‘Yellowstone’: Gambling for Big Stakes

Courage is being scared to death … and saddling up anyway.
                                                   —John Wayne

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the western was the most popular Hollywood movie genre. At its high point, in the 1950s, westerns outnumbered all other genres combined.

Stagecoach, by John Ford, was the biggest hit of 1939, and made John Wayne’s career. In Winchester ’73 (1950), Rock Hudson, heavily made-up, in one of his first performances, played an American Indian. (Today that wouldn’t be “correct”.) High Noon (1952) and The Wild Bunch (1969) were among many other blockbusters.

Some subdivisions of the western movie include neo-westerns (Brokeback Mountain, No Country for Old Men), acid westerns (El Topo), epic westerns (set during large-scale turbulent times, such as a war or profound economic change, such as Giant), horror westerns (Bone Tomahawk), martial arts westerns (Kung Fu), meat-pie westerns (set in Australia, such as Quigley Down Under and The Proposition), revisionist westerns (questioning the simple hero-versus-villain dualism, such as Dances with Wolves, which can also be classified as an epic western), sci-fi westerns (Westworld), space westerns (Firefly) and spaghetti westerns (produced and/or directed by Italians or other Europeans, such as Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly).

Yellowstone is a neo-western and the first scripted series from Paramount. Neo-westerns look at the inner landscape of the Old West through the prism of today’s cultural values.

It is also classified as a “ranch story”, one of the seven basic plots for all westerns, as listed by Frank Gruber in his book The Pulp Jungle. The other six are railroad, empire, revenge, cavalry/Indian, outlaw and marshal stories.

Yellowstone is Kevin Costner’s first appearance in an extended series. Costner has long been identified with the revitalisation of the American western and a figurehead for Native American rights, most notably for his film Dances with Wolves, which he starred in, directed and produced. It won seven Academy Awards in 1990, including Best Picture and Best Director. Much of the dialogue was in the Lakota language with English subtitles. It was the first western to win the Best Picture award since Cimarron (1931) and is included for preservation by the Library of Congress.

Yellowstone was created, written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, who first made his reputation as an actor, playing the character David Hale in Sons of Anarchy, but turned his hand to writing screenplays, notably the acclaimed contemporary Western trilogy of Sicario (2015), Hell or High Water (2016) and Wind River (2017). Hell or High Water was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture. Sheridan has been credited as a prime innovator in the development of the new western, retaining the themes of the classics (horses, bad guys, gunfights) but with a closer look at the effects of the modern world on the western lifestyle, including Mexican immigration and drug cartels.

Verne Gay of Newsday said Taylor Sheridan wants to “demolish old myths and old storybook heroes like Dutton, while disorienting viewers just enough to get them to think about why the demolition is necessary”. Sheridan said in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter that when he was a full-time actor in the popular series Sons of Anarchy, the amount of exposition he was required to memorise in scripts gave him an “allergy” to exposition. He now prefers “absurdly simple plots” with the focus on character. However, the master film-maker Alfred Hitchcock, defending exposition in 1970 at the American Film Institute, said:

There’s a great confusion between the words mystery and suspense. And the two things are absolutely miles apart. You see, mystery is an intellectual process, like in a whodunit, but suspense is essentially an emotional process. Therefore you can only get the suspense element going by giving the audience information. I dare say you see many films which have mysterious goings-on, you don’t know what’s going on, and why the man is doing this and why that and you are about a third of the way through a film before you realise what it’s all about and to me that’s completely wasted footage because there’s no emotion to it.

In the stunning Sicario (the title is Spanish slang for “hit man”), directed by Denis Villeneuve, the first part of a trilogy on the “modern day American frontier”, Sheridan, as screenwriter, focuses on the US border war on drugs. It is a revenge story about a covert FBI operation against a Mexican drug cartel. Sheridan’s dynamic characterisations draw us in and hold us from the opening scenes. The film develops in a unique, opaque way, with innovative use of helmet-cams, drone photography, surveillance footage and brutal action that is often suggested but not shown. It is full of both mystery and suspense. Sheridan commented:

Sicario is written on a five-act structure and a five-act structure within that. I leave the protagonist for 20 minutes at the climax of the movie in Sicario to follow the villain … I look at each movie as, “How am I breaking the rules this time?”

Sam Shepard, in his surrealist-western musical The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing His Wife, also addressed this crisis of the modern cowboy, in deconstructing the legend of Pecos Bill, who was, as Vanessa Byrnes of Theatre Review said, “the Texan giant who ‘dug out the Rio Grande with his bare hands—just to get a drink of water’”.

Fragmentation of the vast mega-ranch, the strengthening political and economic power of Native Americans, urban and environmental pressure, GMO crops and the rising controversy over gun control are other factors altering the landscape of the American West. Larry McMurtry, author of the Lonesome Dove series, said, “the western notion of masculinity goes back a long way. It doesn’t allow for women, and it’s also racist—it doesn’t allow for other cultures”.

In Yellowstone, Costner plays John Dutton, the flinty patriarch of the 30,000-acre Yellowstone Ranch in Montana, the largest contiguous cattle ranch in America. He is a widower with four grown children, Lee, Beth, Jamie and Kayce.

