"Meaner than evil" – Yellowstone vs. Heartland
By Keith Henderson
web posted April 11, 2022
 Yellowstone |
Landscape is character in both these streaming series, the Rocky Mountain foothill vistas of Montana and Alberta respectively. The snow-capped mountains, grassy cattle-filled valleys below, pine and birch forests on the slopes replete with wild-life, bears, elk, wolves, mustang, the impressive homesteads, Jack Bartlett's family ranch, warm, informal, befitting a less imposing Canadian ethos, Yellowstone's western palace, on the other hand, that dark-wooded stone and timber Montana masterpiece, well-suited to Kevin Costner's John Dutton, in his role as power-monger and cowboy oligarch. Similarities end with landscape. Contrasts abound, not just in the difference between the two homesteads but in the two productions' treatment of animals.
In Heartland, Amy Fleming is a caring, quintessentially feminine horse whisperer, whose job is to "gentle" horses, to calm them, steady them, something she's able to do instinctively, as her mother could, but only it seems, if she's calm and steady within her own soul. When personal turmoil takes over, her gift evaporates. In Yellowstone, however, the prevailing attitude toward animals seems to be masculine dominance, best attested to in the oft-repeated scenes of two-cowboy roping, where a steer is lassoed by the head, then by the back hooves, grounded, and like as not branded. Rodeo features prominently in this orgy of animal dominance. Jimmy, as dumb-ass and masochistic a cowboy as ever rode, finds passion and self-worth in bronc busting, even when he's thrown and winds up in hospital with a broken back. Pain and suffering in Yellowstone lead to manhood – something Jimmy can only achieve having thoroughly acquainted himself with both. Even his erstwhile girlfriend tells him she's interested only if he's willing to absorb more punishment.
Heartland, of course, paints the exact opposite picture, no better indication of values than its Season 4 Christmas Special. That normally pro-secular CBC would air a program with such overt religious implications is sign enough. Heartland Canada's values differ from those of its urban elite. This episode in particular features avalanches, more than one, powerful, beautifully photographed, deadly – iconically so, as the death of our current Prime Minister's brother, Pierre Trudeau's son, swept into BC's Lake Kokanee while skiing, can attest. Here the avalanche traps a herd of quarter horses, who risk freezing, starvation, and predation by wolves. While her lovable control-freak sister Lou Fleming bickers over the perfect positioning of Christmas ornaments with teen-age Mallory, temporarily abandoned for the holidays by her parents, snowbound in Halifax, Amy and her companion, would-be vet Ty Borden, alerted by phone, truck out to the rescue to Claw Valley. What greets them is a small, isolated town riven by discord, a dysfunctional family, and horses penned in by impossible mounds of snow.
Can there be a more Canadian metaphor for peace, order, and good government than clearing snow? We've all done it, whether by shovel or machine — Canadians' man vs. nature winter epic, the re-imposition of order on a wild environment, re-enacted seasonally many times whenever we clean out a driveway. Here on Christmas Eve, Amy and Ty try to open a path for trapped quarter horses, later joined by other family members, later still by initially reluctant townsfolk, and finally by a small snow-blower. Success. Blanketed horses are led through the path to a chorus of cheers. Life redeemed, even resurrected as one of the saved mares gives birth to a foal. Despite Louis Riel and the Red River Rebellion, this is how Canadians like to think our west was won – peacefully, at the fore communitarian, dare we say Judeo-Christian values. Treacly. Schmaltzy. Corny. Heartland always tips in those directions, but the writers and producers never shy away from the true meaning of the ranch's name. This is not Yellowstone. No quarter for stone hearts here.
Polar opposite of Amy Fleming is John Dutton's uber-family-loyalist daughter, corporate raider, the "necessary monster," one employer calls her, Beth Dutton – banshee and blonde bitch suprême. No one could be more filled with finer or more scrupulous hatreds. Her attorney brother, Jamie, whom she suspects (correctly) is not a real Dutton, she most uncordially detests, delighting in calling him "pussy," a ball-less weakling, the very reverse of the great love of her life, Yellowstone's head cowhand, Rip, with whom she has a kind of jungle-cat sex that later ripens into strange, amoral affection. Like her father, he's an unrepentant murderer, and when the slightest pang of conscience overtakes him, Beth Dutton is there to correct his path. "There is no good or evil," she tells him, her vision straight out of Nietzsche. She doesn't quote "the will to power" at him. She doesn't need to, since she embodies it, the kind of will to power, in Nietzsche's view, more satisfying than survival itself. That notion also plays itself out in Beth Dutton, beaten to the edge of her life with facial scars to prove it and almost burnt to death in an office IED explosion, testament to which rests in the horribly scarred back we glimpse in one love-making scene, like a tunnel to towers victim with neither warmth nor the slightest need for charity.
 Heartland |
The Heartland ranch represents an Alberta idyll, a peon of praise to "peace, order, and good government," challenged by the usual suspects: oilmen, developers, and US and Toronto franchisers, who want to turn Hudson's traditional western diner into a fast food joint. The Flemings fight back, notably Lou, who buys the diner and runs for mayor, the antidote to cabal and corruption honest local elections, fairly fought and fairly won. Not so Yellowstone. The scale is different but the antagonists are much the same, big developers unscrupulous in the extreme, ready to invest billions, although the phalanx of enemies is augmented, at least temporarily, by a Lakota Indian tribe anxious to return the land to a pristine, pre-white past. But there the similarities end. Yellowstone is no bucolic idyll. In fact, it is the reverse, a true Hobbesian state of nature, "war of every man against every man," with the rules of war, kill or be killed, supplanting civic justice.
