“Trying to nail down the source of the intensity of my response, I kept coming back to a sense of a deep, existential nostalgia for what I could only think of as integrity.”
Integrity is a troubled word these days. People seem to think that there is not much of it around anymore. And without it, trust becomes difficult, which leads to all kinds of social problems and a general cynicism that undermines faith in basic political processes. The idea of integrity goes back a ways. It played a key role in determining an array of the modern world’s forms-of-life where the individual was a crucial, foundational concept and when integrity established the basis for relations between individuals. A literal definition of integrity is intact wholeness (out of integral), the opposite of duplicity’s dishonest doubleness. From this troubled moment in late or postmodernity where we now find ourselves, the basic underlying ideas that would make such an opposition meaningful, ideas like fact, truth, evidence, seem to be disintegrating, if not already gone. Who, then, can one trust?
The invocation of integrity in the mouths of perennially duplicitous officials and politicians has contributed significantly to a general, at best mistrust, at worst downright disbelief, about the continuing relevance of the word in our daily lives. The revelation of outright government duplicity—the Pentagon Papers, or Watergate—has only intensified general mistrust and a deep feeling of the loss of any (perhaps illusory) sense of integrity, other than in reference to marketing communications and brand integrity. As a concept applicable to current USAmerican public life, integrity has become meaningless, a view widely shared, as was evident in the response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) public health crisis. We live in the midst of the disarray, if not breakdown, of modernity’s array of meanings and its components, components that also include democracy and equality, and that extend to the institutions based on them.
I found myself thinking about this in relation to my response to a television show called Yellowstone. I did not begin to watch it until its fourth season when I heard it was the most-watched show on television. Not knowing anything about it (other than it starred Kevin Costner), I was surprised by the intensity of my emotional response. Almost immediately, I was swept up in a roller coaster of feelings that started with excitement at the action. I was stunned by the embrace of deep moral ambiguity. I grew fascinated with the characters and my reaction to them (especially Beth and Rip, and Jimmy). I admired the treatment of animals and the humans’ relation to them. I was impressed by the representation of Indigenous people and their struggles, and I increasingly recognized an intellectual dimension to the narrative that spoke to a long USAmerican conversation about the origin and meaning of the idea of America. Trying to nail down the source of the intensity of my response, I kept coming back to a sense of a deep, existential nostalgia for what I could only think of as integrity.
Controversies have swirled around Yellowstone, mostly having to do with its lack of recognition by the authorized bestowers of prestige prizes, and especially in relation to another show, Succession. Succession is the nearly universally admired HBO streaming series about the travails of an ultra-wealthy family in New York that owns a right-wing media company (based “loosely” on the Murdochs). The similarities between the shows are remarkable. Both premiered in June of 2018 and wrapped up in 2023 (though Yellowstone has gone on to provide the source for at least six other Yellowstone-related shows). Both dramatize what has been referred to as the “bad behavior of the super-rich.” Both feature an aging single, patriarch with four children—three boys and a girl—all of whom have been psychologically brutalized and emotionally wrecked by the manipulations of said patriarch in his obsessive drive to maintain control over his empire. Both are concerned with the question of who will succeed the patriarch. I could go on. Many before me have. A Google search will turn up headlines such as “Yellowstone’ Is ‘Succession’ Set in the Modern Wild West,” “The endless similarities between Succession and Yellowstone,” and straight to the point, “Why Yellowstone Is Succession for Cowboys.”
For all the superficial similarities, however, the answer is, no: They are not the same at all. Succession is a witty (one might say viciously witty), brilliantly written takedown of the ultra wealthy and USAmerica’s media/political culture. It is a satire. The characters are all horrible. Everyone, including the most intensely partisan fans, admits that. There is not one character one would choose to sit down and share a beer or martini with. At points, it is almost painful to watch them repeat the same destructive, impotent behavior over and over—or watch them walk into yet another trap set by Logan, the sadistic patriarch, who continually manipulates them, even after he dies, to keep them divided, weak, and under his control. Watching Succession gives one a sense of moral superiority and, for me anyway, disbelief that people holding the reins of power can possibly be so messed up. I also felt contempt, if that counts as an emotion, and maybe a bit of shame and pity.
Yellowstone is deeply and exuberantly emotional on multiple levels. This is one of the reasons why professional critics have damned it as a melodrama, and opposed that to the serious satire of Succession. Melodrama is disparaged in sophisticated art circles as an aesthetically degraded generic form that relies for its effects on sensational events, stock characters, and over-the-top emotional manipulation. The fact that melodrama is identified with tears (as in tearjerker) implicitly associates it with the world of “women” and leaves it vulnerable to misogynistic preconceptions that condition its reception. In other words, it is not a serious drama. Serious drama is founded on sensitive, insightful, subtle character studies. Succession gives the viewer that in its unfolding portraits of the Roys and their relation to power. It engages the viewer as a critical observer, who is amused by the foibles of the uber rich and the fatal decadence of capitalism, and who admires the brilliance of the writing.
