Taylor Sheridan's Fallen World
The following is a condensed version of "Taylor Sheridan's Fallen World" by Mark Eckel, published at Law & Liberty.
Each 21st century Taylor Sheridan hero fights for ideals in reality’s gray landscape. Sicario offers a hard look at the drug trade, questioning whether a man can be a hero when he himself does heinous things. Hell or High Water displays an economic system that punishes the generational poor encouraging anti-hero brothers to steal to balance the financial scales. The Mayor of Kingstown shows the defects of the prison system and explores the volatility of holding a tension between good and evil, where the definitions of those terms are anything but clear. Wind River calls to account those who would forget the marginalized, specifically, missing Native American women for whom no ledger is kept. Sheridan always shows a desire for universal ideals—what he calls “transcendent” concerns–in tension with the hard realities of life.
Sicario, for instance, shows Sheridan’s scriptural worldview, a seemingly black-and-white world, the clarity of good and bad, right, and wrong. As the film opens, Benicio del Toro’s character first appears to us as a righteous, avenging angel. But given the heinous drug cartel warfare that begins the movie, del Toro’s Alejandro Gillick must himself be the very essence of evil to battle the evil he faces. Sheridan returns to his oft-used metaphor explaining almost any protagonist in his writing, “I’m trying to let characters live in the gray, let the hero do some really bad things. I don’t think I’ve ever met a purely good person.”
It is the streaming series Yellowstone where America sees its reflection in this struggle. Sheridan expects America to be answerable for her sins, showing the reverberations of consequence over the nation’s 400 years. At the very same time, Yellowstone shows that no one is without excuse; those once wronged now want to bear the cudgel against those they can dominate. Here is where Sheridan's storylines turn into American history lessons with application for our present day. Sheridan desires “sameness” that will “give this country a sense of community,” what America “needs.” Acknowledging wrongdoing, in Sheridan’s narrative, begins by conceding, “As a nation the problems affecting anyone in that society are a problem affecting everyone in that society,” holding in tension the ideal and the real.
As viewers come to know John Dutton, patriarch of Yellowstone Ranch, they may conclude he is a moral tyrant. Yet all the characters are deeply flawed. Everyone seeks their view of justice, which is sometimes a simple pretense for power. The Native American leader Thomas Rainwater desires a return to the land of his ancestors, but also fashions his own authoritarian rule within his tribe. Beth Dutton protects the ranch by turning the flame of her childhood sin into a raging inferno, consuming every enemy who dares cross her path. Even Native American Monica Dutton, despite her honorable commitment to remain unsullied from Dutton sin, lives within Yellowstone’s advantages, using its power to her benefit. Every external foe, from developers to environmentalists to political opponents to business conglomerates, wants what they want, when they want it. They are really no different from the Dutton family whom they so often envy and despise. Living in the tension between ideal and real, the protagonist and antagonist are constantly changing roles.
Just ahead of the finale in Hell or High Water, the two marshals chasing the bank-robbing brothers discuss the universal principle of people changing roles. Alberto Parker, a Native American marshal, instructs his European American partner Marcus Hamilton in the way of all flesh. The marshals look across the street at a bank branch from which the brothers are stealing to right the wrongs perpetrated against their family. Parker’s soliloquy speaks the principle for all people, all time, all places, and all cultures.
A long time ago your people were the Indians, till someone came along and killed them, broke them down, made you into one of them. One hundred and fifty years ago, all this was my ancestors’ land. Everything you could see. Everything you saw yesterday.
Shifting from ethnic to economic injustices, Parker concludes, “Till the grandparents of these folks took it. And now it’s been taken from them. ‘Cept it ain’t no army doin’ it.” Then pointing at the bank, he says, “It’s those sons o’ bitches right there.”
In Yellowstone’s opening episode, Sheridan has a Native American grandfather explain what makes all humans the same: “Nothing will change until they find a cure for human nature.” None of us is unsullied from the ills of society because we are society. There is no nation, and no group that can claim to pontificate on goodness when evil resides in every human heart. All humanity seeks Sheridan’s transcendent ideals yet Sheridan makes us all look in his mirror.
Mark Eckel is president of the Comenius Institute.