Jamie, the family solicitor, has successfully defended the ranch against a land developer claiming eminent domain. But Thomas Rainwater, the head of a local Native American tribe, wants to acquire the vast Dutton acreage and return the land to his people. This is one of the key themes in the series. He also wants to build an Indian-run casino on the property.

Native Americans have cut the barbed wire separating the tribal land from the Yellowstone ranch, allowing Dutton cattle to drift over. The Indians claim the cattle; Lee and Kayce ride to investigate; there is a dispute and a shootout, and Lee is murdered in cold blood by the brother of Kayce’s Native American wife. In retaliation, Kayce, a former US Seal, kills his wife’s brother. Knowing that this incident will affect his marriage, Kayce falsely tells his wife that the two men killed each other, but anomalies in forensics indicate an execution-style murder. Rainwater knows that if Kayce is convicted it will be the end of the Dutton ranch. Crucial evidence is subsequently tampered with.

Beth Dutton, the most business-savvy of the children, has been alienated from the others since the traumatic death of her mother, resulting in substance abuse and anti-social behaviour. But when her father reveals that he has cancer, Beth sobers up and applies her business skills to help fight the threat to the property, discovering hidden financial weaknesses in the accounting of the developers’ balance sheets. She initiates plans to neutralise the threat with secret majority share purchases. John Dutton makes Beth the executor of his ranch, with the proviso that she never sell it or allow her siblings to split it up. Kayce finally confesses to his wife that he killed her brother in self-defence.

Costner was originally part of the cast of another fine Western, Tombstone, but withdrew from the project over artistic differences on the character of Wyatt Earp, who he felt should be the focus. In Tombstone, Val Kilmer, in a tour de force of characterisation, creates the most memorable Doc Holliday to date. Costner, stubbornly, went on to make his own movie, titled Wyatt Earp, which was a box-office bomb, while Tombstone became an award-winning smash.

Costner’s portrayal of John Dutton in Yellowstone is very strong. He has the real-life business acumen to play this kind of cowboy mogul. Originally a Republican, a supporter and friend of Ronald Reagan, he switched his affiliation in the 1990s but, although campaigning for both Al Gore and Barack Obama, he still made campaign contributions to Republican Phil Gramm, who represented Texas in both houses of Congress. (Gramm, originally a Democrat, switched to the Republican Party in 1983.)

Costner and his brother Dan owned the Midnight Star casino in Deadwood, South Dakota, for twenty-eight years, selling it in 2017. They came into conflict with the Sioux when the Costners wanted to use 600 acres of National Forest land in the Black Hills—where Dances with Wolves was filmed—for an eighteen-hole golf course and a $100 million resort. The Black Hills are considered sacred by the Sioux, who claim they still own the land under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, and that it was taken away from them as punishment for their massacre of Custer’s troops at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Many ranches in the US are actually much bigger than the fictional 30,000-acre Dutton ranch. The Galt ranch, in White Sulfur Springs, Montana, is 248,000 acres. The largest property in the country, the Waggoner ranch, first established in 1849 in Texas, is over 500,000 acres.

Yellowstone features the latest stereotype of the indigenous Native American: “the Casino Indian”. Others that have done this include The Killing and Banshee. These days, whenever you have Indian reservations in a film, it seems you have to have a casino.

The image of the Native American has been transformed many times over the years, from the “ignoble savage” in early cowboy-and-Indian films, where they were almost always portrayed as bad guys (as Nazis, Russians and terrorists have been in the past), to the lofty elevation of “noble savage”, more in touch with the land, with a preternatural eco-spirituality, than the “civilised” white folk.

In James Cameron’s Avatar, the Na’vi people on the planet Pandora echo this Native American trope, complete with bows and arrows and a spiritual culture centred on their “Tree of Souls”. Some critics have called Avatar a sci-fi version of Dances with Wolves. It is second, behind Gone with the Wind, as the most financially successful film of all time with almost $3 billion in revenue. In Avatar, as in Dances with Wolves, there is a “white saviour” soldier, who arrives on Pandora as part as the colonising military force but discovers the beauty of the Na’vi culture, falls in love with a native girl and switches sides to help the locals fight against the colonisers.

We also see a “white saviour” in The Last Samurai, directed by Edward Zwick, set in the 1870s. Nathan Algren, a US Civil War captain played by Tom Cruise, is sent to Japan as a military adviser to help the Emperor defeat disaffected rebel samurai. But Algren discovers the values of the samurai way of life and joins them to resist the Emperor’s modern army.

In an interview with Indian Country Today, Percy White Plume, who is Lakota, and had an acting role in Dances with Wolves, recalls that when that film first came out, “everyone was on board. The non-Native people got an inside look at us and how it must have been 200 years ago. And that part was good.” But he did not like how the “white saviour” dominated the movie: “It was a white man [Costner’s character] coming into the Lakota country and learning the language and leading the way.”