Yellowstone manipulates the viewer emotionally into the violent maelstrom of a world of actual value under continual threat. At its heart is an old conversation about the meaning of America that began with John Winthrop’s City on a Hill spiel on board the Arabella almost 400 years ago. The issues at stake—the meaning of America, the significance of the wilderness, human relation to other earthly creatures, the legacy of the violence of the invasion, the significance and treatment of Indigenous people—roil beneath the surface and locate it in an intellectual exchange that runs through the history of USAmerica, including Winthrop’s defining address on the wilderness as the absence of Law, Daniel Boone’s propaganda for his real estate ventures, James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, William Faulkner, Howard Hawks’ Red River, and almost any film by Frank Capra. They are all part of that extensive, rich conversation.
That difference in the two shows’ perspectives and generic mode may figure in the disparity between their rewards in the competition for prestige prizes over their five-year runs. Whereas Succession had 75 nominations and 19 wins, Yellowstone was largely stonewalled. Well, not quite zip. Close, though: 44 nominations and, for example, a Cinema Audio Society award for sound mixing (till Costner won the Golden Globe for actor in 2022). Clearly, the people who hand out the prestige prizes think there is a difference. And viewers, too, thought they seemed at odds with the bestowers of prizes: Succession’s third season opener had 1.7 million viewers; Yellowstone had 14.7 million. It remains the most watched show in the streaming world. Melodrama is at the heart of both sets of figures.
Scorn, either open or implicit, still drives many considerations of melodrama, especially among those known as professional critics, even after decades of theoretical attempts at rehabilitation by feminists. It occupies, as E. Ann Kaplan notes, “the bottom rung of a generic hierarchy not only with drama (it comes below tragedy, comedy, poetic and epic drama) but across genres (i.e. it comes below poetry, tragedy, comedy, the novel and other prose fictions).” And while over the last 40 or so years feminist critics especially have reclaimed melodrama from the misogyny that condemned it to the sub-sub-basement of aesthetic valuation, many contemporary professional critics seem not to have heard the news. It seems that far and away the most prevalent word that appears in the negative comparisons of Yellowstone to Succession is melodrama.
Because melodrama emphasizes intense emotions and excessive sentimentality over complex, subtle character studies, it is dismissed as unrealistic, emotionally manipulative, tearjerker twaddle by the sophisticated. But while the sophisticated may dismiss melodrama as unworthy of serious attention, it turns out that improbable, exaggerated plots involving the inevitable triumph of virtue—after some narrow escapes from the railroad tracks—over really villainous mustache-twisting, black hat-wearing bad guys, along with a rotating array of beloved familiar characters, is just what the doctor ordered for a lot of ordinary people. Imported into England from France in the 18th century, melodrama was the single most popular form of entertainment in England for much of the 19th century, primarily among workers and artisans, also known at the time as the “lower classes.” This no doubt explains at least some of the critics’ animus. It was mere “popular culture,” the pap of the masses, as opposed to “real culture.” Banjo music as opposed to Beethoven.
What we call popular culture had a rough time getting a break from the authorized culture arbiters who, following in T.S. Eliot’s footsteps, still represent in some sense the ghost of the Medieval Court and its aristocratic culture against the rude, awkward aberrations of the peasants. Eliot’s Shakespeherian Rag put-down in his 1922 poem “The Wasteland” perfectly expressed the mood of the Anglo upper class at the beginning of the 20th century. They waged a desperate struggle to cling to the last tattered shreds of “Christian civilization” and a stable, hierarchical culture of transcendent value which guaranteed the best seats for their prodigious tushies.
Mostly, the new culture came from the ground up—slave music, gospel, jigs and reels, folk art. Even when it came from the top, it was democratized. Opera came to the United States, where it gave rise to musical comedy which provided the lion’s share of the great American songbook. The new music came from a different world. It was music keyed to the rhythmic drive of physicality, to the deep rhythms inherent in flesh. It was dance music. It was sexy. It was tight. Which drove Eliot and his ilk nuts.
In the 1920s, popular culture exploded in the United States. Newly liberated and educated ex-slaves had been flowing north since the end of the Civil War, bringing an entirely new dimension of genius to the production of urban culture. Previous to this moment, black culture had nourished the roots of USAmerican popular culture but only when mediated by white people in blackface. The unleashing of black creativity transformed USAmerican culture, bringing a powerful intelligence, at once intellectual and rhythmic, into its heart. And its feet.
Melodrama was very much part of the creative maelstrom of the moment. Theatrical melodrama had always been popular. The transition to film was seamless. And while all the old attractions held true—the pitched struggle between virtue and evil, intense, manipulative emotionality, exaggerated plots, stock characters—more attentive, complex readings of the genre began to appear. In a pioneering effort of theoretical reclamation, Peter Brooks proposed that melodrama’s excess is a compensatory mode addressed to a world characterized by the loss of a transcendent basis for determining good and evil. In a world in which the death of the sacred, the loss of a transcendent guarantor, abolished the possibility of morality and meaning, melodrama responded, he argued, with excess as compensation.
