What Yellowstone gets wrong by trying to be too right
And how I try to avoid the same trap
Last week I touched off a lively discussion on Facebook by observing that I have feelings about California actors playing Montana cowboys who look on mournfully as their way of life fades. I was referring to the show Yellowstone and, more specifically, to a moment from Season 5 where Kayce Dutton (played by Luke Grimes) gazes at a cattle roundup with a blend of yearning, sorrow, and nostalgia. While some of my friends from other places took me to task for confusing a show with real life and unfairly blaming the actors for scenes dreamed up by the writers, every Montanan in my feed knew exactly what I meant.
There are plenty of movies and television series set in Montana that are demonstrably absurd. Big Sky, for instance, provokes no outrage because it’s just ridiculous. 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 the narrative 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, of Smoke Signals, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and Flags of Our Fathers. Beach organized a boycott of Yellowstone before its release 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. Any attempt at doing so reminds me of the “What do you mean, ‘you people’?” scene from Tropic Thunder. Typically 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. It has been, as Willa Cather said of Nebraska, both the blessing and the curse of my life. 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.
When I traveled to Tennessee for college in the nineties, people spooked a little when they heard where I came from, because they first thought of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, or the Montana Freemen, a white Christian militia that faced off against the FBI. Back then I bristled at the suggestion that I was an extremist by association. Now I suspect that when people hear that I’m from Montana they see something more like Brad Pitt shadow casting over the Blackfoot River. But that is another extreme, and I still feel my short hairs rising even when the implication is kind.
Many Montanans share this defensive posture — a mixture of pride, defiance, and suspicion of outsiders — with special contempt reserved for the press and for Hollywood. The press is despised because it amplifies the underbelly of Montana life, like white nationalism and domestic terrorism. Hollywood represents California, the source of environmental activists and wealthy tourists, who both seem hell-bent on uprooting working people from their home communities by shutting down their livelihoods or by pricing them out through real estate inflation. Part of me will always be sad that I had to leave Montana to be a professor. I admire those who defied the odds, stayed put, and built solid lives for themselves.
At the same time, I recognize that the rigidity at the core of many Montanans’ identities isn’t much different from religious fundamentalism. And just as religious fundamentalists can only adhere to their doctrine by denying ambiguity, many Montanans aren’t terribly willing to own their own blind spots. Have you heard the one about what Montanans and surgeons have in common? Both are sometimes wrong, but never in doubt. Have you heard the one about Montanans and Texans? Montana is what Texans are really talking about when they think they are talking about Texas. (Thanks for that one, Kerry Fine!)
Montana has also changed in the years since my childhood. Take, for instance, a little shop in my hometown called Booze ‘N Bait. The name makes new acquaintances laugh, but it was an iconic place for years, a little cinder block building painted blue and green like the mountains and sky around it. I’ve always thought of it fondly, as a child thinks of a grandfather who smells of Copenhagen, as we all soften the rough edges of what we love. But outside of Montana the thought of buying a pint of Old Crow with your nightcrawlers is about as normal as abolishing the speed limit. Which Montana also did for a time.
I dropped in at the Booze ‘n Bait three years ago. The shop had moved into a larger space with a fresh coat of paint. I was in a rush, heading out to fish with my father. We are lowly bait fishermen in my family, and I was only after a carton of worms. But I froze once I stepped inside the store. The whole wall behind the counter glittered with assault rifles and ammunition, anything you might need to blaze away at the Feds if they ever set foot on your compound. I paid for the bait and left, hoping I hadn’t given myself away, but that sick feeling still haunts me. If this is what it now means to hail from Montana, I can’t shake the sense that it’s always meant something like this, that Kaczynski and the Freemen lie closer to the truth of what Montana is than Maclean’s four-count rhythm of a fly rod over clear waters.
And this is where I get stuck again, wondering whether I’m guilty of a different kind of nostalgia for a Montana that never was. Wondering if I might be, in that way, more like Kayce Dutton’s character than I’d like to admit.
But Yellowstone does not encourage this kind of thinking. There is no wondering about what the past really was — no irony, whatsoever, in how the Dutton family views its claim to the land or how the show represents the Duttons’ fight against outsiders. When a judge confides in John Dutton that he worries about the future of the state, just after sentencing an environmental activist to a lengthy prison term (an activist that Dutton just happened to be sleeping with), I can’t detect any sarcasm or self-awareness. It’s just straight nostalgia for a simpler time. Those moments — the lulls between the more hyperbolic plot points — are what make me angry, because they are not merely dishonest, they are dangerous. It was this kind of radical forgetting that allowed me to grow up without any knowledge of indigenous nations in Montana. Pretty much everything I know now about First Nations, which is still not a lot, I learned during and after graduate school. A more violent version of this erasure caused James Welch to grow up in Browning, Montana, ignorant of much of his own heritage as a Blackfoot.
This is the core of what chafes me about the show: not the big shootouts or the murders or other razzle-dazzle plot elements. It’s that the show tries, in its quieter moments, to be sincere. And in those moments it really is just full of manure.