Based on previous experiences with the Dutton clan, I didn't think Taylor Sheridan would offer such a well-rounded wholesome journey. Let's first put it out there, he runs very much on the gruff man trope, the quintessential American cowboy, stoic beyond pain--as cowboy'n isn't a passion but a life. And he always reminds us, the plight of the indigenous natives, that Manifest Destiny brought to the lands, regardless of the period. From the eastern shores of Roanoke and its arduous journey west, civilization has conquered freedom, where ever it's been and still going. The land of the Yellowstone ranch, an allegory of man's attempt to shield a pocket of that freedom from the so-called sprawl of progress.
But I didn't expect it would take us to the Serengeti, where the English did the same with colonies far distant from their shores. There, Spencer, a Dutton to the t's, still lives the struggle of existential freedom, counterpart to life on the ridge with the herd, had the Great War not demand the presence of ...men too smart to be brave but born still to do it. How western society romanticized all of it, the cowboys, the Indians, soldiers on the front, even the unnatural colonization of the harshest of climates that produced real apex predators (Africa and Australia, I don't get why man wants a land where the plant life and the smallest of creatures to carnivores honed to hunt or survive from the hunt, for millennia). Sheridan wants to show you the hard truths of the building of that romance; real blood, real pain, real death. And he does it well, better than any other who delved into such matters, that's why "he's so hot right now."
All the story grinds on a different empathy, our need to see ourselves, overcome. I live on it, vicariously, too. But my favorite is when, he draws a sudden halt, and reminds us, despite man's odd engagement with these struggles, that is still the romance of it. Boom. Do you want another?