When critics designate Yellowstone as melodrama, it is meant to diminish its significance: to say, this is a mere entertainment for people who are drawn to excitement, explosions, hyperbolic emotions, and a simplistic morality (as in, unlike me who reads Henry James and adores Bergman films). I am not going to say there is none of that at work in Yellowstone’s immense and enduring popularity—melodrama’s fan base is large and diverse—but it ignores other considerations that have equal if not greater claim on melodrama’s value as a form of beingthinking.
Beyond the rejection of melodrama, there has been speculation that the official silence in the face of Yellowstone’s popularity has to do with a bi-coastal allergy to “red state” culture (to use an Americanism for conservative, homophobic, maybe reactionary, probably fascist), which some people associate with the way the show features a lot of men (and occasional women) with guns, unapologetic violence, many white men with chiseled features, and a rowdy celebration of the hard-working, hard-living culture of cowboy life. In Yellowstone, Cowboy is an ontological state that approaches angelic perfection—honest to a fault, reliable, loyal, a good partner to animals, always ready to protect the weak and fight for justice, and occasionally just fight for the hell of it, all wrapped up in something called integrity—the absolute opposite of everyone in Succession.
It is more than a bit ironic, then, that (blue state) Succession is focused entirely on powerful white men (and the occasional powerful white woman), and that political discussion is limited to debates among the powerful white people about how to hang onto power. The satirical edge introduces an implicit political perspective, but there is no attention to current debates. Yellowstone, for all the accusations of right-wing bias, engages contemporary issues around race, gender, and ecology. They are not central to the show’s thinking, but they are acknowledged. While Taylor Sheridan, Yellowstone’s creator and showrunner, denies any ideological orientation (and the show clearly does not adhere to current political moralistic constraints), the writers bend over backward to fill in spots of potential critical attention regarding gender and race with appropriate signals. A black cowboy joins a couple of others in the bunkhouse in season three—very briefly. He gets the hell out when he realizes what a loony bunch of psychopathic white people he has hooked up with. Racism, check. The barrel racing cowgirls out-macho the cowboys, both on horseback and in the bunkhouse bunks. And then there is Beth. Sexism, check. And as many have pointed out, the recognition and treatment of Indigenous people and their contemporary lives is complex, muscular, and positive, notwithstanding controversies over the ethnicity of Kelsey Asbille. And there is the intense, ongoing ecological message at the heart of Yellowstone. One can wave around words like “token” all he wants, but the Yellowstone writers should get points for all of those gestures, even if they are side bars of the central fact that this is a drama about the last stand of white, patriarchal colonialism against its own inevitable self-destruction. The effort at least acknowledges an actual world of racial and sexual complexity.
It is too easy to use “culture war” to explain these differences. The widespread popularity of Yellowstone across the Grand Canyon of USAmerican political division indicates some deeper attraction than culture war politics. Commentators repeatedly point to other aspects of the show to explain its popularity: Beth’s nudity—well, really, anything about Beth who, as my friend points out, embodies the uncontrollable feminine, Shakti/Kali, the destroyer and creator, the dispenser of justice (“You are the trailer park. I am the tornado,” Beth tells the financier, Roarke Morris)—but, yeah, her nudity; the cowboy lifestyle; the gorgeous photography of the mountains; freedom from moralist restrictions. All true but lacking an explanation of the emotional power of the show. And the real power is emotional. At least it was for me. It touched me. It affected me with an intensity that startled me and settled into my gut with a dark, gorgeous sense of loss that is beyond the loss of any particular thing. Which brings me back to integrity.
When I suggested to some of my favorite critics that the underlying emotional power of Yellowstone rose from a response to its portrayal of integrity, I drew heavy flack. “What integrity?” one shot back, indicating a general cynicism about the current state of the world that precludes using the word integrity at all. And they may—very well—be right. Integrity, in that sense, applied to human beings living in a complex world is quite probably meaningless or at least meaningful only in limited, specific situations. Who does not lie from time to time? Who has not stolen something? A minute? A book? A kiss? Who could possibly claim to be absolutely undivided? Or incorruptible and unimpaired? We are human, after all, which is to say, finite and imperfect. But it seems to me that does not rule out integrity’s importance in defining a sense of human potential.
