots of places.
Not long ago I saw a man drinking yerba mate on a park bench. He was from Uruguay, where I taught for seven months in the year 2000, and almost as soon as I waxed nostalgic about it, he shook his head. He felt the same way, but it was all foreigners buying up the houses now, pricing out young people — even mid-career people like him. So he was drinking yerba mate in State College, Pennsylvania, wishing he was home.
I’d love to know in the comments: Has the same thing happened to you?
Take care,
Josh
Hollywood Still Doesn't Get Montana
I have feelings about California actors playing Montana cowboys who look on mournfully as their way of life fades. By which I mean Yellowstone and, more specifically, a moment from Season 5 where Kayce Dutton gazes at a cattle roundup with a blend of yearning, sorrow, and nostalgia. While some of my friends from other places take me to task for confusing a show with real life and unfairly blaming the actors for scenes dreamed up by the writers, every Montanan reading this knows exactly what I mean.
There are plenty of movies and television series set in Montana that are demonstrably absurd. But Yellowstone aspires to truth telling, sometimes stridently so, which makes the things it gets wrong more grievous. The show isn’t meant to simply entertain: it advances a serious moral premise about the threats that developers and speculators pose to many Montanans.
But what Kayce Dutton mourns in the scene above is a California fantasy about Montana. It jostles those of us who grew up there out of our TV dream, and it does so cruelly, reminding us that the show is another form of the very conquest it claims to critique. You might say that the effect is similar to what a Bostonian would have felt if it had been possible then to watch a television series in which British actors impersonated New England minutemen while claiming to tell the story of American independence.
If you think I’m being too righteous about it, you might listen to Adam Beach, who organized a boycott of Yellowstone before its release. This was because Kelsey Asbille, who plays Kayce Dutton’s indigenous wife Monica, either falsely claimed Cherokee ancestry or claimed it without being able to prove it. This was (and remains) no small matter, especially after the New York Times cited Asbille unironically as an example of how important ethnic authenticity is when casting characters these days. Taylor Sheridan, Kevin Costner, and Asbille herself have all attempted to outlast this embarrassment by ignoring it, and I suppose they have largely succeeded so far as public relations go.
The representation issues raised by Yellowstone are multilayered, and I am all too aware of the pitfalls of trying to claim authenticity as a Montanan, myself. Waxing too righteous about identity invites someone with stronger bona fides to call you out as a fraud, and these purity contests are most ridiculous among white people. I am not the person to write an indigenous critique of Yellowstone, and some may say my credentials as a native Montanan have waned considerably in the thirty-odd years since I lived there.
But being born and raised in a place still counts for something. I was born on a ranch not unlike this one outside Libby, Montana. My parents worked there as caretakers before they built their own house on twenty acres in the hills above Troy. All of my formative memories go back to that corner of northwestern Montana. I watch Yellowstone in part because the land is a significant character in the show, and those timbered ridgelines unlock a longing within me whenever I see them. I am still trying to decide is how much responsibility the show has to get Montana “right,” who gets to decide what “right” is, and whether my visceral sense that the show gets some serious things wrong amounts to more than a pinch of snuff.
Maybe it’s cardboard cutouts all the way down.