The popular image of the Indian then retrogresses once again to being warlike and aggressive, with ninja-like abilities to move unseen and be mercilessly brutal, like Blue Duck in McMurtry’s novel Lonesome Dove, winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. (Blue Duck was a real Cherokee bandit who was romantically involved with a notorious female outlaw, Belle Starr.)

In the 2007 HBO docudrama Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Sitting Bull complains to US Army Colonel Nelson Miles about whites’ violent treatment of the Indians. The colonel responds:

Chief Sitting Bull, the proposition that you were a peaceable people before the appearance of the white man is the most fanciful legend of all! You were killing each other for hundreds of moons before the first white stepped foot on this continent. You conquered those tribes, lusting for their game and their lands. Just as we have now conquered you for no less noble a cause.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Pueblo and Navajo Indians warred against each other to avenge murder and for plunder, taking women and children captive, and killing warriors. Ritual violence and blood feuds were never-ending, leading the Pueblos to create adobe towns for defensive fortifications called pueblos. There are arguments that failure to acknowledge the role of violence and warfare in indigenous tribes is a vestige of colonial repression—denying their history of armed resistance.

In North American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence, Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza show “not only that violence existed but also that it was an important and frequently cele­brated component of Amerindian life”. Lawrence H. Keeley, in his book War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, wrote:

The Yellowknives tribe in Canada was effectively obliterated by massacres committed by Dogrib Indians, and disappeared from history shortly thereafter. Similar massacres occurred among the Eskimos, the Crow Indians, and countless others. These mass killings occurred well before any contact with the West … for example, at Crow Creek in South Dakota, archaeologists found a mass grave containing the remains of more than 500 men, women and children who had been slaughtered, scalped and mutilated during an attack on their village a century and a half before Columbus’s arrival.

The current trope, in contemporary westerns, is to show Native Americans as astute businessmen, or “Casino Indians”, often with shadowy associations to gangs and organised crime. There are 562 recognised tribes of Native Americans in the US and 240 of them run gambling operations, including eight Indian-run casinos in South Dakota alone.

Gambling has always been part of Indian culture, usually betting on winners of athletic games and races, but due to zoning anomalies in the US, Indians have unique sovereignty over their reservations, making them practically immune from many state laws. Casinos built on Native American reservation land fall in a grey zone that allows them to have higher maximum-win limits than Las Vegas.

In 1988, President Reagan signed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, and native gaming income rose from $100 million that year to $17 billion in 2006 and $27 billion in 2011—three-quarters of all casino income in the US. All attempts to challenge the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act on constitutional grounds have so far been unsuccessful.

The Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, operated by the Mashantucket Pequot tribe, earns more than any establishment in Las Vegas or Atlantic City. Stretching one and a half miles, it includes six casinos, four hotels, thirty restaurants and over one hundred retail outlets.

But, according to Ian Lovett of the New York Times, the vast majority of tribes live in poverty, and “disenrolling” members from a tribe is being used by some tribal councils in order to distribute casino profits to fewer members:

For Indians who lose membership in a tribe, the financial impact can be huge. Some small tribes with casinos pay members monthly checks of $15,000 or more out of gambling profits. Many provide housing allowances and college scholarships. Children who are disenrolled can lose access to tribal schools.

Barbara Wells of the Guardian says: “The small number of tribes reaping the benefits of gaming overshadow the majority of tribes that can’t, and don’t.”

Yellowstone has garnered mixed reviews, many downright unkind. Mark Perigard of the Boston Herald wrote, “Who wants to tell Kevin Costner he’s starring in a remake of Dallas?” But Verne Gay, in Newsday, countered:

… given Sheridan’s righteous anger and Costner’s most famous credit (Dances with Wolves) only a fool would have expected a remake of Dallas. Yellowstone is a hard-edged, contemptuous enterprise, and—even with that majestic landscape as setting—a brutal one, too. It also happens to be self-assured, with a sense of the history that shaped these old feuds and the characters who keep fighting them.

Darren Franish, of Entertainment, called it “expensive to look at, painfully slow, lovingly violent, overly dedicated to uncovering the secret sadness lingering in the heart of murderous egomaniacs, generally pointless”. Tim Goodman of the Hollywood Reporter called it “a big, messy, soapy collection of testosterone-fueled clichés”. Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com disagreed: “Yellowstone still prevails as a compelling study of power, while it chews on what really makes a cowboy.” 

The second series introduces Malcolm and Teal Beck, brothers who run a rival casino. Malcolm is also the head of the powerful Liquor Board. The Becks want to take control of the Yellowstone ranch and run it out of business. One of the most visceral and dramatic scenes—on a par with the Russian roulette scene in The Deer Hunter—occurs when two masked thugs, part of the Becks’ security force, attack Beth Dutton in her office and beat her severely. Just when the violence is ratcheted up almost beyond endurance, Rip Wheeler (played by Cole Hauser), the foreman of Yellowstone ranch, arrives to rescue her. Hauser, beefed-up and sporting a beard, is one of the highlights of the series.

For fans of the first series, Series Two will not disappoint. Season Three is coming this year, with Taylor Sheridan again penning the scripts and Costner the executive producer. The Duttons return for another fight, this time against the government, when a lien is placed on their ranch after the Beck brothers’ debacle.