I find both the corporate and dictionary definitions of integrity lacking a sense of its profound, existential dimension. Integrity is not simply a question of honesty, as one’s employer might want him to think. And the dictionary definition, with its notion of integral unity, also falls flat. Why can’t someone be divided in his thinking and feeling but still have what I think of as integrity, maybe even because of the divided thinking? A philosopher will distinguish different kinds of integrity including self-integration, identity, self-constitution, moral intent, etc. For my purposes those are derivative. As Ten Bears told Josey in The Outlaw Josey Wales, “It’s sad that governments are chiefed by the double tongues. There is iron in your words of death for all Comanche to see and so there is iron in your words of life. No signed paper can hold the iron. It must come from men.” The sense of physical materiality is important. When I think of integrity, what it means, my first thought is diamond—the singular presence of inextricably entangled stone-and-light whose crystalline perfection and orientation make it the hardest substance we know. That is integrity. It is a wholeness beyond the question of unity or remainder. Human integrity is a transactional process, a stance-in-relation, that has to do with the relationship between a person and each of their words, and to those around them with whom they share a being-in-common through those words. Do you stand by your word, no matter what threat or risk that brings? Are you a person of your word, or, more simply, is your word good?
At the bloody end of Yellowstone’s second season as the Duttons race to rescue Tate, Kayce’s and Monica’s kidnapped son, and wreak vengeance on the kidnappers, Kayce confronts Teal Beck, one of the powerful corrupt developers who kidnapped Tate in order to force Dutton to sell the Land. Beck is sitting on the toilet reading a newspaper when Kayce finds him. He begs Kayce not to kill him on the toilet, and Kayce responds: “I promised my wife I’d kill you. All a man’s got is his word.” And he shoots him, though not without some irony in this case. That is the ethos of Yellowstone, the foundation of its moral universe. Integrity in every other sense flows from that basic transactional relation.
Full disclosure—I am an old white guy who as a kid watched a lot of B-Westerns on television Saturday morning at my grandmother’s house. In the 1950s, the new television networks were desperate for content, and the films of the 1930s and 1940s were perfect Saturday morning fare, including hundreds of B-Westerns. I was inundated with the Cowboy myth. The “Old West,” the story has it, was a world that existed, if not beyond, at least at the edge of the Law. In that world, all a person had to go on in dealing with others was his word. It really mattered. The social world—think Yellowstone bunkhouse—is held together by the integrity of its members and the affection for each other that grows out of that. Or so the myth goes. In the Old West, no external power guaranteed order. No state, no force existed other than integrity to hold people together in settler communities, where solidarity was an existential necessity. That and the willingness and commitment to defend it from the violence directed against it by those who wanted to take it or take it back. In that sense, integrity is the state of being priceless, a state whose value is that it has no equivalent and cannot be exchanged.
One could not imagine a world more different from the world of Succession. In Succession, speech acts are composed solely to manipulate and mislead in the pursuit of personal power. No one’s word is good. There is the negation of integrity. The final season focused on the deal between Waystar and Lukas Matsson’s (Alexander Skarsgård) GoJo. It began with Waystar proposing to buy GoJo and, after a dizzying series of manipulations, reversals, and betrayals, ends up with GoJo buying Waystar. In the process Kendall, Roman, and Shiv, the three siblings, agree to work together to save Waystar for the family. But Roman immediately betrays his sibs to his Dad. Kendall and Roman betray Shiv, going behind her back to “save the company.” Shiv betrays Roman and Kendall to Matsson. And Matsson betrays Shiv, to whom he has promised the CEO role, to Tom, whom she has called her meat-puppet, based on her belief she will be made CEO. It is a kaleidoscopic free for all of lies and deceptions deployed to acquire personal power. That world enters Yellowstone in the persons of various developers from California and New York—and even Montana—who plan to commodify the Land, cover it with gaudy attractions, and sell it to people in The City who want to spend some quality time in Nature, preferably with good coffee, a comfy hotel suite, and a Michelin starred restaurant nearby. They are not welcomed.
There is a complex way in which this thinking of integrity is tied up with the Land. I am using the term “Land” to designate the deep archaic reality of the physical place in all its living complexity and plenitude. It is not a setting. It is not a landscape. It is the main player in the unfolding (melo)drama of Yellowstone. The Land is America’s primal source of meaning, the embodiment of untouched wilderness, a world beyond predatory human uses and exploitation. The Land is the exemplar and source of integrity. It is the remnant of the sacred in a modern world, in which the sacred has been dismantled by science and buried by capitalism. Untouched by the greasy fingers of commerce, it stands for the very soul of an original America, and an origin beyond America. This is a particular original America, one rooted in European colonization. USAmerican blacks have their own origin stories that have to do with captivity, enslavement, and murder rather than discovery and freedom. And American Indigenous people’s origin stories do not celebrate the “discovery of America.” Each has its own legitimacy in the stories of this place. To be part of this origin story is to come into relation with the Land, to enter and become part of its ancient energies and mysteries. This will not happen while sitting at a café table sipping an $8 super-double-shot-macchiato-whatever, admiring the beauty of Nature in the distance, and answering emails on one’s phone between scrolling through Instagram and posting a photograph of the mountains to Facebook. Those who stand by it and for it, as John Dutton does, are informed by that soul. He is an avatar of the Land.
