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.
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I have a different relationship with stories than most people. It’s not possible for me to read a book or watch a serious drama without wanting to fall under its spell and believe in that world for as long as the story lasts. This is why we say that fiction lies in order to tell the truth. Much of the hyperbole that one finds in Deadwood or The Wire, for instance, is a necessary tool. The Shakespearean soliloquies that David Milch often gives his characters convey a figurative truth about hubris on the frontier or about the intelligence that often goes undetected in working people. David Simon aspires to a similar insight about Baltimore by peeling back new layers of the city in every season. There are plenty of tall tales in The Wire. Scott Templeton’s Pulitzer for thoroughly fraudulent reporting is one of them. But we understand that the point of that story is to highlight very real problems in the corporate newsroom. It rings true.
Yellowstone occasionally does this well. Places like Kalispell, Whitefish, and Bozeman have been steadily gentrifying since I graduated in 1993. I first became aware of the problem when Ted Turner bought the Flying D Ranch in 1989. Michael Keaton, David Letterman, Justin Timberlake, Bill Gates, and a host of other celebrities have purchased their own slice of the Last Best Place. And the conflict between working people and environmental activists has been raging unabated since the Timber Wars of the 1980s and 90s. Wolves have been a particular point of dispute after their reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park in 1995.
But the Yellowstone Dutton Ranch is not representative of most family ranching operations in Montana. It does not work even as a hyperbolic illustration of a home truth, because it falsely equates the Duttons’ fight to save their way of life with the struggles of the working class. Montana is a place that has been defined, since European settlement, by industrial barons like the Copper Kings in Butte and timber titans like Champion International and Plum Creek. John Dutton functions as one of these titans in the show, but he tries to speak for the common person. When he and Kayce, the only child that understands his vision, gaze wistfully into the distance, they are seeing what coastal elites see when they buy their Montana getaways: a feudal idyll in which the lord occasionally dresses like the serfs. Yellowstone is more like The Crown or Downton Abbey in that way. Rip Wheeler is just a rugged version of the beloved butler Carson, who accepts his place gratefully and without question.
This rankles because many Montanans still find themselves caught between the boom-and-bust economy of industrial extraction and its alternative: abject poverty. When environmental activists oppose industry, Montana laborers find themselves caught between two oppressors. One offers a paycheck. The other promises unemployment. This is why I have never been able to wholly reconcile my love of wilderness — and my love for my conservation-minded friends — with the knowledge that most Montanans don’t have the luxury of hearing “resource” as a dirty word. Unemployment following the wane of the timber industry wrought real devastation on my home community. If there is one truth about Montana that Yellowstone does its best to ignore, it is economic desperation. Which is the reason I felt I had to leave in the first place.
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Is there a more truthful story to tell about Montana? If so, it would be driven by contradictions. Montana has two opposing sides: the mountains and the plains. Montana is the place that James Welch recalls in Fools Crow as the Backbone of the World, a sacred land like the Navajo Dinétah. It is also the place where more than two hundred sleeping men, women, and children were massacred near the Marias River, an unfathomable level of vengeance for a single rancher’s death. Montana is the place where a bull elk in velvet can take your breath away. It is also the place where body slamming a journalist is more likely to boost your gubernatorial campaign than to torpedo it.
I have many fond memories of Montana. In those memories, I am leaping from ledges into deep water, gorging myself at church potlucks, climbing talus slopes to where springs bubble out of the mountainside, or eating huckleberries straight from the patch. But I also recall feeling like I did not belong to the human community as a young person. I remember marching (reluctantly) through the streets with my church during one of their revivals, when we tried to reenact the Battle of Jericho, strangely thrusting our neighbors — my basketball and football teammates — into the metaphorical role of enemies. I mourn classmates who fell prey to suicide and addiction and those who have suffered from domestic violence. I remember feeling the pull of that desperation when I came home for summer work with the Forest Service during my college years. There is a melancholy undertow in Montana that I am not certain I would have the strength to withstand if I lived there year-round.
I am still not certain what I yearn for when I return to Troy. What is it, exactly, that calls to me from those rugged mountains? It feels deeper than the bone somehow, and yet I cannot call it by its name. We all search for lost innocence in our home places, but Montana’s power is greater than that. A friend from Virginia once traveled home with me, and I took him to Kootenai Falls, a sacred place that locals and tourists experience differently. He said that he understood me better afterward than he ever had. But he could not express what it was that he understood. The churn of the water? The desolate yet lovely color scheme of black moss among the evergreens? The steep shelves of quartz, sandstone, and shale that flank the river channel? Neither of us left any wiser about what he had seen in the mirror of the place that revealed who I really was.
I come from ranching people a few generations back. One of my great-great grandfathers is a member of the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame. But his daughter went to college and married a businessman. She eventually left him and moved to Montana, where she remarried twice more. Her daughter, my grandmother, married at age sixteen, never finished high school, and lived the rest of her life in Libby, Montana, where I was born.
My grandmother always loved rodeos, though she rarely got to see them. Before she died, she gave me a pair of leather cuffs that may or may not have been worn by a real cowboy. I keep them on my bookshelf next to the last Montana license plate that I owned. I left Montana for good in 1997, but I kept renewing my driver’s license for three more years, hoping I’d find my way back. This story of exile is also what it means to be a Montanan.
Maybe I am a fool for thinking that stories can carry me home, but that is one of the reasons why I watch a show like Yellowstone. It’s also why I read James Welch and Mary Clearman Blew and William Kittredge. These authors speak from personal experience without sermonizing too broadly about what Montana is or ought to be, which is why my memories fit within their narrative worlds. There is no such place for me in the world of Yellowstone. As a native Montanan, I don’t think it is unreasonable — if the series aspires to high artistic standards — to expect there to be. This is what the show gets wrong by trying to be too right. But that, too, is a very Montana kind of error.
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Nice. And a framework for analysis of other places and representation. This one had a "New Yorker" feel and rhythm to it.
Very nice essay. Montana does have a melancholy culture, although maybe that is not true in the gentrified areas. Per capita it has high rates of various social ills.
I also watch Yellowstone for the scenery, including cattle, because I raise cattle. The TV show is too far from reality. Montana is not full of violent, murderous cowpokes. Hired hands are not branded with the ranch brand. The great majority of full-time ranches are out in the wind-swept prairie, and while those families enjoy ranching traditions, few imagine they are romantic characters. The ranchers who imagine they are living in a movie are probably newer folk who have a big hat and a new 4x4, but don't make their living raising cattle. Yellowstone is filmed in the Bitterroot Valley, a place that is growing its last crop - houses.
But the TV show is popular for more than violence and pretty faces. It provides a fantasy life of adventure and natural beauty and manliness to an audience of people who wish their lives are not commutes, bosses, office cubicles and if the money holds out, a family trip to some tourist trap.