Yellowstone’s culture-war bones are poking through the surface in Season 5

[TMC]

https://slate.com/culture/2022/11/ye...ican-rage.html

BY REBECCA ONION
NOV 13, 20228:00 PM

As a certified Yellowstone sicko who has been oddly compelled to watch every minute of Taylor Sheridan’s flagship show, full as it is of highly analyzable propaganda for cattle, hats, and the American way, I was surprised to find myself with a new feeling after watching the back-to-back episodes that open its fifth season: boredom, plus a little bit of sadness and fear. Yellowstone has always been reactionary, interested only in the feelings of a family of settlers that has owned a ranch since, well, around 1883, but now its concerns have narrowed, its flesh becoming gaunt and its culture-war bones poking closer to the surface.

There are soapy B and C plots in these first two episodes—a car accident leads to a lost pregnancy, two siblings torment one another as part of an ongoing rivalry—but the main dish is politics. It’s always been part of the show, to be sure, but now the subtext is text. John Dutton (Kevin Costner) has won a race to become Montana’s new GOP governor, telling the electorate that his opponent is “East Coast politics invading the mountains.” His signs read “Dutton: For the Land.”

At the beginning of the first episode, John is mostly pissed off about having won his election, because John Dutton is truly never satisfied. The season opens with him staring into the distance on election night, telling his daughter Beth (Kelly Reilly), who is his all-purpose aide and forever-loyal Girl Friday, when she congratulates him: “Joy ain’t what I’m feeling.” The Democratic candidate, who’s only lived in Montana for nine years, calls to concede. He asks John, putting a quavering question mark at the end of the sentence: “Hope you’ll fight as hard for my supporters as I’d fight for yours?” John replies, no hesitation: “I fight for what’s right. I don’t really care who supports it.”

This statement triggered an immediate eyeroll from me, accompanied by a jack-off motion. Immature, perhaps, but that’s more and more what Yellowstone deserves, as it continues its game of testing how far will we go to stay on John Dutton’s side. Multiple times, in the course of these two episodes, we hear straight from his mouth that he has only become governor in order to keep a proposed development project from ruining his ranch. In past seasons, through a series of negotiations, a bunch of city slickers have won the right to put in an airport and a housing development. You better believe John Dutton will do anything to stop this—even become a single-issue governor, caring only about running “out-of-staters” (including the money people funding this development, one of whom improbably calls the Duttons—wealthy and politically connected beyond belief—“****ing hillbillies”) out of town. They simply do not, you see, understand the importance of The Land—especially John Dutton’s ranch.

John Dutton has the governor’s office, but he does not want to be there. Mournful music plays over the scene of his inauguration, as a young Black girl sings the Star-Spangled Banner, her presence at this all-GOP party reinforcing the point Tressie McMillan Cottom made about the show earlier this year in the New York Times: Yellowstone, while being “conservative” if you use that word at its bluntest, is “multiethnic, multiracial, and multiclass,” offering “nominal diversity” that “implies that conservatives don’t hate anyone, as long as everyone is willing to conform to their way of life.” After the girl is done singing, Dutton tells the audience he’ll cancel the airport project. More than that, he’s going to tax the heck out of anyone who comes from out of state. He’ll double their property taxes, add a 6 percent sales tax, and new vehicle registration fees.

“The message I will send is this,” he says, each word almost mournful in its gruffness, in the Dutton way. “We are not your playground, we are not your haven from the pollution and traffic and mismanagement of your home states. This is our home. If you choose to make Montana your home, you will start treating it like a home, and not a vacation rental.”