Do not confuse the Land with Nature. Nature is a romantic invention that occurs in the wake of the loss of contact with the Land. Nature was invented by city people along with parks. Nature is the first step toward Natural Resources. Nature is what the Japanese tourists in the second season of Yellowstone come to photograph. The Land is what kills them in the form of a large Grizzly bear. Nature is what Dan Jenkins, the West Coast developer in the first two seasons, wants to package and sell to tourists. The Land is what kills him, too (with an assist from Beth), through the struggle to control it. The Land is primal and undefinable, and the struggle over it unleashes primal, undefinable energies. The Land is sacred. It cannot be “owned.” It endures and outlasts all those who think they possess it. Human laws, even the thought of a general legality, disappear in that space, though some try to impose legalist thinking on it. The result is usually brutal. Dan Jenkins’s last words as he bleeds out under the magnificent Montana sky, having been fatally shot in a struggle over the Land: “I have a right to be here. I have rights. This is America.” The irony is almost painful. Yup, it is America, alright, though not the one he thinks he is in, which very well may be Yellowstone’s point. One of them, anyway. It puts the issue of violence front and center.
Yellowstone is saturated with violence. One of the most frequent reasons I have heard for not watching the show is too much violence. While I understand the resistance to the commercialization of violence, violence as a commodity and violence as an essential topic for consideration are two very different things. In 1925, D.H. Lawrence famously proposed that “all the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” That sense of violence is woven through and through the USAmerican soul, from the very first genocide against the Pequots, to the extraordinary, inhuman violence needed to maintain slavery, to the bloodthirsty slaughter of the Buffalo which made room for the Cowboy and his herd of cattle, to the vicious, lawless violence of the romanticized West, to the bestial brutality of residential schools…where does one stop? January 6th? The threats against the lives of election workers? Attempted assassination of politicians? If one values integrity, there is no way to address USAmerica without addressing violence.
In Yellowstone, violence affects every relationship among the humans, as well as human relationships to the Land and its creatures. The question is whether the violence is melodramatic, gratuitous even, and therefore simply part of a commercial spectacle, or integral to the conversation about the nature and history of America, especially that Ur-American-world-previous-to-the-Law-mythos. On a superficial level, it does not seem too complicated. As Indigenous characters never tire of pointing out to various white settlers who complain about encroachment by Left Coast developers, the Land was seized from them through unconstrained, unrelenting violence, so why should the white boys think they are any different? It is simply about possession and who has the wherewithal to take it and hold it. John Dutton tells Rip/ColeHauser: “You know the first Duttons to settle this valley, fighting was all they knew. It’s how they got here, how they kept the land once they did.” It is a point he makes a number of times.
But the fight for possession is not the only explanation of violence. Cara Dutton/Helen Mirren has another darker vision of it. In the opening sequence of 1923, the second Yellowstone prequel after 1883, a grunting, terrified, man who has been wounded, staggers, stumbles, and crawls in panic through the woods to escape pursuit. When his pursuer finally appears out of the forest, it is a little old white-haired grandma aiming a double-barreled shotgun. After she blows him away—before he can blow her away—she utters an agonized scream and, in a voiceover, says: “Violence has always haunted this family. It followed us from the Scottish Highlands, the slums of Dublin. It ravished us upon the coffin ships of Ireland…And it followed us here, lurking beneath the pines and in the rivers.” More terrifying than the violence over possession, this implies a metaphysical curse in line with D.H. Lawrence’s blunt assessment. Whatever its origin, violence remains an inescapable fact.
But a much more complex fact than is acknowledged. American violence is one of the primary topics Yellowstone investigates or explores in its quest to discover America, but, having said that, I have to admit that the more I think about “violence,” the more uncertain I get about what it means. I know Yellowstone is saturated with it, and I can point to extreme moments of it, but I get a bit hazy when trying to understand its modes and limits, what implicitly determines something as violent and something else as not violent. Or even more confusing: Is there such a thing as good violence as opposed to bad violence? Many USAmericans, for instance, might find it more than a little disconcerting that one can be charged with assault for spanking your child in Canada, where I live. One person’s discipline is another person’s violence. Is there a “line”? And if so, where does one draw it?
That question haunts Yellowstone. Violence obviously involves force. But force takes many forms. And what about force ritualized into meaningful behavioral gestures? Even if it causes some pain, it may not be considered violence by the participants. Is La Danse Apache violent? Not if one sees it as an artful representation of violent gestures that mean no physical harm and do not attempt to apply actual violent force. Observers who lack knowledge of the cultural context, however, may see it otherwise. They might also see the spanking as an act of child abuse.
Violence is central to all the classic mythic visions of USAmerican founding, no doubt because the foundation was genocide. Founding seems always to be complicit with violence, starting with Romulus and Remus. In USAmerica, that violence marked the continuing expansion of the European invasion as it displaced previous European colonizers as well as Indigenous populations in its relentless drive across the continent. In Red River, Thomas Dunson (John Wayne) leaves a wagon train to settle land in what became Texas. When two Mexicans ride up and announce that the land he is raising cattle on belongs to someone named Diego who lives 400 miles away, Dunson shoots one dead, and sends the other back to tell Diego the land belongs to Dunson now. No one in USAmerica is free of the implications of that violence.
