'Yellowstone' or the violent peace of the good American savage

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The most important television series of our time – the one that best raises the critical tension between the world that does not finish dying and the one that has not just been born – is barely known in Spain. In the United States, for years it has broken audiences, motivated sociology essays and fueled political controversies. We are talking about Yellowstone, Taylor Sheridan's creation starring Kevin Costner that SkyShowtime broadcasts here. Pay for another platform? I say that enjoying the five seasons of Yellowstone already justifies that subscription, and even the cancellation of any other platform in return.

John Dutton's (Costner) titanic struggle to preserve the legacy of his ancestors – Montana's largest ranch – underpins the plot. The Dutton family will defend themselves with the law and without it from those who plan to take their land, be they greedy builders, investors from New York and California or the Indian reservation that claims its original property. But the Yellowstone ranch is nothing more than the synecdoche of a traditional way of life threatened not by predatory capitalism, but by a woke ideology that marries it much better than the new identity left would like to recognize.

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Like Clint Eastwood before him, Sheridan turns the stereotype of the Marlboro man on its head by transcending the mere tantrum of the politically incorrect, just as stomach-churning as the right. The edge of the script penetrates so deeply and respectfully into the psychology of that canceled masculinity that it comes out the other extreme: Monica, John's native daughter-in-law, tells him when she sees him cornered by his enemies: "Now the Indian is you." Thus a natural alliance is established between cowboys and Indians, both species in danger of extinction under the advance of the post-industrial economic paradigm.

But it is a series of characters, not theses. And maybe Beth Dutton is the real protagonist. Raised among men – tougher, ruthless, loyal and smarter than they are – she deals with heartbreaking teenage trauma. He is comforted only by his requited love for the ranch's foreman, Rip. "You wouldn't fill a thimble with my faith in humanity," Beth confesses to Rip before giving in to tenderness.

There is in Yellowstone a quiet vindication of marriage and motherhood – source of permanent conflicts between the projected and the real, but at the same time a safe haven of affections, as Monica's character teaches – not as outdated institutions that oppress women, but as real needs that rather protect them from a hypocritical world that is only lip service. Family against the elements.

The happy paradoxes of Yellowstone displace the commonplaces of our public debate. They show that a rancher can love nature better than any activist (John ends up rescuing an environmentalist from prison and welcomes her to the ranch, in an eloquent exercise of moral miscegenation, of ideological leveling). That the family is paradise until it becomes hell, because livestock is the art of Cain and the ranch of this Cainite family figures the evolution of man from barbarism to civilization ... until civilization proves barbaric and conservatism appears as an alternative to an undesirable progressivism. That livestock farming can be a dam against financial speculation. That violence is only instructive when it begins with oneself, like an arduous asceticism through which an orphaned stable boy must go through the same as the heir of the family saga. And that women can play much more dominant social roles than any testosteronic cowboy.

In fact, Beth's everyday attributes – Kelly Reilly's performance is prodigious: I don't remember anything like it – are big-cylinder cars, alcohol, uninhibited sexuality and a fearsome position among financial elites; At his side, any cowboy represents an Edenic figure who does not know the origin of evil. Beth's irreconcilable enemy is her older brother, Jamie, weak in character, tormented by scruples and ambition, whose role raises a monument of verisimilitude to moral ambiguity. The series intones thus, by affirmation or denial, the touching apology of an outdated reciedumbre that men and women equally hold, very capable of sewing their faces with fists in scenes that oscillate between John Ford and Sam Peckinpah.

Beyond accusations of wrongdoing or melodramatic concessions, Sheridan composes a majestic contemporary western that evokes both the parental hatreds of Succession and the ritualized violence of The Sopranos – John Dutton is a mounted godfather – and the Hobbesian premise of Deadwood. There is no good or evil, Nietzsche insists through the mouths of several characters: there is a morality for slaves and another for masters. Only the cowboy's code of honor is inflexible, and it is endorsed on the skin with a red-hot iron.

It is easy to attribute the success of Yellowstone in the US to the collective imagination of a country that entrusted the construction of its national epic to the western genre. But the validity of the culture wars invites us to think that this milestone of American television will be exportable. "I am the wall against which progress is beaten," proudly proclaims Costner-Dutton, who laments the survival of cowards while refusing to show up when a fictional president easily identified with Trump's populist opportunism visits Montana. "A fake cowboy", in the eyes of the real people.

For the rest, you have to be blind, deaf or have a taste for ideology not to celebrate the vision of a rider cast with his mount, guiding cattle between wild mountains, silhouetted against the sunset. Or not to be moved by the strumming of a melancholic guitar in the hands of a cowboy with a rough voice who laments or resigns himself, because country is nothing more than the flamenco of the old West.

Yellowstone is much more than a powerful manifesto of conservative environmentalism. It narrates the eternal drama of the man attached to his peace who, to defend it, has no choice but to prepare war.

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