At first, the series seems to move in predictable leftist directions, a hard-boiled exposé of everything that's wrong with America, best exemplified by John Dutton's natural son Kayce's Lakota wife, Monica, who lands a job as a university instructor preaching the gospel of anti-settlerism, settlerism's most egregious and amoral proponent being, of course, her own father-in-law. One of her students' tee-shirts has emblazoned across the front, "Fighting terrorism, since 1492," and Monica cites a sentence from Columbus' diaries where he states the Arawak of the Bahamas "will make fine slaves," a quote which the writers of the series, in the best tradition of Adam Schiff, have utterly fabricated. From this perspective, John Dutton's Montana mansion is no palace of success, but a virtual prison, abusively built, an outpost in hostile territory defended by forlorn-hopers, dead men walking, ready to kill and perish like the putative heroes of the Alamo. At issue is land-grabbing, whether from natives or from Mexicans, those who possess vs. those who would like to, American history being Bellum omnium contra omnes.
However, without much fanfare, Yellowstone's Season 3 turns away from such leftist clichés. Yes, Monica abandons the white-dominated Montana Masterpiece and returns home to her people, plagued as they are by the rape and murder of indigenous women. Monica determines to make herself bait. The inevitable redneck white man appears beside her stalled car, kidnaps her, drags her to a desolate place he's used before, and tries to assault her, only to find himself shot in the head by a Lakota marksman. Thus, Monica joins the band of murderers imposing their own brand of vigilante justice. Bellum omnium contra omnes takes on a new meaning, and so does evil. Beset by the same violent killers, this time bent on raping the land, not women, in front of his daughter – loyal, admiring, defaced – John Dutton articulates a new philosophy. The whole family, ranch hands included, must become "meaner than evil." Note the transformation, subtle as may be. In Seasons 1 and 2, life was to be led amorally, like fascists, "beyond good and evil." Season 3 features a new recognition. Evil exists, but can only be countered by violence and ruthlessness worse than what perpetrators could ever hope to plan or carry out.
Americans are only a border away from Heartland, but the border is deeper than geography. The Bartlett homestead is a place of bickering, healing, and love. The Dutton homestead is a war zone. No better sign of its martial spirit than the weird phenomenon of ranch-hand branding. Many carry the "Y" brand on their chests and do so with a pride as dumb as the cattle they care for. Medieval knights carried their colours outside on their armour. Dutton's masochist militia have those colours seared into their skin. "Cross me, I kill you" about sums up the approach, the whole resembling mafia territory or the cartel infested towns of Mexico or Colombia. Pickup trucks of armed men roam the highways. Random shoot-outs occur, though Dutton-run Montana – John sleeps with the governor – has yet to witness victims hanged from the sides of overpasses, regular occurrences south of the US border. But in one brutal scene, Yellowstone hands literally carve the brand off an undeserving former mate, while he screams in pain. They hang him, roll him into the back of a pickup, and send him off the side of a cliff, miles away in the wastelands of a neighbouring state, "a county with no people, no sheriff, and no jury of your peers," we're told, i.e. land of anarchy and impunity. The ominous border sign reads "Wyoming: Forever West."
Canada kinder, gentler, more gracious? Our army of the smug and self-righteous should resist any such rejoicing. Blood-porn as Yellowstone may often be, sadly, it comes closer to the realities of twenty-first century life in the West than we might care to admit, the atrocities in Ukraine the current case in point. Wyoming's "Forever West" can well stand for the entire western world, confronted by exterior enemies omnipresent, China, Russia, Iran, terrorists of all stripes, all the while bedevilled by weak-kneed internal allies, Canada included, who expect Dutton-like American marines to defend their "home and native land," even though they cut back on their own militaries and treat them as after-thoughts, "peace-keepers," to echo Mike Pearson, when there's often no peace to keep.
Whatever its excesses, Yellowstone highlights a fundamental contradiction in our way of life. Our own internal enemies brook no quarter. Gangs kill mercilessly, horrifically; few Canadians realize Montreal for years harboured, in the Rizzutos, the most brutal mafia "Sixth Family" in recent history, doing all the things mafia families do, assassination, extortion, construction fraud, corruption of political officials, much like what is revealed in Colombia's equivalent to Yellowstone, Distrito Salvaje or Wild District. Interestingly, there one of the most ruthless criminals is a man in a cowboy hat who works for Canada Drilling, a corrupt enterprise not entirely dissimilar to SNC Lavalin, recently defended by our own political elite. Such criminals know the authorities won't kill them. To help guarantee that, they often turn their children into lawyers. Moreover, if they are imprisoned, there's a chance they can bribe their way back to freedom, as South American drug lords have regularly done. Many are utterly uninterested in rehabilitation and will return to murdering people as soon as they're given a chance. In the past, Canadians included, we've had to prove ourselves "meaner than evil," as the "thousand-yard stare" from the Battle of the Bulge and the nuclear bombs dropped on the Kamikaze-loving Japanese Empire attest. Due regard to judgment and proportion, perhaps it's time to look less dismissively at the Yellowstone proposition. 
Keith Henderson is former leader of Quebec’s Equality Party and author of Acqua Sacra (DC Books 2016), a crime novel detailing Quebec, Italian, and Libyan construction company corruption.