Violence in Succession is singularly vicious and always at least semi-polite, but unidimensional. It exists only in the field of competition for personal power. Masked with the pretense of civility, it is no less brutal for all that—the violence sublimated into verbal attacks, passive aggression, psychological terror, and endless knives in the back. It is citified violence. The one physical encounter takes place in the final episode between Tom and Greg, almost as an oversight, as if there had to be at least one example of physical violence in the story of USAmerica. In a bathroom confrontation over Greg leaking the news of Tom’s ascension, verbal anger explodes and builds to a pitch where Tom slaps Greg, and Greg slaps him back. It is a slap fight! There is a bit of a tussle, some wrestling, and then Tom leaves. Significantly it is pure slapstick, a world in which heroic physical violence is reduced to a joke. It is a world whose sophistication seems to transcend violence, but that world is thoroughly imbued with it, though it is never acknowledged. Perhaps because it is so integral to everything, it has become background noise where it hums away without arousing attention. The key is that it is not physical, and if it is physical, it is hilarious, not heroic.
Wherever the violence in Yellowstone is coming from, it is everywhere. It affects/infects every relationship and inflects every situation, from the opening “Cowboy vs. Indian” battle over purloined cows in which Dutton’s oldest son and Monica’s brother are killed, to Jamie Dutton’s patricidal rage, to the self-destructive, internalized colonial violence (suicide) among the Indigenous people, to John Dutton’s careful calculations, to Beth and Summer’s boundary establishing slug fest, to the Cowboys’ recreational bar brawls, to the shocking militia attack on the Duttons at the end of season three, to the revelation of the infamous Train Station. And that ain’t the half of it.
Some people have argued that the violence is simply red meat for a red state fan base, but this is far too simplistic a view to account for the complexity of the representation of violence. Early on, Kayce and Monica are driving by a trailer cum meth lab in the desert when it explodes. They stop and find a critically burned man with no chance of survival writhing in pain. Realizing he will die painfully before any medical help can arrive, they shoot him in the head to save him from further suffering. This violence is at least bearable, though the moral stakes are high. Still, arguably it is justifiable violence since the motive is to relieve suffering and not forcefully to impose will.
But a few minutes later, Rip murders the Medical Examiner in cold blood in order to protect Kayce from being identified as the killer of Jeremiah Bitsui’s character during the cattle raid. He kills him and actually makes him participate in setting up his own execution. It is shocking in its mechanical thoroughness. Horrific. I pegged Rip for a homicidal maniac, a toxic killer, and was prepared to hate him at this point. I was soon stunned to find myself admiring a further revelation of his character, trying desperately to explain how he could be both despicable and admirable, like some physicist trying to figure out how an electron can be both a particle and a wave. Impossible. But it is. So not impossible. Maybe expansively human beyond what is comfortable. If this is melodrama, it is melodrama with a rich sense of moral ambiguity.
A similar situation occurs later when Kayce and his son, Tate, pass a parked van in the desert, and Kayce pulls over to investigate. The van contains two white men who have kidnapped and raped a young Indigenous woman. When Kayce eventually frees the girl from her bindings, her first words are, “Did you kill them?” “Good,” she says simply to his assent. One would have to be pretty insensitive not to agree with her, not to think, “Good,” becoming complicit in Kayce’s retributive violence. Meanwhile, images of Tate as he violently fights off a large rattlesnake that has violently attacked him (violence is everywhere, it screams at you—forget the fact that rattlesnakes are not violent and do not go out of their way to attack people) are juxtaposed against images of Kayce chasing down a gross, panicked, fat rapist in his sagging stained skivvies waving a gun.
It is a perfect kaleidoscope of images that invokes the full range of shifting emotional responses to violence—fear, rage, confusion, triumph, relief—even pride. When Tate shows the large dead snake to his father, Kayce asks if it bit him and Tate responds, “I beat him to it.” Good, Kayce says, a sentiment the viewer is inclined to share in the event of an actual rattlesnake attack. But if one finds moral justification for Kayce’s (and Tate’s) violence, and I doubt there are many who cannot, or will not at least admit the difference, the following episode, which introduces The Train Station, throws not just a bucket but a whole barrel of ice water on that. Far and away the most shocking violence in Yellowstone has to do with The Train Station, a euphemism for a distant isolated ravine across the State line where Dutton disposes of the bodies of his victims.
An explanation is required here regarding the Human Resources policy at Yellowstone Ranch. The ranch hands consist of two kinds of cowboy: the ordinary cowboy who comes and goes, and the ex-convicts who form an inner circle for whom Yellowstone is literally a lifetime commitment because they are not allowed to leave. They are all branded on their chests with the Yellowstone brand, the same one that goes on the cows. “Those guys just work here,” Rip tells Jimmy about the ordinary cowboys, “you’ll see a thousand of ’em come and go. But not us. We die here. This is your family.” Jimmy has just been whomped by a bully. The bully quits after Rips beats him silly, and Rip directs Lloyd, his lead hand, to take him to the train station. At the end of a pickup ride across the border into Wyoming, Lloyd shoots him and tosses his body over the cliff. Welcome to the Train Station.
Yellowstone seems purposely to interlace different modes of violent events against and with each other, creating complicated conflicting emotional responses. Moments of righteous violence, which most ordinary viewers would identify with and likely think justified, are contrasted with instances of brutal, cold-blooded violence that are horrifying and repulsive. And everything in between. On a regular, ordinary day arriving at school for work, Monica sees and attempts to stop a fight between two teenage boys. She gets accidentally slugged in the face, smashes her head on the concrete when she falls, and ends up with a critical, life-threatening injury.
Violence is everywhere on every scale. A range of contrasting events results in many contrasting emotional responses that constantly challenge the viewer to acknowledge the (arbitrary) moral lines he draws in relation to violence and the operative definitions that shape his reactions. One may abhor “violence,” but how does one feel about it when it is directed at the guy trying to rape Monica? Is the viewer going to deny that he felt just a bit of relief when the bullet hit him, and he fell off her? Is there such a thing as acceptable violence, and if so, where does one draw the line? It might even be possible to invoke the question of integrity at this point, at least as far as the viewer’s response is concerned. From whatever direction one comes at it, violence is integral to the world of Yellowstone as it always has been to USAmerica. Whether it is required to protect the Land or is a primordial human reality co-eval with the Land makes no difference. It has to be acknowledged and accepted as an integral, multi-faceted constituent of the world of actual value in order to be dealt with.
That world is what is at stake as modernity in the form of the City continually attempts to extend its creeping commodification into Yellowstone. Modernity is the site of the fundamental mutilation of the idea of value. Modernity’s engine runs on the separation of value from fact, Alfred North Whitehead’s concept of the bifurcation of nature, the divorce of primary and secondary qualities in scientific discourse, the divorce of subject and object in philosophy, is also at the root of European colonial conquest. Separating value from fact leaves value at the mercy of the unverifiable “subjective” and leaves the fact defenseless before the valueless subject. That, combined with the infiltration of materialism from science throughout the larger culture, leaves value relegated to the measurable, i.e., the monetary. While the struggle over value—metaphysical, sacred value versus monetary value—is grist for melodrama, it is also at the heart of the many critiques of modernity that have fueled anti-modern sentiments since its inception.
The mutilation of value has consequences. If, as Charles Taylor has argued, what is at stake is the extension or contraction of mind as a universal constituent of the world, the mutilation of value creates an opposition between “human,” which possesses mind and value, and everything that does not, which is everything else. “Animal” is consigned to the mindless, and any attempt to think beyond that is dismissed as anthropomorphizing. But truly to enter the “human,” to realize its full potential, requires coming into a relationship with that which has been excluded from it, specifically animals, the fellow creatures excised by modernity’s scientific definition of human. To witness the essential animal in the human and the knowing being in the animal is to become more fully human. It is a mode of connection with Others, a being beyond self, as Donna Haraway argues in The Companion Species Manifesto, “…how to see who the dogs are and hear what they are telling us, not in bloodless abstractions, but in one-on-one relationships, in otherness-in-connection.” Knowing animals, working with them daily, densifies both forms of life, opening the other than human within the human and the other than animal within the animal. Animals resist the mutilation of value in a relation that is beyond use even in its usefulness. That is the cowboy life according to Yellowstone.
The City lacks animals. Or, more specifically, lacks animals as partners in work. Many animals make the City their home, but the relation between them and their fellow human inhabitants is usually antagonistic, at least on the part of the humans. Uncontrolled animals are considered vermin—rats, mice, racoons, squirrels, rabbits, foxes, coyotes, all of which make the modern City home. But the connection in Haraway’s otherness-in-connection is limited to extermination. There are no animals in Succession except for the occasional lap dog, those tiny beings created by humans for an easy form of anthropomorphized companionship without much demand on the human, other than the purchase of cute sweaters and booties. The brilliance of Succession’s satire relies on the complete self-absorption of the Human in the world of mutilated value it has created. The bifurcation of value from fact echoes in the bifurcation of human and animal.
In Yellowstone, the lives of humans and animals are thoroughly intertwined, enmeshed in each other. Cowboys, whom, as I previously noted, have an ontological status in Yellowstone approaching angelic, are inextricably entangled with animals. Take the cow out of cowboy, and what is left? They work with them. They live with them. Everyday humans and animals (both domesticated and wild) confront each other in multiple modes from play to work to antagonism. Humans and animals deal with each other constantly. They live together. They work together. They play together. They help each other. And, importantly, the relation lacks sentimentality, which is doubly significant given the importance of sentiment to melodrama. Cowboys meet animals as equals who are different. As equals, they are treated with the same respect Cowboys show one another. Different as they are, they are part of a working relationship in which both parties trust each other’s intelligence and rely on each other in the work they do together. And both are larger beings for it.
Frequently the animal other provides a transformational relation to the human. Jimmy Hurdstrom is a degenerate tweaker, the grandson of an old friend of Dutton’s whom Dutton agrees to hire for his ranch in order to try and straighten him out. Jimmy has a lot of problems, the worst being his complete lack of self-respect. He cannot ride, cannot rope, cannot do any cowboy things, and worse, keeps falling off his horse, which he does during a cattle drive, losing his hat. Feeling sorry for himself, he whines to Lloyd, “I don’t think I’m cut out for this,” to which Lloyd replies with the Cowboy credo, “Nobody is, Jimmy. It’s gotta be cut into you” and tells him not to come back without his hat.
Left behind, looking for his hat, Jimmy has a transformational encounter with a stranded calf. Tiny. Vulnerable. Big soft eyes. Cute as hell. Abandoned, entangled in briars, and pleading for help as the herd including its mother rides away in the distance. A connection materializes between the two creatures, and both are changed. They touch each other. When Jimmy shows up at the ranch with the calf over his saddle, releasing it into a pen where its mother has been going crazy crying with anxiety, Lloyd says, “That’s as cowboy as it gets, Jimmy.” That connection to and recognition of the animal’s need, yes, but more than that, its co-presence in the world, as if the sudden knowledge of its Being sparked a desire to be better in Jimmy. To be more worthy of the calf’s relation. As Walker points out to Beth, animals do not bull—. They have an inherent integrity.
In the end, the different responses to Yellowstone and Succession are predictable—critical success for one and popular success for the other. The critical success of Succession is connected to the fact that the critics by and large—the ones who make a difference—live in cities. They are urbanites for whom the world of Succession is reality and the sharp satire a welcome commentary on their daily experience. Succession lacerates the pretensions of the uber rich. It eviscerates the destructive banality of right-wing media empires. It mocks the powerful. Incisively written, it lays bare the shallow, competitive dynamics of the forces that rule contemporary political realities and subjects them to contempt. But, finally, it has little to offer beyond contempt.
The reason for the huge popular success of Yellowstone is a bit more complex. Yellowstone, apart from the melodramatic thrills (which are not to be dismissed), offers an intense emotional experience focused on the struggle to preserve the Land from the very people who are the players in Succession. The Land entangles us in unparalleled magnificence, irreplaceable beauty beyond any beauty we think we know. The Sublime. The threat to it is real. And those who take on the burden of defending it against the Dominators are admirable, even heroic in their integrity. Millions and millions of people love the show, for many different reasons. To make nostalgia for integrity a significant part of that diversity may be pushing it. But consider our moment in history.
A brief post-World War II period of frenzied, war-generated prosperity spilled down for a couple of decades to the less economically privileged and created a large “middle class.” Then, following Just Say No, the neoliberal counter-revolution of the 1980s and 1990s and the much ballyhooed “globalization” ravaged those same people. They were promised trickle down wealth even as their jobs were exported and the foreign economies they were exported to grew rapidly. Then came the bank generated financial/mortgage catastrophe of 2008. The rich, as you might expect, profited handily. But the rest were left with no job, no home, no material goodies to distract them from the spiritual wasteland capitalism had created, and no shared spiritual meaning that could see them through the catastrophe. If it had not happened to them yet, it was just around the corner. They were showered with empty promises, prevarications, hokey excuses, and ruthless indifference as they watched more and more wealth accumulate in fewer and fewer (offshore) bank accounts. And the lies piled up.
Ivan Illich has written movingly about the dignity of subsistence in the world beyond the excesses of modernity and its nefarious project of “development.” For all of its poverty, he describes a world of integrity. No one gets rich, but the work is honest as are the relations among those who work together to survive. That dignity has been stripped from those ravaged by current economic forces. They have been mowed down by “development,” abandoned by the rich who get richer and richer while mouthing platitudes about the inevitable historical suffering caused by the “Progress” of the Industrial Revolution and the unfortunate cruelty of change. The sense of an America where honesty and hard work are rewarded is gone, along with the wilderness, the Land, that defined its soul. Is it any wonder that when asked about integrity people respond with cynicism? The world of Succession, a world alien to the thought of integrity, is the world that dominates and ravages people’s lives. And I do not think it is too much of a stretch to believe that given the bleakness of a world that has rendered them historical detritus, people respond with enthusiastic attention to the imagination of a world in which the defense of integrity is central to every aspect of the (melodramatic) story.
Michael Boughn’s most recent books of poetry are The Book of Uncertain—A Hyperbiographical User’s Manual, Book 1, which was released with Spuyten Duyvil, 2022, and Uncertain Remains, which was released with BlazeVox in 2022. A collection of essays, Measure’s Measures—Poetry and Knowledge was published by Station Hill in 2024. He is currently working on Book 2 of The Book of Uncertain.
